Why did this excellent roguelike deckbuilder fail to scale?

Also: the most-streamed titles of March 2025, and lots of 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.]

As April wends on, we’re back to startle you with what can only be described as ‘a continuous stream of text and graphics’, delivered electronically and with a lack of cool but cryptic ‘save the date’ trailers. (Hi, Marathon!) So - no Easter Eggs til later in April, sorry, but learn about video game’s first-ever ‘easter egg’ here…

Before we start, we have to make you stare at the v.weird live-action game trailer for Binding Of Isaac co-creator Edmund McMillen’s Mewgenics, the cat-breeding life sim/TRPG first announced (with different co-creators) in 2012, and finally debuting on Steam in 2025. YouTube commenters are emotional: “this is my silksong.”

[FOR YOUR INFO: indies can help us by signing up to GameDiscoverCo Plus, inc. more from our second weekly newsletter, Discord access, data & lots more. And companies, get even more ‘Steam deep dive’ & console data access, org-wide via GameDiscoverCo Pro, as 55+ have.]

Game discovery news: Runescape’s spinoff hits…

Let’s start off the week with a tranche of game discovery and platform news - starting with the following mellifluous melange - alongside a reminder for Nintendo Switch fans reading to fill out Switch Weekly’s 2025 ‘State Of Switch/Switch 2’ survey:

• Looking at GameDiscoverCo's countdown of 'trending' unreleased Steam games for April 1st to 7th (by 7-day follower velocity), and Runescape's foray into survival crafting, RuneScape: Dragonwilds (#1) got an enthusiastic response. Impressively, it's already in the Top 100 by Steam's 'top wishlists' chart.

• Elsewhere: the Palworld dating game that was an April 1st joke last year is now an upcoming real game (#3). Toby Fox's 'quirky RPG' follow-up Deltarune (#5) is adding Chapters 3 and 4 and shifting paid. Also new: bullet dungeon crawler Enter The Gungeon 2 (#6) and 'sister game' Starseeker: Astroneer Expeditions (#7).

• As U.S. vs. China tariff talk continues to heat up, we’re noting that ‘influential Chinese bloggers’ say, if things keep escalating: “Authorities may also impose curbs on U.S. services, including legal consultancy, and are looking to reduce or even ban the import of U.S. films.” (Nothing directly on games, but ‘Steam global’ sure is U.S-based and largely unblocked in China.)

• Two Switch 2 feature clarifications: it won’t be joining the Xbox and PlayStation consoles with its own system-wide achievements; and the Switch 2’s Joy-Cons don’t use Hall effect joysticks, as rumored: “The Joy-Con 2’s controllers have been designed from the ground up. They’re not Hall Effect sticks, but they feel really good.”

• Valve posted a brief round-up of its Steam ‘best practices’ talks given offsite at GDC 2025, saying they’re “working on putting some of these talks in video form, which we'll be sharing in the coming weeks and months”, and fielding a survey for other events - or virtual events - to give said talks at.

• Nintendo’s U.S. boss Doug Bowser is notably hedging on first-party Switch 2 game prices, after Mario Kart World’s $80 U.S. price tag induced fan groans: “What you see right there is variable pricing. We’ll look at each game, really look at the development that’s gone into the game, the breadth and depth of the gameplay, if you will, the durability over time and the repeatability of gameplay experiences.”

• Social collab platform Collabstr looked at the paid collabs happening there in 2024 (not necessarily game-related!), and 42% were on Instagram in 2024, followed by 41% on TikTok. Also claimed: “Twitch’s audience is dominated by younger users who may prefer authentic, organic interactions over disruptive advertising.”

• BTW, the above ‘trending unreleased on Steam’ chart still includes GTA VI clone Paradise. That’s ‘cos the crypto-linked Russian devs delayed the game, claiming Steam & EGS are “currently performing their final review”, but directed players to a Web3 launcher to get it. Here’s the state of the off-Steam ‘game’ (no bueno!)

• Analyst firm DFC surveyed current PlayStation and Xbox users on Switch 2, revealing that 20% were likely to be early Switch 2 adopters, 41% were ‘positive but cautious’, and 30% were ‘negative or not interested’. (83% of these folks regularly use two or more gaming systems every week, btw.)

• Supercell boss Ilkka Paananen talked to a16z Speedrun (video) about the state of the market, and Pocketgamer.biz comments: “He noted that for entrepreneurs just starting out, without pre-existing live service games, they must somehow become ‘energized’ by the challenge of having ‘super low’ odds of success.”

• Final Switch tidbits: Digital Foundry analyzed Switch 2’s technical chops: “I went into the presentation expecting a machine with overall performance in line with Steam Deck, but early indications do suggest something more potent - at least in docked configuration.” Also: physical Nintendo Switch 2 Edition games - for key first-party titles inc. Metroid Prime 4 - are Switch 1 carts with upgrade codes in the box, wah.

Bramble Royale’s noble fail & its discovery woes…

We were just contacted by Eric Farraro of indie dev Slothwerks, whose transparent data we’ve covered at GDCo for a loong time. Here’s a look at the iOS/Android premium launch of Meteorfall from 2020, and analysis of the PC release too.

He’s just launched roguelike deckbuilder Bramble Royale on Steam, and has a very honest postmortem of its reception so far, explaining: “The reviews so far have been positive and the folks playing it seem to really enjoy it… But from a sales perspective, there’s no easy way to put it: the Steam launch was a colossal failure.”

Eric’s games have always looked - to us - like high quality titles. And he notes: “Though not a jackpot hit, the Meteorfall series had managed to generate over $1.1M net revenue and sold 100k’s of copies since 2017. The previous game, Krumit’s Tale, grossed $108k on Steam in its first year, achieving 174 CCU at its peak.”

But the results of Bramble Royale? It had just 4,117 wishlists the day before launch, and $8,049 gross (from 703 sold units) after one week on sale. Eric provided GDCo the Steam wishlists from page launch last August until launch on March 26th:

And below is the sales situation for the first week of availability. The game had 30% of its sales in the U.S., another 18% in China, 9% in Japan, 5% in Korea, and 4% in German and the Russian Federation, btw:

Now, on the one hand, this ‘wishlists to sales’ ratio - total Week 1 sales of about 17% of Steam wishlist balance at launch - is actually within GDCo’s expectation bounds - above the 10.5% median we estimated late last year, but below the 29% for games with <10k wishlists we surveyed earlier in 2024.

And we really recommend reading Eric’s full postmortem for plenty of smart thoughts on why the game didn’t end up selling. But for us, not scaling wishlist/pre-release interest is by far the biggest issue here, for a game that frankly looks pretty good to us.

There were some flickers of interest, too - Eric notes: “The wishlist rate started out slow but suddenly peaked with the release of a demo in September 2024. A one-two punch of a Retromation video and a Rock Paper Shotgun article about the demo helped give Bramble the biggest single day number of wishlists in its entire lifecycle.” So some people did care. But after that spike, wishlists returned to a very poor organic daily rate.

Even being in February 2025’s Steam Next Fest didn’t really help, with only ~700 players and ~800 wishlists added. Eric noted that it didn’t effectively push past its peers: “Bramble performed so poorly during Next Fest that when I looked at a ranked list of games tagged with ‘deckbuilder’, Bramble was down at about #50 or so.”

When GDCo quizzed Farraro about what he did re: outreach, he noted: “I aggressively pinged steamers and press, mostly by email. Vast majority were YouTube creators, with some on Twitch as well… I basically looked at who previously streamed any Meteorfall content in the past, as well as similar games (Wildfrost, etc.)”

“In all, I emailed about 200 creators of various sizes a few times: at demo release last September, at the start of Next Fest, a month before release, and then 2 days before release. The hit rate.. is low, although hard to calculate since some of them created content without responding.”

And it’s true - we can’t see many ‘scaled’ influencers covering the game on YouTube - even though it doesn’t seem to have been from lack of trying. (Some people might say that 200 influencers isn’t enough. It depends which influencers they are - and we suspect only a handful make a difference in this particular genre.)

We’re a little taken aback too that this game didn’t wishlist better. But Eric does identify some key issues in his postmortem, particularly that “Meteorfall is best known as a mobile franchise” and “The game lacked a marketable hook.”

The biggest issue may be a combination of complexity & subgenre. Why? Bramble Royale doesn’t look - upfront - like an easy game to learn, which may lead to both players and streamers being nervous to initially get into. (Demo feedback in the Steam forums further indicates to us that it’s a good game, but not hyper-easy to grok.)

And then there’s the deckbuilder subgenre. Eric says: “People are just really fatigued on card / deck builder games. I used to play every deckbuilder that released. Now, I just see another ‘Slay the Spire’ clone and skip past it. I’m sure a large number of people felt that way about Bramble Royale.” (This complaint can be extended to many genres, of course.)

We have some evidence that roguelike deckbuilders might be fading quicker than some other tags, too - GameDiscoverCo Pro analyzes rankings for all 400+ Steam tags (by average Hype score for all unreleased games at that time), and that tag is down year on year, and way below the Open World Survival Crafts of this world:

I think you can over-analyze, and I’m not sure subgenre is the key issue. Perhaps there’s an over-riding direction of travel - there’s a lot of games, it’s difficult to stand out, and the market is hit-driven. It’s just that. Bramble Royale’s result is simply the default result, if you don’t do something drastic to jump ahead of the pack.

But we’re also highlighting what Eric told us: “The only particularly notable creator that covered the game is Retromation, who covered the demo launch last September but since then has focused mostly on Bazaar.” Funny timing here - we were just talking about off-Steam ‘async autobattler meets deckbuilder’ hit Bazaar in the last newsletter.

And we’d take two final things away from this:

• firstly, most YouTubers would prefer to ‘main’ interesting games they can get deep into, doubling down on the ‘hit-driven’ issue even in subgenres like this. This is making new game discovery even trickier.

• secondly, Bazaar isn’t a trad deckbuilder by any means. Perhaps ‘vanilla’ titles are at a disadvantage here? Eric added: “After playing a lot of Backpack Battles and Bazaar, I'll be closely watching for any [autobattler] trends.” (Genre mashups: hot.)

Oh, and one mindblowing thing to end on. At the end of Eric’s postmortem, he said: “If I’d quit my day job to make indie games full-time, I’d be in a difficult place right now.” Wait, what - he’s not a full-time game creator, and has (largely) never been? We 1000% couldn’t tell, from the quality and depth of what he’d put together.

And that’s obviously one of the big issues in games right now: on the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog. And since we’re all standing on the shoulders of giants in terms of high-quality, cheap engine tech, we’re in… well, not quite the ‘deprofessionalization’ of games, as I sometimes say, but definitely the ‘everybody-ization’ of them. Finis.

March ‘25 in most-watched livestreams: Mon. Hun.

Finally, we heard once more from our buddies at livestream analytics platform Stream Hatchet. They passed along the Top 100 games in terms of total hours watched via big (non-China!) streaming platforms like Twitch & myriad other smaller platforms.

As always, we think this paints a really helpful picture of the general popularity of specific titles in the PC/console games market. So - here’s the full ‘Top 100’ for March 2025 (Google doc), pruned and annotated by GDCo. Here’s what we saw:

• Monster Hunter Wilds goes big in its first full month: while Capcom’s latest franchise iteration had 21 million hours watched in Feb, its Feb 28th release date meant it surged to 69.8m hours watched in March (#5) - this franchise is still hot.

• New entries were headed by R.E.P.O. and Assassin’s Creed Shadows: the cunning small-dev co-op horror title R.E.P.O. hit #14 with 32.6 million hours watched, actually beating out Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed Shadows, which still hit #24 with 17.9 million hours viewed.

• Schedule I is in the Top 40, but may go higher in April: we talked about the co-op drug-dealing sim Schedule I already, and #35 with 12.4 million hours watched is creditable. But we note it’s in the Top 10 most-streamed Twitch games in the last week - so may inch up in April, depending on rest-of-month trajectory.

Most of the Top 10 were fairly static from February to March (state of the biz!) So we’ll wander further down the chart to point out other notables. Other new entries? Split Fiction (#31, 14.7m hours), FragPunk (#38, 9.7m hours), inZOI (#41, 7.7m hours), and The First Berserker: Khazan (#42, 7.5m hours.)

Otherwise, Kingdom Come: Deliverance II dropped 89% - from 47m hours watched (#9) in Feb. to 5.2m (#52) in March. But it released very early in February, so this isn’t unexpected from non-GaaS titles after their first full month on sale. And the game will still do great from discounts and sales in its Steam & console ‘long tail’. Toodles…

[We’re GameDiscoverCo, an analysis firm 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 real-time data services for publishers, funds, and other smart game industry folks.]