Which new games made the biggest splash at The Game Awards?
Also: how those Fortnite IP extensions are going, and lots more 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.]
It’s definitely time for another GameDiscoverCo newsletter, folks, we can feel it in our bones. We’re so sure of it that we’re writing this sentence right now, confidently predicting we will be able to complete the rest of the newsletter successfully.
Oh, and breaking news? Plus subscribers will know we’ve been looking at overhyped, underbaked survival game The Day Before, which launched to Overwhelmingly Negative reviews. Well, not only did its creator Fntastic immediately ‘close down’, but its sales data got leaked - 201,000 buyers and 91,700 refunders - a 46% refund rate (!!) And it’s now been delisted from Steam. Blimey.
[REMINDER: you can support GameDiscoverCo by subscribing to GDCo Plus now. You get full access to a super-detailed Steam data cache for unreleased & released games, weekly PC/console sales research, Discord access, six detailed game discovery eBooks - & lots more. ]
Which new games broke out at The Game Awards?
It may be a little weird to talk mainly about ‘new games’, when last week’s The Game Awards is primarily pitched to honor the best games of 2023. (Here’s the full list of winners, headed by Baldur’s Gate 3 winning Game Of The Year, btw.)
But as the former co-runner of the Game Developers Choice Awards at GDC, one of the other ‘main’ awards shows, alongside the DICE Awards and the BAFTA Games Awards, I will say: putting game reveals in the program makes for lots more ‘hype’. (We toyed with it, but it didn’t make sense for our, uh, sensibility.)
This year at the TGAs, there was quite a bit of ‘too much Gonzo & Kojima, not enough award winner speech time’ sentiment. (One person timed it: “Winner’s speeches: 10 min; Musical numbers 13.5 min; Award presenters: 26.5 min; Other presenters: 42.5 min; Trailers/ads: 1 hr 28 min”.)
The good news: it seems like Geoff Keighley will correct the shortened award recipient speeches for next year - if not the denizens of the ‘Keighley cinematic universe’ who tend to join him onstage. (It’s like the MonsterVerse, but with more Muppets.)
But we are ‘hype analysts’, of course. So, with trailers and announces for almost 50 games shown, both in the pre-show and main TGAs, GameDiscoverCo decided to put together a full list of all reveals/trailers for unreleased games [Google Drive doc, two tabs], with links to each & lots of extra info.
We also found two ways to rank the trailers. Firstly, our buddies at media monitoring service Footprints.gg searched the ‘traditional’ media (both English-language and international) to find the games with the most dedicated article mentions, post-show:
Some brief comments on the games tracked with the most media coverage (game name links to trailer!):
Big IP extensions - Monster Hunter, Jurassic Park, Final Fantasy - dominate: 6 of the top 10 are existing franchises, including Square Enix games (FF VII Rebirth, FF XVI getting new DLC, Visions Of Mana), as well as Capcom’s Monster Hunter Wilds and Saber doing a Jurassic Park Survival game. (And the first new Dragon Ball ‘Budokai Tenkaichi’ fighting game in 15+ years.)
Hello Games’ surprise - Light No Fire - lit up the charts: Hello Games’ Sean Murray is poking fun at himself for the ambitions of the No Man’s Sky dev, given the OG’s ‘overpromise’ issues. But Light No Fire builds on great existing tech. So when they say it “brings the depth of a role playing game to the freedom of a survival sandbox”, set on “a fantasy planet the size of Earth”, it’s… plausible?
Hideo Kojima’s OD is typically cryptic weirdness: yes, we had to Google ‘what is Kojima’s OD?’. Luckily, GamesRadar has a decent explainer. “At The Game Awards, Kojima reaffirmed that OD ‘is a game, don't get me wrong’ but then went on to note that ‘at the same time, it's a movie; and at the same time, it's a new form of media.’” Or.. non-explainer. Anyhoo, it’s a co-operation with Xbox, may use cloud streaming, and ??
Secondly, GameDiscoverCo used our Plus-exclusive subscriber data to look at 30 of the 48 games featured that have a Steam page (whether brand new or old!) and see how their Steam follower count was affected by the announce.
Reminder - ‘Steam followers multiplied by 12’ are (very) roughly the number of Steam wishlists that these games might have picked up, due to their reveal/new trailer:
You’ll see a number of the same titles in here - Dragon Ball & Light No Fire among them. But here’s some things to point out:
Black Myth: Wukong is the outright leader, thanks to China: most of the momentum for ARPG Black Myth: Wukong - now at 235,000 Steam followers (!) is from Asia, where Chinese mythology is catnip to players. But its standout 3D art - if not its dev behavior - is also endearing it to a Western audience.
Motion Twin’s Windblown made a strong appearance from the preshow: only two of the Top 10 most-followed were showcased in TGA’s pre-show, but Windblown, “a lightning-fast action roguelite crafted by Motion Twin, the creators of Dead Cells”, added nearly 7,000 followers & counting at #4. (The other title? Inscryption creator Daniel Mullins’ Pony Island 2: Panda Circus at #10.)
No Rest For The Wicked is one of two new-IP titles in both Top 10s: another surprise announce, No Rest For The Wicked is a top-down ARPG from Moon Studios (Ori & The Blind Forest), and has gorgeous art/tech, to add to the Ori-related hype. (Light No Fire was the other new-IP Top 10 debut in both charts, and extraction shooter Exoborne also performed, with >3,000 followers added.)
Of course, this is all just a small snapshot of the games showcased. Many others (Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons Remake, Marvel’s Blade, Lost Records, etc.) did almost as well, but charted just outside the Top 10. (You can also sort by total Steam follower count in the Google Doc to see a different view of things.) Interesting, huh?
Fortnite: how the new Epic-created games fared?
Last Monday, we covered the impending launch of three ‘first-party’ Fortnite games from Epic, massively expanding the breadth of gameplay available in Fortnite as a platform. (And it really is a platform, available on console, PC and mobile.)
Since then, we spotted Epic’s president Adam Sussman talking about the launch with the BBC: "This is absolutely about expansion… This is also an expansion in terms of having these experiences appeal to a wide variety of audiences, ranging from kids to teens to adults."
And to do that, the rollout is: LEGO Fortnite (Epic in-house), Rocket Racing (Psyonix), and Fortnite Festival (Harmonix), all made by Epic-owned studios using tech and features not (yet) available in Fortnite Creative 2.0. So - how did they do? Here’s now:
We can look at Fortnite’s global CCU (concurrent user) rankings, as displayed in Epic’s interface since earlier this year and collated by Fortnite.gg, to see that these modes are already ‘settling down’ after an initial CCU spike. And here’s our takeaways:
LEGO Fortnite? It’s a major, major hit (1.2m CCU now) for Epic: the combo of co-op and survival crafting is enchanting players of all ages. Here’s a good overview: “It’s a mix of Zelda: Breath Of The Wild & Minecraft… The survival aspect of it is similar to BOTW. Then the Minecraft side of it, you can build… like an instructions page of a irl Lego set.” (We’ve also seen Valheim referenced as a comp.)
Rocket Racing (400k CCU) & Fortnite Festival (210k CCU) also have good interest: we’re personally loving Fortnite Festival, after early tech ‘teething problems’, and paid for the Festival Pass (a Battle Pass-a-like!) in hopes of unlocking Gangnam Style. Seems like Rocket Racing (monetization-light for now?) is retaining players a little better so far, though.
Thsee new modes seem to be expanding the Fortnite audience: it’s easy to look around Reddit and see posts from gamers like this: “Fortnite Lego dropped and first I thought it would be a complete standalone title, but after I downloaded it I was welcomed in… well, Fortnite. [But] it isn’t only the kiddo game I always thought about it, but it is like a big lobby for different game modes and that’s great!” Interesting, huh?
On this point, it’s fascinating that platforms like Xbox are allowing standalone game pages for LEGO Fortnite on their store as an alias for Fortnite. (After you download it, you can only see Fortnite on your dashboard - but you know where to go!)
The overall result, as Fortnite.gg’s CCU leaderboards, monitored since early 2023, show is a continued surge in interest for Fortnite as a platform, even beyond the ‘Fortnite OG’ season that brought players back:
We don’t know where it’s going from here, of course. But the idea of launching a brand new F2P game to hundreds of thousands of CCU in today’s market? It’s so rare. (The Finals just managed it on Steam, but it’s a major exception.)
So that’s why Epic’s pivot to Roblox-like platform for Fortnite is a smart idea - and the right idea for the 2020s. And we’ll see how it scales over time, especially as third parties get better access to tools - even if they don’t get first-party style ‘featuring’.
The game discovery news round-up.
And as we bring this action-packed newsletter to an end, here’s a whole bunch of other news from, well, all over the Internet and beyond:
How’s Steam Deck uptake nowadays? Here’s an interesting stat from Brian Bucklew: “About 10% of Caves of Qud's daily users are playing on Steam Deck.” (We also saw stats on a recent ‘wholesome’ game launch that had about 10% of its LTD Steam hours played on Deck, too. (But that’s probably on the upper end?)
Google’s Year In Search has the top worldwide video games searched for by name in 2023: “1. Hogwarts Legacy; 2. The Last of Us; 3. Connections; 4. Battlegrounds Mobile India; 5. Starfield; 6. Baldur's Gate 3; 7. Suika Game; 8. Diablo IV; 9. Atomic Heart; 10. Sons of the Forest.” Also: Zelda: Tears Of The Kingdom made YouTube’s trending topics.
Want a good sampling of indie games in 2023? The 26th annual Independent Games Festival has revealed its entrants, and Grapefrukt has compiled 486 trailers into one gigantic YouTube playlist: “There’s 520 entries, 486 of those had a youtube trailer. median duration is 72 seconds, median view count is ~1,300.”
In ‘alternate engine platforms to Unity’ news: W4 Games (which helps the open-source Godot bring games to console) announced another $15m in funding and then revealed a console pricing model that’s not sky high.. but not precisely cheap?
GI.biz has a country-by-country round-up on ‘loot box’ legislation that’s kinda useful. Looks like there’s quite a lot of ‘lootbox probability disclosure’ laws, but relatively few wide ‘bans’, such as in Belgium, where Roblox games with RNG in them are banned. (Also: EA Sports FC 24 is now rated 12+ in Germany, due to lootboxen? Huh.)
Alongside The Game Awards, there were some useful games announced at a related Day Of The Devs/Wholesome Snack showcase, including The Mermaid’s Tongue (above), a sequel to the rather wonderful detective game Tangle Tower. Oh, and a more expansive sequel to Kind Words, which seems like a clever move.
There’s a good Naavik piece looking at how “several major game developers and publishers are pulling back on plans for F2P live service games, either by outright cancellations or pivoting to premium”, citing Remedy x Tencent, Disney Dreamlight Valley, and more. (It’s getting tricky to scale CCUs high enough in F2P, recently.)
IGN’s Peer Schneider extracts from a new player survey, revealing that in 2016, 39% of players said they were “tired of sequels”, but only 27% said that in 2023 - while 71% said they “get nostalgic for franchises / characters from my childhood.” Dammit, this is why there’s a Biker Mice From Mars ‘universe’ now, isn’t it?
Steam has announced more focused (& bigger!) festivals for 2024, dating the June 2024 Next Fest to June 10th-17th, 2024’s Summer Sale to June 27th to July 11th, and also confirming FPS Fest (April 15-22), Farming Fest (April 29 - May 6),
Endless Replayability Fest (May 13-20), and Open World Survival Crafting Fest (May 27 - June 3).
Microlinks: more context on Bytedance stepping away from its Nuverse publishing arm; China’s gov officially approves 87 new video games, inc. Tencent & Ubisoft’s The Division Resurgence for mobile; did you know Xbox has a Winter Games Fest with 30+ demos of upcoming indie games?
Finally, there’s another standout Video Game History Foundation investigation, with NintendoWorldReport, all about the just-discovered Eclipse demo for Game Boy:
Context? “In 1992 Nintendo published a [3D] Game Boy game called X. It was based on a demo called Eclipse that was programmed by a young man named Dylan Cuthbert. It would go on to form the basis of the Super Nintendo game, Star Fox. From there Shigeru Miyamoto would begin experimenting with 3D for Mario and Zelda, leading to Super Mario 64 and the Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. Despite its limited, Japan exclusive release, X is generally considered to be one of the most important games ever made. And all of that came from a single, mysterious demo that until now, has remained lost to time.” Until now, indeed!
[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.]