Which countries played PC and console games... recently?

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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.]

Happy midweek, folks, and welcome to what can only be described as ‘a bar-chart heavy newsletter’. If you have a fear of tall, adjacent rectangles - or xenographphobia in general - we recommend you stand down and listen to some relaxing music instead.

But if you’re good to go, let’s take a look at a whole heap of data that pertains to how people discover and consume PC and console video games in ‘the year of our Gabe, Phil, Shuntaro & still Jim’ (anno GPSJ?) that is 2024. Hit it, charts…

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Which countries played PC & console games recently?

Earlier this year, GameDiscoverCo published some research with data partner GamingAnalytics.info on ‘all-time countries by % for PlayStation, Steam & Xbox players’. We looked at public player profiles & review countries to work this out.

One thing that we - and others - asked afterwards was: how representative were these numbers about who is playing PC and console games now? After all, some of these Steam players could have played Counter-Strike, once, 14 years ago.

So to paraphrase Janet Jackson (above), we took another stab at this data, with a ‘what have you done for me lately?’ lens on it, and examined country splits - at least for Steam and PlayStation - solely for ‘people who played a game in the last two weeks’.

Starting off with Steam, this creates a different view of players by country - with one major caveat that we’ll discuss shortly:

The first difference you’ll spot here is that Chinese players on Steam were 21% of those publicly playing Steam games in the 2 weeks prior to this survey, the biggest country, and up 71% (!) from 12.3%* in the ‘all Steam players’ sample.

The caveat: we surveyed just after Palworld hit big, and we know it has a lot of Chinese players, so that may have additionally inflated Chinese presence on Steam. Nonetheless, ‘the rise of gray-market Steam players in China’ is absolutely a big trend in recent years.

Otherwise, the U.S. percentage stayed very static at around 13.4%, and the other medium-sized ‘movers and shakers’ were Germany (up 28% to 4.6% in ‘recent players’), Poland (up 28% to 3.2%), and the Czech Republic (up 37% to 0.9%).

So, from what we can see - and reminder, newly created Steam player profiles are defaulted to private after 2018, so we may be missing some newer trends - Steam continues to be super-strong in China, North America, and Europe in general, as well as Turkey, Brazil, and so on. (It’s a truly global platform, as these stats remind us.)

[*One important persnickety note: when we did the charts the first time, we calculated the percentages as ‘% of the Top 20 countries’. But we didn’t think it truly representative, so we switched this version back to ‘% of all countries’, and used that same view for comparisons.]

As for PlayStation, we’re seeing very similar countries atop the ‘played in last two weeks’ chart compared to the ‘all time’ version, with the U.S. (31.7% of recent players) barely budging from its previous percentage.

Also remember that, if you compare ‘number of PlayStations per capita’ using this view, France and the UK (also fairly static at 5-6% of the total) have way smaller populations - so are only about 20% less ‘PlayStation dense’ than the U.S.

Self-reported countries surging in this ‘recent players only’ view? Brazil - (up 41% to 5.3% overall) is a notable one, as is Hong Kong (up 64% to 3.6% - these are likely the ‘gray market’ consoles imported from Japan into China, btw), and Turkey (up 115% to 2.52% - hope these are legit and aren’t ‘country tourists’ looking for cheap deals?)

Oh, and Japan is actually down 39% to 2.4%. But this is more reflecting the surge in international business for PlayStation than an absolute decline in Japan, necessarily. (Or more players in gray markets using ‘Hong Kong’ rather than Japan as a region, etc.)

Otherwise, with the Middle East being an important and still-emerging region for PlayStation, it’s impressive to see 5.4% of recent players (between Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates) identifying as from there. (As with Hong Kong & China, people playing in nearby countries may stick with the ‘Saudi Arabia’ region.)

Finally, we can’t easily acquire this data for Nintendo Switch (aw!) And we decided not to re-do numbers for Xbox, which are based on reviews by country rather than profiles. But we’re pretty sure ‘recent’ would be similar to ‘all’, with Game Pass-heavy locales like the U.S., the UK, Brazil, France, Germany and Mexico leading things…

What were the most-streamed games in January?

Our work continues with livestream analytics platform Stream Hatchet - which grabs data from lots of game streaming platforms: “Twitch, YouTube Live Gaming, Facebook Live, AfreecaTV, Kick, Steam, NaverTV, Trovo, Rooter, Nonolive, Openrec, Loco, Mildom, DLive, VK, KakaoTV, Garena LIVE, Booyah.”

The Stream Hatchet folks wrote about the Top 20 most-streamed games of Jan.2024, and again gave us a much bigger list of the Top 100 games(Google Drive doc), which we’ve annotated. Here’s what we think is interesting:

• Palworld invades the Top 10 - but look at Escape From Tarkov go: two notable movers and shakers here. You know Palworld, which hit an impressive 79 million hours (#5) watched in Jan, but extraction shooter Escape From Tarkov jumped from 13th to 3rd (87.3m hours) due to a ‘server wipe’, which often boosts viewers.

• Enshrouded’s launch was much-helped by streamers: we know that Keen Games’ co-op survival title Enshrouded sold 1 million copies in just four days after its January 24th Steam launch, and 14.7 million hours watched (#25) is clearly one of the reasons why.

• Other big January debuts? Tekken 8, Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth: you won’t be surprised if you read our Friday Plus newsletters, but storied fighting game sequel Tekken 8 (#35, 9.9m hours) and ‘you knock a guy out of a coconut tree and fight him’ action RPG Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth (#45, 5.7m hours) also made a good impression on the charts. Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown (#68) and Poppy Playtime (#69 due to Episode 3’s launch) also charted in their debut month.

It’s also fascinating for us to see the games that turn up in the Top 10 over and over again. Think about the amount of ‘free’ advertising Grand Theft Auto V gets from having a deep, complex GTA Online world & a resultant 223 million watched hours (#1) during January 2024? That’s some serious depth of interest…

What these charts show less well are the Chinese game streaming platforms. But per a Niko Partners data point from its China streaming tracker, Palworld was in the Top 5 there recently too, only behind ‘massive in China’ games like League Of Legends, Honkai: Star Rail, Genshin Impact and Honor Of Kings. So there ya go…

The game discovery & platform news round-up…

Finishing off, let’s take a look at some of the top game platform and discovery news of the week, as follows:

• Above, you can see this week’s top ‘trad media’ mentions via Footprints.gg, headed by the inevitable Palworld, JRPG remaster Persona 3 Reload, the ‘actually has Very Positive Steam reviews’ Suicide Squad, and Death Stranding 2: Under The Sea. (Can’t wait to see who plays Ursula!)

• Nintendo’s latest quarterly results saw sales and profit up compared to Q1-3 last year, but “Nintendo Switch shipped 6.9m units this quarter, down from 8.22m units last year.” There’s 139.4 million Switches out there now, and Super Mario Bros. Wonder shipped 11.96m units at launch. Still: it’s a first-party powerhouse, stock price is near a high as it hikes Switch forecasts by 500k, and that ‘mysterious new device’ announce still likely to come (but 100% unconfirmed) in 2024.

• A couple of Steam Next Fest tidbits: here’s a fun ‘see all 1,000+ Next Fest demos’ view in an ‘easily scrollable groups of 15 with microtrailers & screenshots’ format; Valve’s January 2024 Next Fest dev Q&A video got posted onto YouTube, with lots of smaller, granular questions answered.

• Roblox’s latest full-year 2023 results are here, and revenue was up 26% to $2.8 billion. with DAUs (daily active users) up 22% to a whopping 68.4 million. Also notable: average monthly unique players up 17% to 14.5 million. They reported a $1.15 billion net loss, but largely due to deferred recognizing of revenue (when Robux are spent!) & are cashflow positive, with net cash up 24% to $458 million.

• As spotted by IndieGameJoe and others: “Steam has updated its iconography to distinguish between games purchased directly on the platform and those activated with a Steam key. Keep an eye out for the new icons - a 'Star' for direct purchases and an 'outline of a Star' for Steam key activations.” (It used to look like this.)

• Microlinks: some good tips on approaching TikTok influencers to feature your game; the 2024 ‘letter from the YouTube CEO’ hypes AI and subscriptions; here’s the Top 500 Twitch-streamed games of 2023 ranked in chart form.

• Do you want to know which games or sales get front-page ‘takeovers’ on Steam? You need to be a ‘big’ game for Steam to permit this. But for context on who gets it historically, check out this SteamDB ‘takeovers’ page, or this continued Twitter/X thread from GameDiscoverCo’s own Alejandro.

• The ESA and Circana are trumpeting $57.2 billion as the total U.S. consumer video game spend in 2023, up a tad from $56.6 billion in 2022, “driven by a 13% increase in digital download spending across console platforms and an 11% increase in digital premium download segments on PC, Cloud and non-console VR platforms.”

• The most-played Steam Deck games of January 2024 - according to Valve, who should know - are headed by Baldur’s Gate 3, Palworld (it’s that game again!), and Elden Ring, with notable lower-charting titles including Dave The Diver and Cult Of The Lamb (post-’sex patch’, lol).

• Microlinks: Game Pass’ new titles so far for February 2024 include Madden NFL 24, Resident Evil 3, PlateUp! and more; what do negative Steam reviews say about Japanese indie games?; Amazon Prime Gaming’s February benefits include the OG Fallout, a ‘chicken dinner’ booster for PUBG (yum!), and Jackbox Party Pack 10 for Amazon Luna.

Finally, you may have seen that Yager and 2K’s 2012 single-player shooter Spec Ops: The Line was delisted from stores, likely because its music licenses expired. This is a shame because it has such a unique, shocking take on war for a video game - and Game Maker’s Toolkit did a great job of explaining why in this YouTube video:

[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.]