Why the low-profile Necesse hit a big 1.0 release and 2m sales...

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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 back for the pre-Thanksgiving week in the U.S. We’ll be off next week and likely not publishing any newsletters, btw*. (*Unless news gets overloaded, or something cray cray happens.) So please get ready to relax, like we (allegedly!) are…

Before we start, thanks to this newsletter’s sponsor FirstLook, the player relationship platform for the games industry, and the folks behind Games Growth Guild. They’ve also signed up as a regular GDCo sponsor for 2026. (Ping us if you’d like to join them as sponsors…)

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Game discovery news: Ashes Of… Alkahest?

Looking at the big game discovery and platform news since we last checked in, here’s what we’ve got:

• Checking GDCo’s ‘7-day trending’ unreleased Steam game follower chart(Nov 10th-17th), new is oldschool epic high fantasy MMO Ashes Of Creation (#2), in dev for nearly a decade, and is out in December. Dark Messiah-ish first person RPG Alkahest(#4) and anime-based ARPG Solo Leveling (#5) also impress.

• Other trending games? Alkahest publisher Hypetrain (who are 10!) also chart procgen looter shooter Canyons (#6) and ‘tiny person in normal sized world’ x ‘cute pixel art farming’Fourleaf Fields (#13). And the rest of the Top 10 has previous standouts like Blood Of Dawnwalker, Drownlight, and Forza Horizon 6.

• The folks at Hushcrasher have looked at Steam regional pricing variations and created a Steam regional pricing tool where “you simply input your desired USD price, and our tool generates regional prices based on up-to-date economic data.” It uses purchasing power parity, and there’s a bonus version based on Netflix pricing!

• The Game Awards nominees are here, and “Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is up for 12 awards, making it the most nominated game in the awards’ history, followed by PlayStation titles Death Stranding 2: On the Beach and Ghost of Yotei with eight nominations each, and Hades 2 with six.” We find out winners on Dec. 11th.

• Why no Steam Deck 2 in Valve’s hardware announces last week? Pierre-Loup Griffais told IGN that “the thing we’re making sure of is that it’s a worthwhile enough performance upgrade to make sense as a standalone product.” They have a “pretty good idea” what it’ll be, but there’s no chipsets which do what they want. Yet.

• Microlinks, Pt. 1: STALKER’s dev resolved their DMCA issues with Misery - some infringing model and music issues - and the game’s back on Steam; in the mobile space, Playtika’s revenue is now 31% direct to consumer (skipping app stores!); Gabe Newell’s new $500m superyacht has ‘just’ 280 miles of cabling.

• Will attending events to showcase your game make or break success? Likely not, says Paul Kilduff-Taylor, but: “You might get more direct bang for your buck paying for advertising or adding features to your game, but your experience of your overall gamedev journey might well suffer.” The ROI is dubious - but go places, meet real people?

• Fortnite has added the Sponsored Row to its discovery mechanisms, with a bid-based advertising system across all SKUs (except Switch and players flagged under-18!), performance tracking. And for now, “100% of sponsorship revenue goes into engagement payout pool through end of 2026.”

• In ‘games that have wishlists but don’t convert well’ news, solarpunk city builder Generation Exile just didn’t perform on release - 35k wishlists, <300 copies at launch. (Much quarterbacking of the issues - we chatted to the devs, and it looks like ‘soft’ showcase wishlisting & not much organic interest, sadly.)

• Lots of comments on our piece on why Dispatch did so well, but we liked this Florian Stoessel note: “The game is INCREDIBLY great for clipping... and thus shorts etc. which helped immensely with going viral. The comedy and ‘burns’ inside the game are quite substantial and very well written and voice acted.” Yes, it’s sassy, folks!

• Microlinks, Pt. 2: the latest Switch eShop patch allows you to turn off video autoplay in the store (if you can find the toggle); Apple Arcade is adding SpongeBob Patty Pursuit 2, PowerWash Sim & more; what happened when a YouTuber analyzed every single SilkSong review - lots of data crunchiness?

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Why the low-profile Necesse hit 1.0 and 2 million sales...

We’re not sure if it’s smart to call a game that’s officially sold 2 million copies since its December 2019 debut on Steam - and hit 29,500 CCU at its 1.0 release a month ago - more than 2x its previous concurrent user max - ‘low-profile’.

But that’s just what we’re doing with Fair Games’ Necesse, since we think the game is underdiscussed. Here’s our GameDiscoverCo Pro estimates of its copies sold since launch btw:

First, let’s try to explain what Necesse is - because it’s not super easy to grok. This originally solo-dev title - which Mads Skovgaard has been developing since 2012 (!) - most often sees comparisons to games like RimWorld (colony builder), Core Keeper (sandbox fighter, builder, crafter) & especially the epochally popular Terraria.

As a top Steam reviewer - with 82 hours played in the game - explains: “It plays like a top-down Terraria with colony mechanics like RimWorld. After you place your banner, you will be assigned to a plot and villagers will start appearing in your settlement.” It also has co-op, an automation mechanic, bosses to fight, and multiple biomes with new resources.

So it’s a sprawling, complex thing. And it was - impressively - a solo-dev project from Mads all the way up to Dec. 2021, when a lot of the automation & management parts of Necesse got added and sales started to scale. (After that, in 2022, COO Christian Andreasan got involved, and there’s a team of 8 working on the game now.)

So let’s talk about the basics - why is this game popular, and why did it get so much more popular at 1.0?

• The game and systems are impressively well-architected: it’s really not easy to make interesting sandbox games. Notably, Mads was also a RimWorld modder during early Necesse dev. (His game is intentionally way more friendly/chill on colony management than that game.) And his deep knowledge of genre led him to build a game that - if you look at this beginner’s guide - feels crazy deep.

• Aggressive pricing has helped grow players: Necesse was $10 (often discounted to $5-$7!) though much of Early Access. Even its 1.0 launch had a 50% off sale (to $7.50). Is that leaving $ on the table? Christian sidesteps that: “We took a bet on building an evergreen, and believe the low price will not be a problem in the long run.” (FWIW, it’s similar pricing to Terraria, which is still somehow $10.)

• A pre-1.0 graphics update was huge for attractiveness: the original Necesse art was ‘utilitarian’, but check out the changes in both art and lighting for a major patch that dropped in Aug. 2024 and was very well received. We think this is a big reason for it going ‘huger’ at 1.0. Besides new features, it looks competitive.

Oddly, if you look around on YouTube or around its Twitch history, Necesse has never been a super-hot ‘Let’s Play’ streamer game. (Christian told us that “engaging with and keeping our existing players happy” is the team’s priority.) Most of the top YouTube results are actually for game guides & tips - but they are all quite popular.

So what’s going on? We did have one ‘lightbulb moment’ when it came to Necesse, and it’s around product-market fit and the size of some of its competitors. What? Here’s our full Steam review analysis section in GameDiscoverCo Pro for Necesse:

There’s a few things of note. First, the ‘review sentiment by topic’ is incredibly good - it’s very rare to see that tiny amount of red (negative) for a game. And second, most of the game’s weaknesses (per Steam user reviews) are a) hard to find b) ‘we want more plz’.

But look at the giiiant Terraria word cloud mention in ‘positive review sentiment’. (Bigger size = bigger frequency of the most helpful Steam reviews mentioning a word!) For the record, the ‘phrase cloud’ version of the same query also has Stardew Valley and Core Keeper big - but nowhere near that big…

And so we took a look at our GDCo Pro data on Necesse’s top games by player overlap. And 86.5% of all Necesse players also own Terraria (vs. 20% of all Steam players), putting it ahead of Counter-Strike 2 on overlap, which is also quite rare:

And when you remember that Terraria has sold (per GDCo estimates!) 37.5 million copies on Steam alone? Suddenly a game in a similar idiom - priced similarly - selling 2 million units doesn’t seem so outrageous, right? Yet again, it’s the ‘if you like X game, you might dig Y game’ factor really helping, esp. with a lack of competition in this space.

As for others replicating games like Necesse? It does feel a little bit like ‘if you spend a decade+ building a giant systems-led game, you too can share in the spoils!’ Which is - well, not realistic for most of us. But the fact a solo dev can methodically do so, starting part-time, shows how the rise of the semi-pro dev is very real, right?

Roblox’s top Oct. 2025 games: old friends return?

Finally: the Creator Games/Exchange folks - led by David Taylor - are back with some analysis of the top-earning & played Roblox games of Oct. Here’s their LI post, and here’s our exclusive Top 20 earners countdown(Google Drive link) with numeric data.

Per David’s analysis:

• 🟢 [‘Cute horror’ game]Dandy’s World surged +27 places in earnings and +14 in engagement, peaking at 620K CCU following its latest update, one of the biggest post-update spikes we’ve seen this year.

• 🎣 [Fishing action games] Fish It and 🐟 Fisch both continued their steady ascents. Fisch re-entered the top 10 for earnings for the first time since April. Fish It climbed to the # 6 spot in engagement for October, and [recently] surpassed Grow a Garden, Brookhaven and Plants vs. Brainrots to take the #3 spot for engagement.

Still, a lot of the‘usual suspects’ - Steal A Brainrot, 99 Nights in The Forest (averaging 1.63m CCU!), and leading Roblox FPS Rivals - are clustering with Grow A Garden in the Top 5 earners in Oct. And most are meaty, complex titles, somewhat countering old preconceptions of sloppy, gameplay-light sandboxes dominating Roblox?

[We’re GameDiscoverCo, an analysis firm 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 real-time data services for publishers, funds, and other smart game industry folks.]