Game discovery: where do short/niche games fit? 2

[The GameDiscoverCo game discovery newsletter is written by ‘how people find your game’ expert & GameDiscoverCo founder Simon Carless, and is a regular look at how people discover and buy video games in the 2020s.]

Welcome back to the world of, uh, today. We’re moving past the Switch and Steam summer sales and into the halcyon days of mid-summer, where school is out and there’s quite a lot of video game buying going on! (Though the real money is in Pokemon card grading & suspiciously high Mario 64 auction wins. I blame NFTs.)

So let’s get to it, with the first item in this week’s newsletter talking about how games that don’t hew to ‘today’s discoverability ideals' can actually get along, little doggie?

[LAST CHANCE REMINDER: three days left on the 20% off discount for new GameDiscoverCo Plus subscribers, following the launch of our ‘Complete Game Discovery Toolkit’ eBook. You also get Discord, exclusive weekly newsletter, Hype data access. Thx!]

How can shorter, niche games get discovered?

If you folks didn’t spot it, former Bioshock dev & Where The Water Tastes Like Wine mastermind Johnneman Nordhagen wrote an intriguing editorial the other day called ‘Steam & discoverability’ - though to be honest, its arguments abstract to pretty much any game selling platform.

Basically, Johnneman notes that he feels the Steam algorithm rewards popular titles with lots of CCUs and high replayability & continual reviews. This creates a continuous recommendation system that works well for Games As A Service-led titles that have a lot of updates & replayability.

But it doesn’t work for a key, wonderful and innovative part of the game industry. As he says: “Personally, the kind of games I love to play and make are generally small, unique, narrative-focused, and do not have broad audience appeal — exactly the sort of title that gets no help from Steam’s algorithms.”

I’m not sure I’d go so far as to say ‘no help’ - if games are well received over time, they will keep getting incrementally better Discovery Queue referrals. But by and large, it’s true that ‘great but niche’ games that are unlike other games you play can be tricky to find. (That’s why Steam250 created the Hidden Gems chart, for example.)

Johnneman goes on to note: “The criteria which Valve has chosen for Steam’s discoverability rewards certain types of titles and punishes others. It’s obviously possible for weird, story-driven single-player games to be successful in this universe (Disco Elysium springs to mind), but the deck is at least somewhat stacked against them.”

I’ve been thinking about this recently because I’ve been tracking the success and sales of Chicory: A Colorful Tale (above), the Greg Lobanov/Finji title which has been getting rapturous reviews, but got off to a slow start on Steam. (It’s doing exactly the same thing as Greg’s last title, Wandersong, whose ‘staying power’ I wrote about late last year. And I suspect it’s going to power through to a good result in the end.)

As a fan of shorter, perfectly crafted games (I was even chatting to Stuffed Wombat last year about helping to fund the sublime QOMP, although he found a more suitable angel investor in the end!), I definitely feel this issue. Games that are ‘one and done’ are at such a disadvantage in today’s market on multiple levels: less post-release updates, poor CCUs, less likelihood of post-launch traffic spikes from streamers.

And those platforms like Apple Arcade which initially tried to focus in part on one-off narrative experiences have pivoted to more evergreen, replayable titles. In part, I suspect, this was because management’s KPIs were not being fulfilled by the existing slate of titles.

Frankly, if you look at Xbox Game Pass too, a possible oasis for alternate play styles, the GaaS-ish replayable titles are starting to crowd the ‘Most Played’ area of even that service. (I wrote about that, too - although credit to Game Pass for signing games like Rain On Your Parade to allow some quirkiness in there.)

So what are the possibilities, here? Some suggestions:

Concluding his opinion piece, Johnneman notes: “I can’t present a compelling short-term business case why they should change discoverability to help small, weird, niche titles. The best I can do is gesture vaguely at the long-term health of games if we lose new types of genre, small teams, and a diversity of business models for games.”

And I agree that something is being lost here. Sure, niche is niche. Monetization of games of this sort can be dismal, but they’re genuinely entertaining. For example - I’m a little obsessed with GMTK Jam 2020 winner You Are Now Possessed, and totally think it should be a full-sized game.

But monetizing games like this on their own - unless you hit the Baba Is You tipping-point - seems like a bit of an imposing challenge. Can we not create a grouped business model to solve for this type of title? (One that doesn’t require you to make a whole new handheld?) Answers on a postcard, please.

Hype analysis: biggest upcoming city-builders?

So we’ll keep most of the game-specific analysis to the GameDiscoverCo Plus-exclusive newsletters we send out every Friday. But since our updated Steam Hype data now allows searching by Steam tag, we’ll be looking at a tag once per month in the free newsletter. For science.

And the first one of these - pictured above - is for ’city builder’, a tag/subgenre we think is still incredibly strong on Steam. Heck, the Top 10 unreleased Steam games listed above are all in the Top 75 of our self-calculated Hype points score (weighted combination of Steam followers, wishlist rankings, Steam chatter & more.)

So what trends or possibilities can we divine from what’s hot up there right now? Let’s take a look: