Plus: what next quarter's 'hype' says about Steam's biggest games
We let everyone take a look at the start of this one.
[The GameDiscoverCo game discovery newsletter is written by ‘how people find your game’ expert Simon Carless. This newsletter is normally exclusive to GameDiscoverCo Plus subscribers - 30% off ‘Year 1’ deal here, and analyzes game sales trends.]
Welcome to a special Friday GameDiscoverCo newsletter, folks. We’re excerpting one of our weekly Plus (paid) newsletters for all of you fine regular (free) subscribers out there, since we’re planning to cover broader time horizons in them.
(Oh, also - due to the U.S. Labor Day weekend, our next full free newsletter will be on Tuesday, September 6th. Thanks for your understanding!)
Next quarter on Steam? Bring out the big guns!
So, as you may know, our Plus subscribers get access to an interactive back end predicting what the biggest Steam games releasing in the next 7 - or 30, or 90, or ‘all-time’ - days are, ranked by a ‘Hype score’.
This is based on factors like ‘Steam chatter’ (a score based on the number of Steam forums threads and posts), Steam followers (when players follow a certain Steam game to get news about it), overall Steam wishlist ranking - and more besides.
We often think that a ‘significant’ game - one that could sell many tens of thousands of copies in Year 1 - often has at least 1,500 Hype score on release. (That’s towards 5,000 Steam followers, which is v.roughly 50,000 Steam wishlists on launch.)
So our data says that there are 62 of these ‘significant’ games due out in September, October, and November 2022 on Steam (!). Which is a notably above average amount - it’s a busy time of year. We’ve shown just the top 15 or so above.
(We didn’t include December, since there’s a lot of ‘2022’-dated games that won’t actually make it out by Dec. 31st. Looks like December’s first few days have a few notable titles, though - including Hello Neighbor 2, The Callisto Protocol, and Alaskan Truck Simulator.)
Anyhow, here’s our top six takeaways on the big market trends that we’re seeing from these top titles: