What PC game genres have the most 'Hype' in 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.]

Hey, it’s us, we’re here again, our paperclips all ‘minty fresh’ from re-organizing Stationary Village. As always, we want information, and by hook and by crook, we’re going to give it to you.

And we start out this time with one of our signature ‘deep data dives’. It’s into how the top Steam tags for unreleased games have changed in the last 18 months - and how applying different lenses to them gets different results.

[REMINDER: yes, you can support GameDiscoverCo by subscribing to GDCo Plus now. You get full access to a super-detailed Steam data suite for unreleased & released games, weekly PC/console sales newsletters, Discord access, eight game discovery eBooks & lots more.]

What PC game genres have big 'Hype' in 2024?

And on the 7th day, our lord and savior Valve created the Steam tags system - and all was good. (Is what we’d say, if we were dangerously obsessed with the predominant PC video game sales platform.) But look - there’s plenty to like about it.

A brief reminder: developers and publishers can pick from 400+ tags specifically picked by Steam, spanning from ‘very descriptive’ (‘Boomer Shooter’) to ‘wilfully weird’ (‘Transhumanism’). Here’s a good SteamDB page on ‘tags added over time’.

So you have 20 ranked tags for all Steam games, and players can actually vote to add or shift priorities on tags - so you may see your own game’s tags shifting over time. (You can re-adjust them if you want in the Steamworks ‘tag wizard’!)

Anyhow, the base version of our Plus back-end has a pre-release tag ranking page, where we calculate the ‘Hype’ score - the game’s followers, wishlist ranking, Steam forum traffic, etc for all 23,972 unreleased Steam games.

Back in September 2022, we wrote a newsletter looking at how the median genre tag ranking changed over time - and we thought it was time to revisit it! Here’s how the Top 20 genre-related tags have shifted:

Our immediate takeaways from this as as follows:

• As we said previously, the top tags tend to favor complex games that are very PC-centric. (By contrast: 2D platformers are super-easy to make, bringing down the median on volume alone.)

• Many of the top Steam genres a) are obvious b) have retained a high rank - we’re looking at you, Open World Survival Craft, Grand Strategy, City Builder, and Farming Sim.

• Of the notable new entries or climbing games, Extraction Shooter is a new tag that arrived since September 2022. It’s a pretty sparsely populated, complicated to make subgenre, too.

• And looks like Job Simulator is on its way up largely because lots more games are tagging it - only 9 games had it tagged in 2022, compared to 36 now. The rise of Supermarket Simulator must be partly to ‘blame’.

An important note with this data: none of the median Hype scores are numbers you would aspire to. (You’d sell tens of copies in your first week if you made them!) But it at least gives you an idea of the relative crowdedness of certain tags.

Also: when we were working on this, we realized there’s another lens we can easily look at. That’s average Hype score vs. median Hype score.

For context: if there were 5 games, and they had Hype score of 50, 100, 150, 1000, and 5000, the median Hype score would be 150. But the average Hype score would be 1,270 (!) So tags with higher averages vs. median are likely ‘top-heavy’. Indeed, that’s true:

As you can see, this view makes Extraction Shooter the top genre, and some heavyweight genres like MMORPG, MOBA, Looter Shooter and Souls-Like move up the charts majorly. Think of this view as the ‘hot, bigger genre’ view on Steam?

So there’s your bi-annual flavor check into PC game tag fun. Oh, and for those paying attention, the two highest (non-soundtrack-related) Steam tags by median, for tags with >10 games? That’d be Remake (lol) and Warhammer 40k (double lol). So… roll on all those Warhammer 40k remakes, huh?

Steam’s latest controller shifts - and a new device!

Earlier this morning, we spotted that peripheral-maker Hori has announced a Steam-branded controller, including a dedicated Steam button to start Big Picture mode or bring Steam up, gyro support, likely Steam Deck support & more. (Neat!)

And then almost immediately after that, Steam put up a new blog post about controllers which references “work[ing] with HORI's team to make their controller work well with Steam Input”, and also busts out some interesting new stats on controllers:

• There’s more controller use, as the Steam market broadens & more console games come to PC: “Since 2018, daily average controller use has tripled from ~5% up to 15%, and “~42% of these controller sessions are using Steam Input.”

• Xbox controllers (traditionally dominant!) are still big, but other controllers are coming up:“59% of sessions are using Xbox controllers… 26% are using PlayStation controllers… 10% are on Steam Decks.”

• Steam continues to push Steam Input as the best way for devs to set up controller support: “One of the benefits of Steam Input is that when it’s implemented in a game, players can use any one of over 300 supported controllers to play.”

This all makes a lot of sense - and we’re actually wondering if Western peripheral makers shouldn’t be adding dedicated Steam controller devices to their line-ups in the future? (You probably need more complete Steam Input game support for that, tho.)

The game platform & discovery news round-up…

And before wrapping up - and we’ll look at Steam’s new Game Recording feature more next Monday - let’s have a hack at a whole bunch of relevant discovery and platforms news. Which goes a little like this:

• Reminder: Steam’s giant Summer Sale (trailer, above) runs for 2 weeks, from June 27th at 10am PT to July 11th. (Many people opt not to launch new games in that time!) Also mentioned in the trailer: a new ‘Deep Discounts’ section of the sale.

• It’s interesting to see Xbox’s Forza Horizon 4 getting delisted from new purchases as of this December - as VGC notes, it’s “due to the expiry of licensing agreements (most likely mainly related to car brands or in-game music).” Existing owners can still play - but six years is a pretty short lifetime for a game to be on sale, right?

• Mobilegamer.biz followed up on those high-profile premium ‘console to iOS’ ports, estimating that: “under 3,000 people have paid $49.99 to play Assassin’s Creed Mirage on iPhone since it launched on June 6… with gross revenue of $138k to date. The game is only playable on iPhone 15 Pro, iPhone 15 Pro Max and high-end iPads.” (More of ‘Apple paying devs to show off their tech’ than a real biz model, in other words.)

• Tarkov-y VR extraction shooter Ghosts Of Tabor’s community manager Tweeted/X-ed last week that the game had 7,800 CCU on a Thursday night - great numbers for a VR title! (We know that about 300 of those were on Steam, so it does look like the rest - 96% - were on various Meta Quest devices!)

• Some additional Steam Next Fest follow-up, from 40 surveyed games: on average, these games added ~4,000 wishlists during Next Fest, and had 3,900 demo downloads. From those two interations, about 950 players (20% of wishlists, and 20% of demo downloaders!) both played _and_ wishlisted during Next Fest.

• Continuing the post-’not E3’ analysis (we’ll have more Monday!), Footprints.gg has a Twitter thread and an interactive webpage analyzing ‘trad media’ and some streaming mentions by day during the events. (In descending order, most articles were from: Summer Game Fest, Xbox Games Showcase, Nintendo Direct.)

• A new Game Developer Collective survey says that, according to surveyed employees of various game studios, “48 percent of [game studio revenues] fell below projections [in the current quarter], and 40 percent feel they're [at the ‘originally planned’ amount]. Only 13 percent have exceeded their targets.” Hm.

• PlayStation Plus’ July 2024 monthly ‘base’ game giveaways? According to them, it’s “the sci-fi looter shooter carnage of Borderlands 3, on-ice action of NHL 24 and the spaceship-set party game Among Us.” Interesting combo - and there’s a Genshin Impact ‘PS+ wide’ IAP pack with a bunch of in-game currency in it.

• Former PlayStation America boss Shawn Layden has views on the console hardware tussle: “The console war began as a missile race… with each side trying to push the edge of tech… I think we're at the edge of that universe now, we're in the realm of differences that only dogs can hear.” He thinks gameplay trumps graphical fidelity - and we wouldn’t disagree.

• Misc. microlinks: Apple is reportedly halting its next high-end Vision AR headset in favor of something cheaper; how King is using AI to speed up dev on Candy Crush levels; lots of bigger PC titles being given away via Amazon Prime ahead of Prime Day, mainly with Epic Games Store, GOG, or Amazon Games App codes.

Finally, since we’re fascinated with ‘moral panics’ - something video games are often susceptible to - we’re in the middle of reading Kliph Nesteroff’s excellent new book ‘Outrageous: A History Of Showbiz And The Culture Wars’.

It turned us on to the extremely silly 1965 pamphlet ‘Communism, Hypnotism & The Beatles’ [.PDF] by the Rev. David A. Noebel - extracted below. Look, if you think Night Trap was controversial, at least it didn’t ‘make teenagers take off their clothes and riot’?

[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.]