[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, in which I flit around a whole bunch of subjects in the ‘game discoverability & game platform business’ lexicon - and try to keep it under a few thousand words in length.

Lots happening again this time out. So let’s get it going with an excellent data set from the rather good (but I’m biased) GDC Summer virtual event that took place last week.

Indie game publishing deals, aggregated!

A key part of discoverability is making sure you’re getting the right buzz. And the right publishers can really help with that. (As does having enough money to actually complete your game, I guess?) But there are a multitude of things to think about when signing a deal.

So, it’s great that Kellen Voyer of Voyer Law did a virtual talk at GDC Summer which “collected data from 30 publishing agreements for a variety of non-mobile indie games to give developers an idea of what other teams are agreeing to in terms of advances, revenue share, IP ownership, and more.” (I’m using the Gamasutra write-up here, but PC Gamer and GamesIndustry also did articles based on the data that are worth looking at.)

On upfront payments: “The average advance to fund a game is $318,000, including both advance and no advance deals.. counting only deals with an advance, the average amount is $460,000. The lowest advance was $100,000 and the highest $2 million. 18 percent of the agreements had no advance, likely due to higher revenue share.”

One notable point: “42 percent of deals require advances to be recouped before developers see a single dollar. 58 percent see the advance recouped while both the developer and publisher receive revenue share.” Voyer notes, and I agree, that you should get a split recoup on revenue share - unless you think your game will recoup in the first month or two.

And on rev split: "The average revenue split sees developers taking 60 percent, publishers taking 40. That jumps up to 71 percent to devs in the case of no-advance deals, often seen in deals with nearly-finished games that only need marketing support and the like. That drops to 55 percent to devs when only averaging deals that include an advance." Again, not surprised, but great to have real data on it.

Concluding, there’s always outliers - more generous publishers %-wise, smaller ones who give tinier advances than this. But, this is a benchmark - and I love benchmarks! (Kellen told me they plan to open up the data and crowdsource more in the future! I’ll post here when that happens.)

Nintendo Switch’s discounts, color-coded!

Perhaps I’ve been discussing this a little bit too much in recent weeks. But re: how discounting is affecting the Nintendo Switch eShop game charts, I made a color-coded diagram explaining the state of play.

Here my analysis, for August 9th 2020's U.S. eShop digital chart (ranked by 14-day unit sales):

The eShop charts are complex. Games zoom up them if they’re X% off, but often stay there after the discount's done. I listed the current price, but also the ‘charting price’, which was the discounted price that got the game in the charts in the first place. Green = full-price, yellow = 50-79% off, red = 80-99% off.

As I noted on Twitter: “Yes, this means that only 7 games in the eShop digital top 30 are actually selling at full price. So 23 made it into the charts by selling at 50% off or more, & 12 made it in by selling at 80% off or more.”

We’ve heard that your sales go up with a 40-50% discount, thanks to popular subReddits like Nintendo Switch Deals & various Nintendo fan blogs/social media. But they go down again, unless you start charting on the ‘deal’ or overall eShop charts in a particular country.

And you need to be a fairly well-known game (Final Fantasy, Doom, etc!) to chart at 40-50% off - which is why a lot of people are getting ‘extreme’ with discounting. Some of them don’t care about the money, and just want lots more people to play their game.

(Final weirdness: you really don’t sell many copies after the discount is done. So this leads to the super weird phenomenon of 30% of the eShop charts or more not selling copies while… actually in the charts. The mind boggles.)

Other Things…

There’s still plenty of other fish in the sea, velociraptors in the pen, baboons in the enclosure, and so on. So let’s get to the rest of the game discoverability news for this week:

To end things out, here’s something I spotted this week:

Notably, Daniel Gubala pointed out in reply: “EXOR Studios and Ultimate Games have both tied their prologues to a publisher sale - using the daily deal visibility was a great kick-start for the releases.” So that’s clever cross-promotion in action!