Tactical Breach Wizards: how this tiny team sold >100k in weeks
Publikováno: 17.9.2024
Also: Steam's new bundle ordering & lots of discovery news.
[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 definitely back, and it’s definitely another week of game discovery goodness. If we weren’t here, this newsletter would arrive but just be blank, right? And imaginary newsletters are no fun to read.
Before we get started, we’ve been musing if Circana or GfK are counting the Xbox Series S toaster in their hardware sales numbers every month. (They really should - though it doesn’t actually play games, but does burn an X mark into your toast!)
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Tactical Breach Wizards: 100,000 defenestrating wizards can’t be wrong?
Everyone likes a success story, esp. if it’s a while in the making. The latest example is Suspicious Developments’ Tactical Breach Wizards, which debuted on Aug. 22nd, five+ years after announce & seven years (!) after the devs’ last release, stealth roguelike Heat Signature.
As for what it is, here’s how Splattercat (above) described it: ”Sorta like XCOM meets Door Kickers, where you're breaching locations but using magic spells to throw people out of windows, or take electrical conduits and make arc lightning come out of them… [while] also being an XCOM style ‘cover shooter’ tactical RPG.”
And we can confirm that Tactical Breach Wizards, which topped out at an impressive 4,700 CCU (concurrent users), has already sold 100,000 copies - as of a couple of days ago - according to its creator Tom Francis. That’s not easy to do in today’s market - it’s one of only 12 new Steam games in August that did so, per GDCo Plus data.
So let’s talk about numbers, and what went right to have this whole ‘winning’ state occur for the three-person core team. Some thoughts on why we think it went gud:
Tactical Breach Wizard’s conceptual ‘hook’ - SWAT wizards (!) is just very good: Tom says: “I think the name is 50% of it. When I pitch it in real life, some people are just sold by that alone. We've never had that before. If that doesn't get them, the art might - specifically the character art.”
The game has winning & stylish dialogue & narrative: Tom told us: “I was originally imagining a more proc gen game, but once [artist John Roberts] started sending me concept art of these characters, I had to know who they were and how they got wrapped up in this nonsense.” Steam reviews are very keen on TBW’s “witty and genuinely hilarious” writing, btw.
Turn-based tactics games with a more military focus are under-served: there’s been ‘lighter’ partly turn-based strategy games like Arco that haven’t sold quite so well. But SWAT-adjacent games of various genres - whether it be Door Kickers 2 or Ready Or Not - have been sales standouts. ‘Witty wizard SWAT’ is an excellent twist on that, right?
Next, let’s talk wishlists and sales details, for a second. Firstly, here’s Tactical Breach Wizards’ wishlists from March 2019 (!) until its release day:
Tom tells us: “Tactical Breach Wizards launched with 284,002 wishlists, with a one day conversion rate of 9.6% and a 7-day conversion rate of 16%… before June this year, we had around 108,000 wishlists accumulated over that time.”
But the combination of a popular Next Fest demo (#5 on GDCo’s ranking!) and a trailer in the PC Gaming Show in June 2024 basically “doubled our wishlists to 216,000 in a few weeks.” So expectations were high coming in to launch…
What was also tricky was that Tom’s only first-person comparison point was Heat Signature, which released when there were <20,000 games on Steam, a much less crowded market. And you can see that in the game’s ‘long tail’.
He tells us: “Less than 3 weeks in, Tactical Breach Wizards already doubled what Heat Signature sold in its first month - and that's our previous best launch. The curve is different though: our launch day was almost 3x Heat Signature's, but day 15’s [sales for that day] was more like 1x.”
Why would that be? Tom wondered if the sharper fall-off was related to Tactical Breach Wizards being a game you just finish, since Heat Signature was more expressly built for replayability.
But he concluded: “Actually both games' median play time is very similar… so my best guess is that it's just down to how much busier Steam is these days.” We’d agree - we have clients who also last launched games in the halcyon days of 2017. Their ‘long tail’ expectation was almost 2x what ours was, for a game released in the busy 2024 era.
Tactical Breach Wizards’ sales by country (above) are also worth glancing at - the game is only available in English language, which explains a top-heavy U.S. percentage, and the lack of Asian countries on the list.
For now, Suspicious Developments has chosen not to pursue localization. FWIW, we commented to Tom on that decision: “I'm not sure how much money you are leaving on the table, because Asia is the big place to pick up sales - but the game doesn't seem very culturally Asian-compatible.”
Finally, we did also ask Tom why Breach Wizards took so long to build, relatively (woops!) And he admits: “Partly it's our usual foolishness of always switching genres, perspectives, and structure, so we're forever making something we've never made before.”
But it’s really the iteration cycles on a ‘handcrafted game’ that made things go long, he believes: “You can't just make all the systems, then make all the content…. each new chunk of content you build also needs new enemy types, abilities, and mechanics.”
The game has 4 acts, and mission concepts were built out, then dialogue added after those were roughed out. So it’s not a Survivors-like ‘plug power-ups in and you’re done’ type situation. But this sophistication is a big thing people value about TBW - the team ‘punched above their weight’ in polish. And that’s one reason the game did well…
Steam adds pinned bundles, cross-promo deadline
Last week, GameDiscoverCo explained to everyone that “on your [Steam] game page, it will ‘automatically’ show the 3 currently highest-revenue bundles”, with no opportunity for customization. Well, approximately 48 hours later, Valve added that customization!
This wasn’t our doing! The lack of ability to control the top bundle on Steam pages had obviously been a dev request for some time - it was just funny timing. But let’s go through that change & the other notables from another key SteamWorks announce:
Yes, the new ‘Pinned Bundles’ tool now lets you set bundle order per game: as a reminder, these bundles can include both ‘your game + your DLC’, or ‘your game + other games’, with the other games’ permission. Valve says “you may want to feature a newly-created bundle first to make sure it gets visibility.”
The new ‘no linking’ Steam store page rules now take effect on October 15th: this delayed deadline allows devs more time to make the mandatory changes to your Steam page - no external website linking and cross-linking, outside of Valve-controlled areas of the page like footers and sidebars.
Extra sidebar link options for external social media: in addition to the existing options for YouTube, Discord, X, Twitch, and Facebook, Valve looked at who was using other links in current pages & added: QQ, VK (VKontakte), Bilibili, Weibo, Reddit, Instagram, Tumblr, Baidu Tieba, Tiktok, Telegram & LinkedIn (!)
In addition, you can also enable a special, larger view of the ‘More From’ footer, which will “take up the space of two items and display more information about the game along with action buttons for adding to cart and/or wishlist.” Definitely consider this.
This is quite a laundry list of incremental improvements, showing that a) Valve has its eye on the ball right now b) all of us need to keep our eye on the ball, so we don’t miss any changes that may help discovery for our Steam games. (Look sharp, y’all.)
The game platform & discovery news round-up…
Finishing things up for this fine newsletter instalment, let’s take a look at the top game platform & discovery news so far this week, according to - well, us:
The state of mobile game user acquisition in 2024? The ‘misleading UA flywheel’ pic is from GameMakers’ analysis of Last War: Survival Game, which did >$100m in IAP in August. Using casual gameplay to get cheap CPI (cost per install) & feed a ‘secretly’ deep game with big $ LTV (lifetime value) is getting common. (Wow.)
Some great reporting on the state of Twitch from Nathan at Aftermath: “Twitch has been battling the same core affliction for quite some time.. [it] isn’t profitable… Amazon likes its individual businesses to be "sustainable, viable” ventures… which has left Twitch and Amazon at an impasse. Something has to give, and little by little, it has.”
In ‘games as platforms’ news, The Sims 4 is basically becoming the ‘one and only Sims’ going forward, with no direct sequels planned*, according to EA. EA’s also starting up paid - carefully curated - UGC in November under the name ‘The Sims 4 Creator Kits’. (*But maybe some ‘universe expansions’, whatever that means.)
Of relevance to PS5 Pro, some more PS4 Pro data - Serkan Toto spotted that Sony revealed the PS4 Pro sales “are about 20% of PS4 sales” - looks like that’s since its launch in 2016, and not lifetime. In the U.S., per Circana, “PS4 Pro accounted for 13% of total lifetime PS4 units, and about 15% of dollars.” (Which lines up.)
‘Horror x farming’ first-person title We Harvest Shadows is still piling on the interest in Steam wishlists - 129k now in <a month - thanks to big influencers playing the demo, but David Wehle adds: “Discovery Queue is amazing! About 20% of my daily traffic is from DQ” - likely triggered by streamer traffic.
Xbox’s Game Pass continues to push more aggressively into the PC space, grabbing Frostpunk 2 for a ‘Day 1’ PC Game Pass debut this week, as well as the Xbox Game Studios-published grand strategy game Ara: History Untold (which is debuting solely on PC!) Multi-platform expansion, indeed…
What happens when you get AI to watch your Steam trailer? We’re not pro-AI, but we’re pro ‘using AI to get interesting metadata’, which is what Ichiro Lambe is trying here: “We can automate a ‘trailer map’, pinpointing exact moments of key features.”
Xbox is bringing back friend requests as part of an overhaul: “Xbox hasn't had friend requests since 2013… but Xbox will [re-]introduce a more traditional ‘two-way, invite-approved’ friend request system that Microsoft says will give users ‘more control and flexibility’”, alongside a modified version of the existing ‘follower’ system.
Just making sure that everyone spotted that the Steam Families feature is fully rolled out, allowing “a single location to manage which games your family can access and when they can play.” (And adults need to “wait 1 year from when they joined the previous family to create or join a new family”, helping to curtail ‘lite piracy’.)
Microlinks: Meta has leaked an image of the supposed Quest 3S via an update to its PC software; Epic’s Fab content marketplace (superceding its other marketplaces!) launches in mid-October; Australia is putting all gambling & random loot boxes under M or R18+ ratings, leading Roblox to make AU changes.
Finally, in a landmark deal (!), Genshin Impact & McDonald’s are teaming up in the U.S. for a Happy Meal, but “instead of toys, this campaign will give players in-game currency and cosmetic items”, including an in-game apple pastry recipe. Gacha yum?
[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.]