Case study: Steam's 'Deal Of The Day' & DLC attach

In this instalment of Game Discoverability Weekly, I thought we’d start off with some real-world data posted on Twitter by David Leon, the lead creator of shadow-based stealth action game Aragami.

As you may (or may not?) know, Valve/Steam does permit developers to screenshot and release sales numbers and wishlist data using the Steam back end. So this excellent recent Twitter thread by David showcases the power of Steam featuring, and includes real numbers.

(Side note: Steam is relatively permissive compared to most console companies, who do not generally allow this, and in some cases actively crack down on the sharing of real sales data, boo.)

The occasion was a 48 hour Steam Daily Deal - which has pretty major featuring at the top of the Steam front page. Offworld Trading Company is the game featured in the below (real-time!) screenshot, for example:

So, as David notes of this special sale:

"Aragami was launched on October 4th, 2016. For its 3rd anniversary we launched a Steam Daily Deal that went on for 48h. In that time frame we sold: * 50k copies of Aragami * 25k copies of Aragami: Nightfall /1 #gamedev."

And continues: "For a game that is THREE years old, the daily deal sold around 10x more units than launch week - but at an 80% discount. The other spikes in the unit sales graph are related to different Steam Sales and Daily Deals. /3 #gamedev."

And I have to say - wow, that’s impressive, 50,000 copies just from a Daily Deal (albeit at 80% discount). It shows the power of featuring, but also of high discounting if you have a lot of people on your wishlist.

And Aragami is definitely an outlier in terms of wishlist balance, as David showcases below (again, fairly rare to see people being this transparent!)

He continued: "There's been lots of talk about wishlist data, so I was eager to see its impact in predicting the performance of the Daily Deal. Before the sale, around 200k people had Aragami on wishlist. Surely most of them would get the game at 80% off, right? /4 #gamedev."

Twist ending: "But nope! More people ADDED the game to wishlist - at 80% off - than bought it from wishlist. Less than 10% users that had Aragami on wishlist bought it at 80% off. /5 #gamedev."

Couple of notes there - that’s 393,000 wishlist balance for Aragami even now (!), which is incredibly high for an independently made game and massively helped sales, although not unprecedented. (David later notes that the game has sold 500,000 copies total, so that probably explains it!)

Quick context here: most games that do decently nowadays - grossing hundreds of thousands of dollars in their first year - have 5-10,000 Steam wishlists before release, and then rise and top out to have a stable number between 50-100,000 in terms of wishlist balance. So this is way past the top end of this.

Another point which David is right to point out - it’s really true that being featured very prominently in general on Steam or having a Daily Deal gets you more wishlists overall! It just goes to show how many regular Steam users have no idea that certain games exist.

Cross-referencing with some data I was given access to, a moderately popular Steam game that recently did a Deal of The Day at 15% off added 10,000 wishlists for the duration of the sale (!), and also sold nearly 2,000 copies.

So it turns out Deals Of The Day may be as good for visibility as they are for actual sales. But you can pretty much guarantee both - and the more you discount, the more copies you are likely to sell. Higher discounts can be good or not, depending on where you think you are in the game’s lifecycle.

(BTW, you may be asking - how do I get a Deal Of The Day slot? I believe it’s ‘your game has to be reasonably successful and also you need to talk to your Valve rep about it’, but don’t quote me on this. I know, access/privilege, ugh.)

DLC Sale Misconceptions?

As for the second point - David added a final note about the game’s DLC which I thought was interesting:

"One last piece of info. Before the daily deal, Aragami: Nightfall - a story prequel DLC - had sold 15k units. That means less than 4% of Aragami players bought the DLC. A total failure. After the sale, this number spiked to 42k thanks to the Shadow Edition bundle. /10."

The reason I say it’s interesting is that David has a perception that 4% sales for a DLC (before the Daily Deal for the bundled version) is ‘a total failure’, but I’m really not sure that it is in relative terms.

Back in 2017, some devs revealed their attach rates via Ryan Clark’s ‘Clark Tank’ stream, and as noted at the time:

“[The] Amplified prequel DLC Brace Yourself Games released this year for its 2015 hit Crypt of the NecroDancer currently has an attach rate of ~6 percent, a bit higher than the 5 percent he'd predicted…

Matt Viglione of SomaSim estimated that the studio's first expansion for its Project Highrise skyscraper sim, Project Highrise: Las Vegas, had a roughly 7 percent attach rate after its release earlier this year. By comparison, Tyler Sigman popped into the same stream chat to say Red Hook's more recently-released Crimson Court DLC for its 2016 hit Darkest Dungeon had seen an attach rate of about 15 percent.”

So I definitely think Crimson Court was on the high end - because of the high profile and oft-played nature of the game - and the fact that Steam was less crowded in 2017.

But some stats I’ve seen privately for another game that sold ‘in the mid ten thousands of copies’ showed its DLC attach rate - launching in 2019 - at... 5.5%. So there you go.

Thus, this is kinda important - if you want to do ‘must have the game to buy it’ DLC for your game on Steam, expect it to sell 5-8% of the copies of the original game. Which might be a lower number than you were expecting? (Ping me if you thnk differently!)

DLC strategy is probably a whole other can of worms, but here’s some random thoughts on it in lieu of a full column:

Anyhow, I admit I don’t know as much about DLC as I would like, besides ‘the attach rate is lower than you think’. So if anyone else has tips or comments, feel free to ping me!

But it may be in today’s crowded market, you want to skip DLC - especially given these slightly dismal attach rates - and just concentrate on giving your core game frequent (& standout/viral!) updates.

[You’ve been reading Game Discoverability Weekly, a regular look at how people find - and buy - your video games. Or don’t. You may know me from helping to run GDC & the Independent Games Festival, and advising indie publisher No More Robots, or from my other newsletter Video Game Deep Cuts.]