Which Steam games 'won' revenue again in 2023?
Also: Deep Rock Galactic's 2023 stats & all kinds 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 have returned, like the prodigal sonny Jim, for another week of data, surprises, and analysis of the PC and console (and fine, some VR and mobile) video game space. Most of you know what we do by now - thanks for reading about it here.
Before we start, ‘game lifecycle speedrun of the week’ award goes to iOS/Android rhythm action game Love Live! School Idol Festival 2 MIRACLE LIVE!, which simultaneously announced the game’s upcoming global launch (in Feb.) and shutdown (in May). That’s an any% record, folks…
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Which Steam games 'won' revenue in 2023?
A few weeks ago, Steam put up its regular ‘Best of 2023’ sale, which is interesting because it ranks ‘this year’s top games by gross revenue’ on Valve’s giant PC games platform - not precisely, mind you, but in randomly sorted ‘medal tiers’.
Therefore, we can tell which 12 titles hit ‘Platinum’ in 2023, which 12 were ‘Gold’, which 25 were ‘Silver’, and which 50 were ‘Bronze’. It’s a great way to get a basic idea of popularity for last year - both of modern and evergreen titles.
Even better, Steam’s run the charts since at least 2019, and GameDiscoverCo has put together a spreadsheet (Google Drive doc) showing the previous tier rankings for every game that charted on Steam’s top-grossing 99 in 2023. For example, here’s Platinum:
You can already see how interesting this is in terms of understanding how games are performing. (For example, look at Cyberpunk 2077 drifting down the tiers until its Phantom Liberty DLC and the 2.0 update for the base game blasted it back up!)
We could noodle into the details forever, but here’s some top-line notes for you:
35% of the Platinum, Gold & Silver tiers were ‘new in 2023’ games: not sure what you were expecting, but here’s those titles by release date: “2023 - 17; 2022 - 6; 2021 - 3; 2020 - 4; 2019 - 2; 2018 - 1; 2017 - 2; 2016 - 3; 2015 - 2; 2014 - 3; 2013 - 4; 2012 - 1; 2007 - 1.” (Overall: plenty of legacy GaaS titles doing well!)
8 of the top 24 games were F2P & another 10+ paid but discount & IAP-heavy: it’s probably easier to list the premium titles which were largely ‘buy once and done’: Hogwart’s Legacy, Sons Of The Forest, Starfield, and Baldur’s Gate 3 in Platinum, and Resident Evil 4, Armored Core VI & Elden Ring in Gold.
The $ floor to make these charts? At least $20 million gross in 2023: no specifics were given, but we’re guesstimating you need $20-30 million to make Bronze, $30-60m to make Silver, $60-90m to reach Gold, and $100 million to reach Platinum. (And you benefit from a lower 20% Steam cut if >$50 million lifetime, btw.)
How about smaller-team games in these charts? There’s not much ‘indie’ in Platinum or Gold - except maybe Sons Of The Forest dev Endnight Games, which could be <20 people if LinkedIn is to be believed, and grossed >$170 million+ LTD (!) on its tense survival sequel.
Further down in Silver, you’ll see other smaller/tiny teams like Lethal Company (at $10, compared to many $60 games in its tier!), BattleBit Remastered, and the small-mid sized Project Zomboid, which has had two ‘Silver’ showings in a row after adding multiplayer back in 2022, as we covered in depth.
Finally, we think it’s fascinating to look at evergreens. For example, Paradox’s space strategy game Stellaris has been in the Silver tier every year since 2019. That’s consistency for you. (As has Korean MMO Black Desert, actually, and good ol’ Team Fortress 2.)
So there you go - this data isn’t very secret. But by perusing multi-year trends for it, you can get a clear sense of real revenue driven, at least in the Steam part of the PC ecosystem. (And outside of Steam on PC, we covered the F2P ‘big boys’ here.)
Deep Rock Galactic: its 2023 stats, transparently
Some of you may remember that we covered co-op FPS ‘space dwarves’ mining game Deep Rock Galactic’s transparent look at its LTD stats up to the end of 2022, back in January 2023.
Well, good news - the dwarves are back in town with an updated infographic, covering the 2023 milestones for the GaaS title, and we’re here to analyze it. The above detailed DAU chart is a great hint as to its ‘sleeper hit’ status, but here’s what else we noticed:
Copies sold increased again in 2023, partly powered by discounts: the game really settled into a ‘66% off’ groove on Steam in 2023, with 10+ discounts hitting & strong demand. Thus: 2.57 million units got sold, vs. 2.34m in 2022, 1.39m in 2021, 1.18m in 2020, and ‘just’ 400-500k in 2018 and 2019. It’s evergreen!
Cosmetic DLC is piling up, including a well-supported (!) Supporter Pack II: all of the game’s DLC is cosmetic, but there’s now a lot of it, with $130 (at full price!) worth, including a Supporter Pack II that had 33,500 sales within the first 24 hours. Players are super appreciative, with one saying: “I purchased this skin only because Ghost Ship Games deserve it for making a great game and improving it over years with free battlepasses with no FOMO.”
The Deep Rock Galactic franchise plan? Goodwill gets converted to spinoffs: we know excess monetization can really put people off. But where’s the financial upside of being so generous, your CFO might ask? Here: topdown autobattler Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor and first-person roguelite Deep Rock Galactic: Rogue Core are both in the Top 100 unreleased Steam games by wishlists.
Other than that, some micro-points to finish off the ol’ analysis:
Steam average playtime is still going up, thanks to good retention: average playtime was 42 hours and 45 minutes in 2022, and is 46 hours now, and Steam players with >100 hours played went up from 500,000 to 800,000 in the last year.
GameDiscoverCo believes the majority of DRG’s DAU is from Steam: we think that the Xbox ecosystem sees 2x the DAU of PlayStation, but overall, console DAU is about 10-20% of the Steam numbers. (Still good stats, but PC-first.)
Dwarves like drinking beer, so let’s see the data: apparently 22% of players passed out drunk (in the game) in 2023, and those that did faceplanted 3.38 times on average. And 151 million virtual pints of ale were quaffed during 2023. Hic.
We like analyzing Deep Rock Galactic because a) the creators (Ghost Ship Games) are transparent, b) they’ve done a good job of growing and retaining interest over time c) they’re doubtless profitable just on sales of the existing game/DLC.
Their growth and retention is often driven by discounts. But Deep Rock is still $10 USD even at 66% off. And its other deluxe bundles are anywhere between $17 and $39 - that’s smart upsell at work. So why pile on ‘pay to win’ extras and get review bombed, if you’re making money, players are happy and you have a 97% Positive Steam rating?
The game discovery news round-up…
Those of you who are Plus subscribers know that in Friday’s Plus newsletter, we spotlighted Sega’s Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth as the #3 debut of last week on Steam (behind Tekken 8 and big survival hit Enshrouded, which just hit 160k CCU!)
Well, GameDiscoverCo’s Alejandro made the above graph at the weekend comparing all the Yakuza/Like A Dragon franchise CCU, as the Japanese gangster adventure swelled to a franchise record 46,000+ CCU on Steam alone - for a $70 game, too.
Anyhow, there’s a whole bunch of platform news to go through, starting with a major announcement from Apple - and some other big Xbox moves:
As the European Union prepares to roll out the Digital Markets Act, Apple announce some fairly complex changes to ‘allow’ third-party app stores on iOS in the EU. The ‘normal’ Apple App Store fee goes from 30% to 20% (17% plus a 3% payment provider charge), and small biz is down from 15% to 10%. (Oh, and Xbox Cloud and GeForce Now are now allowed worldwide as a standalone iOS app!)
But it’s the other changes that are the most contentious. For all third-party store distributed apps in the EU: “Any app that sees more than 1 million installs per year must pay Apple a 50 euro cent fee (about 54 cents USD) for every new installation… that fee is charged once per every user each year.” And third-party App Stores pay the 50 euro cent fee on all installs. Who’s not OK with this? Spotify: “this takes the level of arrogance to an entirely new place”, and Epic’s Tim Sweeney (citing “hot garbage”.)
VC David Kaye has an interesting piece on ‘the myth of overnight success’, pointing out: “What do hits like [Palworld, Lethal Company] and others like Baldur’s Gate 3, Hades and Elden Ring have in common? They are all the culmination of years (and in some cases, decades) of work by their developers across multiple titles. Over time, successful studios like Larian, Supergiant and From Software have slowly but sure built sustainable competitive advantage.”
More Switch 2 rumors? An Omdia analyst, researching company supply chains of ‘small and medium displays’ in Japan is “claiming Nintendo's next device will come with an 8-inch LCD screen and will arrive at some point in 2024.” And it “will be responsible for a doubling in shipments of so-called amusement displays in 2024.” Plausible? Sure.
Microlinks: those scary Chinese gov ‘restricting game monetization’ guidelines disappeared for now, as 115 new domestic games got approved; there’s a free Switch port of Godot available to authorized developers; Epic Games Store seems to be preparing subscriptions - well, EA Play at least - for its service.
Post-Activision Blizzard merger, Microsoft’s game division has laid off 1,900 employees, about 8% of ‘Xbox & friends’. Notable: Blizzard’s boss Mike Ybarra decided to leave as their survival game got cancelled, even though Ybarra said in November: “Someone will drag me out of Blizzard... That's how long I will be here.”
As part of the Microsoft layoffs, Jez Corden reports: “Microsoft has also shut down departments dedicated to bringing Xbox games to physical retail ... which if you've seen the digital-only Xbox console leaks ... well, you can get an idea of where Microsoft is going here.” (We covered physical Starfield being pulled from Wal-Mart recently - tho MS could still use external physical partners if they wanted.)
On a related note, looks like Circana reported that*: “In the US in 2023, physical spending on software for Nintendo platforms accounted for more than half of total physical software spending. Physical spending on software for Xbox platforms accounted for less than 10% of total physical spend.” (*That Tweet disappeared tho...)
We mentioned that we thought Pavlov on PlayStation VR 2 (the #1 PSVR2 game of 2023) had sold <10% of its LTD Steam numbers. Well, here’s more indication that PSVR2 isn’t flying off the shelves - selling 10,500 units on Amazon U.S. between Nov. 16th and Jan. 16th, compared to >320,000 Meta headsets.
HowToMarketAGame looked at ‘total number of indie Steam games with 1,000+ reviews’ in both 2022 and 2023, and after a revision we accidentally triggered, discovered that 337 games made that milestone in 2022, and 354 in 2023. Top genre tags? Horror, survival, simulation, and multiplayer shooter are high up…
The Day Before devs posted - and then deleted - a drama-heavy document which claimed, among other things, that “certain bloggers made huge money by creating false content” about the game, and that they “implemented everything shown in the trailers”. Here’s a good timeline showing that maaaybe they’re not blameless?
Esoteric Japan-adjacent microlinks: a Tomy robot made it to the moon as part of the Japanese moon landing; two games created solely for Japanese arcade machines to pass regulatory tests; a new survey of anime shows how big it is in the U.S; on JP firm Taito’s avant garde early ‘80s ‘Taitan’ UK arcade machine, co-created by the peerless Roger Dean.
Finally, you may have seen The Pokemon Company’s announcement - regarding Palworld, obviously - that “we intend to investigate and take appropriate measures to address any acts that infringe on intellectual property rights related to the Pokémon.”
We have no idea exactly what this means, but social media sketch-masters RDCWorld have some ideas about the ‘behind the scenes’ intrigue. (Take a close look at who else their ‘lawyer’ is texting during this skit…)
[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.]