Summerhouse & the rise of the 'chill game' on Steam

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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, and we’re delighted to be back in your inbox for some midweek analysis. We’re leading this newsletter off with a look at a game that’s more of a ‘software toy’ than anything - but has captured people’s imaginations due to that!

Also worth noting: the mysterious iii initiative is announcing their ‘thing’ tomorrow, and we’ll have more about it on Monday. It’s ‘only’ from “the people who helped bring you Darkest Dungeon, Risk of Rain 2, Slay the Spire, Vampire Survivors, V Rising & more.”

[REMINDER: you can support GameDiscoverCo by subscribing to GDCo Plus now. You get full access to our Steam data back-end for unreleased & released games & weekly PC/console sales research, Discord access, seven detailed game discovery eBooks - & lots more.]

Summerhouse: an inexpensive, chill success story

So, we’ve been watching the success of Summerhouse ($5), a self-described “small-scale building game and a love letter to the feeling of long lost summer afternoons”, over the past couple of weeks. It launched on March 8th, and we can reveal it’s just hit 120k units sold on Steam.

According to our externally-sourced estimates - which actually underestimate Summerhouse’s success, it was #9 in ‘most-downloaded new Steam game in March 2024’. Well, it’s really #6, now we know the exact sales numbers. So it’s worth examining.

Firstly, you may have noticed two things: one, it’s very cheap to buy - and only took 8 months to make. And secondly, it’s not even trying to market itself as a complex game - you build things with no limit, and no ‘point’ besides making lovely pastoral towns.

We asked the game’s Berlin-based creator Friedemann why he put out something so delightfully minimal, and he said: “I just wanted to make something super small & creative and didn't see an obvious way of including a game mechanic. If I would've had a good mechanics idea I would've definitely implemented it… I think [that] does help with sales."

Maybe so, but counterpoint: there's a whole bunch of good $5-$15 games on Steam nowadays. They’re stripped down, either gameplay-wise or just 'software toy'-ish, but are still lots of fun. Here’s the results so far for Summerhouse, in just 2+ weeks:

Relatedly, we also got country data via the title’s publisher Future Friends Games, which showed 36.7% of the units from China (!), 21.4% from the U.S., 4.4% from the UK, 4.3% from Germany, 4.0% from Japan, 3.0% from Canada, and down from there.

As you can see, this is not necessarily a game that gets a ton of play time - 24 minutes median is modest. But it’s also got 97% positive reviews (!), with one Steam player saying: “this is actually amazing its feel so cozy… no ranked, no bad teammate, no pressure, u can do ur dream house thoough.”

And just talking about overlap with games in this microgenre, here’s the strongest ‘Affinity’ Steam games to Summerhouse, according to GameDiscoverCo data:

It’s not really surprising to see titles like Townscaper($6), and Islanders($5, Friedemann was a co-dev of this!) in there, alongside more scaled ‘build-y / arrange-y’ things like Unpacking($20) or Dorfromantik($14) - all of which have sold great.

We also got a chance to chat to Alex Chinchen of Future Friends about why he thinks that Summerhouse did so well in its initial period. He identified the upside as being “a mix of things”, specifically:

• A lot of Twitch and YouTube interest: “We've had some nice hits on Twitch (Lirik being the biggest) and some steady YT views from lots of great channels - but no silly [big] numbers.”

• Pickups by ‘trad media’ too: “We had positive reviews from some great sites (like Eurogamer, The Guardian).”

• Overall word of mouth:“This definitely feels like a factor, with some good numbers from a number of creators on Twitter and TikTok, and Overwhelmingly Positive Steam review scores.”

This all led to Steam algorithm wins, too - when we first spoke to Alex just after launch:“Steam’s New & Trending visibility & Discovery Queue are driving about 65% of page visits.” It all adds up to a remarkably flat ‘long tail’ for an impulse buy-worthy title:

Impressive stuff! So.. what’s our conclusion? Well, this ‘chill building’ space is a really fascinating niche on PC. And sure, the revenue from Summerhouse isn’t anything to write home about if you’re a big AAA company.

But for a solo dev making a game/software toy in a few months, it’s great - especially since reach and revenue will double or triple over time. And we see this as part of the continued Cambrian Explosion of possibilities in games.

In short: devs don’t have to make a 20-hour campaign, they can still make something very visually competitive as a solo dev, and they can charge as much or as little as they like. For Summerhouse, that’s been a recipe for a surprisingly chill success!

You missed some newsletters? We’ve got more…

Sometimes people tell us: ‘Simon, you already send us about two novels of content every year, via your free newsletter. How can I get inundated with even more information from you?’ (They are often cackling to themselves and rending their hair at this point.)

Well, our first line of defence for those hombres is actually the three eBooks we created for Plus subscribers, which round up all of our useful case studies and research over the last 4+ years in one place. But we found another one! (And it’s gratis.)

Apparently for SEO purposes, the GameDiscoverCo newsletter has ‘sitemap’ pages for each year we’ve been making content. Here’s the page for 2019, for 2020, for 2021, for 2022, for 2023, and for 2024. They show the title of each newsletter released that year.

We’re already finding it handy for looking for old content. Just Googling can be irritatingly imprecise, and early reprints we did on B2B industry sites have stomped on our Google results for older newsletters. (Similar text gets ignored.) So.. FYI!

The game platform & discovery news round-up…

And as we finish off the free newsletter coverage for the week, let’s have a wander through lots of wondrous platform and discovery news, shall we? Avast, avanti:

• Kicking off by looking at Footprints.gg’s latest run-down of ‘traditional media’ coverage, it’s Dragon’s Dogma 2 by a landslide this week - presumably reflecting both a hot launch & then tribulations. Also hot: Rise Of The Ronin, Stardew Valley (due to that new patch), and new Switch launch Princess Peach.

• Polygon’s been talking to Xbox’s Phil Spencer, who’s preaching a broad church again, saying it’d be great to get the likes of Itch.io and Epic Games Store onto Xbox hardware, and pushing back on ‘haters’ who don’t like the abandoning of console exclusives: “Every decision we make is to make Xbox stronger in the long run.”

• There’s a new video from a World Of Warcraft YouTuber which analyzes WoW’s post-2016 subscribers numbers, based on a slide from a GDC talk. Icy Veins has the full run-down, and the pixel-based speculation is that WoW (non-Chinese) subs are back to >7 million, after dipping as low as 4.5 million in 2022.

• Here’s a fascinating case study from Devolver of Cult Of The Lamb using a Twitch extension to help reach. Not always a fan of these if not well-done, but putting people ‘in the game’ led to some hilarious results, and as a commenter noted: “I've streamed using a bunch of Twitch integrations over the years and the Cult of the Lamb extension was one of the best.” (Positive audience interactions ftw!)

• Microlinks: Meta is once again reducing the price of Quest 2, this time bringing the 128GB version of its 2020-era standalone VR headset to just $200; judge rules in PlayStation's favor in $500m patent infringement lawsuit; Xbox Cloud Gaming now has mouse and keyboard support in select games.

• PlayStation stuff: April’s main PlayStation Plus ‘giveaways’ are headed by Immortals of Aveum, Minecraft Legends, and Skul: The Hero Slayer; Community Game Help is a new PS5 OS feature expanding Game Help videos with ones “automatically generated from gameplay footage of players who have opted in.”

• This Bottom Feeder blog on the state of the game biz has a few bangers in it, starting: “Video Game Jobs Are Art Jobs. Plan Accordingly”, and adding:” What is unique and special about your game… that people will pry open their wallets? You need an answer to this question. Your answer, the one that fits the art only you can make.”

• Is Panic’s adorable Playdate handheld actually profitable? According to Panic’s Cabel Sasser, talking at GDC: “Nope… Playdate [hardware alone] actually makes respectable amounts of money. But the challenge we have right now is that there are a lot of people assigned to the project.” (Panic may shift people to help ameliorate this?)

• The folk at Impress.games who do handy indie B2B tools Coverage Bot and Press Kitty have announced an enhanced version of the Press Kitty press kit maker for paying users, including unlimited languages, custom domain support & more.

• Microlinks: Deloitte’s 2024 Digital Media Trends report includes a section on what women gamers want; a great video on why ‘making a game is like running a search algorithm’; here’s a long, weird article about ‘the competitiveness of UGC platforms’.

Finally, we know we’ve linked eli_handle_b․wav’s YouTube videos in the newsletter before. But we couldn’t resist with his latest, transporting Police Squad’s Frank Drebin into the world of.. Resident Evil 4?! That signature title sequence? *chef’s kiss*

[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, developers, funds, and other smart game industry folks.]