How Indiana Jones and Fast Food Simulator (!) hit it big on Steam this week...
Publikováno: 13.12.2024
Also: the latest and greatest discovery news, of course. Pshaw.
[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.]
Penultimate GDCo newsletter of the year? It’s time to boot up the relaxing Animal Crossing Xmas cafe music YouTube slop to get through the rest of the year in one piece. (Somebody legit tried to panhandle us for eggnog the other week. We presume he wasn’t watching those videos, or listening to A Charlie Brown Christmas.)
Before we start, there’s two new YouTube game discovery videos we love: Tia Young’s marketing postmortem for Rimworld DLC (lots of stats!), and Choo Choo Charles (and Cuffbust) dev Gavin Eisenbeisz doing a giant 2-hour video (and related document) on features that help games retain Twitch/YouTube viewers. Watch ‘em or weep…
Game discovery news: Game Awards & top titles..
So let’s have a little look through the major announcements and news of the last few days in the game discovery & platform arena, shall we? It’s these:
Looking at Footprints.gg’s ‘trad media’ coverage from Dec 4th-10th, the well-received new Indiana Jones game tops the chart, with Marvel Rivals, Path Of Exile 2, Fortnite’s new announces, and (the upcoming, at that time!) The Game Awards following shortly behind.
Talking of The Game Awards, here’s the full show video - and Astro Bot led the winners as the joyous Game Of The Year - here’s a useful Verge recap showing a bunch of the reveals (new Naughty Dog game! Onimusha and Virtua Fighter reboots!) Biggest surprise? Sifu studio Sloclap doing an ‘action soccer’ game.
Mixed reality nerds: Android XR is officially rolling out, in partnership with Samsung and Qualcomm, and Job Simulator studio Owlchemy Labs (owned by Google!) put out Inside [JOB], “an experience… designed to introduce Android XR users to the system’s interactions across mixed reality and immersive experiences.”
Highest-rated Steam releases of 2024? Using SteamDB’s algorithm, which takes total reviews into account, the top 5 are Balatro, Webfishing, free games The WereCleaner and Sheepy: A Short Adventure, and (1.0 release) Satisfactory - shortly followed by Wukong, TCG Card Shop Simulator and Fields Of Mistria.
There were several other online game discovery showcases adjacent to The Game Awards - here’s the announces at the Wholesome Snack event, and here’s everything from the Day Of The Devs showcase, including micro-indie Faraway, which is being reannounced 10+ years after it was an IGF 2012-nommed game.
Looking at GDCo’s Switch eShop charts ($, recent, paid, third-party, U.S. by download #), MySims Cozy Bundle holds the top position at #23 in 14-day downloads, with Stray following at #66. Legacy of Kain Soul Reaver 1&2 Remastered and Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: Rita's Rewind had decent debuts at #79 and #96 respectively, while Sun Haven got boosted up to #112.
Author and My Perfect Console podcast host Simon Parkin wrote a New York Times op-ed about games’ long shift towards commerce: “Game design is often no longer predominantly the task of crafting challenges that elicit joy, delight and surprise… it is primarily the job of building machines to keep players engrossed and spending.”
Want to be in a third-party event (publisher or franchise sale, streaming game showcase, or regional/themed event) with a dedicated Steam page? Valve have built out a whole new set of FAQs, which includes important clarifications: “event organizers are not allowed to charge for store placement on a Steam Sales Event.”
There’s also a lot of interesting Q&A responses in the Steam third-party fest organizer FAQ - e.g.: “Each game can only be included in at most one homepage-featured Publisher or Developer Sale per calendar year, regardless of the number of co-Publishers or co-Developers listed on its Store Page.” Go read the fine print!
GDCo’s U.S. PlayStation and Xbox ‘recent’ game charts - using official website countdowns - sees Path of Exile 2 and Marvel Rivals both doing well, with Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 (Call of Duty HQ on PlayStation) and sports titles following behind. New entries: Soul Reaver 1&2 Remastered and The Thing: Remastered did enter the charts, as did Indiana Jones and the Great Circle on Xbox paid titles.
More on third-party Steam powered hardware: “Evan Blass has posted images of an unannounced Lenovo Legion Go S… revealing black and white variants of a handheld gaming PC. The interesting part? The black one has a Steam button.” So possibly a SteamOS-powered Lenovo device here - we may know more at CES 2025.
Here’s how Don’t Wake The Beast added 10,000 Steam wishlists in two weeks after its announcement, via methods including a viral Reddit post. (Not giant numbers overall, but interesting ruminations on picking a game title & implied tension in marketing.)
Microlinks: Epic does a ‘pre-installed’ deal with Telefonica to get Epic Games Store onto Android devices; GameStop’s revenues are down >20% YoY, but the meme stock still has >$4.5b cash & securities; PS+ Game Catalog for December includes Sonic Frontiers & Forspoken ; Apple’s 2024 App Store Awards winners include AFK Journey, Squad Busters, Thank Goodness You’re Here! & Balatro.