[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.]
Hi, folks! Our main story today – exclusive to GDCo Pro and Plus subs – is about big winners launching on Steam this week, since >20 games with more than 50,000 wishlists (and 9 with >100k wishlists) have debuted, post-Steam Summer Sale.
But before we get there, we have a lot of news – and a special mini-section about a couple of interesting Valve changes to Steam rules and infrastructure. So please strap in for MAXIMUM INFORMATION, and let’s get ‘discovery serious’…
OK, let’s start things out with some good ol’ platform and discovery news, as follows:
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The top ‘trad media’ stories for the week, per Footprints.gg (above) are headed by the Switch 2-exclusive Donkey Kong Bananza, which is getting an excellent critical reception. It’s followed by Cyberpunk 2077 (PS+ adding & patch), Subnautica 2 (delay & lawsuit, yikes), and Minecraft/Ghost Of Yotei.
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IGN spotted that the Switch eShop has rolled out multiple new eShop publishing guidelines in Asia, including “how game bundles can be sold, restrictions on sensitive content, prohibitions on inaccurate product descriptions, and when and how product information can be updated.” Wonder if anything similar will come to other regions?
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Roblox has announced a big “expansion of our safety platform”, including a ‘trusted connections’ feature for 13+ players, age estimation tech, more privacy tools, and “insights for parents of teens”. (It’s a big, complex, sometimes Wild West-y platform.)
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We’re cited in this piece about Star Wars Battlefront II’s resurgence, estimating recent Steam revenue as $5m (and a $32m total): “While it’s true that its concurrent users are now giant, it’s all via one-off purchases… [maybe] EA sees this as good catalog revenue, but may or may not see it as a reason to make a new game in the series.”
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Ryan Rigney has a good piece examining a ‘cold email’ to YouTubers promoting a game that helped the creator of Spellmasons pick up thousands of wishlists. But the email didn’t include a Steam key upfront, triggering lots of ‘not best practices’ and/or ‘was it counterintuitively a good pitch?’ discussions. Fun times.
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Valve added another micro-talk to their YouTube channel, this one featuring engineer Yosef talking about “how using Rich Presence can help your game reach more players on Steam.” Here’s the documentation – and it’s true that showing where the player is in your game and even an invite link is a) cool b) under-utilized by devs.
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We’re largely not covering the Subnautica 2 controversy (because it’s not platform or discovery!) But a little bird tipped us that the founders’ lawsuit against Krafton includes the game’s Steam wishlist total (2.48 million), and GDCo’s estimate is currently 2.4m. We’re good at estimating? That’s a statement we can get behind…
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Enjoyed Jason Della Rocca spitting bars as part of a piece on investor expectations: “This is a major shift towards evidence-based investing. Developers who don’t adapt are going to have a very hard time moving forward. The real market failure is that there are very limited sources of funding for prototype + audience validation.”
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The American Time Use survey from the U.S. gov [.PDF] reveals: “On an average day, individuals spent 35 minutes socializing and communicating and 34 minutes playing games and using a computer for leisure.” The biggest leisure activity in this survey was still ‘watching TV’, at 2.6 hours per day. (via Adrian Hon.)
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Microlinks: as K-pop takes over the world, interesting to see PlayStation’s lifestyle ads starring Lisa from BlackPink; Xbox’s latest Game Pass additions include Grounded 2, Wuchang: Fallen Feathers, and Farming Simulator 25; Discord has formally launched its Orbs virtual currency for completing Quests.
We’ve talked about YouTube channel SkillUp (1.07m subs) a few times at GDCo – primarily because of its precise, well-summarized This Week In Video Games weekly 30-minute round-up show, but also its high profile game reviews/impressions.
The latest TWIVG episode (above) has SkillUp’s Ralph debuting a ‘video to text’ extension. It’s the This Week In Video Games website (and newsletter), intended as a zero/low click, ad-free editorial site, run by Edmond Tran (ex-GameSpot/Kotaku Australia.) We’re making a rare excursion to write a monthly column for ‘em.
We join columnists like Nathan Brown (ex-Edge) and Daniel Robson (IGN Japan), and our first column ($) is about “how certain devs and publishers have been using Xbox and PC Game Pass inclusion to help reach impressive player milestones, without necessarily talking about what percentage of those players paid for it.”
Our columns – which are paid supporter-gated, though most of the TWIVG site isn’t – are much more for a B2C audience, as opposed to you B2B folks reading this. But we’re happy to participate, because it’s nice to see a new game website with a focused footprint that’s trying to get ‘back to basics’. Good luck to ‘em!
Two notable Steam things! First, and quoting our own LinkedIn post on the matter: “Great news for Steam devs and publishers: not only is the back-end wishlist data updating again after Valve’s ‘brief’ Steam Summer Sale downtime (haha), Valve has taken advantage of the break to make them, wait for it… realtime!
Well, kinda real-time, but GDCo has confirmed that they update every hour now in the ‘today’ section of the Steam sales dashboard, looking at wishes by day. Yes, this is exciting. Yes, we should get out more.”
A couple of additional notes: the longer-view Steam wishlist pages still don’t update their graphs until the end of the day – which is fine. And some people are seeing ‘interesting’ bugs in their wishlist charts right now – 11 million wishlists in one day?! (UPDATE: we hear that might be fixed now!)
But it’s good to have both wishlist and sales data updating more regularly now, as befits a back end that’s functioning in the year of our Gabe 2025.
Second, the subject of adult games and Steam has been catapulted to the fore again, with the news that payment providers like PayPal have allegedly blocked Steam payments – in some areas of the world – unless Steam removes games with certain most extreme adult themes (like incest).
(Which Steam did, while adding a clause saying they won’t allow “content that may violate the rules and standards set forth by Steam’s payment processors and related card networks and banks, or internet network providers. In particular, certain kinds of adult only content.”)
While the subject of payment providers dictating what’s ‘allowed’ is a fraught one, it also serves to remind us that Valve – a very libertarian company, after all – is remarkably relaxed about what content is allowed on the worldwide PC game platform.
Its current rules – before this particular issue – disallow “nude or sexually explicit images of real people”, “adult content that isn’t appropriately labeled and age-gated”, and “content that exploits children in any way.” And that’s about it.
We’ll be analyzing the adult PC game market more for a This Week In Video Games column posting shortly. (The above paragraphs are the start of that column.) But it’s an interesting and fraught issue, while featuring subject matter we’re guessing most readers of this newsletter won’t stray into making…
