Monster Hunter Wilds went... how big, how unoptimized?
Publikováno: 28.2.2025
Also: a game attracting wishlists, lots of news, and our GDC Plus meetup...
[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.]
As we careen into the weekend, time to take a look at some of the major game discovery announcements for the rest of the week (for all subscribers), and then Steam analysis, and details on our GDCo Plus/Pro meet-up at GDC 2025 (for paid GDCo subs!)
First, before we start, would you like to know a whole lot about video game reviews over the last 45 (!) years? Well, this SpriteCell article does just that, “gathering data on 2,449 of these reviewers” in lovely graphs on review scores, platform focus and more…
Game discovery news: Avowed gets some love…
So let’s take a look around the game platform and discovery news as a starting point, shall we? Here’s what we’ve got:
The latest Footprints.gg round-up of ‘trad media’ mentions shows that Obsidian’s Avowed actually won the week after its release, closely followed by Pokemon (both Pokemon Go news & speculation on new games), Marvel Rivals, the goofy Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza, and the ‘soon ubiquitous’ Monster Hunter Wilds.
Valve has announced that that the Steam Daily Deal slots are expanding to six slots per day, since “in the past year, we found running four spots instead of two is largely additive, and it lets Steam better match the right game with the right player.” (There’s less broad exposure on a per-game basis, but more games in deals.)
Also highlighted in that Steamworks announcement: there’s “a prioritization algorithm that looks at the games played by each user and matches them against the set of current Daily Deal promotions”, 87% of Daily Deals in 2024 were from ‘never before featured’ games, and there’s new Steamworks reporting on Daily Deal results. (Lots more ‘Daily Deals in 2024’ analysis in this HowToMarketAGame post.)
Streamforge’s Nick Lombardi tried to reverse engineer the paid influencer budget and effect for Kingdom Come Deliverance 2, estimating around $500k in paid placements, and noting of the 270m total views: “The bulk of these views (86%) came from organic content, with sponsored content accounting for 14% of total views.”
IDC has attempted to quantify handheld PC gaming device sales for The Verge, suggesting “just under 6 million shipments” in 2022-2024, with 1.93 million units forecast for 2025. This subcategory is led by Steam Deck, which IDC & The Verge suggests is at 3.7 to 4+ million units LTD. So… not giant, but decent over time?
Notable comments from Bossa’s Henrique Olifiers on company direction from the Surgeon Simulator dev (alongside more layoffs, sadly.) After shipping Lost Skies, they’ll “reshape into small teams working independently on novel game ideas brought to the players as early as possible.” A sign for others?
Our full Steam Next Fest data post will arrive on Tuesday. But in the meantime, Aftermath ran a piece on how the Steam algorithm prioritized games for this Next Fest, quoting me that there’s “some odder, tinier games getting… [initially] surfaced… But that's Steam deliberately trying to diversify and get more 'egalitarian'.”
Sony’s PlayStation VR2 headset for the PS5 has been every bit the niche peripheral people figured it might be when it was announced. So Sony is juicing things a bit by reducing its price to $399 in the U.S. (from an original MSRP of $549), starting in March. We’ll see if that helps.
We love data-filled postmortems, and Furnish Master’s ‘1 year in Steam Early Access’ article from its dev is exactly that. The game grossed $787k, was made in 2 years of the dev’s spare time, and launched with 96k wishlists. It has ~205k WLs, and a somewhat high 17% refund rate, partly due to low-end tech slowness.
Here’s more deep thinking on which genre to pick on Steam, from the Void Climber devs: “Many players skimming your Steam page want one simple question answered: Is this like that other game I love? Let me be clear, this is really a ‘vibes’ thing. It’s part of the dark art of a good Steam page.”
Microlinks: PlayStation Plus’ ‘Essential’ games for March are Dragon Age: The Veilguard (swift appearance!), TMNT: The Cowabunga Collection & Sonic Colors; IGDA Foundation is doing a CFS for its Steam charity event in May; Japan is enforcing ‘consumption tax’ for in-game item fees against games like Mafia City.
Snow Town Geek Store: 50,000 WLs in a month…
GameDiscoverCo sometimes get unsolicited submissions from devs who’ve announced a title successfully. And the folks at Perelesoq did that with Snow Town Geek Store, which picked up 50k wishlists in its first pre-release month on Steam.
The devs are particularly pleased about this because its previous, gritty war-themed game Torn Away took a long time to complete, had reach issues & led to financial problems at the developer. Thus, a need to do things differently…
So how did they pivot, exactly? The dev team sent us a full post-mortem, which they’ve just published on their site. Here’s the short but punchy takeaways we had:
Mashing up a couple of different popular art styles is intriguing: the title alternates “[2D] pixel art… and a popular PS1-era [3D] aesthetic”, a relatively novel idea - and both look pretty good. (It’s not the main reason people are interested, but it is a differentiator.)
The hook - ‘management x retro retail simulator’ - is good: there’s echoes of titles like Supermarket Simulator, a serious hit and new microgenre, in the ‘inventory management’ parts of the trailer. If you combine that with attractive retro throwback setting pixel RPG elements, you have a formula for player interest.
The game plays up escapism cleverly: the devs note - “Our audience is made up of people who, like us, want to escape life’s heaviness and relive the warm, lamp-lit days of the 2000s youth and childhood.” So it includes post-Soviet touchstones like a popular voice actor, nostalgic chip brands, and a famous MTV theme tune.
Perhaps games like Snow Town Geek Store may struggle with international reach since they are so culturally specific. But we do think getting good reach somewhere is better than nowhere at all.
And some of the learnings are less about this particular game, and more about learnings on how to pivot, efficiently identify subgenres, and swiftly execute. The full blog post from the dev has a lot more useful thoughts on the change of attitude.