[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 we wander into the weekend, let’s usher you into GDCo Towers! In our lavish foyer, we’re not planning to degenerate into Ballard-ian civilizational mush – but rather, continue to bring you great game platform & discovery news, sans urban decay.
Before we start, shout-out to historian Kevin Bunch & his fascinating YouTube video on the history of the ‘artillery’ microgenre (think: Scorched Earth, Worms), including newly found footage of Potshot, a computer plotter-based version from 1969 (!) that’s the OG.
Let’s start the goodness with a look at what we’d briefly forgotten is ‘earnings week’ for a lot of game platform-related companies:
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Xbox had some pretty decent quarterly results: revenue up 10%, and “CFO Amy Hood cited ‘better-than-expected performance from first-party content and Xbox Game Pass’.” (Gotta be those PS5 debuts like Forza 5, right?) But revenue may be down “mid to high single digits” for July-Sept. due to a “strong prior year comparable.”
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For longer-term Xbox revenue trends, we dig the above 10+ year chart from John Welfare. Look carefully at the red ‘hardware sales’ line – that’s the end of Xbox One, and then the Xbox Series (launching in late 2020, now fading out.) The blue line is games & Game Pass, both bolstered by the Activision deal closing in 2023.
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Budgets are changing in the game biz – here’s Dead Space co-creator Glen Schofield on what he’s being offered for his new game: “We pulled the budget down to $17 million, built a prototype… People loved the concept… But early feedback was “get it to $10M.” Lately, that number’s dropped to $2–5M.” (They mothballed it.)
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Yep, the Switch 2 sold >6 million units in seven weeks, and here’s some good context from John Welfare: “PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 were only able to get 4.5M out in 2 months.” Also: “Switch 2’s big launch game, Mario Kart World, sold nearly as many copies as the console during its first month, at 5.63 million copies.”
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Former Nexon CEO Owen Mahoney is spitting fire yet again with ‘Too Big To Succeed’: “Development has become so expensive under current methodologies that risk reduction has become the top priority… But the safer the project, the lower the odds of producing a breakout hit, the very thing that drives returns.” (It’s a must-read.)
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Microlinks, Pt. 1: Meta’s Reality Labs division lost $4.5b in the latest quarter, with lower Quest sales (but more ‘AI glasses’ – aka AR glasses – $!); top ‘trad media’-covered games of the week are Battlefield 6 & Wuchang; Sony is funding more China-first console games – likely to PS5 console exclusivity, a smart move.
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The just-launched UK Online Safety Act – broad, kinda confusing – has been causing a ruckus. Xbox announced UK adult age verification becoming mandatory for social features in 2026. And here’s experts analyzing the bill, with lawyer Isabel Davies trying to counter “misinformation and panic”.
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Steam has now officially rolled out the video player update that we talked about recently, noting that “you may want to re-upload [pre-2020] trailers for best quality.” Also, Tinybuild’s Alex Nichiporchik found a bonus stealth update which “auto-converts GIFs you embed in your store page to videos”, with Valve’s Alden Kroll confirming that “we’ll let you upload video files… for your store page assets” soon.
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Nintendo things: that rumored Nintendo Direct streaming showcase arrived yesterday. And here’s the full line-up – third-party, with a few notable Switch 2 launches (Madden) cross-platform (Octopath 0), plus the odd Chillin’ by the Fire, but not earthshattering. Also: Switch 1 pricing is going up in the U.S. next week.
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Roblox’s financial results? Pretty impressive, per Ben Sarraille: “💰 $1.44 billion in bookings (+52% YoY); ⏳ 27.4 billion hours engaged (+58% YoY); 👤 111.8 million avg DAUs (+41% YoY; 👾 $316.4 million paid out to devs (+52% YoY).” They’re also emphasizing profitability – $199M operating cash flow (+32% YoY) in the quarter.
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There’s now a full set of talk videos available online from the UK-based IMPACT! Indie Games micro-event, from the Impress Games crew, and we love ‘em, all hyper-practical, e.g. Jarvs Tasker on post-launch community activities and Abi Le Guilcher on how to TikTok for indie games.
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Microlinks: Pt. 2: the PAX West show exhibitor list is live, showing a few bigger exhibitors, but a continued shift to ‘high energy, but more local’ community shows; the NYT takes on video games and AI, inadvertently echoing our 2024 ‘AI &Pac-Man’ piece; Doug Shapiro talks about power laws in culture, including games.
A few weeks, ago the sprite-like Ichiro Lambe of Totally Human Media jammed a rough look at average and median playtimes for Steam games per genre, using public Steam review hours played. We dug it, but the data was intentionally limited – and Steam reviewers often play games for longer than the normal player.
Luckily enough, GameDiscoverCo has a Time Played Explorer as part of its GDCo Pro account that goes deeper still, using (anonymized, randomly sampled) playtime data from public Steam player profiles.
And so we made you all a Google Drive spreadsheet document for median and average hours played in each Steam ‘genre’ tag – using the Top 250 most-played games in each tag, and using tags listed in the Top 8 (out of 20 total ranked Steam tags) only.
This ‘Top 8’ has the effect of only listing games that are ‘really’ in particular genres. (Though remember that many games are in multiple buckets, since we’re using ‘inclusive’ tags.) Here’s the Top 10 tags by median hours played, also listing averages:
At the very top here, unsurprisingly, is JRPGs, which have 7.5 hours played as a median, and 21.4 hours on average. This is due to these titles – many of which are in long-running series – having, duh, a large amount of densely packed content.
Below are the Top 15 JRPGs by median hours, taken from our GDCo Pro data. Yes, a number are not traditional turn-based JRPGs, but are certainly ‘Japanese role-playing games’ – or heavily inspired by them (hi, Clair Obscur – great numbers!) Here we go:
Otherwise, the Top 5 is rounded out by Survival games (7.0 hours median), Grand Strategy (6.6h median, and a whopping 29.1h average!) Looter Shooter (6.1h median), and Action RPG (5.9 h median). Also in the Top 10: Base Building, Roguelike Deckbuilder, Turn-Based Combat, Roguelite, and Job Simulator, all with >5.4h median.
BTW, we’re not saying that you should solely make games in these genres, and no others. Nonetheless, it’s really interesting to see which subgenres ‘win’, in this view. (They are pretty much all genres that we might recommend people make PC games in…)
Moving on, we can’t exactly list every one of the 90+ subgenres on a single graph. But here’s some other tags we thought were interesting to highlight:
Among them, we noted Metroidvania in the ‘middle of the pack’ at 3.5h median, Puzzle Platformer (not a favorite of ours!) near the bottom of the list with 2.3h, and Open World Survival Craft and City Builder both holding their own close to the Top 10, with ~5h median each.
What would we take away from this raft of data? Mainly the following:
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More ‘expensive to dev’ game genres are often higher up the playtime ranks: Grand Strategy is not an easy or cheap subgenre to enter, but it returns well on hours played. (Whether it’s good ROI for new entrants is a whole other question…)
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Super-low barrier to entry reduces playtime on lower-ranked genres: we look at genres like Twin-Stick Shooter? It’s pretty easy to enter the space, and tricky to stretch replayability – hence a near-bottom 2.2h median ‘Top 250’ playtime.
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Median playtime isn’t a be-all end-all – but it provides hints: people play the top games in certain subgenres more. And that – likely – provides better value for money in terms of ‘$ per hour played’, an under-discussed metric. But there’s still cheaper, shorter games in the same or other genres that do just fine!
Anyhow, to end, we did outfit the full spreadsheet with the name and hours played of the game with the largest median playtime out of the Top 250 titles in that genre, and the same for the smallest. Here’s a partial snapshot:
It’s often free games in the ‘lowest median hours’ spot. But some of the titles in the highest spot are interesting to us. RimWorld winning ‘Base Building’ with ~65 hours median playtime doesn’t surprise us, though! (Watch out for an interview with the devs on GDCo soon…) Anyhow… more food for thought, huh?
