Real data: how CloverPit hit 750k sales in 2 weeks

Publikováno: 14.10.2025

Also: lots of discovery news and the latest Roblox charts.

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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.]

It’s definitely feeling more Autumn-y - are any of you readers out there rolling for Fall Damage from the harsher weather? (That’s a U.S. D&D joke, folks.) So we’ll leaf you to get acquainted with rainier climes, while bringing you these pumpkins of knowledge. (Also, this newsletter has not one, but two Spinal Tap references. Why? No idea…)

Before we start, since all games are game platforms, RockPaperShotgun has spotted that “Cyberpunk 2077 can now serve daily word puzzles thanks to a mod called Gonkle, and the answer’s probably choom.” It comes as an in-game text message on your phone, and uses Cyberpunk’s in-game slang for a bunch of the answers. Very cute.

[NEED BETTER INSIGHT? Companies, get much more ‘Steam deep dive’ & console data SaaS access org-wide via GameDiscoverCo Pro, as 80+ have. And signing up to GDCo Plus gets (like Pro) the rest of this newsletter and Discord access, plus ‘just’ basic data & more. ]

Discovery news: Might, Magic, Reanimal trend…

Starting out with a buncha buncha game discovery & platform news and links, as follows:

Real data: how CloverPit hit 750k sales in 2 weeks!

So, we’ve covered Panik Arcade & Future Friends’ “rogue-lite slot machine nightmare”CloverPit once already, since we’re trend-setters. It was via this newsletter back in April on how the game added 100k Steam wishlists in a week, due to its viral demo.

Now it launched (solely on Steam, for now), has it done well? Uh, it’s done 750,000 units sold in two weeks. So we’d say… yes? (This swift a ‘launch sales start’ almost certainly means the $10 USD game will sell at least 2-3 million units on Steam over the next couple of years, some discount-incented. That’s.. pleasant.)

To find out more, we re-engaged with Thomas Reisenegger & Alex Fairwood from Future Friends, who are one of the most trend-first, reactive micropublishers (& self-publishing helpers) out there. We also got new comments from the game’s creators at Panik Arcade, Matteo & Lorenzo, who conceptualized this fiendishness.

Before we start, yes, there’s really no paid ad budget here. Thomas tells us: “All the marketing was organic (so we didn’t pay for ads or any influencers) but the viral demo did a lot of work there.” As for why the demo and game were so viral, here’s what we said in April:

  • the ‘gritty’ PlayStation 1-styled textures and low poly 3D art places Cloverpit squarely in the Buckshot Roulette-ish ‘PS1 horror’ aesthetic.

  • the ‘X mechanic but it’s an upgrade-able roguelite’ idea is very meme-y, and a slot machine (a la Luck Be A Landlord) is a great, grokkable randomized start point.

  • having a cramped, navigable first-person 3D space where you can move between different machines - with a trapdoor to plummet through if you lose - is clever.

Having watched more streamers play it, we’d highlight the complexity of powerup items and ‘builds’. There’s a lot of interesting ways you can change your slot machine output - and the guillotine-like failure moments are great for drama on livestreams!

We asked the Panik Arcade team about the ‘crazy builds’ meta, and they said: “We have seen incredible builds breaking the game in ways we didn’t design! It’s really satisfying to see players finding new ways to break the game.” (Your powerup design combos being exploitable is a positive with this type of game, because it leads to viral videos…)

There’s also been some interesting discussion on whether the RNG (randomness of results) feels too harsh in the game. (I mean, slot machines are harsh, right?) The design duo said - sometimes, but it’s all mutable, and that’s the point: “We agree that the more experience the player has, the easier it is to manipulate the odds. Cheap rerolls of the store in the early game is one example of a mechanic that is often overlooked by new players.”

So that’s the design elements. Next, let’s check out some juicy data. Here’s the overview of performance so far, direct from the Steam back-end:

(Reminder: Valve has said it’s fine to share this data, if you want to!)
The daily ‘decay curve’ on sales is is way less extreme than normal.

We’ll talk about many of these elements in due course, but two misc. things:

Here’s direct info on the playtimes so far, underscoring that CloverPit is not only purchased a lot, but played a lot. The game’s only been out 2+ weeks, but look:

Next, to understand which ‘family’ of PC games CloverPit is most strongly adjacent to, let’s check out GameDiscoverCo Pro data. These ‘Top Affinity’ games have grossed $1-$7m, and only have 5-15% of players in common with CloverPit, but strongly overindex on interest compared to the normal Steam player:

And this makes a lot of sense when you look at them: titles like Ballionaire, Dungeon Clawler and Nubby’s Number Factory are all relatively inexpensive, replayable, and are toying with the corners of ‘controlled randomness & roguelite strategy’.

Next, let’s talk about what the publishers did - besides sign a kickass game, which is a lot of the battle, of course. Quoting FF’s Thomas & Alex directly on launch tactics:

  • “The role of Steam demos has become impossible to overstate, especially with how things have shifted in the past year. If you have a great demo and can launch it during a major event or with strong Steam featuring, that now outperforms almost any other marketing strategy (influencers, social media, you name it.)

  • We put a lot of time and effort into promoting both the demo and full game to influencers. We’ve handed out over 600 Steam keys to trusted channels so far, and that definitely helped push our numbers.

  • We made sure key creators like NorthernLion were in the loop early. They had access to the game weeks before launch, which gave them time to prep coverage if they wanted. Channels like that are super important, since their audience already enjoys this type of game.

  • That said, we’re very aware that tons of coverage came organically. Once you hit the Steam charts - which we did with both the demo and the full game - you naturally see a big wave of new creators jumping on.

  • For example, we got a ton of Hololive VTuber coverage in Japan - dozens of channels with millions of subs. That’s something we’d never seen before. Working with a Japanese agency helped. But honestly, being high in the charts and having the right kind of game was key.”

Talking of regional interest, 29% of of the sales of CloverPit so far are in the U.S., followed by Germany (10%), Japan (9%, an over-index), Korea (9%, also over-indexed), China (‘only’ 6%, interestingly), and the Russian Federation, UK and France with 4%.

Oh, and before we stop spamming you with graphs, here’s how the Steam wishlists for the game stacked up since CloverPit’s announce, inc. April demo & September release:

Finally, we asked the Future Friends crew about short-form video - y’know, TikTok & friends. In this case, it “definitely played a solid role, it was an important piece of the puzzle, but not necessarily the ‘make or break’ factor.”

As for their in-house social video strategy: “We make content for TikTok and then crosspost to [Instagram/Facebook] Reels and [YouTube] Shorts. For CloverPit, Reels was the clear winner - we had multiple posts hit hundreds of thousands (even millions) of views. TikTok followed, with a handful of strong posts. Shorts didn’t perform for us at all - I think it only really works if you’ve got a big YouTube presence to begin with?” Check! Seacrest out…

Roblox’s top Sept games: what, more Brainrot…?

Once again, the Creator Games/Exchange folks - led by the magisterial David Taylor - have provided us data on the top Roblox games of September 2025. This time, they even published their own LinkedIn analysis of it, so we can crib freely from it (yay!)

Read the full thing for a tad more detail/drama, but here’s our exclusive Top 20 earners countdown(Google Drive link) with more data. There’s little movement in the Top 10 highest earners, but notable changes in ‘Minutes Played’ charts.Per David’s analysis:

  • “Plants vs. Brainrots exploded onto the charts this month, doubling every day for two straight weeks - a faster climb than Grow a Garden saw in its rise. The game averaged 916k CCU last week, making it the third-most engaging game on Roblox, behind 99 Nights in the Forest and Steal a Brainrot.

  • Fish It! continued its quiet ascent, jumping 18 ranks in time spent to #7 and likely capturing players migrating from Grow a Garden. Meanwhile, the original casual fishing game that took Roblox by storm, Fisch, has resurfaced back among the Top 15 earning games after dropping as low as the Top 150 earlier this year.

  • While 99 Nights in the Forest and Steal A Brainrot held their ground for another month, it’s only a matter of time before the tens of millions of players in those games migrate, enabling fresh contenders break into the Top 10.”

We really appreciate the continued analysis here, since there’s been such a lack of detail on a platform that regularly has 10-20 million CCU, and peaked at 42.57m recently. More on this, as always, next month - toodles…

[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.]

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