How the iii initiative shakes up the 'streaming showcase' spaceAlso: a look at a VR survey, and lots of discovery news.[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 still on Easter holiday time for quite a lot of you Europeans. But less so at GameDiscoverCo HQ. So let’s go ahead and send out a fresh newsletter on this fine Spring Monday. (*wipes chocolate egg detritus off face*) Before we get started, we’re delighted to see that the Balatro-likes* (!) are appearing already. One of the first is Bingle Bangle, which uses roulette instead of poker for the underlying game mechanic - here’s a playthrough. (*Casino games x roguelites.) [REMINDER: yes, you can support GameDiscoverCo by subscribing to GDCo Plus now. You get full access to a super-detailed Steam data suite for unreleased & released games, weekly PC/console sales research, Discord access, seven detailed game discovery eBooks & lots more.] iii initiative shifts the 'streaming showcase' spaceAs teased last week, the Triple-I Initiative officially announced itself late last week, and here’s the PR for “a brand new showcase aiming to elevate the top independent creators in video games”, with “major announcements and reveals from studios in charge of Slay the Spire, Darkest Dungeon, Hyper Light Drifter, Vampire Survivors, and many, many more.” What’s interesting about the streaming-only showcase, which is taking place pretty soon - April 10th at 10am PDT, 1pm EDT, 7pm CEST - is probably three-fold:
Look, we think being in a high-profile showcase is pretty important nowadays. It’s not ‘be all end all’. But GameDiscoverCo has tracked titles in Xbox’s summer showcase that got tens of thousands of extra Steam wishlists pretty much as default, for example. We ran a detailed story on the best showcases to be in last year, and below is our incredibly subjective list. We suspect the Triple I Initiative will fit in somewhere between Silver+ and Gold, depending on its Year 1 reach:
Next, GameDiscoverCo had a chance to talk to the Triple I Initiative organizers, and we had three burning questions. Here’s what we asked, and how they replied:
Finally here’s the full list of ‘studios and friends’ associated with this first showcase, per the PR - and yes, some publishers are involved: “A44, Assemble Entertainment, Awaceb, Blobfish Games, ColePowered Games, Digital Sun Games, Drop Bear Bytes, Evil Empire, Fireshine Games, Focus Entertainment, Fumi Games, Gamera Games, Gearbox Software / Publishing, Gentlymad Studios, Ghost Ship Publishing, Heart Machine, Hooded Horse, Humble Games, Ishtar Games, Kepler Interactive, Mega Crit, Northplay, Passtech Games, Pathea Games, PlaySide Studios / Publishing, PM Studios, poncle, Quite OK Games, Realm Archive, Red Hook Studios, Stunlock Studios, The Arcade Crew, The Gentlebros, Thorium, Thunder Lotus, tinyBuild, TRIBAND, Youthcat Studio.” The one complaint we’ve seen from devs about this? They thought a ‘Triple-I Initiative’, which was heavily teased, should be so much more than a one-off yearly streaming showcase, given the state of the biz. (Anything is possible, if you believe?) The state of VR games in 2024: new research…Some my remember that we recently (December!) hosted a survey from Cassia Curran of the Curran Games Agency. (It was about VR ‘star ratings to sales’ multipliers on the Meta Quest store. We’ve featured ‘state of VR’ analyses before using similar data.) Well, Cassia, who specializes in representing VR games as an agent, has now put out her full, paid ‘2024 XR software/games market report’ co-authored by Arshea Bimal, looking at the Quest store - as well as PSVR 2, App Lab & a brief look at Vision Pro. The authors are letting us run select highlights from the report. The first one, per the survey: “For titles released in 2021 and earlier [on the Quest store], approximately 1 in every 108 players left a star rating; For titles released in 2022, ~1 in every 101 players left a star rating; For titles released in 2023, ~1 in every 71 players left a star rating.” The obvious asterisk on this is that casual titles can have way higher multipliers. We know that Among Us VR had ~1 in 300 players leave a rating by the time it hit 1 million sold on Quest, for example. (Escape Simulator has a similarly outsized ‘reviews to sales’ ratio on Steam.) Still, if we take the median & apply it to the GameDiscoverCo Plus ‘# of star ratings’ charts we do for recent Quest releases, seems that many new games struggle to break 25-50k units sold. (Increased choice is obviously a big part of that: see above yearly data on new games available in the ‘main’ store, outside of Quest’s App Lab.) Cassia’s report backs this up, suggesting that no third-party titles launched in 2023 broke $10 million gross revenue on Quest. The closest was Assassin’s Creed Nexus VR, followed by Breachers and Dungeons Of Eternity - in the $7m down to $3m range. But evergreens like Golf+ and Blade & Sorcery: Nomad just keep selling, having both grossed towards $100m on Quest alone. So yes: we’re seeing a maturing store, with incumbents continuing to receive a lion’s share of the $. Lots more detail in the report. The game platform & discovery news round-up…It’s a little quieter coming out of the long holiday weekend. But we surprised ourselves with the amount of interesting discovery news out there. So let’s get to it:
Finally, you probably spotted it already, but we’ve profiled TABS creator Landfall before on GameDiscoverCo, and they regularly do an April 1st ‘funny but also real’ game drop. This year’s is Content Warning, a twisted Lethal Company ‘fast follow’ that looks genuinely well put-together, and is free today. Wonder how huge it’s gonna get? [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, devs, funds, and other smart game industry folks.] You're currently a free subscriber to The GameDiscoverCo newsletter. For the full experience, upgrade your subscription. |
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