Revealed: the biggest Switch eShop games of 2024

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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 back to our adorable little newsletter, with its button nose, its lopsided grin, and the plaintive look on its face that says - ‘please mister, will you read me now? can you spare a shilling for our subscription, guv’nor?’

Fine, so we’re the Dickens-ian orphans of video game missives this week, apparently. And we’re spreading cheer by giving you key info extrapolated from a platform that is on the Scrooge-ier side when it comes to public data - Switch’s eShop. (Bah humbug?)

[REMINDER: please support GameDiscoverCo by subscribing to GDCo Plus right now. You get base access to our ‘core’ Steam data back-end for unreleased & released games, full access to a second weekly newsletter, Discord access, eight game discovery eBooks & lots more.]

Game discovery news: Steam Deck goes white…

But before we get into all that good’ ol data, let’s hit you with a jolt of game platform and discovery news - as follows:

• Asked about Concord’s failure in the Sony results call, VP Sadahiko Hayakawa noted Helldivers 2’s success as contrast, adding: “We intend to build on an optimum title portfolio… that combines single-player games – which are our strengths and which have a higher predictability of becoming hits due to our proven IP – with live-service games that pursue upside while taking on a certain amount of risk upon release.”

• Steam Deck is getting a white OLED limited edition version(above), which “will be available worldwide on November 18th.. [it] will cost $679 USD, and will be available in all Steam Deck shipping regions. Steam Deck OLED: Limited Edition White has all the same specs as the Steam Deck OLED 1TB model, but in white and grey.” Hawt.

• Fascinating to see that somebody has built a TikTok-ish app within Roblox, with 8 million MAUs. It has “a swipe-to-the-next-video UI, likes, comments, and a suite of editing tools that lets creators post clips from the game or create their own by selecting poses and background environments for their digital avatars.”

• Mopping up Nintendo results data, people have spotted that“Nintendo has lost 4 million Switch Online members in the past year” - down from 38 million to 34 million - partly due to “fewer new releases in the past year focusing on online play”, according to the company. (Maybe Nintendo Music will help with that?)

• Here’s a useful Video Games Europe & Ipsos survey on kids and games: “95% of parents of children who buy in-game extras actively monitor their children’s spending. 76% of parents… say their children do not make in-game purchases; Amongst those spending, average spend has decreased by 21% since 2023, from €39 to €31 [per month].”

• ICYMI last week: “Steam’s new game recording feature is now out of beta and available for everyone. A built-in system for creating and sharing gameplay footage, it works with any game that supports the Steam overlay, including non-Steam titles.” And it also works on Steam Deck, Valve says.

• There’s a report out of The Information (via RoadToVR) that Meta “has reportedly cut funds to some outside VR game developers, whilst reshifting its focus to non-gaming apps.” Remember how we noted that Quest 3S TV ad that featured games last, after movie-watching and exercise? (An incremental shift, but nonetheless..)

• Nintendo was also asked about rising game dev costs, with Shigeru Miyamoto noting: “We believe that not all products require large costs… with the current technology it is possible to create fun games with a small number of developers in a short period of time.” Ko Shiota added: “I believe that the most important thing for Nintendo is how we create new ideas. Bigger budgets do not necessarily equate to better ideas.” So there.

• One interesting player comment on soft bookmarking, re: our ‘what are Steam wishlists?’ post from last week: “I keep the games I really want near the top of my wishlist. While others are more ‘I might buy this if I play the previous entries and like them’ or ‘I'm sure I'll have time to buy and play this if I win the lottery’.”

• A couple more ‘tricky to interpret’ comments from that PlayStation results call - Sony head Hiroki Totoki talking abstractly about changing the biz structure of the game division, and secondly, saying that forcing PSN account usage on Steam “invites pushback”, but not really indicating a strategy change is imminent.

• Also notable on Roblox: the company is banning kids under 13 from ‘social hangout’ spaces, and also “stopping kids under 13 from playing, searching for, or being able to discover unrated experiences.” (Makes sense after some of the rougher low-profile spaces revealed in that Hindenburg report - here’s the official announce.)

In-depth: the biggest Switch eShop titles of 2024!

Nintendo Switch hardware has swelled to 146 million units sold, but the amount of games available on the eShop has also ballooned (it’s increasing by 50+ games a week, with 2,300 games debuting in 2024 so far.) But some third-party games still succeed.

So, GameDiscoverCo thought it’d use its painstakingly assembled data on most-downloaded eShop game data in the U.S. and the UK. to extrapolate the following: which games, new and old, sold the best in the West in 2024 on Switch eShop?

We’ve decided to do this by ranking, rather than exact units. But for context: we’re estimating the top paid games as selling in the mid-high hundreds of thousands of units during 2024 YTD, with the lowest third-party games in these charts dipping to around 100k, and the very highest topping 1 million units sold.

This reinforces the impression we have of the Switch, a market that’s always first-party centric: new third-party eShop games can sink without trace, but if you have a ‘cozy’ success story, you can be selling tens or even - rarely - low hundreds of thousands of units.

So OK, that’s the backdrop. And here’s the charts, starting with a look at the best-selling paid games (by units) across the entire eShop during 2024:

Some of the games atop this list aren’t too surprising, right? (There’s lots of Nintendo first-party evergreens all over the place.) A couple of meta-notes:

• A caveat: Just Dance 2024 is a game that defaults to a paid SKU, but has a F2P version without the year, so that may bump it up the charts by download numbers.

• Unsurprisingly, Hogwarts Legacy - which debuted on Switch in Nov. 2023 - is the top ‘recent’ third-party eShop game, helped by discounts in 2024 down to ~$20.

• In general, remember that a lot of Switch players prefer to buy first-party (or otherwise ‘big’) games on cartridge, which we can’t see in these charts.

Next up, let’s try filtering by Nintendo Switch games newly released in 2024? Here’s the top games YTD (year to date), in terms of eShop downloads:

Unsurprisingly, you’re seeing all of Nintendo’s new first-party titles - 6 out of the top 7 - clustered at the top, even not taking into account physical sales. And Legend Of Zelda: Echoes Of Wisdom is atop the whole bunch, yupp.

So let’s do one more filter for new games, removing first-party games, which probably gives us the most interesting view of all:

So, you’ll see the top of the chart swarmed by many of the games we’ve covered in recent months on GameDiscoverCo, such as Little Kitty, Big City, and Balatro, and Another Crab’s Treasure. (It’s almost like we’re good at spotting hits?) Other notes:

• Classic collections are doing pretty well on eShop, catalog-wise: you can see the Top 10 has everything from Star Wars: Battlefront, Tomb Raider, Castlevania, and Marvel Vs. Capcom in it - repackaging definitely works!

• Attractive 2D games still make it work on Switch: games like Animal Well, Pizza Tower, and Thank Goodness You’re Here! (which we maybe over-rank, since we use the UK as a proxy for Europe) still thrive on Switch, tho competition is fierce.

• Not releasing on PC makes your Switch sales pop even harder: we don’t think this is a good idea, as such, but Vanillaware’s epic tactical RPG Unicorn Overlord skipped PC entirely, and sold great in the West, with exclusivity part of the appeal.

Finally, we’ll spare you another large image, but the top F2P games by downloads on the Western eShop during 2024 are headed by Fortnite, Fall Guys, and Rocket League - followed by Palia, Disney Speedstorm, and first-party titles Tetris 99 & Super Kirby Clash. (Other ‘new in 2024’ games? Star Wars: Hunters at #7, and Lego Fortnite at #15.)

So what surprised you - or didn’t surprise you about these charts? Answers on a postcard, please, and we’ll try to compile more charts like this, before the year is over.

PlateUp! & why chasing wishlists at all costs is ‘eh’

We think one of the curiously under-discussed success stories on Steam is “classic cooking action with permanent roguelite progression”PlateUp! - from It’s Happening & Yogcast Games. (It’s a roguelite ‘jam’ on franchise classics like the Overcooked series.)

The co-op heavy game released in 2022 - and in a talk from Develop: Brighton 2024 newly posted on YouTube, Yogcast’s Simon Byron and Fourth Floor’s Mark Cantwell discuss how PlateUp! sold “over 650,000 copies in its first four months of release – a result you’d not have predicted from its pre-launch wishlists alone.”

Anonymizing Yogscast game data by replacing their names with members of UK boy band Take That (!), Byron - who helped sign smash hit Human Fall Flat when at Curve - shows conversion randomness & makes the point that Steam wishlist metrics obsession has taken over the biz: “If there's one thing I know, it's that you never know.”

Look, for example, at what PlateUp’s sales curve looked like on Steam after launch, on the way to 1.5 million sold on PC as of February 2024, after it went super-viral with streamers, compared to other Yogscast titles. This is unseeable, ahead of time:

Simon’s talk makes the good point that Goodhart’s law can rule for wishlists - “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” You can’t tell how a game will perform until it truly meets the market, and you shouldn’t buy or barter marginal wishlists just for the sake of it. (We agree!)

You still need to understand the market to pick the right games, and using metrics is vital. And we do think some genres of game that are less streamer-reliant may be less ‘all over the place’ on conversion. But the fact remains that you’re gold-mining, and when you strike it rich, you want to do everything you can to maximize that upside.

Talking of which - Mark Cantwell’s section of the talk is interesting, because it talks about how the team used paid marketing to improve PlateUp’s outcome. In particular, we were intrigued by this slide about the paid influencers that the team picked:

In other words, there are influencers that are popular but also influential with peers - NorthernLion comes to mind for us. So - place a premium on understanding and finding those highly connected folks, if you want additional organic reach. Smart.

[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.]