What's the state of Switch, leading into 'Switch 2'?
Also: the biggest streamed games of April, and lots more.
[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.]
Welcome back, GameDiscoverCo aficionados. And yes, this is the heavy heavy monster newsletter, the nuttiest newsletter around, and we’re once more going ‘one step beyond’ - into the state of game discoverability.
And we start off with a look at a big survey on Nintendo Switch, entwined in a bigger question - what’s up with console sales and indies in today’s game biz? It’s more complex than you would think…
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The state of Switch: better than other consoles?
It’s interesting to see a recent interview with Devolver’s Nigel Lowrie in which he says, of Nintendo’s Switch, that the Japanese firm has “created an ecosystem - and therefore a user base – that is really open to interesting concepts and gameplay ideas.”
He adds: “There's still a smaller portion [of players] than we would like on Xbox and PlayStation that are open to looking at a pixel art platformer and going, 'I'll give this a shot.” This is mainly, per Lowrie, because “the large majority of those people buy those platforms to show off what they can really do [technically].”
Obviously, breakouts like Devolver’s Cult Of The Lamb (above) are an exception, doing well across all console platforms. But this excellent SkillUp article (seriously, read it!) about the state of (non-Game Pass) Xbox indie game sales singled out Switch too.
Specifically, the piece says that “some developers flagged the same [discoverability] concerns with PlayStation [as Xbox]… though it consistently ranked above Xbox in finding sales and players for games, it still trailed significantly behind PC and Switch.”
We’d definitely cite Charles Dickens in our impression of the Switch market in 2024 - ‘it was the best of times, it was the worst of times’. For every The Oregon Trail, Dredge, Bear & Breakfast or Tunic (all of which GameDiscoverCo thinks sold ‘six figure’ units on Switch eShop recently), there’s a host of great games that vanish without trace.
We’ve had multiple conversations recently with devs who launched a great, playable game onto Switch, tried to publicize it, and had it sell <3k copies in Month 1. And we discussed Switch’s discovery issues - mainly the sheer amount of games - in 2023.
We think upside can be higher on Switch - for certain types of games - than anything except PC. The market is hideously crowded. But you can perform on PlayStation and Xbox if you’re an indie that looks - visually - like an AAA title (ahem, Sker Ritual.)
And conversely, you can do really good on Switch if you’re ‘top 1%’ cozy or ‘Nintendo vibes’-adjacent, even a twisted version (see cartoon-y Souls-like Another Crab’s Treasure, which is killin’ it on the Switch U.S. eShop charts right now.)
That’s probably an easier goal for most small and medium-sized devs to attain. However, ‘really really good’ on Switch as a third-party is 500k copies (and >1m for extreme outliers?), versus multiple millions on Steam. At least, that’s how we see it!
The state of Switch: let’s hear what players think!
So: we often cover Chris Brandrick’s ‘state of Switch’ player survey - for example here in 2022. It’s a large-scale survey (3,700 respondents this year!) which definitely skews towards the enthusiast end of Switch owners, but nonetheless has some great data.
In further analyzing what’s up on Switch, so close to the end of this console generation, here’s some of the highlights from this year’s survey:
Many households own not just one Switch, but multiple: the form factor fits well with multiple generations or siblings owning it: “45% of those surveyed have more than one Nintendo Switch console in their home… the most common response was two consoles (28%), followed by three consoles (11%), and four consoles (4%).”
‘Most-played titles in 2023’ - self-reported - are 100% first party published: for the record, that’s The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, Splatoon 3, Xenoblade Chronicles 3, Pokemon Violet & Pokemon Scarlet, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Fire Emblem Engage, Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, Super Mario Bros. Wonder and Pikmin 4.
For this engaged crowd, physical/digital ownership is about 50/50: once again, “on average, a Nintendo Switch owner's library is 52% digital games.” This is a pretty high percentage of physical compared to other platforms, thanks to Nintendo’s first-party ‘boxed games rule’ attitude. (~75% of respondents own The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, we’re guessing mainly on physical.)
There’s a bunch of other interesting tidbits here. For example, 79% of NSO members feel that the current basic Nintendo Switch Online membership represents good value for money, but only 49% feel similarly for the Expansion Pack tier.
There’s also a lot of other complaints about Switch eShop discoverability, with one respondent saying: “I probably miss deals on good quality games, because I quit scrolling when it slows down and the majority of games I see are garbage.” Uhoh.
Oh, and one super interesting mini-stat: “15% [of respondents] said they own the Steam Deck… of those who picked up a Steam Deck, a sizeable 88% said that their buying habits have changed, and they are now purchasing more games on Steam compared to the eShop.”
‘Switching’, uhh, to the next Switch, we note that “76% of Switch owners deem backwards compatibility on Nintendo's next machine as an 'Extremely Important' feature”, and most respondents think it’ll launch at around $400 next year. And if Nintendo can improve the eShop experience for launch, then we may be in decent shape…
How about April 2024’s game streaming hits?
Every month, we collab with livestream analytics platform Stream Hatchet - which grabs data from lots of (non-China) game streaming platforms: “Twitch, YouTube Live Gaming, Facebook Live, AfreecaTV, Kick, Steam, NaverTV, Trovo, Rooter, Nonolive, Openrec, Loco, Mildom, DLive, VK, KakaoTV, Garena LIVE, Booyah.”
The Stream Hatchet folks wrote about the Top 20 most-streamed games of April 2024, and gave us a full list of the Top 100 games (Google Drive doc), which we’ve again marked up. What we spotted this time:
Standout new games? Gray Zone Warfare, Manor Lords: if you pay for our Friday Plus newsletters, you’ll know about both of these, but giant military shooter Gray Zone Warfare (#40, 7.2 million hours watched) and medieval strategy game Manor Lords (#47, 6.3 million hours) are standout debuts in April 2024.
The Top 10 were pretty similar month-on-month, except Rust: we know, giant ‘live services’ games get big, and stay big. But first-person survive-’em-up Rust had a big patch and forced server wipe which sent streamers skittering towards the game again. (Watched hours for Rust, #9, were up 246% to 36.1 million.)
No Rest For The Wicked & Stellar Blade had big MoM boosts: both top-down ARPG No Rest For The Wicked (#39 - up 10.8x to 7.2m hours watched) and PS5 exclusive action-er Stellar Blade (#46 - up 9.9x to 6.4 million hours) had limited streamer availability in March, but really blew up in April
Fallout games rode the TV show (& new patches) to big hourly increases: you’ve probably heard stories on this already. But this data confirms on the streamer side: Fallout 4 - which also had a content update - was at #55, up 11.2x to 4.9 million hours watched. Bonus: Fallout 76 was #70, up 9.9x to 3.6m hours.
We find a lot of other interesting tidbits in here. F2P ARPG Path Of Exile surged 1.73x to an impressive 15.2 million hours thanks to a new expansion, and even Rimworld went up 2.96x to 4.25 million hours watched due to its creepy-ass horror themed expansion.
We dig these charts because they unite Steam, non-Steam and mobile titles in one place to ask: ‘what do streamers actually like playing?’ Invariably, it’s titles like Buckshot Roulette (#56) that are doing just great commercially, whether on your radar or not.
The game platform & discovery news round-up..
And that’s lots of stuff. But we’ve got more stuff. Let’s get into that with this look at the latest discovery and platform news, huh? Avanti:
Sony’s lawyers (we presume!) are having a meltdown re: PlayStation Network & Steam regional lockouts, as Steam has added purchase restrictions on Ghost Of Tsushima to match the Helldivers 2 ones, which got added onto, confusing the devs. (We understand the gist of Sony’s reasoning, but the optics are horrible.)
Talking of regional blocks, sounds like Steam got blocked ISP-wide in Vietnam as of late last week, possibly due to the gov getting upset over some aspect of Steam not doing official game approvals, but selling lots of units. (Difficult to find out more about this, but it may only now be a partial block from the gov-owned ISP.)
Performance-based payouts are becoming more popular in game subscription services, so it’s interesting to see what Apple TV+ is thinking about for TV/movie payouts: “Talent would receive bonuses based on a points system [based on] the number of people who signed up for Apple TV+ to watch, how much time they spent viewing and the cost of the program relative to the size of its audience.”
Neat to see AI used for sentiment analysis on Steam reviews on: a) the new SteamSAIL site, which uses OpenAI to crunch the data; b) Steamdata.ninja, which also has ‘positives and negatives’ interpreted by AI c) Ichiro Lambe’s We Love Every Game, which uses Claude 3 Opus to play up the positives of games like Balatro.
Another notable dev quote from that SkillUp-commissioned piece on Xbox & console strategy: “I feel like consoles in general are just becoming less relevant to indies… If you have a mega hit, then no matter what you do, you’re set. But I’d be very worried about being able to recoup even USD $50,000 on the consoles with a small title, especially with porting costs.”
A correction: in last Wednesday’s newsletter, we misidentified the real name of ‘Argl’, the lead dev of Minishoot Adventures. He’s Séverin Larose - the person we connected the pseudonym to, Adrien Sele, is actually the game’s artist. (Apologies.)
Sony has released a list of the top PlayStation releases of April 2024, and Rare’s Sea Of Thieves (in at #1 in EU and #3 in U.S. and Canada on PlayStation 5) is probably the most striking new entry. Also big: Helldivers 2, Stellar Blade, the PS4 version of Fallout 4, and Fortnite, Roblox and CoD: Warzone in F2P games.
Xbox things: Sarah Bond announced a new ‘mobile game store’ debuting in July, but it’s baby steps, per Stephen Totilo: “This mobile web store will initially be for in-game items for Candy Crush, Minecraft, etc.”; Microsoft is considering increasing the price of Game Pass Ultimate again, according to The Verge’s reporting.
Really enjoyed this Ryan Rigney newsletter on ‘9 rules for talking to players’, since getting that right is important for discovery. Some notable highlights: ‘Ask why you’re saying anything at all’, ‘Start by imagining the reaction you want’, and ‘Tell the truth and talk like a human’. (We are ‘palpably thrilled’ by that last statement.)
Aha, here’s Apple Arcade’s new releases for June 2024, which include the ‘made for AA’ Rabbids Multiverse (“a new adventure game featuring PvP, deckbuilding, and more with >120 cards to collect across 5 universes”), plus ‘vanilla’ iOS store ports: Return to Monkey Island+, Tomb of the Mask+, and Fabulous – Wedding Disaster+. (The strategy of custom commissioning large family-IP titles continues.)
Finally, here’s an inspirational story from the early days of game distribution, via the Slovenian Computer History Nuseum. Commemorating the 40th anniversary of ‘cult Slovenian text adventure’ Kontrabant 2, you can ‘download’ the game like they used to in Central Europe in the ‘80s, via… your radio?!
Specifically, they scheduled “a nostalgic broadcast of… Kontrabant 2 via radio waves at the frequency of 89.3 MHz… Anyone who still has a working ZX Spectrum will then be able to test the game.” Cue those dulcet tones of Spectrum tape loading noises…
[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.]