A lot of the top servers are ‘official’, but not all of them. The ‘verified’ servers for Minecraft, Fortnite and others are run by staff or mods that are approved by the developers themselves. But you also get Discord-partnered servers like Animal Crossing and the Reddit-linked r/LeagueOfLegends - which are not endorsed by the maker of the game, but still thrive anyhow.

The top games are pretty much what I expected. When looking at the most active servers out there, the top titles include Minecraft, Valorant (wow, Riot’s done a good job here!), Fortnite, Rainbow 6, Roblox, and so on. There’s also a few ‘big’ indies like Terraria and Risk Of Rain 2 punching above their weight. And impressed to see Deep Rock Galactic, TemTem & SatisFactory also in the Top 30.

There’s some very active game Discords I was surprised about. If you were to tell me the Top 30 included Spellbreak (a game I clearly need to pay more attention to), Escape From Tarkov and GTFO, I admit I would have been a little surprised. And a Beat Saber modding Discord almost in the Top 10? Yup, that’s reinforcing its position as the breakout VR game - not surprising that Oculus bought the studio.

There’s going to be a new Microsoft Store on Xbox rolling out soon, with redesigned search functionality, a more prominent wishlist feature (interesting!), and a whole new, faster interface. I actually think the existing Xbox store interface was in the ‘good enough’ category for me, and so perhaps this one will take it to ‘great’. (Hoping for ‘Hot New Games’ real-time charts, too, but a boy can dream…)

Liam Twose, who does the #pitchyagame tag on Twitter, also has a Global Games Industry directory he’s hosting for free on Itch (PDF) and Trello. I know directories can be unwieldy (and get outdated!), but I was impressed with his publisher list in here - there will almost certainly be indie pubs you don’t know.

In case you missed it, and SteamDB on Twitter didn’t, Valve “has recently made changing your store country more strict, which requires completing a purchase using a payment method from that country. This should hinder [those] using VPNs to buy games cheaper.” Some rumblings of reduced sales because of this, but it’s a bit early to tell, and I imagine the revenues will equalize (if not units).

Epic noted that mod support is now in beta on the Epic Games Store, starting with Mechwarrior 5. This is interesting, and not a feature I was expecting as an Epic-exclusive integration. IMO, the ‘mods on PC’ situation is starting to get messy, given there’s Steam Workshop, third-party solutions like Mod.io (which you can use on Steam!), and then Microsoft’s Game Store on PC requires specific moderation standards for mods… maybe a subject for another time!

There’s an MCV Develop interview with Inkle’s Joseph Humfrey & my bombastic No More Robots compadre Mike Rose about the state of the eShop for discoverability. I’ve already gone on about this at length, but Nintendo needs to think about the ‘charts/eShop interface encouraging 90% off discounts’ thing. (I think NMR might be sharing Not Tonight eShop discount results abstractly soon, that was an experiment that worked irritatingly well.)

Scourgebringer director Thomas Altenburger has an excellent Twitter thread about pitching to publishers that I recommend you read. Basically: know your publisher, have a playable prototype, have a short/sweet 5-page pitch deck, maybe even make a 5-minute ‘this is us and our game!’ video, be very specific about production budget and schedule. (But read the thread!) Some people get a bit, uhm, overblown with their pitches.

More asset guidelines for game devs, the sexiest thing in the world! This time, Steph H. & the smart folks at Evolve have done one for Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Discord, Twitch, LinkedIn (!), YouTube and Steam. Twin this with Derek Lieu’s game trailer specs, and you may be tearing your hair out marginally less.

Microlinks: Epic’s Tim Sweeney talks about the metaverse (& game platform costs!), xCloud gaming streaming with Xbox Game Pass Ultimate is out on September 15th on Android (and probably not at all on iOS, hah), ‘make a game in our game’ service Core announced a Dungeons & Dragons IP hookup/contest, Switch eShop game releases in July were up by almost 30, year on year.