Which games hit big in Steam's June 2024 Next Fest?

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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.]

We’re definitely, absolutely back in your inboxes, ahead of another exciting week in ‘we try to work out which video games are actually popular and then tell you about it’- land? (That’s why the PC/console game space is so fascinating right now.)

And look, besides the already-established mega-games, we don’t always know where the next hit is coming from. But GameDiscoverCo’s promise: we’ll add it to our giant card binder and show it to you, as the hunters and collectors we clearly are…

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June’s Next Fest: which games performed best?

We imagine that you’re aware that Steam’s Next Fest demo showcase is just ending, having started last Monday, June 10th. We’ve been covering the top games in Next Fests for a while now. (Previous articles: Feb.24, Oct.23, Jun.23, Feb.23.)

This was a giaaant festival - with around 1,800 demos (!), depending on how you count things. And as Steam puts up its official ‘Top 50 most-played games by unique players’ page, we have our giant database of the top/all Next Fest demos(Google doc).

There’s a lot to get through here. But by almost all metrics, multiplayer open-world survival game Once Human (above), from NetEase’s Starry Studio, was the biggest title of the festival, adding 14,200 followers & peaking at 19,500 concurrents on Steam.

This post-apocalyptic F2P treat - which is on both mobile and PC - seems to have a LOT of Chinese interest, and has 14.5 million global mobile pre-registrations. But frankly, it’s unclear what Western audiences will think of it on Steam, especially if it has aggressive monetization. (Most of its Western Next Fest streams are sponsored.)

It’s fascinating to see more of these large-scale PC/mobile crossovers reach for the stars. Though it’s unclear if more of them - like the Tencent and Will Smith-backed Undawn - will end up in the gutter. (It’s super difficult to win over both the West and Asia and PC and mobile, all at once!)

So here’s the top 10 games of Next Fest by new Steam followers (people who clicked a button to follow the page’s news!) over the last week. BTW, ‘followers x 12’ is very roughly the number of wishlists these games added, but ‘followers x15-20’ is more common during big promotions like Next Fest. Some general trends:

• Grim-looking ‘survival-adjacent’ 3D games did good: you may not be surprised, but besides Once Human, ‘co-op tactical survival horror shooter’ The Forever Winter(+6,700 followers), fascinating clone-based sci-fi colony manager The Alters(+5,700) and co-op horror shooter Level Zero: Extraction(+4,900) all performed well.

• Cozy-ish titles (with a twist!) also charted: the two we most obviously spotted are Aloft(+3,800 followers), which is the cozy survival game (!) set on skyship islands, and ‘small relaxing game about doodling castles’ Tiny Glade (+3,500), which has just hit 1 million Steam wishlists.

• There’s still room for pixel art games: we’ve discussed how a lot of top titles are 3D and look AAA-adjacent. But roguelite turn-based pixel RPG Metal Slug Tactics(+3,100 followers) made the Top 10, partly on the strength of its license and execution.

There’s also well-executed top-down titles like the awesomely hook-y - well-explained in the game’s name - Tactical Breach Wizards(+4,300 followers) and the nifty co-op ARPG Wizard Of Legend 2 (+3,000). These are such a tiny fraction of the great games, too! (How many of these were on your radar before the Fest, btw?)

Next, GDCo buddy Michael Chan again generated us a graph of the Top 5 Steam tags across the Top 10 Next Fest games (this time by Top Followers):

Another view we captured in our giant document is highest demo CCU (concurrent Steam users). You’ll see a lot of the same games - but some variance, especially due to various Asian/Chinese online games (one called, uh, Chinese Online Game):

There’s a few Western games with long playtimes or online play scattered in here, though, particularly silly ‘DayZ but you’re a duck’ shooter Duckside (2,600 max CCU) and open-world driving game Test Drive Unlimited: Solar Crown (2,600 CCU)

We have one additional data set to cross-reference here: Valve's official list of the Top 10 demos (by unique players): #1: Once Human, #2: Level Zero: Extraction, #3: Chinese Online Game, #4: Test Drive Unlimited Solar Crown, #5: Tiny Glade, #6: Wizard of Legend 2, #7: Duckside, #8: Metal Slug Tactics, #9: The Alters and #10: Lost Castle 2.

A final, interesting thing - we had to remove a game - Bio Prototype 2 - from the ‘top CCU’ list. It had >2,000 concurrent demo players, which is great. Until you look at its demo CCU graph on SteamDB:

Unless 2,000 people all started playing this game at the exact same time (lol!), somebody was using bots to inflate CCU and interest levels on this title. Which is likely why Valve just banned a whole bunch of publisher BD Games’ titles. Whoops.

So - well, that’s a starting point for top Next Fest titles. There’s so many great games in the Top 50-100, but not the Top 20, so we recommend you perusing the giant GDCo-compiled list to further understand trends & the competition. Which is fierce.

‘Not-E3’ showcases: the top wishlist winners…

You thought we were done with giant lists of stuff? Heck, no! We were chatting to Summer Game Fest’s own Geoff Keighley about this data (above), so thought we would share with all as a Google doc.

It’s the Top 100 estimates of ‘most Steam wishlists added’ for any game from Fri. June 7th to Thurs. June 13th - so basically, anything in the Summer Game Fest, Xbox Showcase, Day of The Devs, IGN Live (and late Sony ‘State Of Play’) timeframe, plus the first half of Next Fest. We’ve tried to label the showcase(s) each game was in.

Obviously, this is only looking at one metric (and we’re extracting it algorithmically from Steam follower & ranking data, so it won’t be perfect.) But it’s still interesting. Here’s what we took away:

• Black Myth Wukong should have a massive launch: you didn’t misread it - we think Game Science’s Chinese mythology ARPG added 850k wishlists in <a week, and now has ~4 million. (60-70% are from China.) It’s out Aug.19th on Steam.

• Multiple Xbox Showcase games made a splash, multi-platform: in some cases, their Steam pages launched for the first time, but Doom: The Dark Ages (+138k wishlists) and Fable (+84k wishlists) both showed they appeal to console & PC owners.

• Summer Game Fest charted with both giant games & tiny indies: the Top 10 titles includes seminal ‘God game’ sequel Civilization VII (+593k wishlists), but also Cuffbust, the latest ‘escape prison with your buddies’ game from the dev of Choo Choo Charles - another high-hook title.

Once again, please peruse the full Top 100 list in your own time, and draw your own conclusions. But it’s heartening to see such a mix of giant and tiny titles being successful in the ‘not-E3’ showcases this year.

The game platform & discovery news round-up…

And we finish up today with various game platform & discovery news, there’s late-breaking confirmation of a Nintendo Direct tomorrow (June 18th!), in which “there will be no mention of the Nintendo Switch successor”, heh. But here’s what else:

• A new Fandom survey (above) suggests: “While stress relief remains the top reason people turn to games, a striking 46% of gamers list creation, imagination, and self-expression as their main motivations… up 10% from last year.” Also: “60% of gamers claim that self-expression through gameplay is more important to them than ever before.”

• Super-interesting to see PlayStation’s May 2024 ‘top game’ charts headed by Rare & Xbox’s Sea Of Thieves - which we estimate has sold ~1 million on PlayStation already. Also notable in there: Stumble Guys doing great in Europe (and decently in the U.S.) in F2P downloads, and MultiVersus going big in the U.S.

• Here’s an honest postmortem of the difficulties of indie game pitching in 2024 when you’re in a high-GDP country (the U.S.!) and may need $3 million to make your game: “Places that used to regularly sign $5mm deals weren’t considering anything north of $1.5 million, and many places were capping out at $500k.”

• May’s UK game hardware & software charts? Sales of Xbox, PlayStation and Nintendo machines in the UK were down 10% over April and 33% over May 2023, and “V Rising was the best-selling game in the UK during May, but it was a poor month overall with game sales down 21% [YoY].” (May 2023 was Zelda:ToTK, tho!)

• In ‘blast from the past’ news, AMD’s CEO Lisa Su used to work at IBM on the infamously tricky to use PS3 Cell chip, and thinks she knows what went wrong - with the rise of cross-platform game engines: “Suddenly, no one wanted to go to the burden of differentiating on the Cell; they just wanted to run on the Cell.”

• New ‘foreign’-created games (with the right local partner!) are getting officially gov-approved in China more often, although still in hilariously tiny quantities: “This batch of 15 licences [including Valorant for mobile] has helped push the year’s total to 61, almost two-thirds of 2023’s 98 overseas approvals.”

• PlayStation 5 is getting a way more complete Discord integration, shortly: “we’re pleased to share that we’re starting to roll out the ability for PS5 players to join Discord voice chat directly from the PS5 console, without relying on the Discord PC or mobile apps to initiate the connection.”

• The folks at Humble are saying goodbye to their ‘Refer A Friend’ scheme - which had discounts for monthly bundle subscriptions - “due to an unmanageable spike in referral abuse over the past several months.” The r/HumbleBundle subReddit has some speculations as to why, but seems like bad actors were exploiting it.

• Good op-ed on why the gradual death of the ‘console exclusive’ makes business sense: “In the future, we should expect to see more games crop up in surprising places. And there is likely to be some tension behind the scenes over what is right for each game.”

• ‘Other media’ microlinks: how kids TV/streaming behemoth CoComelon captures our children’s attention; the curious case of the underselling U.S. music arena tours; looking at fragmentation & ‘the rapid decline of legacy television’in U.S. TV watching.

Finally, as a Video Game History Foundation board member, I was delighted last week when they revealed their latest find: “Instead of the [Nintendo] Game & Watch, the U.S. [initially] got the Mego Time-Out. We recovered the original [1980 TV] commercial.” Whoa:

[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.]