GameDiscoverCo Plus: subscribe today for much extra goodness!

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[The GameDiscoverCo game discovery newsletter is written by ‘how people find your game’ expert Simon Carless, and is a regular look at how people discover and buy video games in the 2020s.]

We’ve been teasing it, but it’s finally time to bust out the ‘IT’S HAPPENING’ GIFs, because the next evolution of our game discovery newsletter & research is finally here. We couldn’t be more delighted about it.

You can now subscribe to GameDiscoverCo Plus, the paid tier to this newsletter. You’ll get access to exclusive custom data-led analysis, exclusive newsletters, an interactive data back end, and a member Discord:

Subscribe now

If you’d like a little bit more detail, here’s what stays free and what is new in the paid tier of the GameDiscoverCo newsletter.

Free newsletter subscriber?

We’ll continue sending out free newsletters regularly to everyone signed up for the GameDiscoverCo newsletter.

These will be filled with the same awesome blend of overviews, analysis and notable links around game discovery and platforms. (And whenever we do public surveys, we’ll print all the results for free, of course.)

Paid ‘GameDiscoverCo Plus’ perks

So, if you subscribe to GameDiscoverCo Plus, we decided to make it fairly inexpensive for professional quality in-depth business analysis and research. For $15 per month for individuals (more like $12 per month, if you sign up for a year) - you get access to the following:

• An exclusive ‘Plus’ newsletter every Friday which reveals and analyzes the biggest games coming to Steam, using the Steam Hype chart data created by GameDiscoverCo & Lars ‘GameDataCrunch’ Doucet. If you (or a competitor) have an unreleased game, you’ll want to see the charts, to see if it makes it in - and to predict which games are (likely) going to hit it big. The first one - more of an ‘explainer’ - is available now.

• Actual access to the interactive GameDiscoverCo Steam Hype chart data itself. Via a password-protected experimental website, you’ll see the data we use, & be able to check daily the 7-day, 30-day, 90-day and all-time charts for all unreleased games, including yours or competitors’. You can sort by different Hype variables, look at daily performance over time, and plenty more (including standalone pre-release follower and wishlist charts) to help you gain insight.

• Additional exclusive ‘Plus’ newsletters multiple times per month. These will include ‘state of the industry’ data-led analyses for large game platforms (the first being for Apple Arcade, coming shortly!), as well as AMA (ask me anything) newsletters, where I’ll answer questions from subscribers and sundry other game industry experts on game platforms & discovery.

• A ’Plus’ subscriber-only Discord, where you can come and discuss/analyze video game discovery and sales trends with me and my colleagues - and other subscribers - to your heart’s content.

• And this is just the beginning. In the future, ‘Plus’ subscribers will also get full back-end access to any other data sets/views that GameDiscoverCo creates over the next few months and years. And we’re planning more, including many deeper data dives.

For ‘Plus’ subscribers, you’ll see there’s also a Company subscription option at $500 per year, if you’re a larger (>20 person) company planning to use the information. We’d really appreciate the support. (It also allows multiple people within your organization to have access to the paid issues of the newsletter & back end.)

We do already put many hours of work per week into GameDiscoverCo’s newsletters - yes, even the free tier. So, by subscribing to GameDiscoverCo Plus, you will be ensuring that we can continue writing all of our newsletters and researching new data in the future!

What’s the GameDiscoverCo Steam Hype chart?

So here’s a bit more detail on the first ‘Plus’ data set - the GameDiscoverCo Steam Hype chart. This will be covered in a weekly paid subscriber newsletter, and also be fully interactive via the GameDiscoverCo Plus data microsite.

We realized that there’s lots of analysis of released Steam games, but exponentially less for unreleased games & their discoverability. We’re excited about the Steam Hype chart because it fuses together multiple algorithmic & custom weighted factors (Steam follower numbers and wishlist rankings, Steam forum ‘chatter’, dev/publisher track record, overall ‘community buzz’ & more) to make a daily score for unreleased Steam games.

And these scores can correspond surprisingly well to how the games end up selling on release! Made by GameDiscoverCo with help from Lars Doucet (former Steam contractor and current GameDataCrunch supremo), these interactive charts are segmented by one week from release, one month from release and three months from release - and even an ‘any unreleased Steam game’ option.

You can search for any game being released in the future on Steam and see how its relative ranking is changing over time. The chart is updated daily. Here’s a pre-release example for a recently debuted game (Mars Horizon, which is doing pretty decently so far!):

We think the Steam Hype chart is extremely helpful for developers and publishers trying to understand the best timing for game releases (vs. other big titles), and how various games are poised to perform relative to the rest of the market.

The first weekly newsletter analyzing the Steam Hype data - which explains exactly what all the variables mean - is available right now to Plus subscribers. So sign up now to get access to it and the tool, as well as the other GameDiscoverCo Plus perks - the member Discord, the Apple Arcade and other platform deep-dive analysis, the AMAs, etcetera.

PS - We’d super recommend Lars to others looking to build metadata-heavy back ends - check out GameDataCrunch for more info/contact details.

[This newsletter is handcrafted by GameDiscoverCo, a new agency based around one simple issue: how do players find, buy and enjoy your premium PC or console game? And you can now subscribe to the GameDiscoverCo Plus newsletter tier for exclusive data, insights, AMAs and Discord access.]