When sequels work: how Strange Antiquities hit 100k sales!
Also: this week's Steam debuts and a bunch of 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.]
We’re back. And by the time you’re reading this, LA’s The Game Awards will have done their traditional mega-reveal thing. We’re doing a round-up of the post announce winners next week, but here’s the full set of reveals to keep you going.
Before we start, if you had any trouble reading the end of our Switch discovery story on Tuesday, here’s a web link to it. (Our newsletter host is now redirecting too-long emails to its website/app, and it was partly broken? We’ll also try to minimize bloat.)
[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 - ~85 orgs have it. Or, signing up to GDCo Plus gets the rest of this newsletter and Discord access, plus more. ]
Game discovery news: Metroid, Fallout see interest
OK, let’s have a rummage through the various bits of game platform and discovery news, before it’s too late:
We like sense-checking via ICO’s Footprints.gg ‘trad media’ mentions chart. And this time it’s headed by Fallout (new TV season, Fallout 76 on Game Pass) and Metroid Prime 4 (new Switch exclusive!), as well as Fortnite, ARC Raiders, Black Ops 7 and the Total War franchise (much-awaited return to the Medieval era.)
After we ran our ‘Call Of Duty’s annual release probably >50% off YoY’ estimates, we see the CoD team confirming that “We will no longer do back-to-back releases of Modern Warfare or Black Ops games…. to ensure we provide an absolutely unique experience each and every year.” (But there should still be annual releases…)
How did the catchy game Deadline Delivery hit 80k wishlists in its first 6 months on Steam? The devs did a Reddit thread with some interesting feedback. What worked: “Taking advantage of short-form media… Screenshot Saturday on X/Twitter… Post your game on Reddit.” Ads & posting in Discord communities didn’t…
Boston Consulting Group has a mega-analysis of the game biz, suggesting the biz growth rate will tick up from 4% to 6% annually as we approach 2030, and showing PlayStation’s strength as a primary gaming platform in Gen Alpha (44%) , Gen Z (34%) and Millennials (36%) in their survey - surprisingly beating out PC.
‘Is Steam a baddie?’ discourse: Hooded Horse’s Tim Bender starts with: “There is no platform that matches Steam’s excellent discovery system… Sustainability comes from taking hard, early looks at games and the reality of the market size they will reach compared to their costs.” And Ichiro Lambe ripostes: “Nobody browses Steam for fun.”
Microlinks: Australia banning social media (including TikTok and YouTube) for under-16s is v.pertinent to the game biz; Steam now warns if an item in your cart can be purchased cheaper as part of a bundle; Roblox’s SLIM tech “allows creators to automatically create lightweight representations of any object in a Roblox experience.”
Best things of 2025: the New York Times’ Top 10 games of 2025 include Baby Steps, Hades II, Despelote, Kingdom Come: Deliverance II & The Roottrees Are Dead; BAFTA’s best video games of 2025 longlist has 64 titles, with Best Game noms including Ghost Of Yotei, Blue Prince, Clair Obscure, Dispatch & Silksong.
Ahead of The Game Awards, the indie-centric Day Of The Devs showcase (video) showed 20+ games and a number of highlights: “Frog Sqwad, a new co-op game from the key creatives behind Fall Guys, was one of several debuts.” Also - wow, The Dungeon Experience is looking, uhh, interesting?
Hallelujah for good quality Roblox analysis like this in-depth piece on Fish It, the Fisch-ish incremental simulator game which “has now crossed 1 million average CCUs” and “scaled its player base by more than 20x” in 4 months! How? A frictionless “auto-clicker style fishing with virtually zero fail conditions” & lots of fun.
Microlinks, pt.2: the PlayStation Plus Catalog for Dec. includes Assassin’s Creed Mirage, Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty and Skate Story; why won’t Steam Machine support HDMI 2.1? Digging in on the drama; Japanese elementary school girls dig Animal Crossing & brainrot, after Minecraft was #1 in a related ranking.
When sequels work: how Strange Antiquities hit 100k sales!
Back in 2022, we had a chance to analyze Strange Horticulture, the Bad Viking-developed, Iceberg Interactive-published cozy ‘occult puzzle game’ which sold ~60,000 Steam units and grossed ~$750k in its first two months, despite launching with only 20k wishlists. (It’s a bit of a sleeper hit.)
Three and a half years later, the brothers behind Bad Viking have released Strange Antiquities, a $18 spiritual sequel featuring “a store dealing in occult antiquities”, with similar cozy/mysterious puzzles. And the game’s already sold >100k units across Steam & Switch (and ~$1.6m Steam gross) - what a great return for the franchise.
Before we start looking at the new game, let’s return to Strange Horticulture, which has been one of these well-differentiated games that just keeps selling. Look at the GDCo Pro data on Steam reviews over time - it never really slows down that much:
As a result, here’s the total Steam sales - which were boosted by the launch of Strange Antiquities, but were humming along before then. Lifetime, we see an outperform vs. norms: ~10x the Month 2 sales and ~7x the Month 2 revenue for the game:
Anyhow, on to Strange Antiquities. There’s a couple of things we really want to talk about the games in this series, starting with why they’re different:
‘Dark academia’ and occult vibes are under-served in games: we hadn’t heard of the ‘dark academia’ subculture until Iceberg mentioned it. But occult-tinged games like Cult Of The Lamb, Potion Craft & Dredge are hits & have high GDCo-surveyed player overlap and affinity for Strange Antiquities.
The ‘find ‘em up’ gameplay is also relatively underutilized: as one reviewer explains, the core gameplay loop is “using information from books on items, gems, symbols, and curses to identify items, and then giving the correct items to people to resolve their problems, based on info they give you.” It’s a chill adventure subgenre - there’s player affinity with Case Of The Golden Idol & The Roottrees Are Dead.
The games’ players seem more gender-diverse than most: many of the top videos on YouTube for Strange Antiquities are made by women, including Gab Smolders (>1m subs) and Cozy K Games. And there’s a ton of TikTok videos, many also from ladies organically hyping the game because, well, they love the franchise.
Erik Schreuder, CEO of Iceberg gave us some great detail on how they saw the vibes behind both titles : “We think players were drawn to the original theme because it felt both unusual and grounded, with a subtle otherworldly edge. It wasn’t cosy in the traditional sense; it was cosy through atmosphere, ritual and discovery. The sequel lets us push that feeling further while staying true to what made the first game resonate.”
Secondly, we’d love to discuss why the sequel was also a hit. We particularly note the following:
When the original is a hit & you have a ‘sold-in’ audience, you can excel: this is our biggest takeaway from another hit sequel, Hollow Knight: Silksong! The original Hollow Knight has >12m sales on Steam. And so, of course Silksong can sell 4.7m copies there, with 75-80% player overlap. (GDCo thinks 68% of Strange Antiquities owners played the OG on Steam for sure - still a lot.)
The outbound marketing & outreach was still on point: Iceberg a) did lots of influencer and short-form video outreach to get organic views b) a good tease/reveal for the franchise continuation c) a post-launch Steam franchise bundle which further increased interest.
The game is deeper & once again incredibly good: we sometimes get dissed for missing out ‘this game is good!’ as a sales reason. It’s 1000% a reason here - Strange Antiquities has 96% positive Steam reviews, a 1.9% refund rate (seriously?!), and a median playtime of 7 hrs 22min, 50% more than its prequel.
Some bonus stats? SA is very U.S. centric, interestingly, with 42% U.S. Steam players, 9% UK, 6% Germany, 5% France and Canada, and 4% China and Australia. And wishlist-wise, it launched at 180k WLs after steady organic interest, and is now at 400k adds, 65k purchases, 26k deletions - for a total of 310k outstanding WLs:
One final note: Strange Horticulture has a lifetime PC/Switch sales split of 74%/26%, despite a slightly later Switch release back in 2022. But Iceberg’s Erik tells us Strange Antiquities “skewed far more to PC than expected”, with an 83%/17% split so far.
Why? Erik suggested “higher community engagement on Steam, which kept Strange Horticulture fans more engaged with the sequel.” Maybe also: discovery issues on Switch for lower-priced games, and the busy-ness of the eShop ecosystem. (Switch 2 hardware is going well, but we suspect many upgrading have heavy eShop game backlogs.) Fin!
Steam this week: Ashes Of Creation goes big…
