E3 showcases - what discovery boost do they really give? 2

[The GameDiscoverCo game discovery newsletter is written by ‘how people find your game’ expert & GameDiscoverCo founder Simon Carless, and is a regular look at how people discover and buy video games in the 2020s.]

Welcome to the jungle, we’ve got… fun and stats? It’s E3/Summer Game Fest week, and while all kinds of other newsletters and sites are doing a great job of saying what has been announced, and why, we’re trying to zag a bit - and take it from a different angle.

Specifically, if your game does get in one of the E3 showcases with your game, how does the extra visibility help? And how can we quantify that? Let’s take a look right here…

(REMINDER: being a GameDiscoverCo Plus subscriber helps subsidize free newsletters, and gets you ‘very friendly colleagues’ Discord access, Hype data back-end, extra newsletter analysis & more. Thanks in advance.)

Steam wishlists, E3 showcases, and thinking about expanded reach.

Whether it be E3-branded, Summer Game Fest-branded (excitable Geoff Keighley pictured, above), or just hanging out there in the virtual ether, the post-COVID June timeframe is busy, busy, busy for new game announcements or fresh showcases.

Even a close observer would have to admit things have got pretty crowded. Was interested to note that Annapurna opted to put their showcase on July 29th, and Axios’ Stephen Totilo commented - partly in jest - that even for him: “A surprising amount of my job covering games is realizing, oh, the beaver colony simulator I just saw a trailer for is not in fact-brand new -- but somehow I missed a demo for it a few months ago.”

It’s so hard to keep so many games straight! And all that hustling to get your game - whether a world premiere or just a new trailer - into one of the showcases? Was it worth it? Ways to measure the effect of a game being in a showcase would include:

Given that I talk to quite a few publishers and devs about their experiences, here are the three broad bands of visibility bumps that I’m seeing so far this E3:

Of course, it’s way more complex than that. Wishlists/interest are built off whether people actually care about your game. So your wishlist total for a showcase is a multiple of your ‘base’ wishlist rate/interest. And then you might be in multiple overlapping showcases, have a minor Steam feature etc. But look, benchmarks!

Related: I wanted to point out the effect of E3 showcases on Steam followers. You may recall that our survey revealed that Steam followers (“I want news/updates on this game”) and Steam wishlists (“Please tell me when the game is out/or on sale”) had a median and average relationship of about ‘1 follower for each 9.5 wishlists’.

Well, that ain’t the case for most of these E3 wishlists, which are adding around 1 follower for every 20-25 wishlists, in multiple examples I’ve seen. Uses those estimates, EA’s Battlefield 2042 added about 57,000 Steam followers on its first day after being announced. I’m guessing - though don’t have access to EA’s back-end, haha - that it’s more like 1,000,000+ wishlists. (Just the first day! Show-offs.)

How should you think about ‘showcase’ wishlists?

I’ve talked incessantly - and borderline annoyingly - about Steam wishlist quality - above pic from Valve via this GI piece - and so I think it’s worth revisiting briefly. Yes, given the high wishlist to follower ratios we’re seeing here, E3 showcase wishlists will be more casual than your average Steam organic wishlist.

Why? People are watching a whole bunch of games in a row, and may attract a ‘need to save this to remember for later’ wishlist action. In fact, I was chatting in a Discord to a number of ‘core’ Steam users recently, and was interested to hear two contrasting approaches to Steam wishlist management:

So yes, I think game showcases attract more chaotic wishlisters than disciplined. But even if you take that into account, getting 5,000 wishlists at 50% or 33% or less of the efficacy of organic wishlists is still way better than… not getting any wishlists! Plus, you have the opportunity to build post-showcase buzz through word of mouth.

And aren’t we all becoming ‘chaotic wishlisters’ at heart, as Stephen Totilo hinted at earlier - just due to the sheer amount of great games and info about those games? Showcases are good because they cut through some of the noise. Just make sure you value the end results correctly.

(And to end, a request from the ‘core gamer’ Discord crew to platform holders: “Can we get custom wishlists so we can categorize them, instead of having behemoth lists that start to lose some of their function?” This especially goes out to Valve, but also other platforms that allow wishlists, like Nintendo or Microsoft. Message sent!)

The game discovery news round-up..

We’re mid ‘E3 globule’ here, so I don’t want to distract you all from the many massive announcements going on, such as the Intellivision Amico E3 press conference. But before we’re done with this newsletter, let’s look at the rest of the discovery and platform news:

Finally, a couple of alternate views of how the press (who they?) filter events like E3 in this direct-to-consumer world. Firstly, I liked this semi-wistful editorial on how QVC-y E3 has become from writer Colin Campbell: “these streams are entirely in the control of the games companies. This comes at a price, and, ironically, the price is transparency.” (And yes, QVC sells games.)

But then again, former Edge magazine EIC Nathan Brown has his own daily newsletter now (woo!) And a recent edition looked at an old method of E3 game discovery, the ‘group journalist roundtable’, which had, uhh, a few related issues:

[We’re GameDiscoverCo, a new agency based around one simple issue: how do players find, buy and enjoy your premium PC or console game? You can subscribe to GameDiscoverCo Plus to get access to exclusive newsletters, interactive daily rankings of every unreleased Steam game, and lots more besides.]