Discovery
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Documents about Discovery
How Do You Get 'More..' Recommendations on Steam?
The Steam algorithm’s "More Like This" section serves as a significant, albeit largely uncontrollable, driver of game discovery.
- The 'More Like This' section on Steam is a byproduct of overall game momentum rather than a direct marketing lever that can be reliably manipulated.
- Since a 2018 algorithm update, the 'More Like This' feature heavily prioritizes established, high-popularity blockbusters over unreleased titles.
- Traffic impact is heavily concentrated in the 'above the fold' Top 12 slots, while the 'See All' list provides only minor discovery benefits.
Why TikTok Matters for Game Discovery
TikTok has emerged as a potent tool for video game discovery, capable of driving significant viral interest for titles with strong visual or narrative hooks.
- TikTok serves as a high-impact discovery engine for younger audiences, evidenced by a single viral video for 'Before Your Eyes' reaching 1.6 million views and driving a direct spike in Steam followers and sales.
- Launching games between 6:00 AM and 10:00 AM Pacific Time maximizes sales velocity by capturing peak evening engagement in Europe followed immediately by North American prime-time.
- High initial sales velocity is critical for securing visibility on Steam’s algorithmic charts, such as the 'New and Trending' section.
Discount Strategy: Your Key Post-Launch Game Discovery Tool
Strategic discounting serves as a critical, often under-optimized tool for post-launch game discovery and revenue maintenance.
- Strategic discounting is a primary tool for post-launch discovery, acting as a mechanism to trigger platform algorithms like Steam’s wishlist notification system to re-engage potential buyers.
- Developers should move away from conservative pricing and adopt a methodical, consistent discount cadence across all platforms to maximize visibility and extend a game's commercial lifecycle.
- Best practices for discount management include participating in every available sale opportunity and utilizing a gradual increase in discount depth over time to avoid erratic pricing.
How to Drastically Increase Your Game’s Daily Wishlist Rate
The primary objective is to demonstrate how analytical, evidence-based optimization of a Steam store page can significantly increase daily wishlist acquisition without relying on external promotional efforts like social media or influencer campaigns.
- Optimizing Steam page assets—specifically capsule art and tags—can significantly increase daily wishlist rates without external promotion, as demonstrated by a developer who grew daily wishlists from 5 to 20.
- Replacing screenshot-based capsule art with high-quality, professional illustrations of game characters or tools signals quality to shoppers and improves discovery through the Steam Discovery Queue.
- Effective Steam tagging requires a hybrid strategy: use the first five tags for highly relevant, low-competition descriptors, and use tags 6–10 to target broader, high-traffic categories like 'Strategy' or 'Simulation'.
Steam Gets 'Experimental' with Discovery
The primary purpose of this analysis is to evaluate recent developments in video game discovery, specifically focusing on Valve’s experimental updates to the Steam store and broader industry trends regarding player engagement metrics.
- Valve has introduced 63 new Steam store categories—consisting of 48 genres, 8 themes, and 7 player modes—to improve game discovery through granular, niche-specific landing pages.
- Titles launching directly into subscription services like Xbox Game Pass demonstrate substantially higher player counts compared to those released via traditional storefront models.
- The cessation of third-party tracking services like GamStat has created significant limitations in accurately measuring player acquisition metrics across PlayStation and Xbox platforms.
Discovery Takeaways From the New PlayStation 5 Store
The launch of the PlayStation 5 store provides a critical case study in console-based game discovery and platform navigation.
- U.S. consumer spending on video games reached $11.2 billion in Q3 2020, marking a 24% year-over-year increase driven by mobile, subscriptions, and hardware.
- The PlayStation 5 store prioritizes human-curated editorial content over algorithmic recommendations, making developer visibility heavily dependent on platform-controlled placement.
- Organic discovery mechanisms like 'best-selling' charts are currently underutilized in the PlayStation 5 store layout, limiting the natural discovery of smaller titles.
Microsoft's Rival Console Experiments & Discovery
Microsoft’s strategy regarding the release of its first-party titles on rival platforms, particularly the Nintendo Switch, appears to have been an experimental effort to extend the Xbox ecosystem beyond its own hardware.
- Microsoft abandoned its strategy of porting first-party titles to rival consoles like the Nintendo Switch by late 2020 due to fragmented user experiences and limited technical integration.
- Microsoft’s current platform strategy prioritizes the growth of the Game Pass subscription model over deep, cross-platform integration on competing hardware.
- Future third-party hardware support from Microsoft is contingent on the ability to implement a full, native Xbox ecosystem, including Game Pass and Xbox Live services.
Switch Game Discovery: Look on the Bright Side?
The Nintendo Switch remains a viable and potentially lucrative platform for independent developers, despite broader industry concerns regarding market saturation.
- The Nintendo Switch offers a more manageable competitive environment than Steam, with 30 to 40 weekly eShop releases compared to 180 to 200 on PC.
- Success on the Switch is primarily driven by high-quality, genre-specific titles, such as 2D Metroidvanias, that secure positive critical reception.
- Discounting is a vital discovery tool on the Switch, with recent platform updates highlighting sale duration and Nintendo Gold Points incentivizing purchases without necessarily cannibalizing full-price revenue.
Estimating Platform Revenues: A Discovery Conundrum
Predicting revenue distribution across various gaming platforms remains a complex challenge for developers and publishers.
- Revenue projections should move away from generic industry benchmarks in favor of a base-and-modifier model that adjusts expected earnings based on platform-specific audience alignment and store features.
- Platform performance is highly variable, as evidenced by 'The Gardens Between,' which saw disparate results across Steam, Nintendo Switch, and iOS despite being the same title.
- Strategic partnerships, such as inclusion in subscription services like Xbox Game Pass, act as significant revenue modifiers that disrupt standard sales-based performance expectations.
Game Discovery Now Is Now the GameDiscoverCo Newsletter
The transition of the Game Discovery Now newsletter into the newly founded GameDiscoverCo marks a strategic shift toward a dedicated research and advisory agency focused on the video game industry.
- Simon Carless has transitioned the Game Discovery Now newsletter into GameDiscoverCo, a new research and advisory agency focused on premium PC and console game discovery.
- GameDiscoverCo is launching a paid subscription tier that provides access to 'labs-style' mini-dashboards for interactive market metrics.
- Data analyst Lars Doucet is collaborating with the agency to develop the analytical tools and data-driven context for the new subscription service.
Your Complete Game Discovery Primer
This primer serves as a curated repository of strategic insights regarding video game discoverability and commercial performance in the 2020s.
- Between 50% and 70% of all games fail to exceed 1,000 lifetime sales, highlighting the extreme difficulty of achieving commercial success in the current market.
- Steam wishlists serve as the primary metric for predicting first-week sales performance and are essential for gauging a title's commercial potential.
- Developers frequently undermine their own success by undervaluing games during the initial pricing phase and failing to build a dedicated fanbase before launch.
Mobile Game Discovery: Why It's Tricky for Indies
The mobile gaming market presents significant, often prohibitive challenges for small and medium-sized independent studios, primarily due to the distinct differences in user acquisition and monetization compared to the PC and console sectors.
- The mobile market's 'winner-takes-all' dynamic forces independent developers to compete with large-scale publishers who possess superior data-driven monetization expertise and capital.
- Success in free-to-play mobile gaming is heavily dependent on paid user acquisition and cross-promotion, which often exceed the financial resources of smaller studios.
- Premium mobile titles face a price ceiling typically capped at $9.99, necessitating massive sales volumes that are rarely achievable for independent developers.