Physical video games: how big a deal in 2024?

Also: lots of neat links, this week's big Steam debuts, and more...

[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.]

Hi! As GDCo oozes into the end of the week, it’s time to give y’all another discovery & platform news update. It’s followed by a ($) lead story on the market for physical video game sales. (Later on: a look at how key Steam game debuts fared this week.)

Before we start, we enjoyed this video returning to “classic [ ‘00s online] kids games from your childhood”, from Poptropica to Club Penguin. It reminded us that VC firm Konvoy just published ‘Where have all the kids’ MMOs gone?’, concluding that, well, Roblox - and kids sneaking into ‘older’ games like Fortnite - ate em. Food for thought…

Game discovery news: Veilguard, CoD, PS5 Pro win

And let’s kick off with a surprisingly meaty set of news from the latter half of this week in discovery and platform news. Look, it’s this:

• Footprints.gg again provides a useful snapshot of ‘trad game media’ interests in the last few days, headed by Dragon Age: The Veilguard, with Black Ops 6, the PS5 Pro, Nintendo Music, and the new Pokemon TCG mobile app all also in the running. (As well as Fortnite, thanks to that rapper-filled Chapter 2 Remix launch.)

• We’ve got PlayStation’s latest results, which look ‘OK’ on the surface: “PS5 shipped 3.8m units this quarter, down from 4.9m last year… [PS5 LtD] sales are now over 65.4m, slower than PS4 by ~2.3m… MAUs are up to 116m (+9m YoY).” And rev/profit looks good: “PlayStation revenue up 12% to $7.2B. Operating profit almost tripled to $929M.”

• However, a couple of caveats - firstly, “Currency fluctuations accounted for 28% of quarterly PlayStation revenue growth.” So a lot of that extra $ is simply down to a weak yen. And secondly, PlayStation Plus saw an 18% YoY revenue growth, but from “a shift to higher tiers of service and the impact of price revisions.” So - all yield?

• Microlinks: Nvidia’s ‘players cloud-stream games’ service GeForce Now will soon limit players to 100 hours per month; here’s a great overview of top Twitch-like streaming platforms - including Korean & Chinese ones - in 2024; there’s also a useful ‘explainer’ on Twitch’s fairly complex subscriber system.

• A new Circana U.S. Gamer Segmentation report provides some interesting info (summary), including: “On average, gamers spend 14.5 hours per week playing, an increase of 1.8 hours from 2022…. The average American gamer spent $56.20 on games in the past six months, although 46% of gamers made no purchases during this period.”

• GDCo’s U.S. PlayStation and Xbox ‘recent’ game charts sees Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 topping the charts (as Call of Duty HQ in PlayStation), with Dragon Age: The Veilguard in the Top 5, and Dragon Ball: Sparking! ZERO holding strong inside the Top 10. (And the ubiquitous sports games from Take Two and EA still hang!)

• Steam announced a pretty cool new dev feature: “Many games on Steam already have multiple build branches available to players; different builds of the game… new Steamworks APIs now allow developers to offer players this choice from within the game itself.” Several use cases are described within…

• Nintendo president Shuntaro Furukawa kindly confirmed for everyone: “Nintendo Switch software will also be playable on the successor to Nintendo Switch. Nintendo Switch Online will be available on the successor to Nintendo Switch as well.” Not a surprise, but good to see it out there in black & white.

• Poking our head into the mobile space, the top-grossing Oct. 2024 games include a lot of usual suspects: Honor of Kings, Royal Match and LastWar: Survival in the Top 3, all with >$100m gross; the top mobile downloads are headed by offline chicken-y Mini Games: Calm & Relax, with My Supermarket Simulator 3D at #3.

• Looking at GDCo’s Switch eShop charts (only recent, paid, third-party, U.S. by download #), Sonic X Shadow Generations continues topping the chart at #30 in all 14-day downloads. Next, Yakuza Kiwami and new entry Metal Slug Tactics sit at #80 and #95 respectively, and Just Dance 2025 Edition hangs inside the Top 100.

• Data nerds have been monitoring Walmart’s U.S. online console sales, since unit numbers are listed nowadays. Their estimate for hardware sold via Walmart in October: PlayStation 5: 71,000 units, Switch: 28,000 units, Xbox Series: 26,000 units. (That’s probably a decent mini-reflection of general hardware trends.)

• Microlinks: Hori’s officially licensed Steam controller is coming to the US; analyst firm DFC Intelligence insists there’s a dramatic turnaround due for the PC & console game biz - up 15% between 2024 and 2028; Steam is looking for feedback on which events you’re attending in 2025, so they can be there too.

Physical video games: how big a deal in 2024?