How three tiny social games inverted Steam interest curves...

Also: a look at the week's big Steam trends, and a lotta discovery news.

[The GameDiscoverCo game discovery newsletter is written by ‘how people find your game’ expert & company founder Simon Carless, and is a regular look at how people discover and buy video games in the 2020s.]

We’re back, with our second newsletter this week, which is - reminder - exclusive to our paid GameDiscoverCo Plus subscribers. (If you haven’t, consider upgrading, joining us in GDCo Plus’ Discord and getting the other perks - we’d love to have you!)

Oh, and before we get started, what’s the latest ‘you can play Doom on this!’ hardware milestone? Why, it’s the giant DVD & Blu-Ray kiosks for defunct U.S. rental company Redbox, which people are grabbing and hacking in all kinds of fun ways.

Three tiny social games buckin’ Steam CCU curves

One rule about concurrent users (CCU) on Steam* (*we can see CCU for all games both in the GameDiscoverCo Plus back end and via SteamDB) - is that CCU interest is generally strongest when you launch, often on Day 1 or 2, and tails off from there.

But we’ve been monitoring some small indie titles released in recent weeks that are, impressively, keeping CCU (and interest!) over time. And we see some trends in their approach. So let’s analyze them a tad, shall we? A quick overview of the three: