How Outbound motored its way to >600k Steam wishlists

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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.]

The first full week of January, 2025? Let’s all breathe in that salty sea air, and intone to ourselves - ‘I won’t shipwreck on the algorithm this year’. We promise GameDiscoverCo will be your lighthouse this year. We can’t ‘make’ you succeed, but we can at least point out the lucky winners (docked safely!) and the unfortunate losers (on the rocks?)

We’re starting out the year with a look at Outbound, an indie game that’s already in the Top 50 unreleased most-wishlisted Steam games, after a Feb. 2024 announce. But how, and how to manage player expectation? We chat to the devs below..

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Game discovery news: Steam review ebb & flow..

We thought we’d burned off a lot of the good game discovery & platform links in Friday’s newsletter, but no, a whole heap more turned up. Let’s have at ‘em:

• Will Cahill (World’s Edge) has been scraping and deconstructing a whole heap of Steam data for funsies. And his look at player review positivity by language(above) is pretty interesting, for starters. (2019 is when Steam added a 'prompt to review' option if you've been playing a specific game for a while, btw.)

• Fed up with looking at all those individual 2024 Game Of The Year articles? GameFA has a tracker that aggregates all GOTY articles together, and so far for 2024, the winner is Astro Bot (104 awards), followed by Final Fantasy VII Rebirth (37), Balatro (28), Metaphor: Refantazio (25) & Wukong (21).

• Some interesting on-the-record quotes here about Switch’s waning eShop sales, with PQube’s Andy Pearson saying: “We have seen Switch release [sales] drop through 2024…. in the last 12 months, the tide has swung very much in Steam's favour on games where we’ve had simultaneous releases on both platforms.” Roll on Switch 2, hm?

• In ‘everything is an Xbox’ news, Microsoft just announced “our collaboration with LG Electronics to bring the Xbox app to their new LG Smart TVs later this year. This means Game Pass Ultimate members will be able to play their games directly from the Xbox app on supported LG Smart TVs via Xbox Cloud Gaming.”

• ICYMI: according to Steam’s year-end player wrap-up, “Steam users spent just 15% of their total playing time in games that launched in 2024. 47% of the total playing time on Steam was spent on games released in the last one to seven years, while a sizeable 37% of time was spent in games that have been out for eight years or more.” Unsurprising.

• Checking in on December’s top-grossing mobile games, LastWar: Survival takes the top spot with $147m, followed by Royal Match, Whiteout Survival, the surging Pokemon TCG Pocket ($117m!) From there’s it’s a lot of obvious titles: Roblox, Honor Of Kings, Monopoly Go, and Candy Crush Saga, all cresting $90m.

• With CES in progress, and apparent changes to SteamOS startup movies to welcome third-party SteamOS handhelds, Valve and Lenovo confirmed a SteamOS Legion Go S handheld, shipping in May for $500, (Also: Nvidia is bringing a native GeForce Now app to Steam Deck.)

• Also notable in that Legion Go S story from The Verge: “Lenovo is currently its only partner for a SteamOS device… but [Valve’s Pierre-Loup] Griffais hints that Valve is close to publicly releasing a new beta of its SteamOS that… might.. start working on other handhelds.” Here’s the Steam announce, and this explains some recent confusion.

• Some thought Black Myth: Wukong wasn’t on Xbox because of (limited?) PlayStation exclusivity. Whether true or not, looks like Xbox Series S technical concerns are also a factor, with Game Science’s Feng Ji saying: “10GB of shared memory… is really hard to make work” without years of optimization experience. (We’re wondering what’s going to happen with GTA6 and Series S - waivers?)

• A couple of great recent HTMAG blog posts - firstly, on why ‘crafty buildy simulation strategy games’ are the way to go with PC games in 2025; secondly, on how Minami Lane made $750k on Steam after being in development for only 6 months. (“You don’t have to go fast, you have to go small.”)

• Julia Alexander suggests that Apple’s Vision Pro is struggling because it hasn’t created a niche for itself: “It’s almost downright absurd that no one has ever suggested the Vision Pro is fun. At $4,000, what’s the f*cking point then? VR is an entertainment device first and foremost. Meta and Sony understand this beyond all else.”

• Microlinks: Netflix decided to make its Squid Game title completely free on mobile for cross-promo reach, as its corporate reshuffle continues; in ‘games as plaforms’ news, Rec Room added a Jet Set/Grind Radio-style mini-game; Meta CTO Boz hyped up the AR/VR troops for 2025: “We’re right at the beginning of the S-curve for this entire product category.”

• Finally, how have game budgets scaled for studios like Naughty Dog? Co-founder Andy Gavin shared numbers on LinkedIn, noting that 1994’s Way Of The Warrior cost $100k, 1996’s Crash Bandicoot ~$1.6m, and 2001’s Jak & Daxter ~$15m. (The company sold to Sony in 2021, in part to de-risk, & Gavin says 2004’s Jak 3 cost $45-50m. 2020’s The Last Of Us Part 2 cost $220m, per a 2023 leak. Wow.)

How Outbound motored its way to >600k WLs…

If you haven’t heard of Square Glade Games’ Outbound, let’s start with its official Steam blurb: “Outbound is an open-world exploration game set in a utopian near future. Start with an empty camper van and turn it into the home of your dreams - alone or together with your friends.” Seems… enticing, right?

We’ve been tracking Outbound on our trending/top unreleased Steam games charts for a while now. (Top 50 out of 26,000 games in <1 year? Prettty good!) And when a GDCo reader intro-ed us to Square Glade’s Tobi Schnackenberg, we got the opportunity to share his granular wishlist and performance data with y’all.

Firstly, as you’ll see above, Outbound has 655,000 wishlist additions (and 622,000 wishlist balance) as of Jan 2025. Country-wise, interest is diverse: the U.S. has 16.6% of the WLs, Germany has 8%, China 7.8%, the Russian Federation 7.2%, Japan 5.1%, Brazil 4.9%, Turkey 4.3%, France 4.2%, the UK 4%, Canada 3%, and down from there…

But how did Outbound get all those wishlists? In part, it’s down to the game’s premise and presentation - which we’ll get to shortly. But Tobi provided us with an annotated set of daily wishlist spikes which is very illuminating:

Some obvious takeaways from all these wins? We think the following:

• Outbound is a game that TikTok & other video creators feature, even without a demo: we were fascinated to see Raptor’s YouTube video, which is simply him speculating for 17 minutes over looped trailer footage of the game! And look at all the big TikToks, such as this games_explorer TikTok (5.4m views.)

• Hot unreleased games keep getting swept up in Steam Festivals: because of how Valve builds Festival pages using tags, if you have a big unreleased game, you can feature prominently in these Fests without entering them. (The same thing happened to Jump Ship and the FPS Fest, just after announce.)

• Using a Kickstarter campaign for marketing further improved reach: whether you need the $ or not, doing a 30,000 Euro Kickstarter that funded in two hours - and ended at 265,000 Euros - further built interest. (There’s a YouTube interview with Tobi about the Kickstarter, if you want to know more.)

So what’s probably most interesting here is - how did Square Glade come up with such a well-pitched concept - especially after their previous game, Above Snakes, is isometric and ‘feels’ pretty different? Tobi explained his thought process to us:

• They prototyped extensively, but settled on ‘relaxing’ open-world survival: Tobi notes that Square Glade “prototyped in all directions”, even looking at an FPS, but decided to focus on “the relaxing, cozy, and creative side of survival games with colorful visuals” - the things they did particularly well with Above Snakes.

• The team analyzed ‘relaxing survival’ titles & found interest and a niche: Tobi says that he looked at Among Trees, a “beautifully stylized build-your-cabin-in-the-woods survival game with a zen mode.” It had decent interest, not the best reviews - and Tobi believed he saw untapped interest around this particular niche.

• They thought very carefully about what players wanted to do: Tobi explains: “I think that a strong player fantasy goes a long way. Like myself, many people like the idea of going travelling with a camper van. And like myself, many people can’t do it because they have responsibilities such as jobs or family or financial constraints that make this difficult.”

And he’s right! #Vanlife is a huge aspirational trend on social media - whether the reality of it reflects the glossy online videos or not. Tobi notes: “I think one of the reasons why Outbound is so popular is because it is the digital alternative to that dream - which is a lot cheaper and more convenient.”

Tobi was also inspired - by driving past wind farms on a trip - to add sustainability to the mix. And there was a final element to add - “the concept of moving bases in survival games.” He says: “there are [very few] games in which you can take your base with you”, and games like Raft, which do so, are hugely popular. Hence, the idea of the electric camper van as your base-builder HQ was born.

GDCo often jokes that 95% of all unreleased games have a ‘hype’ problem (not enough of it!), but the 5% that do have ‘hype’ have an ‘expectation’ problem. No influencers - or players - have tried Outbound yet. And there’s definitely a danger that players will project their wants, and expect things that are - well - not in the game…

You see exactly this in Raptor’s video (above) - where he’s speculating to his audience on what might be in the game. (Health meters? Bear attacks?) We asked Tobi about this, and he agreed: “From time to time, we receive messages from people who played games like The Long Dark or The Forest and ask whether they would be able to hunt animals in Outbound, or if they could freeze to death due to weather circumstances.”

He adds: “None of these things are possible in Outbound, and we try to be as clear as possible to make sure that players know exactly whether the game is meant for them or not. We will very likely make it even more clear on the Steam page when nearing the release.”

So that’s something to watch - Outbound is a self-described ‘cozy game’, with “no pressure on the player, no enemies, and no combat. The game is catered to a… type of survival game player that enjoys cozy games with a focus on exploration and customization.”

But look, we’d rather have massive interest and a message to keep clarifying, rather than not much interest at all? And congrats to the Square Glade team for picking up those wishlists - we’re fascinated to see how the game does at launch…

Most-streamed Dec. 2024 games: PoE 2 starts big

Every month, we partner with livestream analytics platform Stream Hatchet - which also just put out a 2024 trends report(free reg. req.) - and look at the Top 100 games watched via major non-China game streaming platforms in the previous month.

So we’ve managed to procure the full ‘Top 100’ for December(Google doc), which was actually… quite a lot more exciting than we expected. Here’s what we see:

• There’s two new entries in the Top 10, a rare occurrence: we very seldom see >1 game disrupt the ‘big few’ evergreens. But hit Diablo-like Path Of Exile 2 (#4, 93.7m hours watched) & breakout Overwatch-y F2P title Marvel Rivals(#6, 65.2m hours) both did exactly that. (We’ll see if they can stay in there in January!)

• Grand Theft Auto V had a huge month, thanks to Agents Of Sabotage: though a lot of eyes are on GTA VI, GTA Online is still dropping major DLC like the Agents Of Sabotage expansion (and hella holiday gifts), which contributed to a 37% increase in hours watched to a whopping 189 million (#1.)

• Delta Force and Indiana Jones were also strongish December debuts: the GaaS shooter franchise reboot hit #27 and 14.3m hours watched, and MachineGames’ much-praised Indy game did well for a finite single-player title, with 9.6 million hours watched at #33.

Other new entries? Creepy viral horror dating title MiSide - a big indie success story - started at 6.7m hours (#43) And extremely weird but viral ‘person racing’ game Get To Work - made by a dev YouTuber who has a video about creating it as the ‘perfect’ game for streaming - hit #73 and 3m hours. (It’s sold ~40k copies so far, we estimate.)

One fascinating fast-mover in the chart? Veteran French MMO Dofus - which has been around since 2004 - got 6.5x the previous month’s hours streamed (#35, 8.8m hours), as it moved its entire engine onto Unity - from, at one point, Flash! Nice to the game back on a modern engine after nearly 20 years, huh?

[We’re GameDiscoverCo, an analysis firm 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 real-time data services for publishers, funds, and other smart game industry folks.]