[Hi, I’m ‘how people find your game’ expert Simon Carless, and you’re reading the Game Discoverability Now! newsletter, which you can subscribe to now, a regular look at how people discover and buy video games in the 2020s.]

Welcome to the latest ‘GameDiscoverabilityLand’ round-up, where-in I have a few hundred words to recap everything that happened this week. And I inevitably fail, at least on the brevity side of things.

Before we get started, thanks for the amazing response on the Steam reviews/sales ratio survey. You’ve still got ‘til Friday if you want to submit. But we have 220 (!!) responses so far, so it’s going to be a really robust data set. Anyhow… onward!

Xbox Summer Demo Fest - in full effect!

So the Xbox One’s pre-release demo event is currently running, and hopefully some of you have checked it out. There’s around 60 demos available right now (almost all from indie devs or smaller publishers, with exceptions like Destroy All Humans!)

Thought I’d document where it’s being showcased on the console, starting with the Store tab on the Xbox dashboard (even before you open the Store!)

When you go into the Store app itself, you’ll see it has an entire category to itself, which is decent billing:

Finally, here’s what the Game Fest ‘show all page’ looks like - it actually runs alphabetically, with about 12 leftover ‘second set of alphabetical’ games at the bottom of the page, haha:

Since you can look at how many reviews (in the U.S. Xbox store) each game has, I thought I’d briefly document and link to the Top 5 demos:

1. 9 Monkeys Of Shaolin (is alphabetically first, so that may help downloads.)
2. Skatebird
3. Destroy All Humans!
4. Cris Tales (this game is visually gorgeous!)
5. Haven

If you go by reviews, it looks like the most-played demos have around 10x the plays of the least-played ones so far. So plenty of range in there, for sure. There’s also this chart across all game demos on the Microsoft Store, which has different results, so YMMV.

Anyhow, Xbox Summerfest is a really nice way to dip into games you might otherwise not have heard of. I played (and enjoyed) Dandy Ace, for example, which I didn’t know existed before.

So I can’t believe it’s anything but positive - albeit mildly positive, perhaps - for both players and devs. If you’re in it, tell me what you think of the results. And let’s have it happen once a year for all consoles! *snaps fingers*

Steam Summer Festival - the full results!

So, big shout-out to Chris Zukowski for doing the ultimate write-up of Steam Summer Festival’s results, following my slightly more anecdotal comments on the demo showcase a few roundups ago.

Definitely click through for the full thing, but the topline appears to be, for those demos that participated: “Average number of wishlists [added]: 3218; Median number of wishlists [added]: 500; Most wishlists earned by a single game: 41096 (The Riftbreaker); Fewest wishlists earned by a single game: 40.”

One graph I thought particularly relevant - even beyond the Summer Festival - was Chris’ calculation of median wishlists additions per genre for surveyed games:

This data maps fairly well to the kind of VERY broad game facets that I would recommend people make for Steam - to be commercially successful as a small/medium sized game.

(It’s way more complex than this, of course. And getting deeper into tag comparisons would surface a lot more detail. But it’s a super-useful snapshot of where perceived interest and depth is.)

Other Goodness…

Lawks-a-lordy, we’re most of the way through the newsletter already, and there’s still a hefty chunk of content to talk about. Here’s the best of the rest, in no particular order:

Finally, let’s end out with this excellent data-filled sales blog about “modest indie hit game Curious Expedition”. The folks at Maschinen-Mensch have gone above and beyond on the transparency side of things.

Something I wanted to highlight was the game’s gross revenue curve, year on year, since its 2014 (!) off-Steam launch:

If you go deep into their postmortem, you’ll see all numbers of reasons for this impressive maintenance of revenue. These include a Chinese translation, being more aggressive with discounts in sales, and intelligent additions to the core game.

So - great work, devs, and a reminder that extending the tail on your game is one of the best ways to fund your next game.