What a banned PlayStation dev tells us about discovery for console games
Also: this week's big Steam releases & platform/discovery 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.]
The rest of the week happened (huh?), and so we’re ending out the week with a bit of a ‘different’ main feature, alongside this week’s notable Steam debuts (for GDCo Pro & Plus subscribers), and of course, all kinds of news to skim, understand, and handwave.
Before we start, here’s a great piece on how the naming for Nintendo’s Donkey Kong came about - both ‘Donkey’ and the less-discussed ‘Kong’. Did you know alternate titles for the 1981 arcade classic included Steel Kong, Kong Boy, Kong Fighter, Funny Kong, and, uhh, Kong Dong?
[FREE DEMO OF GDCo PRO? You too can get a gratis demo of our GameDiscoverCo Pro company-wide ‘Steam deep dive’ & console data by contacting us today - ~90 orgs have it. Or, signing up to GDCo Plus gets the rest of this newsletter and Discord access, plus more.]
Game disco news: Crimson Desert gets chatter…
As we finish up, breaking news that PlayStation hardware prices are up $100+ in the U.S. and Europe: “the cheapest Digital Edition PS5 will [be] $599.99 / £519.99 / €599.99, an increase of $100, while the premium PlayStation 5 Pro console has seen a $150 price rise to $899.99 / £789.99 / €899.99.” Costs are spiraling, and this will be growth-affecting.
Elsewhere, here’s the notable stuff we noted in the game platform & discovery news for the rest of the week:
The latest estimates on weekly ‘trad media’ mentions from ICO’s Footprints.gg (above) have epic ARPG Crimson Desert way ahead at #1 (as it hits 3m sold & players start to warm to it.) Also trending: Fortnite (new season, Epic layoffs), Minecraft (the Minecraft Live event announcements), and Res Evil Requiem.
An interesting stat from Scopely’s co-CEO Javier Ferreira, referencing the maturity of the mobile game biz: “80% of our revenue comes from people that have been playing our games for more than a year.” While they are launching new titles, he agrees for their space: “The reality is that there’s less of a need for new games.”
We did a fun GameDiscoverCo mini-data dump on LinkedIn ft. 2026’s Steam debuts with >100k units by median hours played. Epic samurai ARPG Nioh 3 was #1 (44 hours), with Dragon Quest VII Reimagined at #2 (~24 hours), and Slay The Spire 2 (~22 hours), Mewgenics (~17 hours) & Menace (~15.5 hours) also in the mix.
We were struck by the second half of Chris Pruett’s ‘state of VR x Meta’ blog post we featured on Tuesday - “the teens of today are the core gamers of tomorrow, maybe.” It suggests “sophistication, polish, and production quality become more important to young audiences as they age up”, but social/unpredictable games may still appeal. (So, as Gorilla Tag fans age, they have more room for titles like Peak or R.E.P.O.)
Sony’s dynamic store pricing on PS4/PS5 games is causing mass confusion with deal websites, with CheapAssGamer social media-ing a $26.99 sale (good deal!) for Astro Bot, but swiftly discovering it’s $39.59 when logged out - and for many other logged-in players. (Wonder if the upside is worth this type of shade.)
Microlinks: Valve got served a new class-action suit alleging the lootboxes in its games violate Washington’s gambling laws; CI Games says Lords Of The Fallen broke even on its $81m budget, as it hit 2.5m copies since October 2023; the Next Playground Kinect-like game camera device is going up from $249 to $299 in price.
Xbox’s March ‘partner preview’ event just happened, with some new reveals (FPS Alien Deathstorm, first-person action game Hunter: The Reckoning - Deathwish), as well as STALKER 2 DLC, Hades II coming to Xbox with Game Pass Day 1, and more - here’s the full rundown.
The latest update from Facepunch’s Garry’s Mod ‘spiritual successor’ s&box reveals: “We signed the new license with Valve this week, allowing us to allow people to export games from s&box's editor and ship them as standalone [Source 2 engine] games on Steam completely royalty free… The first out the door is likely to be My Summer Cottage.”
Following Nintendo Of Europe’s lead, Nintendo of America has announced that starting in May, “new Nintendo published digital titles exclusive to Nintendo Switch™ 2 will have an MSRP that is different from physical versions.” What this means, per The Verge, Yoshi & The Mysterious Book is $60 on digital and $70 physical.
Microlinks, Pt.2: PlayStation Portal recently added a system update with a 1080p High Quality streaming mode; Nintendo Switch is the second most popular brand name among Japanese teenagers; ICYMI, Fortnite is back on the Google Play Store for Android, finally.
How a banned PS dev ‘hacked’ console discovery
Following the news we ran on Tuesday that PlayStation is getting more serious about banning shovelware/achievement-ware publishers, we got interested in one of the two entities whose games were removed, CGI-LAB. Here’s all their PlayStation releases.
Why? Well, we actually think there’s some things to learn from their approach, even if their game icons (above) are largely AI-generated slop-piness, and the games themselves are perfunctory at best. That’s not the point, though - the point is the ways they were mining for discovery. And we see three major ways:
1. Using ‘open-source’ adjacent IP prominently
The Internet has created some really powerful IPs and keywords which aren’t actually owned by anyone. And CGI-LAB used these in its games. These included the creepy SCP Foundation mythos - used for SCP-087: The Stairwell Horror, and the liminal ‘backrooms’ spaces popularized on 4chan, and now the subject of multiple hit games.
And of course, the Italian Brainrot characters have been the source of multiple CGI-LAB games, including the skydiving Tung Tung Sahur Extreme, which GDCo estimated as by far the most popular CGI-LAB games at >60,000 copies sold (at 50c!)
Trademark or copyright can be pretty confusing with these IP - here’s a good El Pais piece on that. But one takeaway for regular devs here: more general concepts like ‘the backrooms’ or ‘brainrot’ might actually be a good subject for better-quality games! (You shouldn’t shy away from it just because a lot of people are jumping on that train.)
2. ‘Squatting’ on keywords for popular games
The other reason CGI-LAB went after this open-source-ish IP is there won’t be (m)any copyright holders complaining about using those keywords. And on console devices, having the right words in your name really help discovery.
From working with Ragesquid & No More Robots for some years on mountain biking game Descenders, I discovered that the game sold continually well on console, despite almost no dashboard visibility. Why? Players were just searching for its name directly.
So it’s not surprising that CGI-LAB uses words like Bodycam and Stray, both popular existing game titles, in the weirdly named Bodycam Stray Kitty. (Look, the cute kitty has a weird first-person camera strapped to it, OK?) Also notable: ONLY Sky Parkour: Island UP!, which is trying to capture players searching for ‘Only Up!’.
The ultimate ‘winning’ tactic here (if you’re semi-predatory) is to have the top result for a super-popular game which isn’t yet available on the platform. Example #1: a whooole bunch of devs jumped on after Supermarket Simulator lacked a PlayStation version, according to GameDiscoverCo estimates:
Anyhow, for all you non-sketchy devs out there, there’s nothing wrong with a ‘fast follow’ with a twist, in our view. TCG Card Shop Simulator is a great example of that. And maybe you can have the right words in your game’s title to show up partially at the right time? (This is a legit tactic, if you don’t take it too far..)
3. Use ‘easy Platinums’ to further incent players
This final issue is around ‘achievement hunters’ who play on PlayStation, are willing to buy games inexpensively, and then easily rack up a Platinum Trophy for getting all the achievements. Above is the top player on PSNProfiles, who has 18,600 completed games & today Platinum-ed Flying Candy in 5 seconds (PS5) and 21 seconds (PS4). Jeez.
To be honest, CGI-LAB doesn’t have as easy Platinum Trophies in most games as some of the other banned companies - here’s a trophy guide to Abyss Backrooms Pools Horror, which looks a bit fiddly. But it’s still relatively trivial to get Platinums in minutes vs. games like Balatro, which can take 200+ hours.
There’s no takeaways for regular devs with things like this, since ‘make your game cheap and easy to 100% complete’ isn’t a non-sus business model. But both Xbox and PlayStation have a lot of games that exist mainly for achievement stacking. (Last year, a bunch of Xbox titles added 1,000 Gamerscore via a loophole, for example.)
The main takeaway I’d have for this - which somebody mentioned in our Discord recently - boy, these games must suck up a LOT of internal time at PlayStation and Xbox for QA and approval. That’s time that should be going to non-achievement-first titles. Which is why it’s good that PlayStation is getting more proactive here…
Concluding: I know it’s a little weird to look at a bad actor to try to work out what the better actors should do. But there’s some interesting keywords and ideas in here - I kinda want to see a charming medieval take on Supermarket Sim that isn’t just this rote reskin. (Or is this just a ‘me’ problem?)
Debuts on Steam: Life Is Strange tops slow week…
