Split Fiction, Two Point Museum debut super strong!
Also: a ton of relevant links for your delectation, as per usual.
[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.]
Once again, it’s Friiiday, folks. So it’s time to check a whole bunch of game platform & discovery news (for all subscribers), and then analysis of the big Steam & related console debuts of the week (for paid GDCo Pro or Plus subs!)
Before we start, we’re digging the weird Newgrounds-y animated videos of Doobus Goobus on YouTube, so - a challenge. Which 3 very defunct consoles & handhelds are the butt of this skit re: Bowser Jr. asking his dad for stuff? Guess, then watch….
Game discovery news: Monster Hunter goes Wild!
Finishing off the various and sundry links for this week, there’s a supernaturally large amount of stuff to get to. So we won’t tarry - let’s get to the meat of it:
The latest Footprints.gg ‘trad media’ games coverage (above) is dominated by Capcom’s Monster Hunter Wilds, which confirmed 8 million units sold in 3 days, lest we forget. (Also big in there - Pokemon, Call Of Duty, and Split Fiction - the last of which which we’ll get to later in this newsletter…)
One unmissable link this week: Voyer Law’s 2025 PC/console indie publishing agreement market report. Notable: deals with an advance average a 58.2% dev revenue share, and without an advance see a 67.9% dev share. (The sample surveyed contracts have an average advance of $675k and a median of $300k, btw.)
Meta revealed that free-to-play apps (presumably including Horizon Worlds, Gorilla Tag, etc) now account for over 70% of the time spent on Meta Quest. Good or bad, that’s leading companies like Fast Travel to try F2P versions of their previously paid games - 2024’s PropHunt-ish Mannequin, in this case.
Here’s a great piece on what AAA can learn from indies, citing trailer pro Derek Lieu: “SO many AAA games’ Steam pages are full of common mistakes that would bury indie games [like] bad capsule descriptions, bad description sections with no GIFs, no HUD/UI in screenshots, trailers which have no gameplay (or take too long to get to them).”
February 2025’s top-grossing mobile games? Per MobileGamer.biz and AppMagic, it’s Honor Of Kings topping $200m, with LastWar: Survival, Whiteout Survival, Royal Match, PUBG Mobile and Monopoly Go all besting $100m - and Pokemon TCG Pocket at $97m, up three spots, despite a badly received update.
Microlinks: PlayStation is adding a new system-wide Beta program for players, for both third-party games and new PS5 console features; Nintendo won a long-running copyright lawsuit against a French filesharing company; here’s an attempt to quantify Monster Hunter Wilds’ paid influencer platform allocations.
The UK’s Entertainment Retailers Association put out its ‘2024 in games/media’ report [.PDF], and interestingly, it includes % share of digital for the Top 20 ‘participating big company’ games in the UK last year (Page 64). (Chris Dring spotted that 55% of Astro Bot sales were physical, but only 19% of Space Marine 2.)
The other ‘highlights’ from the ERA ‘UK game biz in 2024’ report, per Pierre485: “Games market is down to £4.61b (-4%) with a notable decrease in software compared to a slight increase for DLC / MTX / Subs… Hardware is down to £693m (-26%) with double-digit decline for all systems… PS5 is the bestseller with 960k units (-21%).”
Deck Nine’s Stephan Frost made some insightful comments on the last 2 years of the game biz - including ‘divest from the West’ trends, and this: “People keep saying this is a great time for AA, but I don't think we have the same definition of AA anymore, nor do I think it exists. Budgets are iii/A or they are AAAA.”
Neat new research on preferred game devices in Japan from 2022-2024: For ‘core users’, who spend >$330/yr on games, Switch is stable (24% in both 2022 and 2024), but PC is on a slight rise - from 17% to 19%. For more ‘casual’ users spending <$70 per year? A whopping 41% prefer Switch, and 19.6% still dig PC.
Fascinating to see the mix of platforms for Amazon Prime Gaming’s game giveaways nowadays. It’s not Steam - and rarely ever has been. But there’s game codes redeemable with the Amazon Games App, Microsoft Store (Xbox & PC), Epic Games Store, GOG, and even casual PC game store Legacy Games!
Finally: it’s worth reading LocalThunk’s timeline of how he made Balatro, because it shows how the bridge between ‘I’m just noodling on a game for fun’ and ‘oh, we just had a global smash hit!’ can - on rare occasion - be incredibly short.
Split Fiction, Two Point Museum debut strong…
