Why Moonlighter's dev pivoted genres for its new discovery challenge!

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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 have returned, the prodigal newsletter - ever dodging and weaving through the field of combatants in the ‘did somebody notice your game?’, uhh, game. And this time, we have a neat case study from Digital Sun on its smart genre shift…

Oh, and a shout-out to the Video Game History Foundation, which I (Simon) am on the board of, and which is rolling out its Winter Fundraiser with company sponsors (inc. GameDiscoverCo!), individual donations, and daily reveals of newly archived content via email, social media, starting Dec. 1st. (Get on board!)

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

Cataclismo - how Digital Sun Kickstarted a change

In as much as you’re aware of Spanish indie dev Digital Sun, it might be because of its hit pixel-art 2D roguelite ARPG Moonlighter, which had sold >1 million copies from 2018-2020 - and doubtless lots more thanks to console ports, DLCs & discounts.

After working with 11bit as its publisher on Moonlighter - and Riot Forge on The Mageseeker: A League Of Legends Story, which released back in April, the Digital Sun team opted (after originally signing to a publisher) to self-publish Cataclismo, its upcoming PC RTS (real-time strategy) game, and its first 3D title.

We thought this was interesting for multiple reasons - the move to a more PC-centric genre, the fact that it already hit >60k Steam wishlists since its announcement in May 2023, and the fact that the team just completed a successful 68k Euro Kickstarter for Cataclismo.

So we talked to Digital Sun’s Albert Millán and team for more insight. Firstly, here’s the Steam wishlist daily graph to-date for the title:

Some brief notes on this:

• Cataclismo, which evokes hit games like Castle Story & They Are Billions, picked up some really nice streamer interest via its June 2023 Steam Next Fest demo, especially from Wanderbots. (Demo available so soon after announcing = smart!)

• The October 2023 Kickstarter launch was another great ‘marketing beat’, and came with a very positive PC Gamer article (“a wonderfully clever new RTS… the brilliant part is that you build your defences piece by piece, in a manner inspired by Lego”), and positive comments from RockPaperShotgun, two media outlets that do make a wishlist difference.

• The ‘resting’ organic Steam wishlist rate on the game is in the ‘very good, but not overwhelmingly big’ area (looks like 100-200 per day to us, likely fueled by YouTube video runoff & Steam algo?) But given the state of the market, we’ll take it…

Oh, and the devs say the regional wishlist breakdown for this game (which has 11 supported languages on its Steam page) is led by the U.S. (22.4%), China (12.7%), Russian Federation (5.6%), Germany (5.4%) and Spain (5.0%) - then the UK (3.9%), Canada (3.5%), South Korea (3.2%) and Brazil (3.1%) - very international.

Albert and team also answered a lot of questions from us, which we’ll try (and fail!) to sum up competently in three paragraphs:

• The pivot to a 3D strategy game was about targeting today’s PC audience: many of Digital Sun’s employees are strategy game lovers, Albert pointed out that “the complexity and depth of such kinds of games” make it tricky for tiny studios to directly compete. If you’re able to make “deep strategy games that involve complex decision making” at a medium-level budget, that’s… a competitive advantage! (Also with lots of player agency in building modular castles? It’s a hot area…)

• Cataclismo’s Kickstarter was as much for ‘marketing beat’ & fans as the $: as Albert notes, a Kickstarter is another cool announcement that can leverage community & bring in new players. “Around 80% of backers” had played Digital Sun games before, though with 1,500 backers & €68.5k raised, only 30% over the €50k goal, with more hoped for, the result was “a bit underwhelming”. Still - it was a win!

• Digital Sun still believes Next Fest is the best place to showcase demos: we’ve heard people (including ourselves!) suggest that Steam Next Fest is too crowded. But Albert & co still believe “the likelihood of getting your game covered increases during the Next Fest”, and found it key to discovery. (They also did an updated demo with extra content for Strategy Fest, and found that streamers mainly played the OG demo content anyhow. Maybe updated demo content matters less?)

So that’s where we’re at on Cataclismo. It’s an interesting project - a little unexpected, given the previous titles by Digital Sun. But it’s an excellent example of how medium-sized devs can pivot to attract ‘core’ Steam players who want sandbox & strategy in their game, amidst a flood of tiny-dev 2D action or roguelite titles. Good luck!

What do (these) indie devs think of 2023 so far?

We at GameDiscoverCo haven’t had a chance to do a sentiment survey of PC/console devs recently, given 2023 is ‘not a great time’ in the game biz. But we’re happy to note that French indie game marketer Tavrox has, albeit surveying just 60-ish people.

Please read the whole thing, but we wanted to reprint the top-line takeaways and drill down on a couple of graphs. The overview? Tavrox says:

• Indies are in an okay-ish situation and feel confident it will get better in around 12 months to 2 years.

• For respondents in a position to hire, 70% of the hiring has been frozen.

• 70% of people think getting funding will be harder for their next projects.

• Respondents feel contract work is very hard to find.

This seems to reflect our impression of microstudios’ fortunes fairly well. (There is even more pain for larger studios who are releasing games with multi-million dollar budgets into a crowded market and looking for follow-on $, we suspect.)

Finishing off by reprinting a couple of specific graphs. Firstly, yes, 60% of people think there are definitely too many games coming out right now. And just 15.5% think it’ll be easy to find funding for new projects:

And below was the other chart we found fascinating. It’s an almost exact split between people who are adapting their studio or game scope (43.6%) due to market worries, compared to those who are not (41.8%) - with a modicum of ‘maybes’ in there:

Sure, these type of surveys are a bit of a blunt instrument. But it’s great to see one with such obviously honest responses, nonetheless. And check the full survey out for more details…

The game discovery news round-up…

Finishing up for this time, we found a veritable avalanche of fresh news since Monday. So we’re digging out from it with a word shovel, starting… now:

• Very interesting to see Sony announce a ‘strategic partnership’ with NCSoft, in which they “will collaborate in various global business fields, including mobile.” (Amazon is publishing NCSoft’s latest, Throne & Liberty, in the West, btw.) All we know is it’s “leveraging NCSOFT’s technological prowess and SIE’s global leadership in the entertainment field.” Perhaps (mobile? cross-platform?) MMOs with Sony IP?

• Update on Fortnite’s age ratings: they’re working for levels/Islands, but the cosmetics-specific gating is being being rolled back due to fan complaints “until we have a long-term solution in place”, starting Dec. 3rd. Oh, except: “A small number of existing cosmetics and less than ten Outfits will remain playable only in T-rated… islands because of their obvious fear or violence elements.” (Here’s what people hated.)

• Want to know the exact Game Awards Players’ Voice voting so far? For a while, a clever data-miner was pulling all the votes - fascinating to see. (Spoiler: Baldur’s Gate 3 was leading with 57k votes and 8.9% of the total, followed by Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty, Zelda: Tears Of The Kingdom, and Spider-Man 2, with Starfield in a disappointing 18th spot.)

• Mobile all-stars microlinks: how you, too, can do paid user acquisition like Monopoly GO!; understand F2P game upsell better with this mini-deconstruction of Gardenscapes’ monetization opportunities; some great ‘real graphs’ and live ops tips on Beatstar, which has hit $125 million lifetime revenue on mobile.

• ICYMI: last week’s Steam update: new UI elements help “the millions of players with PlayStation's DualShock and DualSense controllers easily find games to play with those devices”, with “better options for sorting and filtering areas of the Steam store [&] seeing clear compatibility info on individual store pages [and in the Library].” So there.

• In ‘physical meeting platforms’ news, Gamescom is adding a Latin America edition in Brazil in June 2024. It’s actually an extension/co-brand with the existing BIG Festival, which had 50k visitors in 2023 anyhow, with the new Gamescom LatAm CEO saying: “That's why we believe the DNA of Gamescom is a perfect match for BIG Festival: we both have the B2B and the B2C content of the show.”

• Platform content microlinks: the Grand Theft Auto Trilogy (remasters of GTA III & variants) is coming to Netflix mobile in December; PlayStation Plus Essential’s December games are Lego 2K Drive, Powerwash Simulator, and Sable; Google Play’s best games of 2023 include Honkai: Star Rail (Google’s pick for best game!) and Monopoly GO! (users’ choice.)

• Sadly, we don’t have time to comb it in detail, but wanted to point out that Roblox’s Investor Day - held just before our week off - is fully watchable on YouTube (2.5 hours), and DigiDay did a good round-up of what consumer marketers should take away from it.

• One notable platform-improving addition from Xbox’s November OS update? “Compact mode [a new feature that ‘enhances your gaming experience by providing a more intuitive user interface on smaller screens’] is now available… [for] handhelds like the ASUS ROG Ally and Lenovo Legion Go.” Xbox is swiftly improving the Windows experience on ‘Steam Deck-a-likes’, in other words.

• Microlinks: Scott Hartsman asks - ‘should everything be a live game?’ ; a Reddit user asks - ‘why is variant shovelware re-published on the Switch eShop weekly?’; David Kaye asks - ‘how do developers create ‘vertical worlds’ to capture & retain an ecosystem?’

Finally, our buddy Leigh Alexander(Reigns: Her Majesty writer), whose Twitter bio nails her interests (“Story, games, procgen, bad futurism, spooky AI”), has combined them fascinatingly in the game prototype ‘McMansions Of Hell’, which she recently talked about at the extremely good Roguelike Celebration conference (all talks are here!)

The pitch? “Reality TV shows are actually constructed realities with their own emergent narrative systems. In this talk, Leigh shares how she is working with her teammate Brian Bucklew (Caves of Qud) to translate the language volumes and behaviors of mid-2000s "celebreality" shows set in McMansions into a generative story environment with Macintosh-inspired B&W graphics.” We love it - what a mash-up:

[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.]