Steam Deck: quantifying the PC handheld's favorite games

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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.]

We’re back, and boy, have we got a Halloween hangover, albeit from handing out too much candy. Costume-related news? Lots more folks recognized our Fallout jumpsuit this year, due to the TV show. And only one person asked if we were Billy Corgan from Smashing Pumpkins (?!) (Imagine if he’d been dressed as Homer Simpson…)

Two bonus Halloween links? How tech & microcultures have influenced Halloween costumes, and a handy round-up of all the spooky IP tie-ins for GaaS games during October. (The controversial Hunt: Showdown 1896 x Ghostface, Dead By Daylight x Dracula, Marvel: Strike Force x Agatha Harkness, etc…) And now… let’s news.

Game discovery news: Nintendo gets Music-al!

As is customary, we’re going to put Friday’s latest game discovery & platform links above the paywall. (Please upgrade and support us, if you’d like to read the main story below it.) Here’s what we’ve got:

• Nintendo has been talking up its ‘taking its online members beyond games’ for a while, and Nintendo Music on iOS/Android is a new example. It’s like Apple Music for first-party game tunes - minus detailed artist credits, woops - and you have to have a Switch Online account ($20-$50 a year) to access it. Interesting.

• Meta Quest things: Meta’s Reality Labs division lost $4.4 billion in the third quarter, with revenue up 29% year over year to $270 million, ahead of a likely Quest 3S launch $ spike in Q4. Related: GDCo spotted this Quest 3 U.S. TV ad opposite sports - interesting to see movie-watching, then exercise, then games?

• Looking at GDCo’s ‘new on Switch’ eShop charts (last 3 months, paid, U.S. by download #), Sonic x Shadow Generations wins out - it’s inside the Top 30 for all games most-downloaded in the last 2 weeks. Next, Yakuza Kiwami had a strong debut at #73, Just Dance 2025 is still in the Top 100 and Core Keeper sits at #130.

• PlayStation’s joint CEOs did an ‘exclusive’ interview with Variety, in which not much happened, besides Hermen Hulst noting: “PlayStation Studios is now a much bigger organization than when it started. It’s grown tremendously. And that is organic growth that our existing teams, I think, hired quite aggressively, as well as through M&A.” (Foreshadowing - the interview was done before Tuesday’s studio shutdowns.)

• There’s two weeks of ‘top trad media mentions’rounded up by Footprints.gg, and the most recent week is dominated by Call Of Duty: Black Ops 6 (duh!), followed by Dragon Age: The Veilguard and Monster Hunter Wilds, due to its Open Beta. (The week before had some Silent Hill 2 and Alan Wake 2 (DLC!) in it….)

• A minor follow-up to Tuesday’s Tiny Glade piece? A couple of people pointed out the game got a Steam front page editorial ‘takeover’ banner on launch, which must have really helped reach. (It's a great example of how Steam will feature games with >X wishlists at launch, regardless of studio size.)

• Xbox’s results were also this week, and were relatively pedestrian, with revenue up 43% to $5.6 billion, but with all of that increase coming from the Activision Blizzard deal. Existing biz? Hardware down 29% and games/subs offsetting, as Game Pass hit “a new Q1 record for total revenue and average revenue per subscriber.”

• In Microsoft’s earnings call, Satya Nadella said: “Black Ops 6 [set] a record for day one players, as well as Game Pass subscriber adds on launch day… unit sales on PlayStation and Steam were also up over 60% year-over-year.” It’s a well-received entry, if not a quantum leap, and Circana notes“on October 28th, 52% of US active XBS players and 34% of US active PS5 players launched Call of Duty HQ.”

• In ‘more disclosure is good for the platform’ news, Steam has added a mandatory store page sidebar for games that “install a client side, kernel mode anti-cheat”, and “will be going through old games and contacting partners with games that fall into this category.” (This is mainly multiplayer games, obviously.)

• It’s a results-busy week, with Roblox also putting out its 3Q financials, which were impressive: “Revenue was $919m, up 29% [YoY]... free cash flow was $218m, up 266% [YoY]…. average daily DAUs were 88.9m, up 27% YoY.” (Beating expectations, its shares jumped, and the CFO claimed it’s all due to a discovery win: “we’re now matching users with content that’s just more interesting and relevant to them.”)

• GDCo’s U.S. PlayStation and Xbox game charts for games released in the last 3 months sees Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 topping the charts, duh, with Dragon Age: The Veilguard coming in strong, Dragon Ball: Sparking! Zero still charting, and Phasmophobia having a strong PlayStation debut. (Also: all usual sports games!)

• Microlinks: Fandom charted its ‘top Wikis’ links for two decades, with plenty of Roblox games in the recent mix; a look at the ‘blood-red shooter market’, with multiplayer PC/console shooters so hard to break into for new IPs; the U.S. Top 20 best-selling games of the year from 2000 to 2023 is fascinating stuff.

Steam Deck: quantifying its handheld player surge

When it comes to Valve’s Steam Deck PC handheld, there’s plenty we don’t know. For one, there’s installed base - we guess-timated it at between 3 and 4 million late last year, so we’re wondering if it’s approaching 5 million soon. (But we genuinely have no idea - Aperture Desk Job players are up about 20% in the last year, for context...)

But what we do know, thanks to a recent change by Steam, is whether a user review has been left by somebody with majority (>50%) Steam Deck play time for that particular game. Here’s an example - see the Deck icon on the right:

This enables us to do some fun things with stats. Firstly, here’s the Top 20 most-played Steam Deck games by total hours, captured from Valve’s data earlier this week, with added ‘% of reviews in the last month that were from Deck-majority players’:

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