How Abiotic Factor sold 600k copies in just 3 months!

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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.]

Ah, the ides of August - a perfect time for us to reveal a standout milestone (600,000 copies sold!) for a standout game (Abiotic Factor), right? (Oh, and thanks to sponsor Mod.io for returning to advertise. Hit us up if you’d like to become a sponsor too.)

Before we start, we found out about Japanese indie game ‘Life of a Lonely Indie Game Developer’, in which “your character is bound to grow old and die (bringing the game to an end), and you choose whether to focus on grinding [on] your passion projects, getting rich, or living a healthy and long life.” So, Tamagotchi but with GDCo newsletter readers, then?

[PLZ NOTE: you can support GameDiscoverCo by subscribing to GDCo Plus now. You get full access to a super-detailed Steam data suite for unreleased & released games, weekly PC/console sales newsletters, Discord access, eight game discovery eBooks & lots more.]

Abiotic Factor: how it sold 600k units on Steam..

We’re wondering if this game is a little under the radar - it isn’t the kind of thing that gets talked about lots on ‘very online game creator Twitter’. But we’re super excited to discuss Deep Field Games & Playstack’s Abiotic Factor($25), which we can reveal has sold 600,000 copies on Steam since its May 2nd, 2024 release date.

If you check out the above (swear-filled) creator video - or the Early Access launch trailer, which is probably a better overview - you may not initially grok why Abiotic Factor (which launched with a creditable 200k Steam wishlists) sold 250,000 copies in just its first 8 days on sale. (That’s 8x+ expectations, folks.)

But the game, which is another win for publisher Playstack (Balatro, Mortal Shell), and developed by the creators of goofy 2016 social deception game Unfortunate Spacemen, has excelled - in our view - for the following reasons:

• The blend of ‘co-op x Half-Life-adjacent look x exploration x crafting’ works: although its visuals are in the ‘deliberately retro headcrabs’ style, there’s really a lot to do in this game - both single-player and (preferred!) co-op. The game’s design director, Geoff “Zag” Keene, agrees that “some of the more obvious [influences], like the art style, we wear a bit on our sleeves.”

• The gameplay is surprisingly deep & genre-mashup-ish: Keene notes that Abiotic Factor’s level design “…pulls heavily from the Souls genre, with interconnecting routes and unexpected, elegant shortcuts you open up through play. Project Zomboid inspired us a lot in terms of how you can convey the feelings of a character… and at the core, a lot of our co-operative angle is a mix of old-school chaos (Sven Co-op, Halo) and newer, more social mechanics in things like Lethal Company [and] Valheim.” Very smart.

• Abiotic Factor’s vibes are awesome, because it doesn’t take itself too seriously: we’ve also seen this with Lethal Company and as Keene says: “We all look at serious products and serious people as a sort of a joke, because I think at our core, humans really like to laugh.” And there’s a lot of silly ‘emergent situations’ in the game.

AB has managed a tricky feat - deep (8 hours median play time!), enjoyable solo, way better with co-op, and has Overwhelmingly Positive Steam reviews. Here’s a tickbox-based meme review so you can soak in the vibes: “☑ bring your friends to work ☑ hl2-like story ☑ minecraft crafting ☑ goofy weapons ☑ unlicensed forklift usage ☑ poop in a bag ☑ overwhelming amount of radiation poisoning.”

For more context, we recommend you check out CaRtOoNz’s playthrough of the game with his buddies & fellow streamers. Zomboid gets namechecked, and there’s an unbelievable amount of (entertaining) bickerin’, swearin’, and bug-splattin’ happenin’.

When it comes to players by country, the game is fairly America and China-heavy. Here’s the rundown, from the creators: “U.S. - 38%, China - 21%, U.K. - 4%, Russia - 4%, Canada - 4%, Japan - 4%, Germany - 3%, Australia - 3%, Other - 18%.”

That’s the game design. But how about the publishing and marketing strategy? As you can see from the Steam wishlist trends (above), Abiotic Factor is definitely a ‘you gotta play it - or watch someone play it - to get it!’ game, and this needs a special approach.

As Playstack’s Shawn Cotter explained to us: “Trailers that we aired at large showcase events didn’t do much to move the needle. Most press outlets weren’t interested in covering the title (even when we were offering exclusive reveals and hands-on opportunities), so instead we looked for ways to get the game directly in the hands of players.”

Demos can be tricky for those who are worried about giving away too much, especially an ‘open world survival craft’ title. But here’s what Playstack did:

• made Abiotic Factor’s playtest demos expansive in scope: Cotter says: “In order for us to create compelling pre-release playables, we decided to be generous with content, with the first playtest having around 2-3 hours of content, with each subsequent demo adding an additional hour.” (The full game has a LOT more content still, of course.)

• helped streamers play for longer, due to demo length: “In each playtest, we had a handful of large streamers playing it for hours, even after reaching the end of content. More time spent streaming increased the chances of multiple big streamers playing at once, pushing us up in the list of top viewed categories on Twitch.”

• got better feedback to AB’s creators, because they showed more of the game: “We made sure it was simple and easy to submit comments and criticism, which directly affected development, and with such a comprehensive slice of the full game, it was easy to apply these learnings to the full game.”

Abiotic Factor already had two strong playtests before the February 2024 Next Fest, where our data says it was #20 by top CCU, with ~900 CCU during the Fest. (But it launched its Next Fest demo early, and this was its third playtest. So multiple bites at the cherry help keep incrementing interest.)

Finally, in terms of how to really make the game ‘pop’ at launch, Playstack:

• spent a lot of time targeting streamers, based on them playing Abiotic Factor’s demo, as well as influencers who enjoyed Lethal Company & Content Warning.

• were “very generous with key distribution” - because playing with friends is a big hook for Abiotic Factor. 

• allocated marketing budget to “a select few sponsored streams at launch”, based on content/vibe match.

As part of this, Playstack “worked with a talent agency to create talent groups that had a natural chemistry between them for group streams, which resulted in exactly the type of co-op fun we were looking for.” This is kind of like programming your own reality show, right?

Abiotic Factor’s results are impressive: GameDiscoverCo estimates it’s one of the Top 30-selling new paid games on Steam in 2024, despite only launching in May. And it’s succeeded - we think - because it understands both game design and social dynamics. (We hear a lot about the first of these, but much less about the second!)

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The most-streamed games, July 2024 edition…

Every month, GDCo collabs with livestream analytics platform Stream Hatchet - which grabs data from lots of (non-China) game streaming platforms: “Twitch, YouTube Live Gaming, Facebook Live, AfreecaTV, Kick, Steam, NaaverTV, Trovo, Rooter, Nonolive, Openrec, Loco, Mildom, DLive, VK, KakaoTV, Garena LIVE, Booyah.”

The Stream Hatchet folks had a social media post highlighting the Top 10 games of July 2024, but have given GameDiscoverCo a full list of the Top 100 games(Google Drive doc) for us freely annotate & then interpret. Which we’re happy to do, below:

• The most-watched games are, well, staying the most-watched games: other than Elden Ring dipping 56%, after excitement over its DLC launch quietened down, you can see behemoths (GTA V/Online, LoL, Valorant, DOTA 2, CS) dominating.

• Final Fantasy XIV rode up the charts, thanks to the Dawntrail expansion: it’s the quiet powerhouse behind Square Enix, and the MMO was up 94% to 15.4m hours watched (#26), due to the launch of a new expansion. (Meanwhile, F2P ARPG Path Of Exile was up 23x (!) to 14.8m with a new expansion and League.)

• The First Descendant and Once Human led most-streamed new games: we’ve been talking about these a lot in GDCo Plus newsletters, but Nexon’s Warframe-ish looter shooter (#19, 20.1m hours) and NetEase/Starry’s post-apocalyptic survival game (#20, 19m hours) seem to have scaled well in both the West and Asia.

Otherwise, MiHoyo’s impressive looking Zenless Zone Zero hit #30 and 13.6m hours, the vintage 7 Days To Die was up 2.4x to 11.6m hours (#33) thanks to a 1.0 and console releases, and hey, EA Sports College Football 25 made #36 and 10.3m hours watched, despite being a very U.S.-only phenomenon.

We’re also looking closely at NetEase’s Marvel Rivals, which has been trending in our Steam follower velocity rankings, and had 6.3m hours streamed during its playtest in July. (The full document has more interesting trends, if you’d like to poke at it more.)

The game platform & discovery news round-up…

As we do when we switch to one free newsletter per week, we have a discovery and platform news round-up that is, uhh, ‘non-small’ in length. But let’s get to it, shall we?

• Nintendo’s results last week? Not great, with profit down 55% and 2.1 million Switch units sold (down 46% YoY). Serkan Toto also notes: “To reach the FY25 target of 13.5M units, they need 11.4M from Q2 to Q4. That would be almost as many as last year from Q2 to Q4 (11.8M).” But we’re all waiting for ‘Switch 2’, rite?

• Kitfox’s Tanya X. Short and Alexandra Orlando have a great piece on ‘doing Early Access the ‘right way’’, including three formulas for launching your game, “virtually complete even when it hits EA” like Hades, ‘skip it entirely’ like Dwarf Fortress on Steam, and “highly replayable ‘infinite’ content” - patched a lot - like Caves of Qud.

• Microsoft’s overall Q4 revenue was pretty spectacular - $22 billion in profit - and Xbox as a division was up 44% YoY. But that’s including the Activision acquisition. Without it, game revenue would have been down 4%, and Xbox hardware revenue was down 42% YoY. MS’ earnings call emphasized PC & mobile expansion in (per the CFO, lol!) “the software annuity and subscription business.”

• Government approvals for Chinese games are picking up pace - 105 domestic games approved in July, including Tencent’s Arena Breakout: Infinite & miHoYo’s mysterious Xingbu Gudi. And look, even foreign-ish games are being approved in smaller numbers: Marvel Snap, Paper Mario, and a mobile FFXIV game.

• Microlinks: here’s the main Expo Hall exhibitors for Sept’s PAX West in Seattle, showing lots of small companies, but not much ‘big company bingo’; the first month of small roguelike Guncho made $12k in Month 1, with iOS the top platform; MobileGamer.biz got more dirt on Apple Arcade’s shifting vision.

• This Thomas Altenburger piece on game dev fatigue is worth reading: “Accepting that aiming for an overnight success is a very rare exception rather than the norm is a huge relief…. It’s not about building the biggest… rocket ever to shoot for the Moon [but] building for efficiency, knowing many of these rockets will explode on the launch pad.”

• U.S. Circana game hardware (& much software!) results were down 5% YoY to $4.6b in June 2024, with console content spending down 26%, and hardware off 37%. Mat Piscatella noted that mobile game $ helped out, “not having a PC release strategy in 2024 is silly”, and trailed July lookin’ better due to EA College Football 25.

• Here’s a neat Twitter/X thread about spider ‘physics sandbox’ game A Webbing Journey getting 7k wishlists in 14 days, just from social media - looks like this web-building ASMR video on TikTok is the chief reason for the surge.

• Former Valve economist (and Greece’s finance minister!) Yanis Varoufakis has been chatting to Aftermath about his role there back in 2012, working on prediction markets and a mega-question: “What is the optimal strategy for monetizing without losing the joy of playing to over-commodification?”

• Microlinks: Twitch is losing some market share to YouTube and Kick on streaming, partly due to allowing simulcasting; Ubisoft’s own cloud streaming service has launched - via the Ubisoft Connect app on Windows for now; Discord on Xbox will soon let you watch your friends’ streams.

• Some good extra commentary on the new Steam demo rules from Chris Zukowski, and he’s spotted one major ramification: “Don’t waste that demo launch email on a low initial wishlist count [immediately after announce]. Launching your demo too early could mean that you miss out on New & Trending visibility.”

• Meta things: like Microsoft, the overall Meta biz is going great, with quarterly profit up 73% to $13.5 billion. And Mark Zuckerberg told investors that Quest 3 sales are "outpacing our expectations", with Reality Labs revenue up 28% to (a still fairly modest) $353 million. Elsewhere: the Quest game referral % has been cut from a (probably too generous) 25%.

• Microlinks: Microsoft and Activision have formed a new team within Blizzard to work on smaller games based on existing IP; PlayStation Plus’ ‘basic’ games for August are Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga, FNAF Security Breach and Ender Lilies; Top mobile games by revenue for July are headed by Dungeon Fighter Online ($160m, wow!)

Finally, here’s a very silly Olympics-adjacent LinkedIn meme from Ilia Eremeev (The Games Fund), who we’ll forgive for mis-spelling Blizzard, due to the general vibes:

[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.]