Steam's new store interface: what you should know

Also: a look at a newly viral wizard-y game, & 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.]

Things are certainly slowing down a tad for the summer - GameDiscoverCo has our special one-time-only yearly ‘summer guest post’ scheduled for next week, alongside un petit vacay, for example. But in the meantime, there’s plenty of data to disgorge..

Before we start: the Pokemon Presents streaming event held last week was decent, if a tad light on new announcements. But the big win may have been DJ Pikachu turning up for the pre-show, spinning an hour of chillout & EDM bangers from the Pokemon game catalog to.. a bunch of other Pikachus. Is this silly? Yes. Is this great? Also yes.

[GET MORE GOOD DATA? Signing up to GameDiscoverCo Plus gets more from our second weekly newsletter, Discord access, basic data & lots more. And companies, get much more ‘Steam deep dive’ & console data access org-wide via GameDiscoverCo Pro, as 70+ have.]

Game discovery news: Battlefield 6 looms large…

Starting out by looking at game platform and discovery news, here’s what we have looming on the horizon:

• Checking GDCo’s 'trending' unreleased Steam games by 7-day new follower velocity, from July 21st to 28th, top performer is EA's Battlefield 6 (#1), whose reveal picked up 30k+ followers. (It'll also be a strong seller on console.) Next: OKU (#2) and Brazilian F2P pixel-art MMO Drakantos (#3) with a hot playtest.

• Otherwise, the Metal Gear Solid: Snake Eater remake (#5) picked up interest as its release approaches, anime battle royale Fate Trigger (#4) and mini survival crafter Grounded 2 (#6) both chart, and Agefield High (#12) is very interesting - a '00s high school sim which takes inspiration from Rockstar's much-missed Bully.

• The Steam Autumn Sale’s new timing - shifted from the end of November to Sept. 29th, caused ruckus that led Steam to clarify its decisions. They say there will still be a Black Friday-highlighted ‘Special Offers’ page at the end of Nov. - tho it won’t be discount cooldown-exempt - and the Steam Awards will still open then.

• After de-indexing all of its adult games to avoid issues with PayPal, Stripe or Payoneer, Itch has updated its FAQs with the specific content that it can’t host. It also added an explanation on why it went (temporarily!) wider than Steam: Valve’s smaller platform had less infringing content to deal with. (In hindsight, ‘de-indexing’ but not removing all adult games - for later opt-back-in - was confusing?)

• Sony is suing Tencent for copyright and trademarket infringement in the U.S. over the similarity of Tencent’s Light Of Motiram to the Horizon: Zero Dawn series: “Sony said… it declined an offer from Tencent to collaborate on a new ‘Horizon’ game last year.” Interesting timing, given Pokemon vs. Palworld is still ongoing.

• Roblox’s profile article on tech stock site Sherwood is a good overview, showcasing its 200% share growth in the last year, and touching on the ‘no net profit, but lots of cashflow’ $ issue which confuses many. Also notable: “‘Probably well over 90% of the kids on our platform’ play for free, [CEO David] Baszucki told me.”

• The PlayStation Plus ‘Monthly Games’ (available at all sub levels!) for August are out, and it’s Lies of P, Day Z and My Hero One’s Justice 2. (Lies Of P is an especially good get, and comes shortly after that Soulslike’s well-received $30 DLC shipped - I presume they’re looking for upsell.)

• As teased the other week, GDCo’s second article at This Week In Videogames is now posted ($), about popular adult content on Steam. This pre-dates the current adult content issues. But worry ye not, the game where you play an “ancient but hot fox yokai who… is forced to start an adult streaming page” is still online*. (*Uhh, NSFW.)

• Netflix’s latest games effort has them spoofing a ‘90s style arcade golf (& fighting) game alongside Happy Gilmore 2’s release. Here’s the game, which is cloud-streamed, if you have access. It’s wilfully dumb, but so is the movie - and it’s notable to see a less mobile-first approach looming from Netflix.

• Here’s a stat on incoming YouTube pitches from Wanderbot, via Ryan Rigney’s latest: “‘I get a minimum of ~30 emails per day from unique developers who are either asking for coverage or just trying to catch my interest,’ he says… during major events like Steam Next Fest, Wanderbot says he sometimes gets over 100 pitch emails per day.”

• The first Gabe Newell interview in a long time is fully up - perhaps randomly acquired by Zalkar Saliev emailing the Valve bossman directly. Besides learning about yacht life, and that Newell used to deliver telegrams for a living (!), there’s not much directly practical in there, save some choice anti-VC invective.

Steam’s new store interface: things to know…

Valve announced that a redesigned Steam store menu is now in Beta, including some reasonably big changes. In particular, the old blue side-bar (above) has been removed entirely, and a new, much more personalized set of menu items have been added.

Will this have some effect on game discovery? It absolutely will. Can we work out what they are? Here’s some general thoughts, while we look through each of the new menus:

The Browse option (above) has Top-Sellers and Discounts and Events as the key menu items (double width and in color!), but also New Releases, Free To Play, Demos, and even a direct link to your wishlist, duping the top right wishlist link. All very logical, and way less cluttered… Points Shop is also there, but now WAY deprioritized.

The ‘Recommendations’ tab picks three games to specifically recommend to you in icon form. We’re not 100% sure where they’re picked from*, but it’s based on your player data. (They are not the first games in the Discovery Queue.) There’s also a more obvious new link to the - previously obscure - New Releases Discovery Queue.

(*Steam’s blog post cites some personalization options: “Games based on your playtime, what you've purchased, or recommendations from people you trust.” Some of the ‘Featured & Recommended’ titles on Steam’s front page explicitly explain the criteria often used by the site’s recommendation engines.)

The ‘top genres’ view is particularly interesting because it picks six Steam tags that Valve thinks you’re particularly interested in. (One of them is SteamOS & Linux right now, cos GDCo has been playing Steam Deck.) This is a much cutdown view compared to the giant ‘laundry list’ on the old page.

The new Hardware section underscores that Steam cares a lot about new forms and functions - yes, it’s a giant feature for Steam Deck and its docking station (with a small mention for Valve’s VR hardware.) But that totally makes sense, vs. the previous more tacked-on sidebar mention for the Deck.

Finally, the Ways To Play tab is interesting because it includes things that extend Steam beyond its normal ‘PC and mouse and keyboard’ stereotypes. These include Great On Deck, Remote Play, Controller Friendly, and a big current trend for popular games: Co-Operative. (All go to existing Steam pages.)

And one other thing? The sitewide Search dialog still works the same way with autocomplete, but has some really interesting new options:

As Steam notes, the new elements are: “Popular Searches: See what others are searching for right now… Recently Viewed: An easy way to jump back to games you've previously looked at… More than just games: Search for categories/tags, publishers, and more.” And top genres are also hanging out in there…

There’s also a new Advanced Search link in this not yet widely-rolled out Beta. But it’s very cool to see both search history and extremely popular searches turn up as default when you start searching for games. And being able to find e.g. Devolver as a company from search is super-neat.

(Our view on how to think of Steam search: 90% of games, people search for your game name and then find it. For a minority, they’re looking for a subject, e.g. ‘racing’ and then see your game in autocomplete. That latter option can be good for discovery.)

Anyhow, please read the full Steam post for lots more details. Our conclusion: these changes won’t shift the fact you need to have some momentum to get somewhere on Steam. But they brings personalization to the fore on frequently browsed menus & may amplify interest in specific genres & styles - something Steam already does well.

Fireball! Why Mage Arena is going viral on Steam…

So sure, it’s only a $3 game, but we’ve been keeping a careful eye on Mage Arena (above) since it launched on Steam last week. It now has >2,500 Overwhelmingly Positive reviews and just crested 13,000 concurrents in the last day or so.

For reference, the game’s described as: “A co-op PvP experience about using your voice to cast spells in the Mage Arena to settle an ages-old feud between sorcerers and warlocks.” And it’s basically a real-life version of the ancient Dead Alewives ‘I cast magic missile!’ sketch - you yell in order to cast spells, you can hear everyone else, and it’s… chaos.

Here’s the CCU chart in our GameDiscoverCo Pro/Plus back end, and you can see it’s going on an ascending magic carpet ride. We wonder how high it’ll get:

You may say: oh, c’mon, it’s a novelty game, why give it column space? Well, for a couple of reasons:

• It’s another voice chat-based idea that unlocks viral potential: Lethal Company and Peak have innovated with voice effects (echo, distance, etc.) And the idea of speaking spells into existence is perfect. One reviewer: “Never knew I had an itch to scream fireball at midnight and wake up my sleeping family until I spent the $3 bucks on this game. 15/10”

• There’s actually intelligible & fun gameplay in there: you’re teaming up and doing team-based attack/defend with your buddies against other player teams. And sure, it’s janky as heck. But the price reflects the novelty-first view. (We actually think the dev could have charged $8 or a tad more without much trouble.)

• Data says there’s clear overlap with other goofy co-op games: our GDCo Pro data set says that 66% of Mage Arena players also own Lethal Company, 6x the normal Steam player. Also high: 55% PEAK and R.E.P.O and 46% Content Warning. overlap. (And there’s actually 59% overlap with Helldivers 2,.)

Of the games released on Steam last week, only Wuchang, The King Is Watching, and Killing Floor 3 have a higher 24-hour CCU peak. And none of the others are still going up in CCU. So that’s.. interesting, right?

The final interesting thing: the barrier to entry to do an online co-op or PvP game with voice chat, technically, seems ultra-low. The tricky thing is user moderation - which games like Mage Arena basically ignore, leading to threads like this pointing out yelled racism all over the servers.

(Bigger platforms have issues with unmoderated voice chat too. But for larger firms, there’s a liability issue - which games like Mage Arena skirt or ignore by being by a random indie who kinda hasn’t thought about it, cos who knows if the game will hit?)

[We’re GameDiscoverCo, an analysis firm 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 real-time data services for publishers, funds, and other smart game industry folks.]