Introducing the GameDiscoverCo Pitch Deck archive!

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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.]

Welcome to 2024, game discovery spelunkers - hope you had a great time off. We’re starting things off a bit easy, with just one free (and one Plus) newsletter this week, before getting back into our regular Mon & Wed (free) and Fri (Plus) schedule.

Oh, and before we get started - if you’re a VR game dev, this week’s the last chance to fill in this brief anonymous surveyfrom us & Cassia Curranabout ‘ratings to sales’ ratios for Quest & Steam VR games - and your comments on the space in general.

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The GameDiscoverCo Pitch Deck archive is here…

You may recall we asked for your PC/console game pitch decks a few weeks back. Well, we now have a ‘free to all’ pitch decks page on the GameDiscoverCo Plus site, compiling the 10-ish we received so far.

Besides Glitch’s pitch deck archive, there’s little out there for people to look at - and we’re proud to say we have 100% different content to that archive, woo. So let’s highlight a few notable pitches from our ‘pitch deck’ page & talk about what they’re good for:

• Cosmoteer’s pitch deck: Walt Destler’s hit ‘starship architect & commander’ sim Cosmoteer launched in October 2022, and sold almost 300k Steam units by Feb. 2023. This is a deck made closer to release to chat to publishers - but Walt ended up choosing to self-publish, and doing great. Still, we find it very clear-headed.

• Wargroove’s ‘pretend pitch deck’: Chucklefish kindly sent along this pitch deck that it made, post-release, for its 2019 Advance Wars-ish hit Wargroove. It has a ‘perfect for publishers’ structure - one-pager, gameplay video, features, timeline, what the dev needs from a publisher, budget.

• Mind Scanners’ pitch deck: this quirky 2021 “retro-futuristic psychiatry simulation” was a pretty cool niche hit on Steam, and its key hook is explained well in the deck - “2D UI-based gameplay similar to Papers, Please and Orwell.” (‘Papers, Please-like’ is an underused microgenre, btw - also see the success of Contraband Police.)

• Trash Goblin’s pitch deck: this ‘powerwash sim for the RPG crowd’ is a fascinating one, since the devs have been public about pitching to 75+ game publishers and not agreeing a deal, and are now most of the way through a ‘likely to succeed’ Kickstarter. The deck’s long, but seems very functional to us, and the hook’s good.

There’s also a number of other interesting decks, including for roguelike minigolf deck builder Golfie (deck, Steam page), upcoming desktop virtual pet game Nanomon (deck, Steam page) and physics sandbox game Operation Outsmart (deck, Steam page.)

Check out the GameDiscoverCo Pitch Deck page for more decks, and also contact us if you can contribute a deck for an older or newer game. (Just having a selection publicly available is great.) To end, here’s some more thoughts on decks:

• Decks are pretty important if you want up-front funding for your game: obvious, I know. But you need some kind of structure in place (in addition to a ‘vertical slice’ or other demo.) Why? To convince publishers and funders you have a) a great idea b) a rational business view on what you need to finish it. Some don’t!

• The current market has an excess of decks/games, and a lack of funders: especially in the ‘>$500k USD’ space, it’s getting trickier and trickier. We’ll have some more specific data on why shortly. But it’s simple: you need to gross at least $1 million (depending on dev recoup) for a funder to make $500k back. And less and less new titles are doing that. So: there’s less demand to sign games.

• You can use a deck to talk to publishers and then… not use them: a couple of these games - notably Cosmoteer, which already had good ‘Hype’ and was a solo-dev project - ended up opting to self-publish. (We’re estimating it’s grossed nearly $7 million now, btw!) So just noting - if you can bootstrap, that’s a choice.

2023, a year in review: a review of the reviews…

Well, it’s definitely 2024 now. But the end of last year stacked up a whole bunch of ‘end of year’ interesting things. So here’s a special section going through all of them:

• Derek Lieu lists his favorite game trailers of 2023, saying: “I'm always looking to highlight trailers that did something different, drew my attention, or pulled off a very difficult communication goal for a game.” Some interesting trailer picks in here - including Getting Over It spiritual sequel Baby Steps(above).

• There’s loads of info in Steam’s official ‘top games of 2023’ charts/sale, which we’ll explore further next week. But good news: our top new Steam games of the year mapped very closely to this list (19 out of the 20 made it, in a similar order!)

• Nintendo Japan officially released the top-selling Japanese Switch eShop games on 2023: “Suika Game, which became a worldwide hit this year, topped the chart. Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom… follows right behind. Pikmin 4, Super Mario Bros. Wonder, and Dragon Quest Monsters: The Dark Prince round out the top five.”

• Some interesting Amazon hardware/physical game charts using public numbers: Amazon France’s top-selling physical games of 2023 has 6 Switch games in the Top 10, and no Xbox titles in the Top 20; December 2023’s Amazon U.S. top hardware/games shows Nintendo first-party games, Spider-Man 2, and Quest 2 (plus Switch and PS5 hardware) performing.

• GamesIndustry.biz rounds up a whole bunch of sources for a giant ‘The Year In Numbers 2023’ infographic, with some notable areas like ‘most viewed game trailers’ (yes, the GTA VI reveal trailer is #1), top TikTok-covered games, and ‘most covered in media’ games (led by Starfield and Diablo IV.)

• Some extra Steam stats: 32-33 points out that Steam’s Year In Review revealed that only 9% of the games played by the average Steam player were released in 2023 - vs. 52% released 1-7 years ago; Game World Observer chops up a lot of Steam stats, including most popular languages, most expensive game & more.

• StreamElements & Rainmaker.gg posted a year in review for Twitch, revealing: “Only 9 new games debuted in the monthly top 10 on Twitch with Diablo IV [70m hours in launch week] dominating the pack in terms of hours watched. Hogwarts Legacy [50m hours] also had a strong showing.”

• A final bonus: GI.Biz’s Christopher Dring posted GfK’s data on Xmas physical game No.1’s by ‘single platform’ winner, back to 1984 (Activision’s Ghostbusters on ZX Spectrum!) Yep, 39 years of ‘Xmas #1’ history - with plenty of FIFA and Call Of Duty spread around in there. And, uh, James Bond: Tomorrow Never Dies.

Oh, and late-breaking news? The player-voted Steam Awards winners for 2023 are here, with Baldur’s Gate 3 getting ‘GameOf The Year’, Lethal Company grabbing ‘Better With Friends’, and Starfield being honored with ‘Most Innovative Gameplay’ (?)

PC/console paid ad spend: what worked in 2023?

The folks at Gamesight, who do a lot of tracking of paid ad spend from their clients (Xbox, Warner Brothers, Riot, Bungie, etc) put out their 2023 digital marketing spend analysis(free report, reg required). And here’s some key takeaways:

• Twitter/X - it’s on the way out, baby:“A 46% drop in click traffic on X (previously Twitter) was recorded for game marketers [in Gamesight’s anonymized client data] between 2022 and 2023.” Gamesight says: “advertisers have adopted a ‘wait and see’ attitude”, due to Elon Musk’s mauling of the platform.

• TikTok - it’s still hot, if you can play it right: Gamesight notes: “For game marketers, we saw a 46% increase in D7 retention rates [from 2022 to 2023]. TikTok presents both challenges and opportunities for marketers… [but] last year, TikTok reported a staggering 3 trillion views solely on gaming content.”

• Meta leads the ‘most used’ platform Top 5: among Gamesight’s campaigns, Meta Ads is used by 88%, with the majority targeting Facebook & minority (but increasing $!) Instagram. Elsewhere, 79% use Google Ads, 37% use Reddit Ads, and 36% use TikTok Ads…

Finally, Gamesight also notes that correctly managed influencer (video) campaigns can have pretty competitive ad conversion compared to ad networks. Here’s their data:

Anyhow, the full Gamesight report has a lot more data, so go check it out. Paid ad spend for PC/console can have dubious ROI at times, especially for less expensive ($20 or less) games. So it’s good to have a company trying to better instrument the results.

The game discovery news round-up…

Finally - and yes, this is a four-part newsletter, apologies, RIP your inbox, etc - let’s take a look at some of the notable game platform/discovery news since mid-Dec:

• Another, somewhat larger game got affected by a Steam hack over the holidays: standalone, free Slay The Spire mod Downfall had “a malicious upload [patching] our game on Steam's library for a period of roughly one hour” on December 25th. The trojan uploaded in place of the game went after “Discord info, autocomplete [data], saved passwords, network info, cookies, saved credit cards & Steam info.” Sigh.

• Sony announced just before the holidays that the PS5 “has surpassed 50 million units sold through to consumers, three years since its Nov. 2020 launch.” VGC adds: “PS4 reportedly hit 50 million sales after 160 weeks, which is one week faster than PS5 managed - although the last-gen system didn’t face the same COVID-related supply issues that have checked the current-gen console’s momentum.”

• A couple of ‘real-life stories’: Arnold at TinyTouchTales did his end of year round-up, revealing that catalog $ and Google Play Pass revenue (above) are powering his IAP-light Android/iOS titles; the Froggy’s Battle dev did a Reddit ‘my year in micro-indie dev’ postmortem with transparent numbers (4600 copies, ~€3800) on his ultra-cheap action roguelite.

• As of Dec. 20th, a new Steam Client Beta ushered in a notable privacy change: “You’ll be able to mark specific games as private and they’ll disappear from anywhere they’d be viewed by someone other than you.” You can now have your Steam account public or friends-only, but with specific (NSFW? Bad Rats?) games 100% private.

• You might have heard that the Chinese government put out some aggressive domestic monetization guidelines around loot boxes, daily log-in rewards, etc, leading to big share drops for Tencent & NetEase. Well, the gov agency softened its language, and now a senior official has been removed as a direct result. Woops.

• This Australian-specific game biz overview, with a ‘survive until ‘25’ tag line, is still pretty representative of current global woes, so worth checking: “As the economic conditions have deteriorated and interest rates have increased, publishers and investors have tightened their purse strings.”

• Ugh, this PlayStation/Insomniac hacked data leak is unpleasant for the studio, and we won’t cover in detail. But for those wanting a gander: GameDevReports has a round-up, Kotaku went deeper into the data than many, and Game World Observer also compiled a bunch of specific takeaways.

• Since some were confused: Baldur’s Gate 3 was not in our ‘top new games of 2023’ list on Steam because it’s been Early Access on Steam (albeit a rare ‘prologue’-y version) since 2020. (We counted only ‘brand new’ games.) It would have been way up (atop?) the chart, though…

• Yes, Activision’s Bobby Kotick departed the company at short notice on December 29th, post Microsoft deal. (He was widely expected to leave in early 2024 anyhow.) There’s a platform structure takeaway, tho: “Microsoft has not appointed a direct replacement and instead has rolled the suite of Activision Blizzard executives… under Microsoft’s game content and studios president Matt Booty.”

• Microlinks: PlayStation Plus’ ‘Essential’ games for January 2024 are A Plague Tale: Requiem, Evil West & Nobody Saves the World; Valve put out its December 2023 Next Fest dev Q&A video to comb through at your leisure; mod/server company Overwolf said it paid out $201 million to ‘in-game creators’ in 2023 - we think a lot of it is via third-party Tebex/Minecraft servers? (Hypixel, etc.)

Finally, we’re not sure if this is a recommendation or a warning, but skit crew Mega64 has released Todd & Aaron’s Game Awards for 2023, legitimately the 16th year (!) these dumbasses have been doing this. Here’s the chronological playlist - and, just, wow:

[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.]