Revealed: the top new PC and console games of 2024
Also: the buzziest titles showcased at The Game Awards, and yer 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 here: last stop for 2024, everybody off, the GDCo newsletter is heading to the depot. Before we quit for the annum, massive love to our increasing band of colleagues at GDCo: Alejandro, Avi, Matt, Tomek and Strale - building our game data and info platform right, behind the scenes. (Some exciting news about that in Jan!)
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Game discovery news: Fortnite’s new mode trends!
Before we get into all the other chart goodness, let’s have a look around the game platform and discovery news since late last week, huh? Here we go go go:
We’ve been keeping an eye on the Fortnite real-time CCU charts since Epic rolled out its Ballistic first-person shooter mode, as well as updated Lego Fortnite ‘Odyssey’ and that new Lego Fortnite Brick Life game mode. Right now (above!), both Ballistic and OG Lego Fortnite are ~100k CCU - we’ll see how they sustain!
November 2024’s UK game charts were down 33% YoY, but most of that dip was due to moving Call Of Duty to Oct. this year, and Black Friday not being in the Nov. data set. Still: "1.53 million games were sold during Black Friday week, which is a fall of over 8% compared with Black Friday 2023." So perhaps not that stellar anyway.
Here’s a good piece on how Gorilla Tag on Quest scaled to $100m revenue: “predominantly played by boys aged 10-18, [it] has become their third place. One-third of the game’s monthly players log in daily, with server activity peaking after school hours. Kids are drawn… by the chance to meet friends and play on a virtual playground.”
Some good stats and info on announcing Duck Detective’s sequel for Steam: “We hit 11k wishlists within the first 4 days… this is really promising. So far it's 95% more wishlists than the 1st game in the same time period.” In-game promotion really helps!
Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella doubled down on the ‘we’re everywhere’ chatter coming from Xbox recently, per Game File ($): “It's about being able to enjoy Xbox on all your devices… in [the] long-term, as a company, we can bring the best of the AI innovation, cloud innovation, console innovation, PC innovation to build the best games, that can be enjoyed by gamers everywhere.”
Twitch’s annual recap shows there were 879 million hours streamed and 20.35 billion hours watched across the video platform (!) in 2024, with Grand Theft Auto V (1.46b hours watched) topping categories worldwide, ‘simulator’ games having a 91% YoY viewing increase, and lots more.
Roblox CEO David Baszucki is celebrating a couple of impressive concurrent user milestones on the platform: “Dress to Impress went over 1.5M concurrent players this morning. And Blox Fruits just went over 2.25M concurrent players.” These are both huge numbers - higher than anything on Steam except maybe Counter-Strike 2.
That short, cheap ($3!) but very viral Steam horror game The Cabin Factory which we profiled the other week is out already, and it sold 30k units in the first 3 days thanks to big streamers hopping on: “373,232 hours watched [on Twitch] in total… caseoh_ was the top stream with 53,206 viewers, then LIRIK with 19,560 peak viewers, and ironmouse with 9,257.”
Apple shared the most-downloaded free and paid iPhone games of 2024. And in the U.S., stalwarts Minecraft, Heads Up! and Geometry Dash headlined paid iPhone games. As for F2P, looks like Block Blast!, Monopoly Go!, Roblox, Call Of Duty Warzone Mobile, Township, and Last War: Survival topped U.S. charts.
Microlinks: Nintendo still hadn’t taken action on the Unpacking ‘clones’ on the Switch eShop, but maybe just finally did;; Steam had a new ‘browsing store/playing’ CCU peak of 39.3 million last weekend; players can now choose to stop their Steam games autopatching, if they are too giant - or they don’t play them.
Revealed: top new PC and console games of 2024
Some of you may recall that at the end of 2023, GameDiscoverCo ran down the top new games of the year across PC and console platforms, according to our large and complex (and fun!) estimation algorithms. Well, we’re back for more in 2024.
Let’s start out with what’s likely the most important platform for the vast majority of game developers in 2024 - Valve’s Steam PC game launcher and store. We’ll have two views for this chart - copies sold and revenue. And here’s ‘copies sold’ for paid games:
Some notes on this intriguing view? There are a few more surprises here than in the upcoming console charts, but:
The top three games are the ones you’d expect, in the order you’d expect: that’s Chinese action RPG sensation Black Myth: Wukong, hot everywhere ‘Pokemon recruitment meets survival crafter’ Palworld, and co-op bug blaster Helldivers 2.
Plenty of cheaper, cleverer viral sensations crowd the chart: that’d include the masocore multiplayer ‘Only Up!’-inspired Chained Together (#4), ‘cheat to victory’ card game Liar’s Bar (#6), and the newly multiplayer twisted dice game Buckshot Roulette (#10).
Path Of Exile 2 is the late-breaking surprise chart entrant: We’re very impressed with ‘paid now, F2P later’ Souls-Diablo-like PoE 2, which already made it to #5, despite only being available for 11 days. (Today’s peak of 437k CCU on Steam is seriously good.)
Also notable in here - the ‘intricate first-person store management sim’ microgenre perfected by Supermarket Simulator (#7) spawned a second similar game in the Top 20, TCG Card Shop Simulator (#16) And there are other, smaller hits like Fast Food Simulator on the way. (This genre is catnip to streamers, in particular.)
Finally, to give you an idea of scale - all of the games in the above chart sold >1 million units on Steam, and further up, 4 of them sold >5 million, and 14 of them >2 million copies. (Over time, they’ll probably sell a lot more than that, of course.)
We also thought we’d briefly feature the top paid games by gross revenue - which includes IAP/DLC estimates. That is partly why titles like soccer sim EA Sports FC 25 - a rare ‘bigger on console than PC’ title anyhow - shoot up from #14 to #7.
This view also pulls all the inexpensive titles off the charts, and grabs some premium priced, previously ‘just outside the Top 20’ games like Dragon Age: The Veilguard, Gray Zone Warfare and Farming Simulator 25 into the top list. Makes sense, huh?
Next up, let’s take a look at top new PlayStation paid games of 2024. BTW, we’ve decided to only show ‘# of players’ view here, because the revenue chart doesn’t differ much at all. (Most top PlayStation games are also premium priced.)
Some notes on this chart, which we don’t think is unexpected - duh, EA Sports FC & Call Of Duty - but has a couple of small surprises, like the overperformance of Dragon Ball: Sparking! Zero (#7):
Sports games are half of the Top 10 on PlayStation: there’s plenty of other titles in the mix. But between perennial soccer, basketball, American football, and wrestling games, that’s five of the top worldwide slots used up. (It’s a sports console - at least for new, paid games!)
Black Myth: Wukong showed PS5’s ‘hidden’ power in China: we’re estimating >3.5 million Chinese PlayStation players of the cultural sensation, more than 50% of its PlayStation sales. (And they’re all ‘gray market’, by the way.)
PlayStation got four of its own titles in the Top 20: those would be Helldivers 2 (#6), The Last Of Us Part II Remastered (#10, with the caveat that there was a $10 upgrade for owners of the original), Astro Bot (#15), and MLB The Show 24 (#17).
Units-wise, we’re estimating all of the above games to have sold >1 million units, with about 11 of them cresting 2 million LTD, and 5 selling >5 million units. That’s some handy context on the general size of the market for the tiptop new titles.
For more platform context: we didn’t do an overall Top 20 by DAU/MAU across all PlayStation games, regardless of age, in 2024. But you would have seen Fortnite, Call Of Duty, Grand Theft Auto V, Roblox and Minecraft as some of the key perennials.
Let’s take a look at Xbox! And we’re ignoring Game Pass this year - for which the top 5 new GP games by download # were Palworld, MLB The Show 24, Little Kitty, Big City, Hellblade II and Indiana Jones, btw - and concentrating on paid games. Notes:
Xbox consoles are strong in the U.S. - so (American) football wins: who would have bet the top new paid video game of the year on Xbox would be a college football title? (Anybody who knows how fanatical college football fans are!)
Warhammer 40k: Space Marine 2 and Star Wars Outlaws did ‘well’ on Xbox: again, we think it’s down to the US and UK-centric nature of the licenses. But both Space Marine 2 (#5) and Outlaws (#7) - had way closer to a 1:1 ratio between Xbox and PlayStation than other major titles. Both just missed the Top 20 on PS.
Game Pass & Xbox console slowdown has made paid games way slower: that’s why you see Suicide Squad (#13) on the list - tho it’s had a 95% off sale. But in general, Xbox’s sales numbers don’t compete with PS/Steam. We see four new games at >1 million units, and 11 at >500k, but #20 is less than 200k units.
Finally, we already printed a bunch of Nintendo Switch charts last month. We didn’t have a chance to update them - probably MySims Cozy Bundle would be the only major new entry, if we did. But here’s the eShop new games chart we had:
And that’s all of our gloriously calculated data. No doubt there’s a glitch or two in here. For example, Call Of Duty is very difficult to estimate due to its uber ‘CoD HQ’ app approach, and there’s gotchas with demo/trial versions of games (Skull & Bones?)
But we’ve done our best. Answers on a postcard if you can see anything we obviously missed or over-rated, and we’ll correct it in the New Year. And thanks for reading the 2024 chart jamboree!
The Game Awards : which games came out on top?
Finally - GDCO’s adorable data packrat* (*we have several!) Alejandro decided to start working on a giant document looking at buzz from The Game Awards 2024 announcements (Google Drive doc). So we crunched data & teamed up with ICO’s great Footprints.gg ‘traditional media’ article tracking service for a second viewpoint.
Before we start - if you’re still trying to pick some of the TGA announcements out of your teeth, so many and complex were they, we liked Skill Up’s 30 minute summary of the whole ceremony (above). (Or if you just need Statler and Waldorf from The Muppets clowning on Geoff Keighley, we’ve got a highlights vid for you too!)
So, our first view (above) of post-awards buzz is simply, according to Footprints.gg, which of TGA’s announcements - even those without any digital store page yet - got the most trad media interest. (It’s tab #3 in the document.) Short notes:
The Witcher 4 ‘won’, because duh: the majority of CD Projekt has been working on this action RPG sequel for some time, but good to see it confirmed.
Existing IP made up eight of the top ten most-discussed games: that includes the new Elden Ring spinoff, an early in dev Okami sequel, the next Mafia game, the new Onimusha, and Borderlands 4. Phew, sequels!
Original IP interest was led by Intergalactic: the next Naughty Dog game - which some wags are joking is its only new IP for the decade - was #3. The other new IP games in the Top 10 - sorta a spiritual sequel - is Split Fiction, from It Take Two’s sweary Josef Fares.
The other views we’re championing using GameDiscoverCo data are TGA-related games with Steam pages, calculating charts by follower and wishlist increase. (For existing games with DLC, we’re just tracking the main game page.)
That’s in tab #1 and tab #2 in the document, and we’re just doing the ‘Steam follower increase’ chart above. Brief info on it:
Elden Ring Nightreign ends up reigning supreme: the unexpected standalone co-op adventure added >40,000 followers and 800,000 Steam wishlists in no time.
PC versions of existing PlayStation games keep getting hype: many are excited that Final Fantasy VII Rebirth (#2) is finally coming to PC, and similar for The Last Of Us: Part 2 Remastered (#7).
Original IP announces are led by Kyora: surprisingly, the multiplayer 2D sandbox from the Core Keeper devs was the 100% original IP title with the most extra followers, post-announce.
There’s also plenty of other notable titles picking up interest here - from survival ‘spiritual successor’ Blackfrost: The Long Dark 2 to superhero workplace comedy (!) Dispatch. Fascinating to see what pops out, huh?
And that’s literally all we have for the year from GameDiscoverCo! We’ll be back in the first full week of January, and have a wonderful - and quiet - holiday. Toodles…
[We’re GameDiscoverCo, an agency based around one simple issue: how do players find, buy and enjoy your PC or console game? We run the newsletter you’re reading, and provide consulting services for publishers, funds, and other smart game industry folks.]
Great stuff as always. Thanks for this :)
Any idea of the copies sold for the top-20 Switch eShop games?