When games don't sell - and what happened next...

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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.]

Back, we are, for more game discovery analysis - and speaking like Yoda, we also are, for some reason. (Does anyone remember the game Star Wars: Yoda Stories, by the way? A procedurally generated adventure, it was ahead of its time (1997) in some ways!)

Anyhow, our lead story today comes from a reader request we had after a recent newsletter. If big successes in games are a ‘lottery win’, shouldn’t we be covering some of the people who didn’t find - or design for - a Golden Ticket? OK, we will do…

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

When games don’t sell… and what happened next!

When we put out the call for ‘quality game, didn’t sell’ titles, Damien Dessagne of French dev Embers reached out about Strayed Lights. This good-looking third-person “atmospheric adventure" debuted in April 2023 - and just hasn’t done that well.

It only has ~190 reviews on Steam, despite being rated Very Positive (84% positive player reviews), and getting positive critical reviews like the Noisy Pixel video above. And total ‘on-Steam’ sales for the game were just under 7,000 units a few weeks back:

The Steam version has 34% U.S. players, 8% France and Germany, 6% UK, and 4% China, Canada, and Spain, by the way. Its median playtime of 1 hour is a little low - tho remember it’s had quite a lot of casual players via Humble Bundle keys.

So clearly, these numbers are a disappointment for Strayed Lights, which is using Re-Koup as an agency to improve the game’s ‘long tail’. So we deeply appreciate Damien being willing to talk publicly about why.

To set the scene, Strayed Lights was aimed at a broader audience including “a casual version of the parry-based combat of Sekiro”, per Damien, and ‘vibe’ inspirations from Journey. So where did the game run into trouble? Some thoughts:

• The devs tried to resist marketing the game as a Souls-like: Damien says: “we knew [Strayed Lights] would not appeal to the hardcore fans of the genre. We wanted players unfamiliar with the genre to experience the thrill of the loop that makes Souls games satisfying, without the massive difficulty that usually comes with it.” But the press - and some players - just ended up lumping it in to the genre anyhow.

• The game realized it had to self-publish late in the process: Damien noted “We spent years searching for a publisher, but as we had funded the game on our own”, they couldn’t find a deal with the right revenue split. So in October 2022, they “had to start everything on our own” for marketing the title, with only 6 months ‘til release.

• Pressure to lean in to Souls-like comparisons drove marketing:“During the pre launch campaign, we noticed that traction was higher when we presented the game as Souls-inspired.” So the team accentuated that, but: “We ended up having a followers base of Souls players, for a non-Souls game. To address that, we added difficulty modes and ‘boss rush’ as quickly as we could after launch.” Difficult to play catch-up here…

• The devs feel that pricing and initial reviews didn’t help: Strayed Lights was $25 when it first came out, and Steam reviews did start off closer to the 70% range. In addition, pre-orders via the game’s website “from the hardcore fans of the game were not counted towards Steam's rating, because it was not considered as a purchase.” The team also had issues with harsh Chinese language review scores - common!

GameDiscoverCo’s view is that pricing and initial reviews % were (relatively) fine. But we think the discovery issue with Strayed Lights is largely genre-related. Souls-likes are paradoxically ‘super difficult, but also mainstream’. Thus, understanding & leaning into the gameplay tropes - as we saw Another Crab’s Treasure do - can pay dividends.

But in trying to broaden to ‘good-looking, medium length 3D action adventure’, you don’t have enough easy game comparison touchpoints for players. So it’s a bit of a ‘dead space’ for today’s market. (Perhaps you could break out by going ‘3D Zelda’-y, like Kena: Bridge Of Spirits did. But even that is tricky and relatively rare.)

So it’s weird - it does seem like being hyper-specific with genres nowadays is better than having ‘a general action adventure game’, commercially - perhaps because a lot of more casual players have F2P GaaS titles like Fortnite to draw their attention?

And that’s where we were going to leave it. But then we discovered that Embers have a new $5 game out today called Murky Divers, and we love the ‘Lethal Company x underwater’ angle. Look, here’s a giant YouTuber playing it with his friends:

In Murky Divers, you have to “dive with a team of up to 4 to the bottom of the ocean. Your mission: Remove all corpses from Pharma Corps' abandoned labs. Erase any evidence of their failed experiments.” (Scary.)

And yes, it has the co-op voice chat & a variety of scary monsters that sneak up on you, Lethal Company style - but a bunch of twists based on the swimming mechanics. And wow, just look at how many videos are being made of it right now.

So we don’t know where Murky Drivers will trend. But it already has 1,700 concurrent players on Steam, less than 2 hours after launching. And Strayed Lights’ all-time peak was just 87 CCU. So that’s certainly quite a contrast already…

And to be clear, the takeaway here isn’t ‘just fast follow a massive game’, so much as ‘understand where big pockets of audience are, and how to reach them’? And a lot of this is down to game design and setting choices which will enable virality. Because it just doesn’t matter how good your game is, if you can’t expand its reach somehow…

Nintendo’s Direct & what it says re: Switch’s future

As we noted on Monday, the latest of the big summer console platform streaming showcases - the Nintendo Direct (above) - just happened. And we recommend reading the post-show press release for a good overview of the reveals.

But we definitely had some takeaways from this Direct, which surprised a number of watchers. In particular, we wanted to highlight the following:

• Nintendo’s many, compact teams allowed for more Switch game debuts than expected: with the Switch’s console sequel (likely!) due out in 2025, a fallow holiday was expected. Instead, we got a new chibi Zelda game actually starring Zelda, an absolutely giant new Mario Party, and a new co-op Mario & Luigi game.

• There’s still plenty of big first-party Nintendo teams left unaccounted for, tho: as Stephen Totilo wrote up ($): “Teams behind some of Nintendo’s biggest franchises are due for new releases. That includes its Animal Crossing team (last game in the franchise, New Horizons came out in 2020) and Mario Kart group (last game in the franchise, MK Tour, was released in 2019).”

• Third-party releases are looking (selectively!) pretty strong: we know the Switch is technically underpowered, and tastes lean towards cozy and ‘Nintendo-like’ games on a crowded eShop. But some third-party titles still sell - and games like (former Apple Arcade exclusive) Hello Kitty Island Adventure & (big hit elsewhere!) Stray, plus Sony’s (!) Lego Horizon Adventures are all well-positioned.

So - we’re not expecting this to radically change Switch sales trends. The ‘chibi’ Zelda Switch Lite hardware bundle isn’t going to do the same numbers that the Switch x Tears Of The Kingdom bundle did in 2023. But all of these newly revealed titles will likely be playable (backwards compatibility!) on the ‘Switch 2’, bolstering its start.

And we’re very interested in the finally confirmed Metroid Prime 4 - which is a more graphically intense title, and is due out in 2025. Will there be a graphically enhanced version for the next Switch? The Magic 8-Ball - if not Nintendo - says yes…

The game platform & discovery news round-up…

And as we draw a curtain over our free coverage for the week (paid Plus subs, strap in for a Friday newsletter!), let’s take a look at the game platform & discovery news of interest:

• Entrepreneur and metaverse aficionado Matthew Ball has a big X/Twitter thread on ‘the state of games’: “For years, publishers have been investing to grow their pipelines: more incubations, more greenlights, bigger live services expansions.. after years of revenue stagnation/decline, cost increases, and flops, they are now re-evaluating their forecasts.”

• Anecdotal comments on ‘wishlists gained during Steam Next Fest’ are in the replies to this ‘people were disappointed’ Tweet. But Chris Z is grabbing everyone’s results via a survey (fill it out!), made easier due to Steamworks’ new ‘event recap’ summary (above).

• Here’s another editorial about the lack of moderation on Switch eShop: “If you have ever checked the sales page on your Switch… there is a chance you will have seen AAA Clock in there… the developer RedDeer.Games has released 39 versions of that single product, with each version being the same base game, but now released in a bundle.”

• Starfield recently added paid community (& official) game mods - sometimes controversial - and Kotaku wrote up the aftermath - some Steam review bombing. Bethesda’s Todd Howard is defending the idea, though: “It’s part of our job to make sure [modders] get paid and they see the monetary rewards if they make awesome content.”

• Microlinks: EA Sports FC & My Time At Sandrock are coming to Game Pass this month; trying to track the costs of PC/console AAA marketing in 2023; VR megahit Gorilla Tag just hit $100 million in revenue and 10 million LTD users.

• Here’s a provocative take on Netflix’s game strategy so far: “Apple Arcade got its shake-up 3 years in. It leaned out and got bundled with Apple One because it focused on quantity over quality while misunderstanding what drives real engagement in games. Netflix Games is now… facing a shake-up due to the same fundamental reasons.”

• A small correction to Monday’s Steam Next Fest postmortem: co-op tactical survival horror shooterThe Forever Winter did add 6,700 followers during Next Fest, but it never actually published a demo (despite being tickboxed for it in the Steam back end somewhere), so we removed it from our NF-specific Top 10 list.

• The top ‘trad media’ mentions from summer showcases, per Footprints.gg? “Summer Game Fest is first with 6,659 articles… Xbox Games Showcase is second with 4,318 articles… Nintendo Direct is third with 2,421 articles.” (But Nintendo had less time to accrue mentions than the others.)

• As Sony releases an update for its quirky PlayStation Portal remote-play handheld, it reveals the most-played games in the 3 months since launch: “Single player adventures including God of War Ragnarök, Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 and Astro’s Playroom to multiplayer titles including Fortnite, Rocket League and EA Sports FC 24.”

• Microlinks, Pt.2: Fortnite and the Epic Games Store are apparently ‘coming to iOS in Japan next year’; Xbox chief marketing officer Jerret West is leaving Microsoft to join Roblox as its new CMO and head of market expansion; how I Am Your Beast did super-well with a reveal/demo ahead of Next Fest.

Finally, the VTubers (virtual YouTubers!) at hololive may be the highest-profile virtual influencers, and they often play video games on stream. But we weren’t expecting a real-world baseball game collab with the LA Dodgers: “Gawr Gura will add to the fun during the seventh inning [on July 5th.] That’s when the self-described “shark-girl idol”… will regale Dodger fans with a rendition of the diamond classic “Take Me Out To The Ballgame”.

[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.]