Inside the Chinese Steam/console 'companion app' you may not know
We look at Heybox in depth. Also: this week on Steam & lots of 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.]
And we’re back in the room. This time, we decided to focus on a particular Chinese Steam-related mobile app because, believe it or not, it’s one of the services we get the most questions about. (We also touch on the Chinese PC game ecosystem in general…)
Before we start, did you know that the Emoji Standard and Research Working Group are now accepting new emoji submissions? As Jennifer Daniel suggests: “Aim for semantic density…. The Pig Face 🐷 is a masterclass in utility. It’s a literal animal, a symbol for hunger, a nod to the Lunar New Year, or a cheeky warning that the cops are nearby.”
[FREE DEMO OF GDCo PRO? You too can get a gratis demo of our GameDiscoverCo Pro company-wide ‘Steam deep dive’ & console data by contacting us today - >90 orgs have it. Or, signing up to GDCo Plus gets the rest of this newsletter and Discord access, plus more.]
Game discovery news: Indonesia’s (bad) ratings…
So, let’s take a look at intriguing bits of news that popped up since Tuesday, as follows:
Our buddies at ICO’s Footprints.gg put out their ‘trad media’ coverage charts for last week (above), and Crimson Desert is still getting a ton of interest, thanks to guides & buzz. Also new? Starfield charts, thanks to an update and a PS5 version, Marathon’s patches get interest, and Tomb Raider (remasters, movie) adds articles.
Niko Partners has an update on Steam’s mandatory Indonesian age ratings, which rolled out & then, uhh, un-rolled out again: “Following confusion from developers and backlash from players… Komdigi issued a statement clarifying that the IGRS ratings shown on Steam beginning last week were not final.” Here’s the Steam statement on it.
We were pretty impressed with the ‘tude of the Triple-I Initiative streaming showcase yesterday. Here’s all the trailers from it and an overview of everything announced or updated, including a new Don’t Starve game and a grimdark Mario Party from Buckshot Roulette’s creator. And all in 45 minutes (minus post-show).
Netflix things: the company announced Netflix Playground, a new all-in-one mobile app for the under-8s to “play, explore, and interact with their favorite characters, from Peppa Pig to the friends on Sesame Street.” And no linking-out to separate game downloads! Also: the Netflix controller mobile app - used for party games, etc - was U.S. trending during the Easter holidays, per Stephen Totilo.
Steam wishlist email obsessives: as Valve continues to tweak email notifications, we got anecdotal reports that the # of games featured in emails to players - and the number of emails, for mega-wishlisters - increased earlier this week. (This is good, if you’re one of the games featured in said emails.)
Slay The Spire 2 co-creator Casey Yano had a sympathetic comment on some of the China ‘review bombing’ around a nerf patch for STS2: “It's difficult for players to feel like they're heard by developers, so I understand why they choose to use Steam and do something that would impact visibility in the store to try to portray their feedback.”
‘Long dev cycle’ things: the devs of Eastshade discuss spending almost $2m (>50% their own salaries for 6-7 years) on witch academy RPG Songs Of Glimmerwick; Mewgenics’ Tyler Glaiel jokes: “turns out it WAS true, the best game dev advice actually was to spend 6 years making a 100+ hour RPG with infinite variety.”
Valve just revealed a significant Steam Workshop browser update, with the game mod browsing interface getting “Wider page & bigger items… Faster filtering… Smarter filtering per-section… New Quick View.” It’s also now mobile and Steam Deck-friendly, which is nice…
We’re also seeing the new Steam regional pricing recommendations trickling down to game prices, with Payday both simplifying and region-adjusting its franchise pricing, and Lorn’s Lure another example: “I'm sorry it took till now to adjust, but I had no reliable method to do so until Steam's new feature.”
Microlinks: Xbox is updating its achievements look & feel, also allowing hidden achievements & a call-out for 100%-ed games; there’s rumors Steam will show estimated FPS for games on your system, based on its new review specs; Amazon Luna is removing its third-party subscriptions (like Ubisoft+ and Jackbox Games) & the GOG/EA/Ubisoft ‘bring your own library’ feature.
Inside the Chinese Steam/console ‘companion app’ you may not know
GameDiscoverCo has covered the Chinese PC game market multiple times, thanks to strong growth from ‘grey-market’ players on Steam Global. For example, in early 2024 we asked Spiral Up Games about key social platforms there, from Bilibili to Douyin to Douyu.
And a recent Reddit post from a successful Chinese indie reminded us that there’s one platform we get consistently asked about, the game-specific mobile app Heybox. It’s one of the more popular ways to access Steam info in China, with many millions of MAU, but we’ve found objective English language info on it to be lacking.
Obviously, we could have asked Heybox itself. But since it’s a commercial service which monetizes largely on the ‘margin’ it gets selling Steam keys it gets from devs, as well as in-platform ads, we thought it better to get a third-party overview of how the Chinese-language app works. (We understand it can be a non-trivial % of China sales.)
And the folks at Hidden Player, a China game consultancy co-created by the person who helped lead Cyberpunk & Dying Light: The Beast’s China marketing, were kind enough to provide a 15-slide presentation just for GDCo readers explaining Heybox. Going through the high level on how Heybox works, from Hidden Player:
The platform is a much-used companion app for Chinese PC gamers: Heybox “started as a games forum”, but is now used to find out about “upcoming games, news, game stats, promotions” and more, per Hidden Player. So it’s not just a Steam key sale platform - which is often the context that GDCo hears about it.
You don’t need an ISBN license in China to have visibility via it: the game database used on Heybox is “nearly all Steam titles (excluding explicit content), along with major releases on EGS, PlayStation, Switch and Xbox.” So it’s mapping to what players can get on the ‘gray market’, even console titles.
Games have natural visibility even if you’re not working with Heybox: there will be people talking about your game and wishlisting it - if they care about it - even if you don’t have a commercial relationship with Heybox. (That is to say: selling them keys or working with them on ads or promoted posts is somewhat optional.)
Here’s another slide from the presentation, which explains how users customize their main app tab, by selecting subReddit-like topics to follow news about:
So Heybox is a platform with info feeds, user posts - which can be text, video links, etc, with a link to the game’s page - but also ‘official’ publishers and dev channels. (In the presentation, Paradox and CD Projekt Red are shown as two examples.)
But in addition to that, it’s a bit of a ‘shadow store’ for Steam, we presume in part because the official Steam mobile app doesn’t work easily in China for ‘Steam international’ users. And there’s some interesting details here:
Heybox has its own best-selling charts & algorithmic recommendations: the ‘Game Library/Store’ section is “likely the second-largest traffic hub on Heybox”, and recommends you games and shows you offers, much like Steam. (You can buy games direct on Steam, or via game keys on Heybox if the dev provided them.)
The platform has its own internal metrics for sales and wishlists: there’s a public ‘best-selling keys in the Heybox store’ chart, but also, interestingly, ‘most wishlisted games on Heybox’, using a platform-specific wishlist function which is separate from Steam wishlists.
However, you can sync with Steam from Heybox, via Steam logins: as we understand it, Heybox has a ‘login with Steam’ function for players, which shows owned games and “enables its distribution partners to activate a wishlist sync feature, prompting players to sync with Steam when they add a game to their Heybox wishlist.”
Related: we at GameDiscoverCo noted that Chinese players seem to under-wishlist compared to other countries, even though they turn up to buy. We’re now wondering if it’s due in part to players ‘keeping’ their wishlists on third-party apps like Heybox.
We’re basically out of space, but there’s a lot of other interesting details in the full PPT - for example ‘mini-apps’ in Heybox (above), which include game stats tools for PUBG, and a free Steam game ‘claimer’ mini-app.
We were also interested to read about ‘H Coins’, which are an internal currency in Heybox which adds discounts to your key purchases, can be earned through “daily login bonuses, rewards from high quality posts, lucky draw events, and purchase rebates.”
Anyhow, what’s fascinating here? This is another example of the positive ecosystem effects that Steam has elicited for its platform by allowing Steam game keys to be given out for free to devs and publishers for resale, a profoundly unconventional idea. (I still see newcomers to the space ‘double-take’ when they hear about it.)
Keys definitely lose Steam a lot of direct revenue, and at times have fraud-adjacency issues. (Valve’s latterly cut back key allocations, and we wonder if there’s more changes coming.) But it’s also led to businesses like Heybox - which strengthen Steam’s market leadership - effectively funded by donated ‘platform cut’ margins.
[Thanks again to Jacky and Katya from Hidden Player for their work on the Heybox overview - we may run some more detail-first China-specific content from them in the future!]
Steam this week: Road To Vostok hits solo glory…
