Discount strategy: your key post-launch game discovery tool 2

Is There Any Deal? is a PC-based deal monitoring site for players. It’s particularly interesting because you can see how many registered site members are waiting for discounts on a game, and at what discount they’re going to get notified. (See above picture, for an example involving Subnautica. Slightly odd example because the game’s base price has changed a couple of times, but you get the idea. Thanks to Lars Doucet for pointing this out.)

SteamDB is always spectacularly helpful, and the main game page for each Steam title has a discount history if you scroll down. Here’s an example for the original Overcooked. Team17 is pretty ruthlessly efficient at discount revenue maximization, by the way. So I recommend checking out some of their games for approaches, both for frequency and discount amount.

DekuDeals is a good site to browse for Nintendo Switch, though it includes a lot of cheap retail titles. So maybe browse to the eShop section if you’re interested in the digital side of things. Looking at games like Axiom Verge (see below) clearly brings up sales and discount history. eShop Prices is also a good ‘discounts / discount history’ site on the Switch side of things.

Frequency: you should discount your games at every available opportunity. Not necessarily at massive percentages to start with, though! It’s not seen as a negative from a player perspective, since most players only notice a fraction of available discounts. It’s all about being methodical about the Steam discounting rules, finding ‘special’ sales you are eligible for, and being similarly exacting for Switch (discount rules NDA-ed, but go find ‘em if you have access!) Xbox and PlayStation are more complex - they have no at-will discounts - but work with your rep, and get in whatever discounts you can.

Amount: it’s our view that gradually increasing discounts is the best practice. (So don’t jump discounts down and then back up again. Unless perhaps there’s a ‘viral’ Switch-style one off discount you want to try?) As for how aggressive you are - it varies per platform, and Switch has been tending more aggressive recently. But I personally like Steam discount strategies like Overcooked 2’s, taking the game down to 50% off over a period of about 2 years.

Aggressiveness: There’s no doubt that some games get more aggressively discounted %-wise, and you can potentially make more cash that way. Curve’s Bomber Crew got to 50% off on Steam swiftly, and is at 80% off in sales nowadays. And even the relatively new Hotshot Racing was 50% off in the Winter Sale, four months after launch. Bit strong for my tastes, but I also think No More Robots probably underdiscounts somewhat. Not Tonight has never been more than 40% off on Steam (for the base game - the bundle with the DLC has been >40% off), despite releasing in 2018. Perhaps too conservative, and leaving money on the table?

The ever-transparent semi-pro dev Eric at Slothwerks, who provided us two excellent newsletters on deckbuilding roguelike Meteorfall: Krumit’s Tale fairly recently, is back with his 2020 round-up. These include revenues (see above graph) for Krumit’s Tale, as well as its predecessor Meteorfall: Journeys. Also interesting to hear his comments about Google Play Pass and publishing on the TapTap Android store in China, among other subjects.

Large-ass game research firm Superdata just released its 2020 year in review, and VentureBeat has a fairly in-depth overview. Skimming quickly: “Free-to-play games continued to generate the vast majority of revenue (78%), with Asian markets accounting for 59% of free-to-play earnings… SuperData said industry consolidation will continue in 2021 as developers and publishers fight for a spot in a competitive market.” Oh great, consolidation.

The devs at Stuck In The Attic, makers of point & click adventure game Gibbous: A Cthulhu Adventure, put out some public stats about their performance in the Steam Winter Sale. We love public stats! They’ve reached 40k units sold on Steam, and the Winter Sale was “An average of 450 units sold per day at 70% off… pretty good for an adventure game that's 1.5 years old.” The game originally launched in 2019 with 31,000 wishlists, and “We've sold very close to 10k units on Steam alone this winter.” Though the discount was 70% this time, “to put it into perspective, it took us ~1 year to reach 50% off.” Interesting data, and not possible without “good hooks [and] good production values”, as they note.

It’s significantly outside the mainstream, but enjoyed this piece from The Register on those still making Linux ports for their games - to target Linux players, or because they like them. Not much $ upside, but as noted: “Things are changing in Linux gaming. [Friends of] Valve now have Proton, a project that does a good job of running many Windows games on Linux platforms. That's unlikely to stop Linux devs doing their thing, either via native code or multi-platform engines.” We think Proton is a great way to worry less about Linux support for your game.

Complaining about the 30% ‘platform shakedown’ over here in the West? Cut to China, where “Tencent’s online games were removed and then reinstated on Huawei’s app store on Friday in a dispute over revenue sharing by the Chinese companies. Huawei was insisting on a 50% cut of Tencent’s game sales on the app store and the Tencent games were removed because the companies had been unable to agree a deal, a Tencent source said.” Yikes. (And no, I’m not saying 30% is fair either.)

Microlinks: a ridiculously large heap of games (39,000!) disappeared from the Chinese iOS App Store at the end of 2020 due to no government license; a free iOS/Android game postmortem with out-of-pocket cost at $4k, and revenue of $30 shows how difficult it can be to get traction; this Tweet about how instant/welcoming the Flash game ecosystem made me think, again, that the lack of effective monetization at the ‘super cool shorter game’ level is a real problem. Anyone know how to fix?