Analysis: why some Steam wishlists won't make players hit 'buy'

Publikováno: 5.11.2024

Also: platform & discovery news, and the most-watched games of October on streaming.

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[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.]

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Game discovery news: hi, Showa American Story?

We’re starting - as we do nowadays - with the most interesting game platform and discovery news since late last week. And here’s what we’ve got for you:

Some Steam wishlists don't make players hit 'buy'.

Look, we all know the drill for PC & console games - which sometimes remind us of the movie industry, in the sense that they can be unpredictable and hit-driven. You announce a title, you drive a bunch of interest and Steam wishlists, and you launch!

The issue is the (lack of) reliability of knowing how you perform. When we last surveyed this back in April, the median for games with >10k wishlists on launch was 0.17x Week 1 sales compared to wishlist balance. (So: 20k wishlists, 3,400 Week 1 sales.) But the variance is huge - as low as <0.02x, as high as 1x or more. Fun times.

This is why a lot of people are talking about trying to understand ‘wishlist quality’ better. (We’re working on some metrics around it.) But we also thought it’s worth zooming way out, and re-describing what happens on Day 1 of a launch, as follows:

  • Pre-release, a player hit the ‘I want to wishlist this’ button on a game: could be a casual ‘bookmark’, could be ‘damn, i can’t wait for this to come out’. Can’t tell.

  • Immediately at release, the player gets notified the game’s out: if they notice the email, and if they’re interested, they click through and look at the game’s price, its genre, any reviews and forum comments to date. And then buy! (Or don’t.)

This may seem self-evident, but (at least for non pre-orderable games), people are making that buying decision ‘in the moment’, based on what they’ve heard or seen about the game. You’re not banking wishlists, waiting for them to convert at 0.17x. You’re banking eyeballs that you then have to push over the line to buy…

We know a lot of the reasons that games do better than expected, in today’s market: they are exceptionally good or replayable, they’re in an under-served market, perhaps a lot of influencers hop on and play them, they have a ‘je ne sais quoi’ virality.

But looking at games that under-performed - and why - is also worth our time. And we’ve been tracking great-looking Unreal Engine first-person, solo-dev “heavy metal horror indie game”The Axis Unseen as one of those titles.

Just to break down the stats: the game launched on Steam on October 22nd with - GDCo estimates - >150k Steam wishlists, a good total. But it maxed out at 86 concurrents (CCU), and we’re estimating it’s at a 0.02-0.03x Week 1 conversion rate - so perhaps 10-15% of ‘expected’. (We’d have ‘expected’ it closer to 500-1,000 CCU.)

We’ve actually mentioned the game before when it comes to ‘look what solo devs can do nowadays, technically!’ It’s resonating with a certain player base - the reviews are close to Very Positive, and the game’s dev - Nate Purkeypile - told us “the people who sunk time into it and resonated with it have started leaving more and more [positive] reviews.”

For a solo dev, we reckon the title will work out fine, $-wise for Nate. But it just didn’t have the ‘pop’ out of the gate that we expected. Can we work out why? Some thoughts:

  • First-person fantasy RPG games come with high expectations: unlike certain niches, if you have a first-person fantasy game with good looking graphics, you start to get compared to games like Skyrim in terms of depth of content.

  • ‘Former Skyrim dev’ may attract casual wishlists from Bethesda fans: it’s quite possible ‘new RPG’ and ‘ex-Skyrim designer’ - and good art - is the kind of thing that will make more casual players take notice, but register a ‘softer’ wishlist. (A ‘remind me to check back on this’, effectively.)

  • The final game is quirkier and more hunting-based than some expect: the initial trailer for the game was big on environments and less big on gameplay. And we note that even Splattercat’s video after playing the game starts out by saying: “This one's a little bit of a weirdie.”

So, as Splattercat explains, The Axis Unseen “imagines…if you took a game like Cabela’s.. or theHunter: Call of the Wild, and you set it inside of a strange post-apocalyptic monster ridden universe.” It’s a pretty original idea - but it may not be a super-mainstream one.

So far, so guess-y. But do we have any data to back this up? There’s not enough players of the game to easily sample it. But if we look at Steam wishlisters of The Axis Unseen and how much more likely they are to have played these games than the median Steam owner (‘affinity multiplier’), we get these top charts:

If you’re a company who wants access to these Affinity charts as part of our Steam Deep Dive offering, ping us.

So here’s possible evidence. There’s a lot of deep & complex open-world RPGs, headed by Outward & quickly followed by multiple Bethesda games, including Morrowind and Oblivion. (theHunter: Call Of The Wild only has a 2.1x ‘affinity multiplier’, btw.)

Essentially, to be flippant, we feel like a bunch of AAA game players 'bookmarked' the game, and then turned up on launch day - if they noticed the launch email - and were like 'oh yeah, sure, but not buying at $22.49'. The Axis Unseen still got its core fans - but it jettisoned a lot of people along the way.

So the biggest lesson we have, here: are there a class of people who like playing a certain game subgenre who are going to say: 'Oh yeah, I will spend $ on this game right now!' on launch day when it comes to your game? You need that! And Shapez 2 is our go-to for an example - albeit in a hot, underserved niche, automation games.

And the more you get away from 'expected' genres and maybe attract people who are a bit more idly wishlisting because it 'looks cool', and there’s a lack of easy Steam comps for the game you are making, the trickier that conversation can be.

October 2024’s most-watched streams, analyzed..

Finally, we’ve collab-ed with livestream analytics platform Stream Hatchet - which grabs data from basically all the major (non-China) game streaming platforms. It’s v.helpful for understanding PC/console games are being watched in real-time.

So, as per usual, here’s the full ‘Top 100’ for October(Google doc). You can see League Of Legends surging to the very top of the chart - +40% to 233 million hours watched - due to the ongoing Worlds 24 champs. And lots more ‘usual suspects’. But otherwise:

  • Call Of Duty: Black Ops 6 made the Top 10, even in a partial month: Activision’s signature game already had 10 million hours watched in Sept, thanks to Beta Access, and only fully launched on Oct. 25th. But it still made the Top 10, with 40.8 million hours watched.

  • Black Myth: Wukong hit just 19% of its September numbers: the game is finite, and China’s not included streaming service-wise, so it’s not really a big surprise. Wukong’s drop to #77 - from 16.7m to 3.2m hours watched - was the largest in the Top 100, %-wise. (It’s still peaking at 90k CCU on Steam tho, which is great.)

  • Silent Hill 2 & Dragon Ball: Sparking! Zero led full October debuts: some impressive numbers here for the survival horror remake (#13, 27.6m hours watched) and the 3D anime fighter franchise continuation(#18, 21.5m hours watched), showing the importance of influencer streaming in their multi-platform successes.

Other ‘new’ entries? We spot the Switch-exclusive Super Mario Party Jamboree(#38), viral Steam hit Liar's Bar(an impressive #39), the Until Dawn remaster(#51), A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead* (#57), and the reconfigured (with console release!) New World: Aeternum (#58). (*Horror titles overperform with livestreamers, but that doesn’t mean they are smash sales hits: GDCo estimates A Quiet Place at ~100k units LTD so far - decent.)

One interesting new entry? Gunzilla’s Off The Grid(#63, 3.8m hours watched) a F2P PvPvE extraction shooter that is uses (optional) NFTs, so is solely on Epic Games Store on PC, as opposed to Steam, since Valve’s platform disallows blockchain games.

Finally, we’d be remiss to not highlight ‘automation game OG’Factorio (#75) getting a 13x increase in its hours watched - from 222k to a whopping 3.26m hours. That’s thanks to the 8 year old game getting its first ever expansion, the $35 Space Age DLC, which players - and watchers - are lapping up.

[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.]

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