Should games be 'nasty, brutish, and short'?
Defining a new publisher category. Also: 'Elden' Steam debuts & lots of 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.]
As you trudge wearily to the end of another marathon week in game discovery, GDCo is at the side of the road, with snacks and a squeezy bottle of water. (We don’t promise to get you through the wall, but we can certainly guarantee you a wall… of text.)
But before we start: shame that Katamari Damacy creator Keita Takahashi’s latest game, To A T, hasn’t launched so strong (~100 CCU on Steam). But on the plus side, veteran Internet skit troupe Mega64 have debuted a wonderfully silly ‘To A T’ video, where they ask - what if Rocco was perma-stuck an a T-pose in real life? It cute.
Discovery news: what’s the Switch eShop legacy?
So let’s drill down on that game platform and discovery news, shall we? It starts with the following:
The latest Footprints.gg ‘trad media’ coverage chart - for May 21st-27th - shows Switch 2 out in front again, but Elden Ring getting double coverage due to Nightreign’s release and the movie announce. It’s followed by The Last Of Us (TV hype!), Fortnite, Clair Obscur, and Doom: The Dark Ages.
At The Verge, I was quoted in a piece about the Switch eShop’s sloppification (and unsloppification?), where Victoria Tran makes a great point: “I don’t know if any store is free from the eventual onslaught of ‘slop games’ unless they’re highly curated or gatekeep-y, which would present its own problems.”
Steam’s doing some excellent developer/publisher page enhancements: “We've made it much easier to link new games with your existing developer or publisher homepage; enabled the display of social media accounts on your homepage; and are now showing the creators in more places.” (Remember: unlinked/mislinked games = bad!)
Apple things: it’s launching a standalone gaming app, leading M.G. Siegler to speculate on it being a possible ‘Game Store’ alternative to the App Store. And the company acqui-hired the two-person Sneaky Sasquatch team - were they fed up with sending them big checks? (That game is giant on Apple Arcade!)
Nvidia’s GeForce NOW cloud game streaming service has released its standalone Steam Deck app (tho you have to add it via Desktop Mode), and the - compelling - pitch is: “Play… Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered [or] Monster Hunter Wilds… at max settings - without worrying about hardware limits or battery drain.”
Microlinks: Discord is adding Orbs (a virtual currency!) to their in-platform game-specific Quests; Kickstarter is starting a ‘pledge over time’ option splitting backer payments into 3 monthly parts; an ‘explainer’ on the upcoming Digital Fairness Act in the EU, including in-game currency transparency, dark patterns, etc.
We’re getting close to ‘not E3’, or Summer Game Fest, or however that works: there’s a ResetEra post with the basic ‘streaming showcase’ overview, and reminder that the Games Recap 2025 page will be hosting all game trailers as they happen, sorted by showcase. (Handy.)
Here’s a chat with the Clair Obscur marketing director, noting that critical reception was a big virality boost: “The element that really allowed the game to blow up at launch was most likely the Metacritic score on the day before launch, sitting at 92 and not coming down. This seems to have created a form of FOMO [which was] incredible storytelling for a debut game from a small studio.”
The folks at Evolve have looked at Steam regional pricing in China, showing that Black Myth & Wo Long are being pretty aggressive in China, pricing-wise. But in general: “the data suggests that you should price your game around 30% ~ 55% cheaper than the equivalent of today’s [USD → yuan] exchange rate.”
Continuing his post-Nexon CEO ‘strong opinions’ jag, Owen Mahoney has a ripper on ‘invisible decisions masquerading as best practices’ in planning today’s AAA game, from “the schedule dominates over finding fun” to “graphics [don’t necessarily] sell games” and “the industrialized development process is fine.” Hot stuff.
A clarification and a refutation from Tuesday’s Grow A Garden article: the original creator of the game (BMWLux) does still contribute creatively to the Roblox megahit, and the Robux acquisition cost listed for A Dusty Trip on its unofficial Wiki is apparently inaccurate. (Otherwise, we good.)
Microlinks: Fortnite is opening up a full data API on June 9th, with all ‘islands’ showing minutes, retention, and more; China’s government has approved another 144 games for ‘official’ domestic distro, inc. mobile title Destiny: Rising; game platform Everywhere is being bundled into the creator’s first game MindsEye.
Should PC games be ‘nasty, brutish and short’?
Today’s featured story is about a fairly new publisher, Oro Interactive, whose Steam publisher page simply says: “We publish catchy, creator-focused games.” And so what, I imagine you’re saying? Doesn’t everyone want to get featured by creators?
Well, they do. But founder Sam De Boeck has done what few people have managed to do in the PC publishing - deliberately look at the market & slant its releases high on the catchiness quotient for influencers - while still making them good.
BTW, the title of this newsletter is riffing on English philosopher Thomas Hobbes’ view of life without government - but by focusing on shorter, horror (‘nasty’!) and co-op centered game releases, Oro is building an interesting catalog with different flavor.
The results so far are intriguing - inconclusive, of course, but nonetheless:
First title, eldritch horror-tinged co-op Lethal Company-like Murky Divers ($5-$8), created and co-pubbed by French studio Embers*, hit 500k copies sold recently, an impressive milestone. (*whom we featured re: their non-hit Strayed Lights.)
Short horror box-packing game Order 13 ($9) has sold 50,000 units since its debut in March, and while it only topped out at 340 CCU, it’s been a hit with the jumpscare streaming crowd. (It’s got a cute cat in it, btw.)
Upcoming relaxing/creepy-adjacent driving game Easy Delivery Co. has already hit 100,000 Steam wishlists, thanks in part to streamers digging its lo-fi, slightly macabre charm.
Another upcoming title is first-person horror game Dead Format, in which “you play as a desperate sibling searching for their missing brother who was last seen obsessing over a mysterious VHS format.” Sounds creepy AF, right?
So we sat down for a Q&A with Sam, specifically focused around what Oro might - or might not - be doing differently. And our first key question for him was on how important it is to find a trend to jump on ‘now’, vs. 1-3 years later. Sam’s view:
“Trends are important, but not in the way people often assume. They don’t disappear overnight. In fact, they often last longer than you'd expect if you bring something fresh to the table. Take Lethal Company, which launched in Oct. 2023.
We released Murky Divers in early access by June 2024. That’s a pretty quick turnaround and showed we could move fast to stay within a trend’s wave. But then R.E.P.O came out in Feb. 2025, 1.5 years after Lethal Company, and it absolutely crushed. That shows you can still succeed long after the trend starts, if your game is good and adds something new.
Another great example is The Spell Brigade. It's a co-op game in the heavily saturated “Vampire Survivors-like” genre, which is hyper-competitive. But they focused on co-op and used visuals inspired by Magicka. That combo felt new, and it resonated… So yes, it gets harder over time as the space fills up. But it’s not about being first, it’s about being fresh and delivering quality.”
So we see Oro as being market-reactive some, but not all of the time - but still picking relatively ‘hot’ subgenres, influencer-wise. Another differentiator, we think, is the lower price and shorter dev time for many of Oro’s titles. Sam tells us:
“In terms of development time, our ideal range is between 3 and 12 months. That gives us enough time to not only build a strong game but also plan and execute a marketing campaign with multiple beats…
Order 13 was completed in under 3 months, start to finish… Cybernetic Walrus came to us wanting to create something in the simulation horror niche. They had a rough high-level concept and knew the space they wanted to explore. They were fans of The Cabin Factory and Dollmare, and we took those shared references as a jumping-off point.”
The reason that Oro feels intriguing to us is that despite what we estimate is only about $3 million in gross Steam revenue so far, 85% of it from Murky Divers, Oro feels like a child of the new paradigm. And when we asked what a lot of people are missing about the market right now, Sam said the following:
“There’s a big shift happening in how indie games are made and released. Spending years and big budgets on a single title is just way too risky these days. Of course, some of those projects will succeed, and when they do, they’re amazing. But the truth is, most of them fail. You’re betting the farm on one shot.
A smarter approach is to develop three smaller games over three years instead of one massive one. The market is volatile. Trends change fast. With three games, you give yourself three chances to hit, and even if none of them are breakout hits, you start to build compound revenue.
That recurring income can start sustaining your studio. You’re not betting everything on one release. You’re building a foundation. It’s not about shooting for the moon every time. It’s about consistent output, smart decisions, and creating sustainability.”
There are definitely other publishers digging in this general area - Critical Reflex has some big hits with both Mouthwashing and Buckshot Roulette. But, unencumbered by high overheads, all kinds of interesting bets are being made on a new breed of different-looking, cheaper, shorter games. You might want to keep an eye on that.
This week on Steam: Nightreign debuts swingin’..
So, the big debut on Steam (and console!) this week, which we’re analyzing for our Plus/Pro subscribers? It’s FromSoftware’s multiplayer centric Souls-like title Elden Ring Nightreign ($40-60), which is, frankly, a bit of an unconventional left-turn for the franchise. As the Gameranx reviewer explains above: