The rise of console wishlists & their one big problem

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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.]

As we motor effortlessly into Friday, it’s a ‘work holiday’ long weekend (eggs & Jesus?) in Europe. But less so here in the U.S., so you get a newsletter anyhow. Which is good, because we have a lot to talk about…

Before we start, we gotta spill: yes, comedian John Mulaney is portraying EA Sports* founder Trip Hawkins in David O Russell’s upcoming movie about American football great John Madden. If you look at the multi-decade history of Madden’s game genesis (on Genesis, lol), this makes much sense. (*And founder of EA, don’t email us, Trip!)

News: Xbox Cloud Gaming gets platform diverse...

So let’s get going with some platform and discovery news, shall we? And we can start out with some new platform data & stats from Microsoft:

• They’ve posted all of Xbox’s talks from GDC 2025 on YouTube, and John Welfare spotted this graph of Cloud Game Pass gameplay by hours in Dec, from this Xbox Cloud Gaming talk. (Bonus stat: Oct-Dec. 2024 had 140m hours of gameplay streamed via Xbox Cloud, which Fortnite is still 100% free on, lest we forget.)

• Nintendo’s just confirmed the same U.S. pricing - $450 for the basic bundle, $500 including Mario Kart World for Switch 2, despite those pesky ‘up and down’ tariffs, as well as a new April 24th pre-order date, ahead of a June 5th launch. (Bryant Francis spots that the dock, controllers and camera are going up $5-$10, though.)

• The inaugural Galaxies streaming showcase - hosted mainly on Twitch and from an ex-Twitch staffer - had a robust set of 40+ trailers, inc. Remedy’s FBC Firebreak, though it skewed ‘new trailers for existing games’-heavy. (Here’s the full showcase on IGN’s YouTube, if you want to poke around..)

• Netflix’s latest earnings calls pronouncements on games? Per MobileGamer.biz, it’s “still early in its ‘multiyear iterative journey’… Squid Game Unleashed and Black Mirror: Thronglets were high points… it is ‘going after’ more mainstream titles like GTA… party games are further out, but still incoming.”

• Meta is really keen to juice interest in Horizon Worlds, alongside its $50m Creator Fund, hence expanding genAI tools for making Horizon Worlds levels, which they claim “dramatically reduce development time from weeks to as little as hours.” (Roblox is also hot on using AI for UGC and third-party levels.)

• If you make a hit game on one platform, expect it to be cloned - fast - on others. Prime example: Max Power Gaming wrote about E.R.P.O. on Roblox, a big ripoff of Steam co-op horror hit R.E.P.O. Looks like it got banned off Roblox since the article, but there’s straight-out ripoffs trending on Android, too. Sigh.

• A Minecraft Movie’s success spawned Xbox exec interviews - Minecraft boss Ryan Cooper explains the future is “about continuing to empower creators to express themselves”, both UGC & influencer-wise. And Phil Spencer says: “I’m very proud of the fact that the games industry is now being seen as a place where really deep stories and characters are told” (jk on that Chicken Jockey link, but the movie has great vibes.)

• The European Commission’s Ursula von der Leyen is talking digital platforms & possible EU tariffs on the U.S., noting that “a few US firms” control 80% of digital services, and “whether we are trading in industrial goods or digital goods, we are entitled to present all aspects of the situation.” (Tariffs on digital advertising are more likely than game platform-based ones - but we should keep an eye on this.)

• Tom Warren’s latest Microsoft-themed ‘Notepad’ newsletter from The Verge - normally part of their paid sub, which you should def. sign up for - looks at Xbox’s upcoming AI-powered Copilot for Gaming experience. (The MS employee-specific version they’ve seen from includes getting game recommendations, installing games & tips for completing games.)

• One sign that China appreciates access to a worldwide game market? Per Josh Ye: “President Xi Jinping has praised the success stories of ‘literary works, online games, online TV shows’ going global in his latest…. article titled ‘Accelerate the building of a culturally strong nation.” (Perhaps Black Myth: Wukong’s international success - which could be considered a ‘culture war’ win - is on his mind.)

• Microlinks: PlayStation Plus prices in Canada are increasing again - by CAD $15-$35 per year; coming to Xbox Game Pass in April is Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, Towerborne, CoD: Modern Warfare II & more; Nintendo shared images of the Switch 2 Online app/library for playing emulated title. (It’s looking slicker.)

The rise of console wishlists, and one big problem..

So - while doomscrolling LinkedIn, we discovered Joe Henson from Hypercharge: Unboxed revealing: “In just 2 weeks and 4 days since we announced that our action figure game is coming to PlayStation, well over 50,000 players have added it to their wishlist.”

What an impressively swift console wishlist figure. And this is from a five-person self-published game that also did great when launched on Xbox, as GDCo profiled in June 2024. (It had sold 80k Xbox units in a 2 weeks, and has likely sold a lot more since.)

But we thought we’d look around both PlayStation’s website and the PlayStation Store itself for how ‘PlayStation games available to wishlist’ are displayed - here’s a URL, if you don’t have a PS5 handy to look at. And we realized something horrid: Hypercharge: Unboxed gets zero extra PSN store visibility for those 50k PlayStation wishlists.

Below is the current view on the PlayStation console for unreleased ‘games to wishlist’, and it appears to be sorted simply by these three sequential choices:

• alphabetically by game pages added to PSN this week? (2 or 3 titles)

• alphabetically by game pages added to PSN in the last month? (20+ games)

• alphabetically by all other PSN game pages for unreleased games (660 more games!)

And we gotta be honest - many unreleased PSN titles have big ‘low effort AI-cover slop’ vibes. So it’s additionally sucky that unreleased games that are higher-effort and genuinely wanted - per wishlists - are sorted identically to generic/suspect ones.

While a lot of the PlayStation storefront’s key front-page game visibility is ‘pay for play’, due to Sony’s historic business choices (hmm!), some other of its algorithms are just fine. The ‘new games’ feed? It looks to be sorted by recent games, but also looking at sales & revenue, yay.

And if newly released creepy toy parkour game Finding Frankie is getting interest in ‘New Games’ because it’s very Poppy Playtime-y, we’re fine with it, since it’s clearly a good game too, with 4.76/5 in user ratings - it’s been well reviewed on Steam, as well.

But we’re looking at the lack of visibility enhancement for unreleased, highly wishlisted games. And asking: why is co-op hit Bread & Fred’s PlayStation iteration (which likely has interest) located on the wishlist screen next to Croissant SAS’s Bodycamera: Outbreak, an apparent ‘Bodycam x zombies’ clone? (Why? It’s alphabetical.)

Croissant SAS are also the devs who brought you A Game About Digging A Hole clone A Prison Digging Game (1.84/5 rating) and Supermarket Manager Simulator, aka Grocery Manager Simulator - with a terribad 1.54/5 rating, but 1k ratings! (BTW, both of these titles are PSN-only, a key indicator they’re made mainly to hoover up confused players. IGN already wrote a great piece on console ‘slop game’ issues.)

Let’s not overegg this, though - most people aren’t finding games like Supermarket Manager Simulator via the ‘wishlistable game’ menu. They’re finding it via searching for keywords for popular games that didn’t hit PS5 yet (Supermarket Simulator!), something that store visibility changes won’t ‘fix’.

So perhaps the fear from PlayStation is that, if they start featuring highly wishlisted games on PSN, some of these ‘slop’-ish titles will also appear on the list. Well, maybe. But I think it’d be better than what we have now, given that high-effort, desired games get no visibility boost from pre-release wishlist interest. Let’s just expose the games people seem to want, change the name of anything being actively deceptive, and then let user reviews sort it out later….

Sure: console stores like PSN are fans of pre-orders (something Steam doesn’t really love!), so you do get things like this screen featuring the top pre-ordered PS5 games releasing in the next 30 days. Perhaps Sony sees pre-order $ as a more reliable metric than wishlists? That tends to skew heavily towards AAA titles that do ‘em, though…

Concluding, we wanted to point out that one of the reason that Steam is such a dynamic game platform is that it has a ‘top wishlists’ section for unreleased games, and it shows games more in its Discovery Queue when they have been heavily wishlisted. Valve also uses wishlists to gauge how much editorial support to give you.

And elsewhere on consoles, we suspect Switch 2, which is playing up the Wish List function on the eShop, will also mainly use wishlists as a bookmarking feature. That is fine, but the reason wishlists are powerful and interesting on Steam is not just the bookmarking feature, but also to change what you see on the store…

Steam debuts: hey there RuneScape: Dragonwilds!

Finishing off for the week, here’s some analysis of the top Steam debuts of the week for our GameDiscoverCo Plus and Pro subscribers - which is headed by the ‘stealth drop’ launch of a game that was already trending in our ‘unreleased Steam game’ charts…

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