Why older games rule - and new games drool - in DiscoverylandAlso: interesting stats from a niche success & 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.] It’s midweek in Discoveryland, and we’re enjoying the Spring. And due to free association, we’re now also enjoying Rob Hubbard’s 1985 music for Thing On A Spring on the C64. (Here’s a history of the franchise, surely due a reboot any time now.) A scheduling note: besides the Friday Plus newsletters, which are still happening & we’ll talk about in a sec, we’re partly out next week. So there will be just one free newsletter next week - Tues, April 9th. (Back to normal schedule on Mon, April 15th.) A milestone & a pressing Q on our Plus newsletter!Before we get started, a little milestone and a PSA. The reveal: the GameDiscoverCo newsletter now has >25,000 free subscribers - hurray to us. (And thanks to everyone who reads us religiously - or at least semi-fervently.) But we’re often surprised that only <2,000 of you (including groups and clients) opt to get the extra Friday newsletter & other GameDiscoverCo Plus goodness. That’s the newsletter where we get deep into which PC/console games do well, and why. It’s literally ‘which games are ‘making it’?’ - which you should probably all care about. So we’ve made last Friday’s Plus newsletter 100% free. In it, there’s comments on Outpost: Infinity Siege, a full analysis of which games converted on Steam last week (and which have Hype this week!) & more. If you dig it, here’s the Plus upgrade link to get it every week. Seacrest out. How older games dominate PC/console playtime…We at GameDiscoverCo have talked about some of the current issues with market tightness - especially for new games - before. We’ve particularly discussed the high game supply issues around a ‘no-reset’ console and PC generation. We summed up our view of the market in a recent client note: “The issue remains: catalog revenue is strong, big old games get played continually, but the gap for new games to be bought and played is smaller than the amount of money going into that hole, by a lot. But obviously, new games are where most of the investment is going. This is going to be a permanent problem and significantly affect employment levels and success in the game biz - particularly because there's a lot more games out there in the market than there used to be.” So we’ve talked about high supply. But we haven’t quantified the ‘big old games get played continually’ data point. That’s what game analyst firm Newzoo has done as part of a ‘state of PC & console in 2024’ report (free reg. req) that we would v. recommend. As you can see in the above Newzoo graph, older games (6+ years old) are now taking 61% of all PC/console playtime in 2023, up from 45% in 2021. And in fact, Fortnite, Roblox, League of Legends, Minecraft, and Grand Theft Auto V made up 27% of all playtime in 2023. Newzoo adds: “These older games are gaining an increasing share of playtime over games between three and five years old... The drop in [3-5 year old game] playtime in 2022 can be attributed to Fortnite's shift into a 6+-year-old game, but not in 2023.” That’s not all, though. The Newzoo report also estimates the following re: playtime:
It’s interesting to see such stark and slightly scary data from Newzoo, whom we’ve historically considered a little anodyne and ‘rah-rah’? We actually went and re-downloaded their 2023 PC/console report to make sure we weren’t misremembering. We weren’t! Last year’s takeaways include things like: “2023 will be a strong growth year for the PC and console market… packed with top games across many genres and on every platform.” (Whee?) Yet 2024’s report is way more, um, realpolitik. Kudos on the pivot. And sure, playtime doesn’t necessarily map perfectly to spend in today’s PC and console markets - you don’t spend linearly per hour played. But the fact remains: time spent playing another game is player time not spent on a newly launched game. Anyhow, we highly recommend reading the full Newzoo report for a lot more detail on large-scale market trends - and paths to growth in this extremely tricky market. WitchHand - data on a niche solo Steam success!We recently spotted WitchHand, a strategy card game semi-inspired by Sokpop’s breakout hit Stacklands, which we spoke to the devs about back in 2022. It’s a really interesting microgenre, actually - card stacking as a strategy game mechanic. So we caught up with WitchHand’s creator Jon Nielsen, who was kind enough to chat about the game. It launched in early Feb. 2024 at a $12 price point, and maxed out at 750 CCU (concurrent players) on Steam, a very creditable result! Here’s the first month of so of WitchHand’s Steam units sold. The sales curve is interesting, and we’ll return to it later: Additional data: the game is only English language, so 50% of the players were U.S., with 7% from Canada, 7% from the UK, 5% Germany, and 4% Australia. (Localization would have increased Asian players - but for micro-indies, it’s not always easy.) And here’s WitchHand’s overall Steam stats, as of earlier in March (we took a little while to publish this, sorry!) Items of interest? The very high median time played, relatively low refund rate, and decent (but not giant!) overall wishlist balance: The other things we found interesting about WitchHand specifically are the following:
That’s what we tend to find in this market - especially for games like WitchHand, which are great but you won’t necessarily ‘idly stumble upon’. The first week or so’s sales are very anomalous - in a good way, sales curve-wise, due to various YouTube videos hitting & miscellaneous virality. But as the virality dies down, you’re reliant on a much gentler discount-based long tail. As Jon says: “The game did well, but hasn't shown explosive growth that I'll be able to ride for years. I have one large update planned and then it might be time to move on to new projects after that.” That’s the reality, even for well-crafted games in today’s market, unless you can get people to play your game over and over for their audience. (Or can re-activate them via patches and/or clever new features.) Anyhow, Jon did a postmortem thread back in mid-February on Twitter/X which includes the above annotated wishlist graph, which we’re always fans of. And we appreciate him being so transparent with us. The game platform & discovery news round-up…And as we slide inexorably away up the wooden hill to Bedfordshire, let’s check some of the most notable game platform and discovery news from the last coupla days:
To end, we liked Danny O’Dwyer’s latest video for the a16z Games YouTube channel, which posits: “The cost of games relative to their respective prices seems to have hit a tipping point.” It’s high level, but definitely worth a watch: [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.] You're currently a free subscriber to The GameDiscoverCo newsletter. For the full experience, upgrade your subscription. |
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