Discord: a new public 'hot spot' for game discovery?

Will Discord be the new Reddit for SEO video game discovery? If those series of words just made the brains ooze out of your nose and ears, then maybe this isn't the podcast for you. If those series of words just made your brain explode in lots of good, but curious, but terrified, but hopeful ways, then I think you're in the right place. I am Chris Plant, co-host of Game Discover Co-Show, a show all about game discoverability, helping us make sense of video game industry that seems to make less sense by the day. And I am joined, as always, by my brilliant co-host, Simon Carless. How you doing today, Simon?
I'm doing great. It's also funny you started with that because that particular word salad was my attempt to do a title for this podcast, which will almost certainly be edited by Chris to be more intelligible by the time we put this out. But is nonetheless a series of words we are going to discuss. So, I appreciate I appreciate you putting it up front.

We might keep it as is because it is so chaotic and yet so real. I mean, let's just start right with this story because it is
[sighs]
Simon, sometimes a story comes across our desks that uh fills me with like an existential dread combined with a nightmarish anxiety. And that's this story. And maybe it doesn't need to. Maybe it doesn't need to. But here's what's happening. Uh there's an important visibility change on Discord, and this will allow search engines to index discoverable servers, which is like the most public spaces on Discord, places with over 1,000 members uh that And here's a caveat, that their admin that the administrators choose to list.
Yep.
In certain countries. So, first, we'll get into like what this actually is, but what is it What is going to be discoverable? What will be parseable? And why is the US an

to that caveat that I just expressed?
Yeah, I mean I mean this is the kind of thing that fills me with a little dread as well because I haven't been paying attention to what I've been saying on what Discords. And so I think everyone has a little like what what did I say 2 and 1/2 years ago on a Discord I don't go to very often that might now be you know available on Google results. So I think that's sort of the slight I mean there's many levels of existential dread I'm sure but that's the that's the personal one that I had. And yes so the important thing to know here is you can personally opt out and it looks like in certain countries Discord has just decided like if your account is marked as being in the EU, UK, Canada, Brazil, Australia they've just decided they don't want to mess with the privacy authorities there. So as default anyone who is geographically marked in those countries even though you're in those servers your messages will not be indexed for search engines. But yeah if you're in yeah if if you're in the US and you've been in one of these servers and it's important to know I had to do a little research into this. There is if you go to Discord's website

there is like a discovery index of of the the public Discords you can just look at. So if you're worried about something just go just go to that Discord page and be like oh is this server in here? And if it's if it's not then your information is probably not going to go out all over the internet. But yeah I think I mean the reason this is potentially exciting I think especially for game companies is there's a lot of useful information on those Discord servers that is not been well exposed. Like let's say you want to know you know there's a bunch of fans on a Discord and they have opinions about certain feature like in theory these will now be exposed on Google and people will know it's come from your Discord so they'll come to your Discord to check it out. So there's all kinds of potential upsides here but it's also weird.
Yes. I can say in a very dark way this is like a monkey's paw curling and giving me my wish because when I was at Polygon a thing that we talked about constantly was the real link exchange, the real

social media had become text messages in Discord. That that's where incoming traffic was and it was basically black boxes. And we were long past the era of, you know, being able to point to a blog post or a social media post or a Reddit subreddit and and then, you know, kind of like target that to get more audience. Like suddenly, you just didn't have it. So, I get the appeal here. I get why people want to be able to see into these rooms. I also Yeah, have the deeply personal anxiety. I also just don't I don't know. We talked in the the kickoff here of like this being part of a SEO game discovery. But SEO is this shrinking market compared to AI search. And I'm curious if the goal here is for Discord to just be more readily scrapeable for AI. Is that part of what's going on here?
I mean, partially. I don't think the other thing that's happening interestingly is I think Discord might

see an opportunity because as you might know right now, Reddit is getting increasingly annoyed with people scraping them for AI. And I believe their share price went down a lot because people are like, "Well, you know, why is So so Reddit is locking down more right now." And so, you know, you're going to have to log on to read a hub. I mean, I guess you have to log on to Discord to to I I to grab to grab more information at least. I mean, I think Um the other thing is Discord has been quietly okay with people scraping its Discords for a while. So, the argument would be uh and I I believe I've even been told like in some cases Discord will refer you to like third party companies if you're kind of like, "I want to get Discord analysis." And they're kind of like, "Well, you know, we don't do that, but go speak to some of these people." So, I think it's sort of been something where it's this weird thing where it's a semi-permeable membrane, right? It's sort it's sort of for Reddit, but it's sort of not. And so, I think um yeah, I mean, it could be good. But, you know, I'm often the glass half full guy and I also think there's a bunch of stuff in here that I'm not going to be happy with like if someone did have an

argument with someone on a Discord like 2 years ago. I And then they're both in the US. I presume that argument is now going to be Google AI discoverable in a in a few weeks. And so that's potentially a little scary, right?
Yeah. You I'm going to disconnect my anxiety privacy chip for just a second cuz we should talk about the business side of this. In a best-case scenario, how is this helping with game discoverability? Is it Is it being able to know where your game is most likely to be talked about it? Is it learning more about the demographics of the people who are playing your games based off what servers they're in? Like what what's the opportunity?
Well, I mean I think part of it is, you know, a lot of people, you know, the classic joke is you always Google with Reddit added to your Google search term because you actually trust people on Reddit. I mean, I think there's an element of that. Like Discord users are probably highly trustable compared to whatever AI sloppy kind of stuff exists on the rest of the internet. So, um

Yeah, so I would personally, like if I'm looking to find out more information about a game, if I'm looking to find out what people who know a lot about the game think about a certain aspect of it, I would like I would like to know that without necessarily having to search around on the Discord for something that was mentioned like 2 and 1/2 years ago. So, I think there is a real I'm not sure it necessarily helps new games, to be clear. I'm not claiming lots of like new games will find that aren't don't have interest. They're going to find a lot more interest via this. But I think it does help. I think if you go look at the discoverable servers, a lot of the top ones are obviously video game related. So, I think it does help.
Yeah.
You know, the power worlds of this world, like it'll get more accurate information on that stuff out on the internet and more fans will get their their things kind of kind of discoverable. But there's so that's that's my two cents.
That that point about trustability is hilarious to me because like yeah, of course things are more trustable and they don't think anybody is listening. I I do wonder, we're doing a podcast right now, is this just one of many

areas that are going to be scraped in the coming years? Should we expect similar things happening in podcast and YouTube video transcripts and things that were not easily searchable but are these massive data and analytics. I mean, in a in the most cold way possible, um, you know, pools.
Yeah, absolutely. And I think uh Four Four Media has done some stories about this recently. They they did one, I think, a few weeks or months ago about someone was just going to scrape all the Zoom meetings they could possibly find. And it was including including meetings that were not really public. Uh but just just had a a public and a flag them or someone had posted them somewhere that they ended up getting into the public internet. So, it does feel a little bit like some of the unintended conferences unintended consequences of this uh like may occur. But, I'd also say that I think Discord is trying to do this in a sort of they're not just like, "Ha, it happened." They're giving people a heads-up and they're and they're being it very clear where you need to opt out.

And uh looks like they're just opting entire countries out, but I think the countries aren't going to be cool with it. So, um I'm I'm I'm not sure this is good. But, I I think it's it's at least being handled in a sensible non-cowboyish manner.
Yes.
Well, I want to talk about something that's more of uh free-range organic version of game discoverability, which is uh the Triple I Initiative's most recent showcase. We finally have some numbers on how this is done. And to catch folks up who weren't paying attention, the Triple I uh Initiative, it is I would say the largest of the indie showcases. I typically takes place during the spring and this year, and correct me if I'm wrong, was the first time that they doubled up. That we got a double dip in the fall in October. And there was questions of like, "How will that go?" There are so many thing festivals and streaming opportunities. How how did it go, Simon? What what did

we learn?
Yeah, so I I wrote an article about this last week cuz I was talking to someone about this and I don't generally write like, "This thing didn't go quite as well." articles, but I sort of made an exception for this and it did fine. But previously I I I'd run an article on like how all the showcases doing and it turns out the two triple I's that had happened so far had done like really well. They were almost up to Jeff Keighley level showcases in terms of the median amount of wish lists that were gained and that that's kind of quite an exception. But it turns out like running this one in October, you know, we think it's a combination of I'm not sure it got a ton of Steam featuring. It's so busy in October and also I think they just didn't have as many hot games to bank, you know, like a lot of the reason those previous showcases did good is they had a ton of reveals and reveals always do better incrementally than than other titles. So in the end and this is including some games that have released and they don't really add many wish lists at all, it did a median of about 15,000 7-day Steam

wish list increase, but that's sort of about a quarter of what the two spring ones have done. So I just think that's interesting. And maybe not unexpected, but I don't I don't know what people were expecting, right?
Yeah, I'm very curious what expectations were because it really couldn't pick a busier time. And I get that there is this weirdness going on right now. If you don't want to be anywhere near Grand Theft Auto, but at the same time that means you're near Steam Next Fest and you're near all of the other literally everything else that's being released in the fall. It just is a hard time to hear about new games when you already have too much stuff to play. Um that said, you know, you have to start making inroads somewhere. I am curious if we would see this move to closer to the Keighleys um in future years if they're doubling up. It seems like more of the opportunity. December is a slower time anyway. It's counter programming. Um but either way,

I'm I'm glad it didn't bomb. I guess what I would say. Like it still did the job. Uh it's just nothing compared to like the astronomical success.
And And worth noting I think, you know, the 15,000 median off a whole over a whole bunch of games. Like, that's similar to what a bunch of other showcases do uh normally. So, so, it's really But, then I I think I did look at some of those other showcases, their October versions, and they were kind of a third of what they were in the in the June timeframe. So, I think it just does show that I think there's a limit on some on some of these showcases. And I do think, although you can do them at any time of year, people do get dialed in to some timings for this, you know, June in particular. So, people are more likely to look uh in the in the June timeframe, I think, cuz they're all clustered, and it used to be E3.
I also could be wrong, and uh people can add a correction in the comments if I am, but I think 15,000 is more than the bump that you get for winning the IGF Award Grand Prize at this point. So,
Yeah.

it's still pretty good. It still still helps. Uh let's talk about another interesting thing that is going on in the game space. The Talos Is it Talos or Talos?
I say Talos, but I I've never been uh
Which is more right?
Yeah.
to change. Uh we're going to go with the Talos Principle 2 has increased its default price from $30 to $40. Uh and they specifically said in the blog post on Steam about this, "The cost of developing and supporting games has continued to rise significantly." Now, first, we'll get into that statement and the decision to do this. But, how often do devs raise their prices like this?
Yeah, it's a good question. Like, devs definitely do raise their prices, especially if they're going from early access to uh 1.0. They will release They will maybe sometimes once or twice within early access, they'll raise their prices, often by $5 at a time, though. And so, and so, this one was just after the release of the game. Um the thing about this, which is interesting, is

that um in general, it actually kind of doesn't matter, because your early adopters have bought your game at whatever the price is. I- If you're raising it by five or 10 bucks, a lot of the time everyone else is buying it on um you know, on discount. So in fact in fact all the feedback I've seen from people who changed their prices is nobody really minds. But I just think it's it's it's interesting and rare to see that a change relatively soon after launch for a game that's sort of you know $30 and it's quite quite a meaty game. So I thought you know I don't quite know this is Devolver I think I don't quite know Devolver's exact reasoning for this but maybe they were kind of like well we did it cheaper and it actually we would have made more money if it was 40 bucks. So we're just going to put it to 40 which is going to be a better a better base for discounts I guess.
I I assume there's a way for calculating this but how does one calculate the possibility of fewer sales because of

the higher price versus a possibility of more money gained by a price increase?
I hate pricing is my main takeaway [laughter] from this and whatever what what whatever anyone asks me about pricing I'm very like how long is a piece of string because the answer is it's really difficult to know.
[laughter]
I I I I I always used to say price stuff five bucks more than you think you should price it for but the problem with that nowadays is there's a ton of stuff coming in at five to $15 that is both really good and also is not two hours long like there's a bunch of these $12 games that have got like a good 10 or 20 hours in them. So so it's no longer clear to me what's going on. I think in hindsight The Talos Principle was probably like well listen we spent a lot of money and time on this it needs to be a $40 game even if people play it and buy it $15 or $20 later. And I and I suspect I suspect that's what you should do if your game is more meaty

but it's very difficult right?
We need to bring in the Jason Rohrer approach. Wasn't it Rohrer who just kept increasing the price of his game never put it on sale? I think I can't wait to see somebody try that approach one more time.
there's definitely some people like famously Factorio has never been on sale and also RimWorld has never been on sale more than 20% ever. So, there were there there was a couple of games out there that just have a niche and they sell really well where they're just like, "Eff it, we're never never discounting it. We're never discounting it significantly." And it works for them, but they're special special flowers.
If it works for Nintendo, it can work for you, too, as long as your games are basically good enough to be on Nintendo.
Yes.
there the only other thing that I want to point out here is is the reasoning, because that feels a little more unusual, and I'm curious if I'm right on that. To actually say, "Hey, it is more and more expensive to just make games and to support games, and we need to pass along that price to you a little bit." It Am I right that that's

an aberration?
That's pretty rare. That's one of the main reasons, you know, I put this as a small item in the newsletter last week, and that's one of the reasons I did that, cuz I've very rarely, if ever, seen people seen people say that. It's quite Oh, I mean, Devolver is known for being kind of quite an honest company. It's quite sort of an honest thing to say. Uh so, yeah, and I don't know how the people will respond to this. But basically, I think the other way to do this is to Well, there's two other ways to do this. One is to not mention it at all. And I actually think that might have been fine. And and and the other way to do it is just say, "Hey, we've just decided to do this." And sort of not not give a reason. And that probably would have been okay as well, but I think I think what Devolver is really saying is um this game cost quite a lot of money to make. I'm not really sure we're making it back right now, so we need to make it a little bit more expensive. That's sort of sort of my read on how they've how they've said that, but I don't know.
I'm curious for people who listen to this show what the general vibe is around the need for price increases, because we've obviously seen like consoles and PCs have the price hikes

over the last couple years. And now, what used to be like shocking, you know, like a barn burner on Kotaku and GameSpot and Polygon, is like, "Yeah, we actually kind of expect more price increases to come, right? Who knows what the next gen is going to cost." And well, it's not directly tied to RAM and materials in the same way. There's no secret that like the cost of living is increasing for everybody, including the people who make these games, and the cost of their hardware, like everything is becoming more expensive. And I'm just curious how people will balance their personal need to increase prices cuz they want to get more money to pay for their bills with the reality that the customer also is experiencing, you know, the changes in the economy, which means they're less likely to spend cash. So, like one side is looking to increase the cost of a game, and the other is looking for cheaper and cheaper things. And that just seems bad. I realize that's not a question. It's really just

It just seems bad.
Yeah, yeah, you're you're just sort of calling out to the void here. So, yeah.
Yeah.
What what What I would say is I think this particular case, like if you told me The Talos Principle 2 was 40 bucks, it's a pretty complicated first-person puzzle game with really nice art. I would've been sure. So, in this case, I feel like this is almost like a correction for maybe a semi error they made when they put it out. This totally I would not have blinked an eye if this had been 40 at launch. I think it gets more controversial if you're going from like 10 to 20 or 60 to 70. So, so, yeah. I think I think that makes sense.
It also makes me misunderstand your game sometimes in a weird way. Like when I hear a $40 game, I think of double-A games. When I hear a $30 game, I think of a smaller game. Um anyway, I want to talk about something that really just makes my brain swirl into a massive confusion, so much so that you're going to have to walk me through this. Roblox's latest financials are out. And here me, not an

economist, here's my read. A lot of numbers are down, but revenue number is up. What does that mean?
Yeah, I mean, Roblox is still doing pretty well as a company. It's just the Roblox is publicly traded, and people want to see different stuff from publicly traded companies cuz it's true. Like in general, uh you know, and there's a guy there's a guy Ben Ben Schrail who I who I done some, um you know, quoting for me in the newsletter on this, but it was sort of noting, you know, that their Q3 last year was a huge outlier cuz they had like Grow Garden in it and Grow Garden was like a massive like like kiddie kiddie craze. Uh and it was before I think they'd started doing more of their age um restriction stuff which has affected, you know, they were being probably too permissive on who could play it and not checking age. So, I think the combination of those two things has changed their numbers, but they're still having 138 million daily active users.

That number is pretty crazy. I mean, you know, think how many people there are in the world. 138 million is is a decent chunk of that. Uh so, um but yeah, I but but their revenue is still going up, but the problem they have I think is that their share shareholders expect more. So, their So, their share price has been going down and they're under some pressure I think to uh grow again, especially on the higher end, which is why their latest financials aggressively played up AI and getting to a an older audience. Like so aggressively played up AI that I think it's contributing to the AI the generalized AI panic in the industry right now, but you know.
Yeah, it feels like break glass in case of emergency is like the AI button in many a C-suites right now of like that's what the market wants us to hit. We'll smash it even if it doesn't make sense. And I do not know about that. But it has a different threat that I want to talk about and that is Grand Theft Auto.

Maybe it isn't a threat. I want to get your read on this. It's rare that a I only play one game a year video game comes out, a brand new one. And specifically like all-encompassing borderline forever game. And I know GTA Online is like not even out yet. Though, GTA 6 might bring people back even to GTA 5 online. Probably not. Are Roblox and Fortnite and the other kind of forever games, should they be expecting a dip over the next few months?
I mean, I would normally say no, cuz most of the answers, almost all the answers to will this game cause interest in my game to dip are no, it won't. And far too many people are like OMG. Uh, you know, my completely unrelated game is going to be killed by this by this game that's coming out because some people want to play it. So, in all in general, almost all was no. And and I would say for Roblox, it does have a young audience who presumably, if their parents are being upstanding citizens,

should not be allowed to play GTA 6.
[laughter]
Um, but uh, you know, but
Big game.
Yeah. [laughter] Who really knows? Uh, but yeah, I mean, I mean, the answer is I we haven't had a game as big as GTA 6 launch in a very, very long time. Probably, I mean, was GTA 5 like the the last most anticipated game of this size? I don't know.
So.
So, so, I mean, I think I think the answer is we don't know. We we will be monitoring it. Everyone will better see, you know, we'll we'll better see CCUs on Steam and we have some DAU estimates on consoles. So, we we will try to see if any of that takes a hit. In general, what I'd say is only very related things tend tend to take a hit. When I've done this before, I may have mentioned this before, like let's say a medieval farming sim comes out, it's a strategy game. The as far as we've seen, the only other stuff that takes CCU hits is other medieval farming games. It really is that specific, even if that game is huge. But I don't but I don't I don't necessarily know with with with GTA 6, I

guess.
Uh, one last question on the Roblox adult. The stock, as you mentioned earlier, not doing so hot. It has fallen 50% from where it started this year. $87 on January 16th, 43 this morning when I checked.
Yeah.
Uh, pretty significant. They've been doing the AI button. They've been smashing it for a while now. And the plane doesn't seem to be, you know, going in a different direction. What What is What should we expect here? Like is is this more of like a finding its norm after a bit of a peak for for 2025 or could it keep dipping?
Yeah, I'm just looking at its share price all the way back. I don't know if it ever had any splits, but it looks like it started out as high as 130 and it's been in the kind of it's basically back to where it was for most of the last 3 years, but it just had a big a big bump going into

like basically when it had its crazy Q3 numbers basically. So So yeah, so I don't know. It seems to be back to where it was. I don't think I think that the mashing the AI button to get your share price to go up thing is reaching the end of its tether. We're seeing some other big companies like Intel having having issues around this. I think there's now significant nervousness about this whole run-up. So yeah, so I think Roblox is fine. I mean again, just to point out, Roblox's free cash flow, which is really what I consider to be their profit in many ways, is good. That they have cash flow. Like they get cash flow in every every quarter. So they're So they're in no danger of like going out of business, but you know, they maybe in danger of of not you know, their market cap right now $31 billion. Pretty high market cap, right? If you wanted to buy a Roblox, you'd have to be off the open market, you'd have to be offering about 40 billion, I think. So you know, so so the question is is that is that market cap sustainable?

Is it actually going to be less at some point?
Yeah. Well, it's time to talk about video games.
[laughter]
After talking about business all that, I want to talk about what's going on on Steam. What happened last week? What's happening this week? Simon, tell me about last week. What blew up and what maybe didn't do as hot as people would have hoped.
Yeah, so last week Phantom Blade Zero was sort of the gimme. We were pretty convinced that was going to do well. Honestly, that probably did better than a lot of people are expecting. I think we had it at 670,000 concurrent on Steam as of last Friday. And you know, that's a very high number. That's within I think the top 20 all time for concurrent on Steam. It is very driven by China. It's worth noting. I was talking to someone about this. I think we think that China is probably 80% of the concurrent on this on this game. This shouldn't be unexpected. It's a you know, it's a it's a Wuxia game or whatever. It's Black Myth adjacent.

Black Myth was this huge as well. It's the first really big AAA title since Black Myth. But you know, I think it's yeah, it's doing decently. I mean honestly, I think if if China if you couldn't see China in there, it would still be probably a 100,000 CCU game in the in the other countries. And so that's still pretty darn good. That would be number one like most weeks. So it is being played as well. I hear it's good. I hear it's quite linear. Someone was comparing it to God of War 2018, I think, which is kind of interesting. Yeah, but I've heard it strongly recommended in reviews. So I think it is going to have a pretty nice long tail as well.
Nice. Anything else pop up?
Yeah, I mean so a couple more. Actually, the next two I'm planning I'm planning to do. One of them may be shipping with this with this podcast in the newsletter. But there's there's both probably stolen and crack. Probably stolen is a Cyberpunk Shopkeeper Sim, which had tremendously high high concurrent users for a while. We've been tracking it in in for the demo. We've been tracking concurrent for

it for the demo around 20,000. And we were kind of like, well, this seems a bit weird. There was even someone in our Discord being like, what's really going on here? And as we know from some of our recent research, we we would presume that the final CCU for a launch game would be like three or four X its demo CCU. And it turns out in this case it's like six X. This game's gone up to 125,000 CCU, which for a 2D Sim Shopkeeper Sim is crazy good. So I think what's really happened here is it's a really good theme and really well executed. But it just is one of those battle royale style crazy high retention. I think average hours played are very high for this game, and people are really really recommending it and grinding on it heavily, and it's apparently just exceptionally good. So, I think that's really interesting. Congratulations to Congratulations to the dev and tiny build the publisher cuz it really seems to have been a a big success story. So, we're going to have a newsletter on that, whether that be probably probably next week or or or this week I'm working on it. And then the other one uh crack

is this game made by a solo dev, uh which is all about cracking an egg, and you might be like, "Oh my god, this is some Roblox trash." But actually no, it's a really fun It's It's It's a really funny game about you and your buddies uh teaming up to crack an egg. Uh and um and you're in kind of an industrial setup, and you have like little vehicles you can drive around, and you're like mining mining the egg, and it's really cute. And so, I I I I have an interview with that dev that I already did, and will be in the newsletter shortly. And I think it's it's really interesting, and it's a great example of uh you know, maybe the future of popular games is stuff like this. It's It's like a single dev. It didn't take him particularly long last than less than a year. People love it. Um it's not a particularly long game, I don't think, but it's definitely worth the whatever it is, eight bucks or so I think it costs. So, I think we're going to see more and more titles like this.
Yes, I had not seen this game, and holy moly, what a terrifying thing. Merging in the best way. Uh it looks like merging Friends Lab with idle games in

some way. I don't think it actually Well, I don't know what it is, but it looks good. Um it also looks like a game that Peter Molyneux would have promised at some point, and maybe even tried to make. I think he did make a game about breaking a box.
Yeah, yeah, he's he's he's he was a famous for for famous box breaker. But yeah, I I think um yeah, it's it's this thing it's got it's got a catchy premise behind it, but it's also really well made. Like um the dev is working under a pseudonym, but did tell me that he's made lot This is not a first dev game, I could tell. So, I think I think I I I I think this is I I I think this is sort of one of the interesting things you'll see. There's plenty of people just around the industry now who can do this stuff just mainly on their own. And so I think if you're smart you can you can do that and that's what that person has done. So, yeah.
I love it. I love it. Um I do want to talk about next week but first I just want to put a little lantern on something. We talked about Queen's Domain last week which is the kind of spiritual successor to King's Field, the series that came before Dark Souls from FromSoftware. This is made by maybe a

solo dev by at least a small team. Um and I just want to put a a little lantern on it because I'm curious how it does over the next month. It had we think like pretty modest expectations going into it but I'm curious if a word of mouth hit can happen for a single player RPG in the year 2026 or 2027. Um so
Yeah, I think if I I I think if the words FromSoftware involved in that the reason this is obviously very inspired by early FromSoftware games then yes. And what I saw is when we ran it on Friday it was actually only 1 2 3 it was like number six in our in our in in in in in in our countdown. We were even further down like number eight or nine and it had 2500 CCU and it's now up to 7200 CCU and it is going up every day. So uh it it it's already got some kind of indication there. You know, I think this is going to be I don't know how much of a sleeper hit but I think you know, this might get to 10K CCU. It'll certainly

uh end up selling I think hundreds of thousands of units at that point. I mean maybe low hundred not high hundreds of thousands but still for uh for a pretty small game. I think it is um it and I heard it actually it's got it's very difficult. It has a very high barrier to entry but that's what you want with games like that. So I guess everyone is fine with that, right?
Yeah. I screamed at it for 15 minutes half hour, washed away for 3 days and then was like damn I need to play it again. Went back and I think I put like 15 hours into it. Like it's just one of those games. Uh let's talk about this week. What do we have? I don't even know. I'm looking at this week and I increased my my Steam game count to 250 and I'm still looking at this week and there is nothing that I see that I'm like, "Oh, that's obviously that's the big game that's going to pop this week."
Yeah, I mean the stuff I have is we have we have all all age Chronicles which is an MMO and I think an Asian MMO which did do quite well in Next

Fest. I don't know how much how big its budget was. And then we have we have Cozy Game Restoration which is um like a cleaning restoring job sim. It's it's it's a lot like the the other one that came out recently where you're fixing old consoles. It's got lots of classic zeros nostalgia in it. And then there's like Loftia which is an online life sim. There's Find the Needle which is one of the many needle in a haystack incremental games. And then this is medieval builder I think or Country of Fortune that has a has has has a bunch of which this is well. But it's a bit of a mixed week and I I feel like yeah, I feel like people are running down the clock here before they want to stop releasing and so this is sort of yeah, this is this is a week that's a bit like that.
Yes, I look at this week and next week and I see a bunch of fearless developers who are putting a whole bunch of like smaller projects out and I I imagine hoping for the best. I just saw that one of my most anticipated games of the year, Dig Dig Dino, is coming out on November 18th.

Really really daring to approach the the behemoth. Okay, let's start to wrap things up. What should be people be checking out on Game What should people be checking out on Game Discovery Co Plus and Pro this week?
Yeah, yeah, good question. I mean we're still we're still working on our publisher. I mentioned last week we we we we did a redesign of our publisher pages so it actually has more more useful information in it. I actually think that redesign partly works for people on on basic as as well as pro so that's good. We're sort of mixing things up. We've changed some of the visualizations so so that's something you can check out. We do have, you know, median gross revenue, average gross revenue in there for publishers, not just the stuff we had before. Um, you know, the the other stuff we're working on we're still working on some of our our trends stuff. So, I I got we got some early results back from from our from our from our trends research. So, we're trying trying to trying to classify certain micro

genres of game. And and all I can say is it's interesting so far, but we're actually trying to do things like we're also trying to look at screenshots and compare screenshots for different games and see if we can if we can work out they're similar cuz they have similar screenshots as well as looking at text data. So, this is sort of an experimental area for us and so that's something we're working on. Uh, we we also shipped I can't remember if I talked about this last week. I think I should talked about it a little bit, but we also shipped all the changes to our PlayStation Plus and Xbox Game Pass um uh, estimates for for our pro subscribers uh, because last time um, we we were sort of overestimating paid and underestimating Game Pass a little bit for some arcane reason. So, yeah. So, I'd say I'd say a lot of bits and pieces, but definitely the publisher stuff has shipped if people want to look at it and it's going to be improved.
Nice. I love it. Normally, this would be where we like wrap the show up with my like surprise question of the week, but I want to do something a little bit different this week, which is I'm going to put a question to you for you to chew

on and then report back on. Really probably in like early January. But, I would love to know what impact, if any, like top 10 lists have on a game sales. If you show up as number one or if you show up in the top 10 across most of the major publications, uh, how does that impact? If you show up in the mainstream publications, you're in gift guides or something, how does that impact? Cuz I really don't know. A question that I have was like the press that it gives me anxiety is like who are the tastemakers? Like what are the things that are influencing these sales uh, going into December? Is it streamer recommendations? I don't know. Uh, but it is end of the year season and I know it matters to a lot of people to be on these list. One, because of the prestige, but two, you know, the sales don't hurt.
Yeah, yeah, no, I'll I'll think that over. And I think it is interesting and and sometimes difficult to work that out, but you know, I think I think it

does it does matter specially for certain types of games. So, I'll try and do some digging on that.
I love it. Well, let us wrap things up. You listener have been listening to another episode of the Game Discovery Co show. Thank you so much for doing that. If you enjoy the show, obviously, you should go check out the Game Discovery Co newsletter and all of the amazing analytic tools and everything else through Game Discovery Co. You can also go check out my show Post Games where I interview people about video games. Think like NPR but video games. You're you're basically there. And you can always just share this show with a friend. That is a great way to keep this show going. That is it. I am Chris Plant and Simon, as always, please take us out.
Yeah, I'm Simon Colas. Thanks for listening and we'll catch you next time. Bye.