Steam's quarterly mega-sales $ increases, revealed...
And yes, we also have 'not-E3' highlights somewhere within...
[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.]
Yup, it’s a fresh week in Game Discovery-land for all y’all. And we’re back in the building and refreshed, after semi-monitoring the various ‘not-E3’ showcases on social media over the weekend. (Boy, that was a lot of games to take in.)
What might be surprising is that we’re not making these ‘announces’ our lead story - mainly because most of them don’t relate to platform & discovery trends, our bread and butter. But we’ll get to it, directly after a neat new official Steam data dump….
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New (to us!) Steam data, live & direct from Valve…
Since Steam is the predominant PC game distribution platform, we’re happy when more direct data surfaces from it. And recently, there’s been a couple of official videos - on Steam visibility and high-level ‘best practices’ - that have been super helpful.
But there’s also been a Steam Business Update presentation we’ve been searching for. And looks like Valve’s Kassidy Gerber did this ‘biz update’ .PPT in a video just uploaded* to Nordic Game’s YouTube. (*H/T to Pocketgamer for indirectly tipping us off, by including slides in an op-ed about mobile discovery.)
The talk is worth checking out for a general refresher on what’s going on with Steam in 2024. But as Kassidy herself says, most of the info has been released before in Steam blog posts or other videos. But… there’s some data slides we’ve never seen before!
The first we wanted to showcase (above) was average daily revenue from the four quarterly Steam sales from 2019-2023. These are the mega-sales that you can discount for, no matter what your ‘cooldown’ schedule. (Reminder: the Lunar New Year sale was replaced with the new Spring Sale in 2023 as cooldown-exempt.)
The Summer Sale was up by 23% YoY in 2023, vs. Autumn at 17% and Winter at 13%. And this data also confirms that Autumn & Winter are the top quarterly sales by daily revenue. (Though the Winter sale is much longer than Autumn, as is Summer - so sales-wide revenue will be higher there across the entire sale time period.)
[There’s several meta-questions in here about whether players are becoming more or less discount-centric, and whether these numbers are growing above or below ‘new game’ revenues. But we don’t have the data to answer, so we’re handwaving them away, sorry…]
Here’s another great new data point on the global reach of Steam. Kassidy notes in her talk: “We invest a lot in making sure we price in the right currencies, accept the right payment methods, and connect our servers close to our customers.”
While some of these may be from a small base, it’s good to see which countries are growing by >100% and >150% in terms of brand-new user growth from 2019 to 2024. (Seeing China in the >100% range and Japan in the >150% range jibes with our view.)
We’ve seen various views on ‘primary language selected to use Steam’ - it’s actually part of the Steam hardware survey every month! But this appears to be a clean view from Valve’s entire active DB, without any of those ‘limited sampling’ biases.
In the talk, Kassidy makes a good point of Western developers “traditionally focusing on EFIGS” - English, French, German, Italian, Spanish - & being surprised about the real language splits on their games. (Here’s some real-world data we recently ran on this.)
Finally, a couple of other tidbits. In noting the need to add controller support for your PC game, it’s mentioned that Steam had an average of 6.7 million daily active controller users in 2023, up 19.2% year on year. And secondly, there’s this graph:
This is, almost certainly, the most mysterious graph we’ve ever run in this newsletter. Kassidy describes it as “revenue over the last 5 years”, but it’s also ‘year to date’, yet includes >5 data points. (It might also not have 0 as the base for the Y axis, lol!)
So, however you want to read it, Valve is making a point. Sure, the Covid pandemic happened, but, as Kassidy says: “We're still seeing sustained [revenue] growth on Steam, even if folks have left their homes and have more options on how they spend their time and money.”
We’re guessing that Steam’s global expansion is a big part of this, given that other third-party estimates* for high-GDP areas like the U.S. - for mobile, and even on PC/console as a whole - aren’t seeing much growth. (*If they got it right!)
On that front, we do actually have a new estimate for Steam’s total gross platform revenue in 2023, calculated from daily sales for every single game on the platform (!) with our friends at Gamalytic. It’s $12 billion - including IAP/DLC revenue.
There’s been a few other public (or semi-leaked) attempts at Steam store $ estimates, including $6.5b in a Microsoft slide from 2021, and $9 billion (excluding IAP/DLC) in 2023 from VGInsights. So we’ll just toss ours on the barbie, and sidle away quietly…
Summer Game Fest & friends - how did it all go?
The cluster of LA-based announcements (and boutique physical events) around the former date (RIP!) of E3 have been popping off since Friday. We count over 550 new game trailers on the GamesRecap 2024 website since last last week, good gravy.
And good news: some GameDiscoverCo data we grabbed for him (the top YTD Steam games of 2024 by units) was used by Geoff Keighley in his intro to the Summer Game Fest showcase. He made the point that, despite layoffs and general turmoil, good new games - often not from ‘the usual suspects’ - are reaching millions of players.
It true, and we’re trying to surface a) what they are, and b) how it happened. So.. we’re not even going to attempt to pick a ‘Top 10’ from the showcases. But here’s a paragraph on each of the majors - we’ll go in ‘descending GDCo ranking’ order:
Summer Games Fest (all announcements) wasn’t blockbuster reveal-heavy, but had a well-curated blend of indie/AA neatness (Innersloth’s new Outersloth funding label, Blumhouse’s ‘horror games’ line-up) with new reveals (Civilization VII, PlayStation’s Lego Horizon Adventures coming to PS5, PC.. and Switch!)
The Xbox Games Showcase (all announcements) really showed off the array of first-party IPs the company has access to, with Doom: The Dark Ages and Gears Of War: E-Day two of the higher-profile reveals. And Fable and Perfect Dark are also still ‘bubbling under’. (And then there’s Call Of Duty, a behemoth, of course.)
The Xbox showcase also attracted a raft of third-party notables (second half of this announce), including Assassin’s Creed Shadows gameplay (ish!) footage, squad-based shooter Fragpunk, a new Life Is Strange game, and more on S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2. (These are all coming to PlayStation & PC too, of course…)
The PC Gaming Show (all announcements) was chock full of interesting medium-profile titles, including real-time occult tactics title Sumerian Six, Ghibli-inspired management sim Hotel Galactic, and an updated trailer for long-awaited rhythm game Unbeatable.
That’s not even including OTK Games Expo, Guerrilla Collective, Day Of The Devs, Devolver Direct, Future Games Show or Wholesome Play Direct - and Ubisoft Forward coming up shortly. (Use the Gamesrecap dropdown to find trailers.)
Platform-wise, with Nintendo skipping any opportunities to present, and PlayStation using a recent State Of Play to talk games (except Lego Horizon Adventures here), Xbox’s current strategy was the main focus of ‘not-E3’, for us platform nerds.
In his IGN Live interview, Xbox head Phil Spencer reiterated: “Our commitment to Xbox customers is that you’re going to get the opportunity to buy or subscribe to the game, we’re going to support the game on other screens. And you are going to see more of our games on more platforms.” (So, yes, a continued opening-out to a multi-platform strategy.)
Oh, and re: that ‘Xbox-branded handheld’ rumor going around before the show? There was nothing in the showcase, but Spencer told IGN: “The work that the team is doing around different form factors, different ways to play, I'm incredibly excited about… we will have a time to come out and talk more about platform.” And he added that “being able to play games locally” is important. So it’s not a PlayStation Portal, basically.
And there were two interesting Call Of Duty-related tidbits. Firstly, “Internet is required for Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 even in campaign [mode], due to texture streaming tech” - though you won’t need a PS+/Game Pass Core subscription to play it. (This is one of the first major AAA titles to do this, right?)
Secondly, you will need Game Pass Ultimate - or a weird & more expensive combo of Game Pass Core (formerly Xbox Live Gold!) and Game Pass Console - to play the full CoD: Black Ops 6 - with multiplayer & ‘Zombies’ online modes - on your Xbox. (Game Pass Core gets you just the multiplayer modes, and GP Console just the campaign mode.)
This reminded us how convoluted the Game Pass tiers are. Notably, vanilla Game Pass Console doesn’t let you play (non-F2P) multiplayer online games on Xbox. So CoD does have the ‘Game Pass Ultimate’ upsell built-in, which should help Xbox’s yield.
The game platform & discovery news round-up…
We’ve accumulated quite a few pieces of game discovery & platform news since last Wednesday. And we’re proud to toss them in your general direction, starting… now:
Many of you may be aware that Steam’s June 2024 Next Fest (above) kicked off a couple of hours ago. Here’s a good mega-list of available demos from SteamDB, and we’re excited to see the top games. (Full analysis in next Monday’s newsletter!)
This interview with Netflix’s Leanne Loombe says that ‘reality show to game’ crossovers have been a highlight for the nascent (mobile-centric) games division so far: “We’ve seen a lot of success with interactive fiction games like Selling Sunset, Perfect Match, and The Ultimatum.” Makes sense.
A smaller - but still notable - part of the Xbox announcements was a new disc drive-free Xbox Series X console with a 1TB hard drive: “A perfect option for digital-first players to experience the speed and performance of Xbox Series X for only $449.99 / €499.99 ERP.” (Previously, only Series S had no disc drive.)
Loved this Ryan Rigney piece on avoiding ‘hard mode’ for marketing: “A hot new game comes out of nowhere and starts pulling in tens of thousands of reviews or [CCU]. So I'll try to reverse-engineer their go-to-market plan to see if they did anything weird or interesting… most of the time the answer is not really.” (Yep - the game’s the thing!)
‘How much $ to charge for GaaS titles?’ - if anything, up front - is a big topic in PC/console right now. So it’s interesting to see PlayStation picking a $40 price point for Concord, given it feels (potentially!) more IAP-centric than Helldivers 2.
Intriguing data from Streamhatchet here looking at watcher overlap between Genshin Impact and Wuthering Waves streamers: “62% of people who watch Genshin Impact watch Wuthering Waves.” This may have led to Genshin Impact streaming slowdown in May - it was down 25%, ‘hours watched’ month on month.
Some ‘online discourse’ over costs to be featured in big summer showcases happened, after Summer Game Fest’s ‘$250k for one minute trailer’ figure got out, but Kotaku clarified: “Indie publishers and developers [told us] that some “free slots” are provided to smaller, non-AAA games and studios.” Swings and roundabouts, etc.
Nielsen’s Mike Klotz has a new piece hinting that single-player AAA might be underinvested in, noting that “only 7% of gamers said they want to see less Single Player Narrative games, compared to 13% saying they want to see less Live Service games.” And 67% of 25-54 year olds they surveyed want more single player narrative goodness. (Can they get it via subscriptions or discounts, though?)
Apple’s WWDC keynote was light on direct video game news, but Apple Vision Pro is expanding to eight new countries - including Japan, China and the UK, while a tranche of high-end games coming to Mac include Assassin’s Creed Shadows (also coming to iPad!), Palworld, Wuthering Waves & Valheim.
Microlinks: Apple Arcade’s new games for July include AA-exclusive cozy crafter Outlanders 2: Second Nature, plus Punch Kick Duck+ and Zen Koi Pro+; Game Pass’ first June additions include Octopath Traveler II, The Callisto Protocol, Still Wakes the Deep & more; PS5 removed its ‘8K’ logo on the hardware box because, well, only The Touryst was insane enough to actually support 8K res.
Finally, my Facebook account told me that 6 years ago today, we were all staring at the Fallout 76 mural on the side of Hotel Figueroa in Los Angeles. Whereas this year in SoCal, many were staring at an e-billboard saluting laid-off game biz workers which says: ‘We love you, we miss you, we hate money.’ The vibes - they changed?
[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.]
Someone needs locking up for that horrendous graph crime!