How this solo-dev 'incremental' game hit 100k+ sales!

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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.]

Happy Monday, folks. Of course, it would be remiss to start this newsletter without mentioning ‘survival crafting x Pokemon-ish creature collecting’ phenom Palworld, which just hit 5 million units sold in, uhh, 3 days - and >1.5 million CCU, #3 all-time for Steam games. (We were expecting it to do about 400-500k units in its first week, btw…)

We may have more to say about it later. But in the meantime, our Plus subscribers were already aware of it as the #3 most-anticipated game of Q1 2024 on Steam, and got Friday’s Plus-exclusive analysis newsletter when it’d ‘only’ sold a million units (haha!):

How (the) Gnorp Apologue sold 120k+ in a month!

Anyhow, for today’s lead story, we wanted to highlight a great example of ‘tiny solo game is breakout Steam hit’, in the form of incremental (idle-adjacent) resource management title (the) Gnorp Apologue by Norwegian dev Myco.

According to GameDiscoverCo Plus data, it’s the #4 new Steam game of December 2023 in terms of copies sold, albeit at a far smaller per-unit cost ($7 USD) than the other top games, House Flipper 2, Warhammer 40k: Rogue Trader & (the already-dead, refunds given out, stop kicking it?) The Day Before.

What is this game? This Steam review explains it well: it’s “much like your garden-variety Cookie Clicker, except with… a steady growth of mechanical depth, which leads to actual invested decision making… Resource accumulation times which are timed excellently… a clean, simple, highly tangible interface.”

These are games where you can press buttons repeatedly to do things - in this case mining ‘shards’. But - here’s the fun bit - you can also control and upgrade cute, tiny little ‘gnorp’ creatures and related building units to do it for you! (This Orbital Potato video explains things, and dev Myco mentions Frank Lantz’s Universal Paperclips as another game in this genre he admires.)

This is a perfect example of a solo-dev breakout hit emerging from the ‘Cambrian explosion’ (thx, Will Wright!) of small, hobbyist games. And yes, these compete with your games, too. (People only have a certain amount of time on the Steam platform.)

So we chatted to Myco, who showed us the following Steam back-end stats for his game - which has >2,700 Overwhelmingly Positive reviews since its Dec. 14th launch:

Impressive numbers - and the game is still only in English language, currently. Its country buyer split is 51% U.S., 7% U.K., 6% Germany & Canada, 4% Australia & China, 2% Japan, Netherlands, France and Brazil. (It’s possible ‘incremental games’ are also mainly popular in those countries - but difficult to tell, sans localization.)

Myco is based in Norway, is in his twenties, and “the game was as a hobby-project that was started as a way for me to eventually make 'real' games… [but] I decided to turn it into something that I could put on Steam.” He’s been working on it ‘on and off’ for 3.5 years…

So let’s talk about this oddly named game, and what it does so right? Here’s what we can see:

• This particular ‘flavor’ of game may actually be undersupplied on Steam: we challenged Myco, and he said he thought idle games weren’t very undersupplied, but: “What I do think is undersupplied are visual incremental games. I think you can see this with the success of the Vampire Survivors-like genre of games, which could be classified as action-incremental games, whereas (the) Gnorp Apologue is a strategy-incremental game.” This comment kinda… blew our mind?

• The unexpected upgrades and swift ‘scaling’ endear the game to YouTubers: a lot of ‘incremental’ games thrive on the feeling that you start out doing a task ‘one by one’, but eventually get things running thousands of times faster. The many YouTube videos of (the) Gnorp Apologue thrive on this fun, but labyrinthine complexity. Thus, you get comments like: “For me, the Wombo Combo that broke things was the talent that let Zsygnorps gain energy from shards eaten by drones.” (?!)

• Besides gameplay loop, having adorable pixel art helpers is the main hook: Myco says: “The biggest hook for the game, in my opinion, is the gnorps themselves. I tried to infuse them with a lot of personality, which posed some challenge, given the small number of pixels I had to work with. Being able to watch the gnorps do their thing has been the most satisfying part of the project for me.”

Myco also talked about ‘the smaller details’ he put into the game that made it so mentally stimulating for players, and had a delightful example: “The garden [above], for example, features flowers that are turned into juice - and the whole process of it is simulated: Flowers are grown, and they get sucked into a machine that outputs a cube, with each pixel on the cube representing one flower.

That cube is then lifted into the main building of the garden, and squeezed by a press into unprocessed juice. The unprocessed juice flows through a pipe, and is output into a flask that boils & turns the juice into something drinkable.

That mix, is then sent to the 'nix-mix', which splits the mix into the three different juices. Now there's a product, and that is sent to a stall to the left of the garden, where gnorps wait in line to receive some free juice.”

Amazing. BTW, almost all of (the) Gnorp Apologue’s actual discovery ‘juice’ came from YouTube videos & resultant Steam discovery (New & Trending, Discovery Queue, etc). Heck, on “the day of the release the game had roughly 1.7k wishlists”, which is… kinda underwhelming.

And though it had “a Discord of ~100 interested users”, its resultant sales volume came - in our view - from it being so fun to play on stream, and giving players those rosy ‘I want to buy this and play it too!’ feelings..

Finally, we asked Myco why he wasn’t more aggressive with pricing the game, which is $6.99 in the U.S., but has people playing for tens or even hundreds of hours(!). We found his answer fascinating: “Pricing is hard, I suppose - is my comment. I didn't think too long and hard about pricing, but these were some of my thoughts:

• Games are too expensive

• Weird games need a lower opportunity cost

• There were few associated costs with making the game, so why not make it cheap?”

And that’s pretty much a perfect answer, from his perspective. He ends: “The project was overall a very unexpected success, and my primary goal was always to release something I was proud of.” We really dig it too - and kind of want to play it now too, uhoh.

What do ‘regular devs’ think of today’s game biz?

My former employers at Game Developers Conference (& partners) just put out the latest ‘State Of The Industry’ report, surveying a lot of PC & console (and some mobile/VR!) devs about what’s going on in their world in 2023/2024.

It’s all interesting stuff, since GDC’s audience overlaps a lot with GameDiscoverCo’s. The summary article goes deep on a few subjects, including ‘return to office’ trends (above). But here’s key trends that interested us from the full report(free with reg):

• PC rules on ‘current dev platforms’, and next-gen Nintendo gets a look-in: unsurprisingly, 66% of all respondents are making their current game on PC, with 35% preparing it for Playstation 5 and 34% on Xbox Series. Further down, 10% are making their title for VR, and 8% for whatever ‘Nintendo Switch successor’ is.

• The survey’s engine split - for a more AAA user-base - shows Unity/Unreal tied: for this particular demographic (35% are making games on the PS5) around 33% of those replying are making games in Unreal, and 33% in Unity. (A large 14% are using ‘proprietary in-house’ engines - some big studios here - & only 3% Godot.)

• People are looking at new engines - but unclear if they’re doing so more: unfortunately (we checked!) this question wasn’t in last year’s survey. So we have no comp, though we know Unity’s licensing issues made a lot of people blink. But 7% of respondents switched game engine in the last 12 months, and 28% ‘considered switching’ - many (smaller folks?) to Godot, looking at literal responses.

There’s also an interesting section on AI, which we haven’t touched much in this newsletter yet. This is partly because its practical implications on the game market - and we cover practical, real-world stuff here - are still fairly unclear. But:

• Generative AI will have a ‘mixed impact’ on games, devs say: 21% of respondents think it’ll be positive (more than we expected?), 57% mixed, and 18% negative. (Although: “Developers working in business, marketing, and programming were more likely to say the technology would have a positive impact. Those in narrative, visual arts, and quality assurance were more likely to say the impact would be negative.”)

• Ethically, a lot of game devs have issues around AI, for multiple reasons: a whopping 42% are ‘very concerned’ about the ethics of using AI in the game biz, with another 42% ‘somewhat concerned’. Reasons include all the greatest hits - particularly possible job losses and AI being trained on copyrighted material.

There’s also lots more interesting answers on unionization, layoffs, and other major trends for this particular audience - which is 62% North America, 26% European, and 6% Asian, BTW. So it’s more of a ‘PC/console GDC attendee’ demographic than an ‘entire game market’ representation. But it’s still data we very much appreciate…

The game discovery & platform news round-up…

There’s a whole bunch of game discovery and platform news out there which isn’t on Palworld (haha!), so let’s get to it to finish off this whole newsletter type thing:

• The folks at Steam are trying to work out which physical conferences devs are attending in 2024, “so we can find the best way to meet up for talks, networking, and roundtable discussions.” Please fill in to help them out - and no ballot-stuffing, conferences who want Valve to turn up at them.

• It’s amazing that game biz person Ryan Rigney got the first-ever interview with Lethal Company creator Zeekerss* (*that we spotted!) for his newsletter. Love this quote: “I think you should always be a little suspicious when getting any huge amount of success and attention all of the sudden… Money is powerful but also imaginary and untrustworthy.”

• Really dug this Konvoy newsletter on the history of China and video games, because it lists the strained 50-year history of ‘games vs. gov’: “China’s CCP [ruling Communist Party] has long viewed gaming as a negative influence for the population, describing it as ‘spiritual pollution’ and alleging that it diverts students from their studies.”

• Xbox’s new ‘Developer Direct’ presentation [video] is summarized by them here, and largely focused on first-party studios like Obsidian (Avowed) and Ninja Theory (Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II) releasing in 2024 - with much excitement for MachineGames’ new Indiana Jones game (above), which was formerly also for PS5, but post ‘Xbox x Bethesda’, is now Xbox console-exclusive. (Platform drama.)

• Give it to me straight, doctor? That’s what these un-named game biz leaders are doing to GI.biz about the state of the business: “If 2023 was the year of layoffs, 2024 will be the year of closures. Not just developers, but publishers, media, service companies... There are just too many unprofitable businesses in video games.”

• We know brands are getting excited about UEFN and Fortnite Islands, but maybe not you, British Army: “This Fortnite UEFN X British Army integration breaks Fortnite's Island Creator Rules, which prohibit commercial content that ‘promotes enrolment in the military’. The whole thing sucks but whoever sold this to the British Army also created a huge liability for themselves.” [UPDATE: it’s been disappeared.]

• Reports of U.S. Walmart stores removing the physical version of Starfield - and note that “the supplier is funding this action” - is leading to speculation that Xbox may be getting out of physical software distro entirely. (It could be Starfield-specific - but we know that the upcoming Hellblade 2 is digital-only, for example.)

• We’ve been saying ‘middle of the market is a rough place to be’ - so it’s interesting to see Square Enix comment similarly: “[CEO Takashi] Kiryu notes the “polarization” occurring between major and indie titles. AAA titles are becoming increasingly competitive [but] Square Enix has been making too many titles that are neither AAA nor indie… [causing] their ‘resources to become scattered’.”

• StreamElements & Rainmaker.gg summed up December 2023’s video game livestreaming scene for us, and there’s an interesting top individual streamer (13 million hours watched!) - in the form of Japanese-speaking streamer fps_shaka. “The game that drove this rise was Grand Theft Auto V, which he streamed for 239 hours.”

• There’s a new MIG Switch flashcart available on the gray/black market which “can store and load multiple ‘backup’ games on any revision of the [Switch]”. It’s advertised for homebrew dev, but is clearly also for piracy - tho “if you copy someone’s game and their certificate, Nintendo can now see that the same certificate is being used twice.” We’ll see how Nintendo responds to this ‘breakthrough’…

Finally, thanks to the ‘Obsolete Sony’ Twitter/X account, we’ve been re-introduced to this spectacular(ly non-ergonomic) third-party PlayStation peripheral: “The Activision Wu-Tang Clan Controller was released in 1999. It was a licensed release, estimated to have a production run between 5,000 to 10,000 units, and it was included with the special edition of [PS1 fighting game] ‘Wu-Tang: Shaolin Style’.“ Sure - how else would you Protect Ya Neck?

[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.]