The Discovery Problem | Design Club

[music]
Good time zone internet. Hello and welcome to Design Club Live, the only game design show on the internet that promises to focus for like a crisp half hour today. I am your humble host Will, joined as always by my pal Jeff, and today by a new face. But first, uh Jeff, say hi to the people.
Hi to the people. Hey everybody, I am Jeffrey Zatkoff, the studio director of Extra Credits and Extra History. And more importantly for this longtime game designer, uh Will and I have a joke that uh if I say it but bad old things like zombies appear, but I've been devving professionally since '97. And
I just turn I just turn into dust and blow away in the wind.
Absolutely. But we are joined by a special guest today, uh Chris. Chris, if you could introduce yourself, please.
Yeah, yeah, thank you. Uh can we do a high five real quick?

Yeah, it works. Uh hey, I'm Chris Zukowski. I uh run a blog called How to Market a Game. And there that's it. It's a it's an old uh school blog, kids. Kids People used to write, and uh that's I still do it. I I That's just what I do is I write. So how to marketagame.com/free, I publish a weekly newsletter cuz newsletters are also still cool. Um and all I do is I study the Steam marketplace. Not not uh mobile, not consoles. I just study the Steam marketplace cuz a lot of indies really only find their success on Steam. And so I just write a weekly blog about how indie devs uh make and market their games and go on Steam. I don't cover the dev side really for the most part. Uh and it's mostly just how do you how do you go viral? How do you get wishlists? How do you sell your game? How do you do well and what's doing well and what's not doing well. Uh so that's everything I do. So I'm here just to answer your questions, everybody. Thank you so much for uh being down in the audience.

Yeah, cool. Um first off, if you remember Zanga as a blog, uh take your medicine um because just take it. Take your painkillers. Take take your take your daily aspirin. Just take your meds. Um I I now have
It is one of those things. And by the way, Chris came in Chris and I have probably like walked past each other at GDC and other things numerous times. But Chris um you were recommended in to me by Eric. Eric has been on recently um cuz we were doing a little bit of dev preview with them for Without a Hitch.
That's right.
And then um actually, were you involved at all with that?
I was not. There was not Well, I did play He he talked about playtesting. I did do a playtest with Eric. Eric was like, "Do you want to playtest the game?" So, I playtested it. So, that was the extent of my involvement, but um
Got you.
But I do know Eric. Eric's a great guy, so cool. It's a great episode.
And then we also had um oh, well, why am I forgetting their name? The um
Walkaround?
Walkaround people. Um which was a ton of fun. So, we've been

doing the things, but today we're going to talk about one of the things that are near and dear to my heart, which is game discovery. And game discovery has been a problem for a while. Like back when I used to run E3 from '05 to 2015 or '16, every year at GDC I'd go to a data talk, and one of the points I'd talk about was how many games were coming out each year. And I had this cool graph that basically went higher and higher and higher, and people would look at it and say, "Oh, wait. That was just console. Now, let me add Steam. Now, let me add mobile." And you'd see this line just going up, and the quantity of games coming out has been a huge industry shift, and it is continuing to do so. And one of the cool things for game players is that means, "Hey, cool. There's lots and lots of stuff to play." But one of the hard parts for the industry is if you're trying to make a living making games, and especially if you're not say AAA or S-tier, who have budgets, marketing budgets that equal their development

budgets, meaning that, you know, for a lot of the AAA and S-tier games that cost 120 to 150 million dollars to make, they'll spend roughly that same amount of money on TV and radio and magazine and all these other things. Not every group has that, especially if you're a small studio or an indie studio. And so, part of what you're competing with is not just there's a lot of games, and not just, "Hey, we're digital now, so Slay the Spire is still viable on Steam, or Into the Breach, or sorry, FTL, or
Any of those.
you know, the original Darkest Dungeon, or the original like all of these games going back, there is so much catalog you can get now, so it's not just the new stuff. It's if you're a small group putting out something, how do you even get noticed amongst this sea of what's coming out there? And it's a harder and harder problem.
Yeah. So, Chris, what when

do you feel like that's like the biggest hurdle, right? Like any like there are more tools than ever to make a game, right? And obviously that's that's what we're talking about. It's become easier and easier to like pick up a Unity dev kit, pick up a Unreal dev kit, and like fiddle around. There are asset marketplaces, there are tutorials, there's YouTube channels, there's everything. Do Do you feel like one of the hardest barriers to clear is, "I've made a good game, now I need to get noticed?"
Yeah, to a point. Um, it's hard to tell when it starts. Um, I actually I Okay, so I'm an optimist. I actually And so, the here's the thing is we like to put these scare numbers like, "Oh, 30,000 blah blah blah games are released every year." I here's the thing that I keeps me alive is I every day uh see games do very well made by very small teams. And so it is possible and I don't want to scare you all. Like it is totally possible and like I have a backlog for my blog of articles to write from small devs who have done well. And I can't even keep up with all the games

that have done well. And when you look at the sales charts of games that have released well, uh you know, hit games like schedule one did fantastic last year. And that was a small team like it was one dude.
[laughter]
One dude. Um and um so I would be more pessimistic if I weren't seeing success stories. And there aren't even um I don't even like to look at the top chart cuz those are like miracles that happen.
Yeah, right.
Um
Yeah.
There is a big middle class of games that do well on Steam quietly and I'll name them out and you're like I've never heard of that game. And that is like supporting a studio and you've never even heard of this game, but it just secretly does super well. Um so I think that it's
Actually, let me jump in there. One of the big things to talk about for that too is if you're a Bungie putting out the new Marathon, there's a certain level of investment you've put in, you know, say it's a hundred million dollar budget. And then you have to do a hundred million in marketing. That means before you're even breaking even, you need to clear two hundred million in sales.

If you're a team with four or five people that worked for a year or two, you know, the bar that you need to clear is significantly lower. And so while the discovery problem is hard, you also don't need to be the meteoric thing that shoots to the top of the charts, you need to do well enough.
And and And I think for the market that we're talking about, one of the things that is often easy to forget is that Steam is unique in that it is a user base who the install base that continually grows. Unlike consoles that reset every console generation, right? If you're making a Switch game, now you either have to make a Switch game which is perceived as less good than a Switch 2 game, or you have to make a Switch 2 game and deal with the less humongous install base for Switch 2. But for Steam, Steam's install base just keeps going. Very few people I feel like leave Steam.
No, they don't. And here's the other thing that's awesome about Steam. That's why I do Steam. I used to do mobile. Like I made a couple mobile games and I

was trying to market it and stuff. And the the the thing Steam is hardcore. [snorts] There is no hardcore audience than Steam. And and that's a good thing. So a lot of people will be like, "Oh man, it's going to you know, if we get too many games, it's going to be like the mobile market." Where the mobile market falls apart, you know, it's like just slop on there. The mobile market basically once Do you guys know that What do they call it? The Forever August Forever August or Forever September, I think they called it. It was when the new kids got into college and then they invaded the internet. This is how old I am. It's when the internet was new. And so the thing is like when mobile phones went super popular and everybody had a mobile phone, the casuals came in and they ruined the party. But there's always going to place where the really hardcore survive. The hardcore gamers. And that is Steam. And these people are absolutely crazy in the best I love them best way. They will throw money at games that they've never played. They actually did some analysis and they think about 50% of games have

never been played on the Steam If you take your typical Steam library, half the people have never These people are so hardcore, they will throw money at you and not even play your game. And Steam is that. And there's no hardcore place. And so the good thing is they're very passionate. They want games. They will seek you out if they like your game. You don't have to Like mobile, you have to spend millions on ads to get somebody who doesn't even really like games to like games and then like your game. Whereas Steam, you're just like, "I have this game. It's in the genre you like." They're like, "Give it to me. I will study you. I will learn who you are. I will hunt you down. I will buy your game. And so, Steam is There's got to be a home for the super hardcore crazy nut jobs, which I love. And that is Steam. And so, that is why I'm eternally optimistic about Steam is like people want games and these hardcore people will hunt down hardcore games that do awesome stuff. And so, I'm always like whenever there's like numbers being thrown around, I'm always just like, but people still love

to play video games and they will play these very obscure games and we'll go into some of these ones.
It's funny based on what you just said like I'm in a I am in multiple different Discords and Slacks. Almost every single one has a recommendations like one of the ones I'm in a lot of the people like Roguelikes so I'll get them. Almost never is it here's a mobile Roguelike. It's here's an obscure Steam game that is with this really cool thing. You should check it out like everything that surfaces to me except me not everything. I'd say 80% of the things I see end up being a Steam recommendation rather than a console, mobile, VR, you know, any of the different hardware groupings.
Yep.
Yeah.
So, that's interesting to me and maybe it is just because also that they're all digital purchases. Like the fact that it is easy to recommend.
I think so. And there's always going to be a hardcore audience. Like and I I wrote an article a while ago. Um, you know, um, knitters have

piles of yarn where they're never going to knit anything with that yarn. Uh, board game geeks have piles of boxes of games they've never opened. They never played them. It's like the idea that maybe someday I'll play it. Uh, train enthusiasts have backrooms full of trains. Steam players are the same thing. They just have backlogs. Like, I like the idea of that game. I just don't have the time to play it right now. And so, that is that's kind of secretly awesome.
[laughter]
100%
have to actually You don't actually have to play our games to get their money, which I mean that in the most positive way.
Yeah. I I
[laughter]
I think I think the Okay, so so let's let's also just um establish to make sure that we're on the same page. What is your uh what's your bar for doing well? Breaking even, making a like being able to put together a modest fund for the next game? Like when we talk about games
just you're talking to a group that you're working with.
Yeah. What what's your doing well bar?
Okay, here's it here's here's the secret. Okay, so Steam is actually curated. People don't know this. Steam

is actually there's really promotions and stuff. There's secret ways to get promotion on Steam. Um do you do you all remember Greenlight and all that kind of stuff? Do you remember Greenlight?
Oh yeah. I'm Greenlight.
Greenlight never actually went away. It's we still are living in Greenlight. Greenlight's still here. Um they just switched it and they didn't tell anybody. They they secretly said it in a bunch of blog posts, but nobody quite understood them. Um so when Greenlight it was like thumbs up and if you get a like 60,000 thumbs up, you get on Steam. And um Valve realized, "Oh, you can game that system. You can like thumbs up and get the gaming the system." And then then uh people could thumb it up and they'd like the idea of it, but then when Steam's like, "Okay, we'll pay money for it." They're like, "No, I don't actually want to pay money. thought it was a funny game, so I gave it a thumbs up." And Valve, the you know, they're like half economist, half super weird libertarian stuff. They're like, "Oh, okay. Uh you know what? That's not good. We only want the money." And so they switched to Steam Direct and that instead of thumbs up, it's now money.

And they don't tell people this, but there's kind of this invisible line and I track it all the time. My gut feel it's about $150,000 earned in about the first 6 months of your game's launch is enough for Valve to go, "Mm, that game's got something going there. Your gates are open." And you can actually ask Valve for promotions. Uh you can do all these other things. The algorithm shows you more. it's not a hard line. It's a very fuzzy line. And that's what I call real Steam. And that's the secret green light that never went away. People don't realize this, it didn't go away. So, my minimum bar, whenever I look at it, at a game is, did this game get about $150,000 minimum in 6 months? And the reason I put that in there is because then Steam will work with you. And you can phone up Steam once a year and say, "Can I get a daily deal?" They'll put you more prominently in some of these widgets all over the place. There's They just open the gates to you. That's why I call it real Steam. Like, you actually can show up on Steam after that that point.

And this isn't, by the way, Steam being evil. This is Steam being we're a marketplace filled with 100 Well, and not even the money, but it is the money, but like, if you're trying to curate hundreds of thousands to millions of games, and your job is to match a game that the person logging in might be interested in, you don't want everything. Like, you really don't want everything. You want some way to slim it down and look at, you know, let's try and get people things that they're actually going to enjoy because if you serve people up enough crap, eventually they're not going to come back.
Right. And this is this is them um allowing their user base to be their guinea pigs and to help vote with their wallets to decide what is quality and what is not, right? Steam doesn't like if if it's $150,000, then that's $150,000 that that game made because the developer spent marketing money, and by word of mouth, which I'm going to argue is probably a much bigger deal in the indie space and on Steam than it is in many others um because of

Discord servers, because of the I saw my friend playing feature in Steam, right? That's another big one. Um
Yep.
So, uh then they can decide, all right, that game has already proven itself, and the gamers have done the market research for us, and now we get paid for our market research that we didn't do, and then they just highlight that game. That seems rather genius, actually.
It is. And the other genius thing is it's based on money. Because if you all these social platforms like Twitch, here we are, or YouTube, they're always like flip-flopping the algorithm. They're like, "Oh, comments matter. No, no, no. Likes are the important thing. No, no, no. Now now it's average view time over the first 10 seconds." Valve's awesome. They're just like, "No, it's just cash money. It's just money."
[laughter]
They don't have to play the games of like, "Well, wish lists earn in the last this or that is this and likes and clicks." They're like, "No, whatever makes us the most money, we're going to that's the one we promote."
needs another super yacht, right? Like the yacht the yacht the fleet must grow,

right? Like it's just
I mean, he's got to get an aircraft carrier eventually.
Number go up.
Yeah, number must go up. Well, and like it's funny that you
that you have to understand with the Steam algorithm, it's not a a solid line. It's not like 150 is it. But I it I've done this enough that I kind of see like these games. And so what Valve is really doing is opportunity cost. And you'll see these games. You're like, "My game is 90% positive, but I'm stuck at 100 reviews. And why is it everybody likes it? Why is it not getting promoted up?" And what really is happening there is it's an opportunity cost. And I like to say like if you were walking by, you were late for an appointment, and you saw two bills on the ground, one was a $100 bill, and one was a $1 bill, both are awesome. Which one are you going to pick up? You can only you only have time to bend down and pick up one. Which one are you going to pick up? The $1 bill.
Right.
Valve knows that. And so even if your game is like very positive, there are some games that people see and they're like, "That's awesome. I love that. I

will buy it." And then there are other games that are people like, "That looks pretty good. Yeah, that looks good."
Wish list.
I'll buy it later.
Right. And it's that subtle difference that is the difference between having a hit game or not is that 1 second. And so with Valve's, they only have I've I've kind of counted it up. It's about 200 slots on the front page of Steam. You know, if you go through all the widgets, about 200. Every day they only have 200 slots. So, they're going to pick the 200 best games to show that convert the best because think of it like if this game earns 50,000 a day on the front page, why would we put a game that earns 25,000 dollars a day? They're They're missing out on that $50,000 game. So, that's what I mean when I say an opportunity cost. It's not that they don't like your game. People loved it. They thought it was awesome, but it just doesn't convert as well as a similar game.
Because Steam's job isn't to promote your game. Steam's job is to sell things to people who who come to Steam. And so their motivation, in the same way like, you know, we obviously do a lot of

YouTube work. YouTube's job is to keep people watching videos because that lets them serve more ads. Once you understand that, you kind of start to understand how they recommend and do other things because their job is to keep you watching interesting things so they can serve more ads. Steam's job is to show you the most interesting things you can so when you come to Steam before you go play your game, you might see something that encourages you to maybe pick up another game.
It so follow-up question, you mentioned the front page slots and that there's a limited number of them. Are those front page slots universal or personal? Right? Because I feel like that's like the next follow like some some are column A and some are column B is my instinct, right? But that um that only gets you so far, I guess, I feel like. Like are is the bar for reaching both of those? Like I'm a big roguelike person. I play a new roguelike every week. Is the bar for getting one of my personalized recommendation slots for

roguelike games, roguelikes, roguelites, roguelike adjacent, whatever, is that lower, higher, about the same versus hey, this is the new hot schedule one game and you've never played a game like schedule one on Steam, but we're going to advertise schedule one to you because it's we think it's great and it's doing gangbusters.
Yeah, it's a mix and Valve is actually the trend is towards more personalization. So, if we just go I'll just do like the top three or four widgets. So, when you first everybody load up Steam on on a different tab not I'm here to talk to you. Don't close me out. So, on another tab up here we'll go we'll go down this top to bottom. I can going to remember it pretty much there at the bottom. So, the top is a banner so I'm going to do a banner and then sometimes when it's a big game like a Slay the Spire 2 or Mutagenics or something, it'll do a takeover. Those are not paid. Everybody was like, "How do I get paid to that?" If you have to ask how to get up there, you're never going to do it. There it's it is for the most top top top top top tier games like we're talking a million wish lists at launch.

Don't even ask. But, that's the thing is Steam is so powerful you don't even need to be up there and get it. So, that's the top banner. Down is a new it's kind of a recommendation thing. That one is dynamic. It's based off the tags that you've recently played. And basically what they do is they every game is tagged and they monitor how long you've played that tag. And then if you play above the median of the typical tag player. So, if an average person plays rogue lights for an hour and you play rogue lights for on median three hours, they're like, "This person plays rogue lights." Cuz they're monitoring how much you play a game. So, if you are above median playing this specific tag, they will recommend that game and they usually prioritize newer ones. That's the it's this this carousel at the top. Down below is the next one and those are called special offers. And when I say a daily deal, there's also weekend deals and midweek deals. These are what I call Steam being curated. It actually is curated because what you do is everybody gets one a year and you go to Valve and you go, "Can I

have a daily deal?" And they look and they're like, "Has this person made $150,000 or more recently?" And they look in the data and they're like, yeah you have, you get it. And then they unlock a tool where you get to pick which day you you show up on there. That's what I mean by Steam is actually secretly curated. And some devs even say like, oh no this guy's on duty. Don't ask for a daily deal. Oh now now that Steam employee is let's let's do it. It is curated. And Steam is actually curated. Interesting. And so those happen. So daily deals you get 24 hours and you can only do one a year. And your question is is Steam getting more or less visibility? Here's one thing that recently happened about two years ago. It used to be you could do two daily deals per year. And now and there were only like four slots on that front page for the daily deal. Valve was like these are really well. And so what they did was they said uh-uh we're going to make it a little bit more egalitarian. It turned out more egalitarian. Valve was like you get one per year, not two. No free rides here. And then you only we're expanding it. We're doubling the number of little

icons that'll show up. So what they did was they made it more egalitarian. They can now allow more games on the front page. But then the devs who used to get two a day two a year and they had a big icon they're like hey that's not fair. And then they're like no it is fair. We're making it more egalitarian. But all the indies who used to get two per year were like So sometimes remember to make it more egalitarian you're going to lose a little bit to spread around the wealth. But so now and now the way Valve is doing it and we're seeing some early signs they're now personalizing daily deals. So it's like daily deal for roguelike above median roguelike players. Yeah. And then the other thing that they're doing is the other one that's really powerful. And this is totally nobody cares about this but it's secretly the most powerful thing is there's one way down I think it's the next one under that is usually something called the discovery queue. And the discovery queue is so underrated. Nobody cares about this. They always say how do I Chris how do I get the banner at the top? No no no you don't want the banner at the top. You want the discovery queue. And so when you launch you usually get a little bit

of time in the discovery queue. And I call it like riding the bull. And what they do is when you launch and you get 10 reviews, they pop that 10 reviews is their minimum bar to keep the AI slop at bay. If you get 10 reviews, paid reviews where somebody bought the game and and played it, they'll throw you in this thing that it's a discovery queue. And everybody do your discovery queue right now while while I'm talking. What they do is it's an algorithm that looks at your median play time for all your different games, and then they just share you 10 games with you. And that when I I've done this data enough. At launch, this discovery queue will account for about 50 to 60% of your traffic at launch. It is It is amazing, and nobody cares about it. Everybody's like, "How do I get on the front page?" It's a discovery queue. And it's one of the super powerful
It The discovery queue is the reason that you need to curate your page so heavily, right? Because
Right. And your launch trailer and everything else.
Right. Like the the moment that someone lands on your Steam store page, you have a finite amount of time to get them

interested in your game in an environment where they are looking at games to spend money on, right? And yours has to land quickly because the next one is a click away, right? Which is why it's so interesting when I see uh sometimes I will see games that like look conceptually interesting, and then I look at the store page and it sucks. It just sucks.
this is a very important point, and this is what I did at my I I what I did about uh 4 years ago, I I just I found gamer ass gamers. I specifically felt that like you don't have a Twitch stream, you don't have a YouTube, you're not you're not anything. You're just a regular ass gamer, right? And they're like, "Yeah." And I followed them along, and the thing that was most And I just said, "Can I just shop? Just spend a half an hour on Steam. I'm going to watch you." And the thing that made them trigger the most to wish list the game or buy it. They never bought it, actually. They only wish listed it and later bought it. We'll talk about that later. Um the thing that was most important was they could identify the genre. So, like you said, I'm a huge Roguelike fan. If your game

doesn't look like a Roguelike, and you know, it's a you needed a screenshot with three cards that you're picking between, you know, you need top-down dungeon crawling. You need like Slay the Spire map if that's your game. If your game is easily identifiable as a Roguelike, that fan who's clicking through the discovery queue is going to whoop. Oh, that looks like a a Roguelike. Let me check that out. And then they spend the time. But if your game is like, "No, no, no, I'm secretly a first-person shooter, but when you play it, you discover later that it's secretly a Roguelike." They're going to be like, "First-person shooter, I don't like those." Click. You've got to And this sounds
Don't be Brutal Legend.
"Don't be so creative. Look like your genre." And And I mean
Exactly. I'm going to do a talk at GDC sometime soon based on like having moved from games like doing over to YouTube, one of the things then launching a video every single week, like the amount we have to optimize our titles and our thumbnails, because all people see in the big wall of videos is a title and a thumbnail.
Yes.

It's very similar to games going through Steam. Like you get your game's title, you get your game's cover as they're kind of going through. And I see so many games that don't sell that. You know, they'll This is a fictitious. They're going to name their game Bob. And you look And you know, sure, Bob may be the main character, but you're going to look at that, you're going like, "I don't know what this means." Right. Like it isn't helping you get somebody in and interested in your game.
Yeah.
The funny thing to do, this is what I love to do. Go to your genre. You You can filter by tags and stuff. The genre that you're making or that you like, and then just line up all the capsules. So, that's the what they call the thumbnail like title thing. That Steam calls them capsules. Just put them in a big like Miro board or some Figma board, something where you line them all up, and then just play the little kid game where you're like, "What is the same?" And just look for the same thing over and over, and you'll find like the minor open-world survival crafting games like a Minecraft, they always have a a pickaxe. There's always the main character with a pickaxe on their on their shoulder. And that [clears throat] just tells people subconsciously at the at the nanosecond level, this is a

crafting game, okay? Or if you look at and they used to joke about this like BioShock, like if you look at the old BioShock No, BioShock Infinite, I believe it was. They always made fun of the guy cuz it's the main character and he's got a like shotgun over his shoulder. Brilliant. I know it's cliche and it's stupid. And then you look at every game that came out that year and everybody had a main grizzled character with a shotgun over his shoulder. That's not because they're not creative, it's because that instantly tells them you're going to be shooting stuff. And if you like shooting stuff, this is the game for you. And so we as consumers always thumb that down, but as a developer, you've got to be like
And And this is And this is where I remind people, right? I saw someone mentioning like, "Oh, I don't I've never used the discovery queue. I don't use the discovery queue." I always hear that.
Right.
You don't, sure. Again, you are watching three dudes in an animated coffee shop talk about the process of discovering a game on Steam. You are not a gamer who is just gaming

for fun in their free time, right? You are someone who invests in this hobby. You You are either a developer or someone who invests in the hobby heavily and is interested in the way that the hobby works as a whole. You are not the kind of gamer that we're talking about who makes up the majority of Steam sales.
Here's the other thing. This is This is This blew my mind when I kind of like pieced it all together. Okay, even if you if you survey if you went to the hardest core I don't know where if you went to somewhere where all the Steam players hung out and you said, "Hey, what's your discovery queue?" Even even among Steam players, not everybody's going to go, "Oh, yeah, I check the discovery queue every day." My theory is for Steam and there's I don't know how I could ever prove this, but this is my theory and you have to just roll with it, folks. I think there's a population, maybe it's like 10% 20% of the Steam audience that is super ultra duper hardcore and they literally play every game. Because when I did my survey, there were some where I watched players, there was a certain percentage of players, I can't quantify how many, but I know that this exists, and their job is to discover games.

They've just they volunteered to be that type of person, and they play every single whatever their favorite genre is, and they delight their their hitch, the way they get off is they go to their friends and like, you got to try this new game. I'm the first one to play it. You're going to know this before anybody. You heard it here.
Yep.
And you see it with board games and other things, too. Because everybody has that board gamer friend who has tried all of them and shows up at board game night be like, oh, here's this one. So, you're saying that also exists for video games.
And that is why the discover queue is so powerful, because that is you are talking to the audience that is the tastemakers, okay? And then if they like your game, they're the gatekeepers, and if they like it, it goes everywhere. It just goes everywhere from there, because they tell their friends, and their friends trust them, and so you've sold four copies. You sell one to the the guy that figures it out, and then he tells his four friends, and they all buy it. They're just like, and and you can't ask them like, where did you hear about this game? They're like, oh, yeah, my friend Bob told me. He plays every game. That's

that's the word of mouth that we're talking about. It's at these little tiny networks, and it happens instantaneously. Um and I I got to run pretty fast. I got I got to go. Here's the key thing. This is the key thing you guys have to flip your mind to. Um some games have it. And this is the discovery We're going to talk about the discovery problem. Here's the discovery problem. Some games have it. And this is that comparative advantage that I was talking about or the the comparative where it's like where it's like some games convert at 50%. Some convert at 100%. I'm just making these numbers up, but like at some percentage. And so Steam's like, I I it's an opportunity cost if I do not show this game. I I have to.
Right.
And so the games if I want to save the discovery problem is actually and I hate to blame the the developers, but it's a game problem. [laughter] Your game and this is what we're finding now and this is the future of discoverability and everything. You have to make sure that your game has what I call the magic and it is so I can't quantify it. It's art,

it's not science. I can't put a number on it, but some games just sell. They just do and it the marketing is so easy. You just show it and like immediately get a thousand wish list. And I run a discord howtomarketagame.com/discord and we have a channel called share your numbers and developers just share their numbers and we'll see two devs do the exact same thing. They were in the exact same festival. They were on the exact same page. They were like right next to each other and their numbers are 10 times different. Some games, they're basically the same genre, too. Some games just like the concept, the art, the way that it was described just makes people go, "This is awesome. I want this game." And other games they're like, "That looks pretty cool. I don't see anything wrong with it. Do you want to buy it?" "No, I'm okay." That that micro difference is the world. And what the Steam algorithm does is it exploits that that slight gap in interest and that matters all the world. And I think that there's nothing you can do but what kind of what I my general

thought is your game is cast in concrete within the first month of development. Like once it's uh the once you identify the genre, the art style, the hook, it's basically it. That's the game and it's very hard. I've seen devs like, "Wow, we're not getting picked up. What if we change this or that?" I I've never seen it where they're like, "You know what? Let's just What if we made the shirt red on the main character?" It doesn't matter. I really think it's it's the combination of that like genre and art style and basic hook that sets the whole path and I I say it's like as soon as you pick a genre, you say, "We're going to make this type of game." The the doors of the multiverse close and you have like one hallway basically and it's like maybe you could take a little bit of a light slight right or left. It's done. You're decided and then it's just a matter of it playing out in slow motion. So my general advice for devs is test early like put a build up on the itch do some early social media like show shorts on like YouTube and Tik Tok show

off your game and early concepts and you will start to see some game just rocket up and I have a site called how to market game.com/benchmarks and just community my community sharing data. I do surveys. I've just collected like at this point you should have this many wish lists and we can see the benchmarks and they are people tell me all the time they're like I just looked at the benchmarks. I knew exactly how my game was going to do based on all the benchmarks I was hitting along the course of my game. So that in my in a nutshell is the discoverability problem is I don't know how to parse it. You asked me to bring it full circle. You asked me like how important is discoverability problem is like well it's I I'm trying to shift blame but it's kind of the game the genre what your graphics look like in your hook. That's the discoverability problem and and devs that adopt that mentality of like I got to think market first before I go crazy on this one idea. I'm not trying to be lame.
[laughter]
I'm just saying

you can't you can't take an idea and just do something and then make it sell well. It's the game and the product itself that matters.
You have to make a thing people want to get.
And and I think I think
Unfortunately we do.
And and the really difficult part about that too is that I think that there's another element to that which um is unfortunately devs are going to hate this one too completely out of your control. Cultural moment right? The cultural moment means that sometimes there are things that are just not in your control like um Okay, E33 is a good game and was always going to be a good game. Right? But it's a great game that sold so many copies because of when it hit. Or blueprints or Balatro or STS 2 or any of these other things, right? There's like a part of the industry or there's a part of the gaming zeitgeist that is attached to something that those games picked up, right? And I think that that's It's not huge.
I'll push back a little bit on that. I'll have the last word before I have to run.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
to push back on this but a little bit.

Yeah.
When we talk about those games, that all the games you listed are mega sellers, okay? You do not You can make a full-time career and never have that level of success.
Yeah.
So I do believe that level of success is kind of zeitgeist moment. But don't let that stop you guys.
Correct.
Um because you can make a full-time living doing this with a team of I'd say about three to five and never reach that level of success. And at that point it is not based on, oh I just may missed it at this moment. I If you look at my benchmarks page and you look at the data, you can tell pretty well and it's even if you don't like, oh this game launched on this day or it turns out that there was some big world event. That really doesn't matter that much for this median game. You know pretty well if you follow on the benchmarks like this game is hot or this game is not. And then it's, yeah there might be a little bit of variance on the edges with these external events, but I just don't want people to feel defeated like you're at the whims of the fates or something

like that. I want to I want to empower
I I I I take it as freedom.
matters.
Yeah, I take it as freedom, right? There there is some there is some extent where like I've done all the stuff, I've checked all the benchmarks, I've read every single one of the blogs on how to market a game.com, right? And and now uh my game did fine. It didn't do amazing, but it did fine. And sometimes that's not in your control. It It have done amazing tomorrow, right? But
Actually
Actually, well, I think we can talk about this after. I think you're off on the timing thing. Like I know Chris beats you on that. Let me walk Chris Let me walk Chris out
Okay.
coffee shop. [laughter]
Yeah, you can you can just talk about how wrong I am when I can't defend myself. Go for it. I'm here for it.
We would never go for it.
[laughter]
All right. All right.
Chris, thanks so much for coming.
Yeah, we'll see you at howtomarketagame.com/free. A blog post goes out every week and you'll get an email if you go to howtomarketagame.com/free and you get a book about the mistakes you shouldn't make. You get that for free. So uh

And we just posted in chat. So give it a Give it a look.
Thank you so much. I hope to see you all around. Good luck. Good luck out there. Bye.
[laughter]
Well, I'm going to walk him out. I'll be right back.
Okay, great. Excellent. Chat, don't go anywhere. We are going to continue this discussion with me and Jeff cuz we have Yeah, uh thank you so much to Chris uh for picking for letting us pick his brain. I know there were a bunch of questions for Chris in chat. Unfortunately, we had not a lot of time. I would love to sit and talk with Chris for hours and uh mediate those questions from chat. There were a lot of really good ones about the nitty-gritty of stats and specificity and I get that um a lot of what Chris is driving is data-driven, right? Totally get that. Um but I think those are all questions that we just didn't have time for today, unfortunately. If you are here because you like Chris's stuff and you want to talk about game design and game development and game discovery, uh we do this every week. So, when Jeff gets back, we'll talk a little bit more about some of the the stuff and Jeff's going to tell me how wrong I am about the cultural moment. Um while we're doing

that, uh chat, what's a game that you think succeeded because of the cultural moment? Can you think of another example of a game that succeeded because of the cultural moment specifically while we talk about this? So, Jeff, why why am I wrong about the moment?
I I think that there are Oh, by the way, so Chris was great. Like I'm Having been a dev for a while I've made a good number of people who do marketing. Chris is aces. Chris understands, Chris does things, Chris is not a theoretical
Correct.
one. He is a I got my hands dirty, I do this.
No, he he is he he's got data up to his elbows from where he got in the guts of Steam and just like started rooting around and was like, "Hey, I've got data on how all this works." And that's fantastic.
And you know I like the data. But the other one is if you're a dev looking at this and feeling a little bit intimidated that there's a lot to learn, you know, parse it out. You know, do something go grab his newsletter and make yourself, you know, a 20-minute coffee a day to go read backwards. So

like read the stuff coming forward, but spend 20, you know, once a week 20 minutes go read his previous two. And then the week after the previous two. By the time you're getting towards where you need to be
Yeah.
for this, you'll have and you know, gotten enough out of this that your mind will be working along it. And
Yeah.
I've actually given a couple of talks around what he's talking around in from a different angle. But um Okay, cultural moment. So I think that there are absolutely times where you're right. But I would say if you look at the volume of games coming out and developers, that that's almost the exception rather than the rule.
I agree.
Like I think if Balatro had come out 6 months earlier or later, it wouldn't have mattered. I think almost any game you mentioned that, you know, maybe Animal Crossing because of the pandemic did better. But Animal Crossing would have done well any like there were certain cultural things that accentuated it.

And I agree. I think that the moment is a force multiplier. I think that the moment is not a thing that is make or break.
Yeah.
It's
But what what was the moment that you you think Balatro had?
Um Balatro sort of hit at this weird spot where it was well positioned to be a um in the same kind
just calling that out, but like any of the ones you mentioned, I don't remember a cultural thing happen. I remember people The culture got wrapped up around, "Hey, this is a cool game. Let's all talk about
Because there was space in the conversation for that. I think that that is a kind of cultural moment, right? So, for instance, the the reverse of this, right? The reverse of this and again, these are all good games. They're not crushing. Um is uh the unfortunate uh repetition of the Horizon games. Every time a Horizon game comes out, another big action open-world RPG-esque thing comes out at the same time. It got

stepped on by Zelda. It got stepped on by I don't remember what else, but like this happens, right? Are Are the Horizon games good games? Yes. Do they do poorly? No. Do they do as well as they would have if there had been um space in the conversation for them to be considered and for them to reach prominent. I would say no. Is it a massive difference? I don't think so, but is a difference worth mentioning, right? That like the difference between superb and immaculate, right? If we're If we're counting those, can be this variance, right? And that variance often leads to what what I will say
I think I'm agreeing here with um M that our um
Mandy.
Mandy saw um here that there are enough games for every big genre that there is never going to be a huge clear thing. I think it's just that the Horizon games are good, but they are a little generic compared to some of the other things that came out.

I I think that that's
And that's more of a packaging and design and how you build the game problem rather than the moment it came out.
Right. I just feel like there even even if we account for that, right? Most games don't get stepped on by Zelda. Right?
Yeah.
Which is kind of tough, right?
to be fair, everything within 3 months, pro or minus Zelda, gets stepped on by Zelda. So, that's what I'm saying is there's enough tentpole other things that I think it's almost impossible for most big genres.
Yeah.
Like if you were like, "Hey, my roguelike came out and it got stepped on cuz another roguelike came out." There are so many roguelikes and roguelikes and etc. that come out that it is hard to have a moment. It's like, "Oh, Slay the Spire came out."
Right.
"Oh, Monster Train 2 came out. Oh, you know, this and this and this you know, the next Hades came out." There's always going to be something.
Sure. But there are And again, this is not a This is not a hard
here, let me pull back so that we don't

fixate on this.
Yeah.
Yes, there are absolutely times thrown colon. I think you're overstating based on seeing how well some of these others do, but I think it's more of a root problem that Chris was talking about is that part of what they're making isn't as interesting as the other thing. It's that opportunity cost. It's that $100 versus $1 bill. It's given your choice. Like sure, they could have shifted a little bit, but there's still that other $100 bill game that's
I mean
I I think there's um To put it another way, right? Uh there are $50 games,
Mhm.
right? That might have succeeded in the absence of the $100 game, right?
Right.
There And And And that is not a common occurrence, but it is an occurrence that I think deserves to be part of this conversation, right? And like yeah, in the examples I'm talking about, it's it's oversold a bit, but I think it happens on a much smaller scale with much smaller scale games, right? The uh roguelike discovery queue in particular is an area in which I have some level of

familiarity, right? I run a weekly show called the Rogue Review. I get keys from developers. I go shopping on Steam. I am trying to remain plugged into my incredibly niche genre. It's a teeny tiny like very narrow niche in all of gaming, but I've played an awful lot of roguelikes. Probably like a different at least one different one every week for 4 or 5 years, right? Um and so I've seen variations there that have made or broken games because they accidentally stepped on one another or because um the moment was wrong and like I'll I'll give a fascinating example that I brought up with Chris actually, which is Inkscape. Um and this is sort of like my big one. Inkscape is a beautiful phenomenal game. It is a game about uh it's a tactics game with like a wooden aesthetic. It's like wooden pieces on a wooden hex board that you're moving around. It's gorgeous, the

lighting's great, the storytelling's great. It's got like a missed puzzle element to it that really reads really well and fits in with it. And nobody heard about it cuz it came out at the wrong time last summer. Right? And that that is sort of the thing that I'm talking about, right? I went back I loved it. I felt like it had the it factor and maybe I'm alone in that and maybe it didn't have enough it factor to show up. Right? I don't know. I just feel like I feel like that's that's always my concern is that there's not necessarily a timing thing, but it does feel like the bar between hitting the data and hitting the There's still range in the data, right? There's range in the benchmarks, there's range in everything and I feel like there's always these ephemeral factors that like hit weird. I don't know. Maybe I'm not making sense.
Yeah. And I I just I think you're right. That is a thing, but I also think it is one of many many things and it is a circumventable thing

unless you're extremely lucky or unlucky.
Yeah. so don't release on GTA 6 launch day. Incorrect. Absolutely release on GTA 6 launch day if your name is developer digital. I don't know if anyone's heard about this. This is a fascinating counter example. Developer digital has a game that is done.
Developer or Devolver?
Devolver, excuse me. Devolver digital has a game that is done. It is done and packaged and ready to go and unannounced. And they have said that they will chase Grand Theft Auto 6 to whatever day Grand Theft Auto 6 actually releases on and release on the same day. Which
And one of the reasons for this is because so many other groups are clearing out from around GTA this next release, there're going to be a ton of people who buy it. There's going to be a lot of people with zero interest in that.
Yeah, especially on PC. Yeah.
Where there'll be smaller movies that specifically try to release on the same day as a big tent pole thing. They're

like, "Well, a certain amount of people aren't going to go see Transformers. They're going to show up and see Transformers at the theater but it's sold out and then they're going to want to go see something else."
Yeah.
And they want to be that something else because they don't have to make back Transformer Michael Bay money. They just have to make back their dev money.
Yeah, that's that's definitely true. I think there's definitely a space for non-open world action games. I would I would hazard a guess that right on Grand Theft Auto 6 is a great time to release a cozy slice of life visual novel, a fun colorful puzzler, something totally not in the same uh space as Grand Theft Auto 6.
Different field, different milieu.
Yeah, diff- different milieu. Yeah. Yeah, works exactly like Mandy says it like family films at Halloween. Um and yes, I I would argue Larky that Devolver shareholders are not sweating. Devolver shareholders are furiously eating a bag of popcorn waiting to see what happens next because if you've ever

watched Devolver market anything, this is like normal. This is like reasonable and normal for them. They invented a fake mascot for a presentation and then back stopped the mascot with fake back years of mascot footage of that mascot. Absolutely unhinged. I love them to death. Um Yeah. Uh Jeff, was there anything else that you felt like we didn't get to with
Let's see. Discover discover. Well, I mean so it's really interesting cuz Chris has one aspect of discovery and he actually came in at a way more optimistic tone which is great for me than I was expecting to hear.
Mhm.
Um on that and I think like he he's very right for a certain amount of what he's doing. And I guess part of my fact is the fact that I've worked on everything from AAA down to Indie. Like there's different feels and different takes and the same for Steam versus console versus mobile

versus VR, you know, just versus web to all of the different things. But you know, as somebody who's slowly working on, you know, having done lots of big games, but I'm slowly working on my own project like on the side, it is a good thing to hear as well because I feel like a lot of what he's talking about is a lot of what some dev studios think of and it tends to be the more experienced developers. Like honestly, ideas are easy. I have 10 ideas for games I'd like to make. It's choosing which one you make, when you make it, and like I'm choosing a game that I can make solo or maybe I'll bring in another couple people. And I'm choosing a game that I think I can show a couple people and be like, "Oh, that's interesting." I'm choosing a game that I can think I could put up a picture and a trailer that people look at that and like, "Oh, that would be a fun thing." There's plenty of other games I'd like to do that have none of those that would be very hard to kind of push out and get discovered

amongst the sea of other things.
Let's do uh another example of that exact same phenomena in a slightly easier maybe to to relate to lens. This show. Do you know how many things Jeff and I want to talk about on the regular? We could talk forever about so many things. But if we can't
you that paints and colors for GW paints for orcs, but nobody's going to sit around for an hour and a half for that.
Right. But if we can't package it, if we can't think of a title and a thumbnail and maybe a cool guest like Chris to come on and talk with us about it,
Mhm.
it's not worth doing. Right? Because we have
Because we could There's so many other things. We have the list.
Right.
And then we have what we're actually going to get to.
Yeah, exactly. That's That's exactly it. I think that that is That is a really great way of saying it, right? Is that there are lots of
Mhm.
There are lots of good ideas, there are not lots of marketable ideas. Or rather, marketable ideas are a uh subset that is smaller than some people would like of good ideas.

Mhm.
Um uh
Ooh.
Painted shadows versus better lighting. Stop this madness right now or we're going to talk about non-metallic metallics.
I will say some of the inking paints that GW helped pioneer
Right off INTO THE DITCH.
[laughter]
AND THERE GOES OUR FOCUS. I mean, we did we did manage 45 minutes of focus. Uh
Yeah, which is pretty good. So, actually, if you just came in and you're watching this because um you came in from Chris's Discord or this is your first time in here, little bit about Design Club. So, we do a chat every week. You can see we're live here on Twitch, we're live here on YouTube. The bots mostly live on YouTube. We also post them to Nebula, which is our creator run streaming service that we're part of. We are a branch of the Extra Credits and Extra History channel. It's kind of a big team. We usually do animated videos. History talks about history, Credits talks about games, game design, and game

culture. But our most frequent things are the Twitch streaming that we do. We have two shows a week, Design Club, which you're listening to right now, which is talks about games, game history, game production, and just the general love of games. And then Games for Breakfast, which is our weekly news show.
Yep.
We are in the process of getting ready to move when these happen. Will, can you talk about that for a minute?
I absolutely can. So, one of the things that we suffer from right now is that breakfast is Monday morning, which for a news show is not ideal. Um breakfast has been Monday morning for many a year, and we're finally biting the proverbial scheduling bullet and changing it to Fridays. This will be happening in June. Do not worry, we will make lots of noise about it uh right before it happens, but in June we'll be moving breakfast to Friday so we can talk about all the news that happened this week instead of all the news that happened last week. Because all the news that happened this week is way more interesting than all the news that happened last week, even though they're only 3 days apart. Uh and

Design Club
this is happening on Thursday, we don't want to do a back-to-back Thursday-Friday show, we're going to move Design Club up in the week.
Yes, to Tuesdays, I believe, is our current plan. Though, as with all plans, nothing survives contact with reality, and I'm sure Debs know that better than anyone. Um so, uh those things will be coming up in the near future. Uh if if this has been of interest to you, please don't uh forget to leave a follow over on Twitch, a subscription over on YouTube. We'll be back with more uh talk show type stuff on Monday. Uh one of the things as as a brief teaser, I cannot imagine we'll miss this. Destiny 2 just announced that they are entering permanent maintenance mode. There will be no new content for Destiny 2 after June 9th. Matt and I are going to talk about this and sort of the history of Destiny probably briefly and our relationship with it on breakfast. We may even talk about it next week here on Design Club cuz I think this is a huge moment for Bungie. Uh and we we got to talk about it. So, uh I think that is

all that is all for our show today. So, would you please say bye to the people, Jeff.
I'm going to tell the people, Jeff. Thanks, everybody. Have a great week.
[music]