[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.]

Readers: we’re here once more, infecting your inbox with a complex mix of half-baked writing and partly-considered graphs. Thanks to all supporting GameDiscoverCo recently, both on the free and paid newsletter side of things, btw - it’s a blast.

One note on Ukraine support: the Itch ‘Bundle For Ukraine’ is zooming towards $6 million (!), and dev support has been stupendous. Also wanted to highlight Supercell’s match for Ukrainian humanitarian aid to folks contributing $ directly. We recently donated there, since it has 100% Supercell matching up to 1 Million Euros. (Thx!)

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Game discovery: it’s also about supply & demand

There’s been a series of articles recently about the number of available video games. You may particularly remember Jeff Vogel’s ‘There Are Too Many Video Games’, which tries to argue inelegantly that: “If my country was healthy, stable, and on a sustainable path, most of them would not exist.” (Uh, no?)

In the last newsletter, we linked VGInsights’ 'Make More Video Games’, which tacks in the other direction, points out correctly that many games are made for fun and not for profit (correct!), and tries to extrapolate that “just under 20% of games released in 2021 have been potentially unsuccessful vs their original goal.”

Well, I definitely disagree with that too - it’s much more than that. And it brings me to a conclusion I’ve reached after the last couple of years of writing this newsletter (and 15+ years of working with indie games, and 25+ years of being in the game biz):

Developers (and publishers) consistently underestimate raw supply and demand when considering the chance of success for their game.

Above, you’ll see a custom chart we did showing cumulative numbers of video games available on Steam since 2006. It won’t be perfect - we added up SteamDB’s chart of releases per year, which is a more common way to view this. But it’s a bit startling.

When you just see individual yearly releases, you may think ‘oh, this year was only a bit more than last year’. But if you look at it all together - well, there were around 5,000 cumulative Steam releases by 2015, about 20,000 by 2017, and there are now 60,000+ games available.

Most importantly, many of these older games are not ‘one and done’. The most successful ones - think No Man’s Sky, Rust, etc - keep updating regularly, and keep selling, continually adding features for a returning userbase.

And heck, some don’t need to update, and keep selling. For example, Supergiant’s isometric ARPG Hades has 3,300 additional Steam reviews - likely 100,000-150,000 units sold - in the last month. Lucas Pope’s superb Papers Please - a game originally released in 2013 - added 550 reviews (15,000-25,000 units?) in the last 30 days.

What’s the ‘no-reset’ PC/console market?

So for me, this relatively new concept of a ‘no-reset PC and console generation’ is significantly changing the market. Which is to say - in olden days, you bought the NES and games for it until the SNES came out. And then you sidelined your old console, upgraded, and bought a bunch of new games for your new device.

But your Steam library has been percolating for 10-15 years now. And both Xbox and Sony has made it way easier to play games you bought in previous generations. (Over time, Xbox is entirely blurring the concept of ‘generations’ with Game Pass, Xbox Cloud Gaming, etc.)

Many people - Valve included - point out that new games can continue to do well on their platform, due to strong platform growth. The above graph, from an April 2020 Steam blog post, clearly shows that. More games on Steam make >$10k in their first two weeks in every single year up to 2019. I’m sure that’s also true for 2020 & 2021.

What’s difficult to graph is the cost of making games and the ROI, though. And it’s my impression that the number of ‘serious’ attempts to make profitable Steam games in the last 3 years are gradually outpacing the (formidable!) user growth on the platform. The same, of course, is definitely true for Switch, PlayStation and Xbox.

So, those sales problems you thought were genre or quality-related? They may be that as well. But I’d wager they are more supply & demand related than you think, exacerbated by the rise in high-retention GaaS style titles. Examples:

If you look at the market from this perspective, it opens some interesting viewpoints. Rather than seeing Xbox Game Pass and other subscription services as an existential threat to the status quo - perhaps they could be considered a net positive?

In this scenario, it’s not Game Pass or PlayStation Plus or Apple Arcade which is the cause of the problem. Rather, they are a potential solution. They’re using platform funding to aggregate titles that might otherwise fall foul of some of the long-term supply/demand mismatches.

That’s one angle on this supply/demand problem - and not sure that I wholly believe it. Either way, these complexities shouldn’t make us stop trying. You just need to be more analytical on market gaps, work closely with platform holders, and find the ‘recurring success’ titles that can help you navigate through these ever-complex game discovery seas.

Unity’s state of the game biz - stats, stats, stats!

So the folks at ubiquitous game engine/monetization company Unity revealed its 2022 gaming report this morning, via both a press release and access to the full report. Rather than pushing Unity’s market share advantage (a bit of a fait accompli?), it concentrates on aggregating data from all 230,000 developers making 750,000 games in Unity, referencing:

We probably shouldn’t read these DAU numbers as canon for the whole industry, since Unity may have also been adding market share. But Steam’s MAUs were up 40% from 2019 to 2021, so it’s not a million miles off.

Because the majority of Unity-made games are mobile-first, some of the more detailed report stats seem less relevant and/or mushy from a PC/console perspective. There’s good data on how advertising-led hypercasual games are still surging, and how in app purchase-centric monetization is built around genre depth, though. (See above graph.)

There are also some handy charts in the full report showing that, post-pandemic, people are playing at ‘normal’ hours again - since they have work or school. In addition, this graph shows longterm DAU for PC/console peaking during the height of the pandemic and then coming down - less so for mobile, intriguingly:

Finally, I think it’s worth listing the Unity Gaming Report’s conclusions on future trends: 

- game lifespans will lengthen
- cross-platform multiplayer games will become more common
- mobile multiplayer games will become the standard over the next decade
- indie and mid-market developers will invest in player intelligence
- there will be increased adoption of specialized tools and third-party expertise
- metaverse and the blockchain will be tested but not just fully embraced.

Agree with many of these, particularly the first one (see previous newsletter item on high-retention games.) And I’m definitely a fan of increased adoption of third-party expertise. *points at self, gauchely* Thanks for the data, Unity!

The game discovery news round-up...

There’s many miles to go before we sleep, and many links to send out before we go up the wooden hill to Bedfordshire. So let’s take a look at some of the game discovery platform news and info we’ve magicked up for you this time:

Finally, I was surprised to learn about the state of North Korea’s video game economy (!), from someone who visited Pyongyang multiple times to research the space:

Not that despots should be supported, of course - see Russia as a current example - but it’s intriguing to find out how things actually work in North Korea. (Mainly via existing Android games modified by local studios, apparently.)

[We’re GameDiscoverCo, an agency based around one simple issue: how do players find, buy and enjoy your premium PC or console game? We run the newsletter you’re reading, and provide consulting services for publishers, funds, and other smart game industry folks.]