Game platform deep-dive: from NeuroVoider to ScourgeBringer 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.]

So, welcome back to the world of ‘staring obsessively at video game numbers and charts’ - which is why you dig us so much, right? (But seriously, we at GameDiscoverCo love transparency, a lot. Kudos to the game devs willing to put info out there.)

First up this week, we have a unique chance to compare a couple of games from different timeframes and the same dev, looking at their relative performance on multiple platforms…

NeuroVoider vs. ScourgeBringer - the data.

Over on Twitter, Flying Oak Games’ Thomas Altenburger was kind enough to launch a detailed thread on the relative performance of his two biggest recent Dear Villagers-published games, NeuroVoider (a twin-stick pixel shooter with roguelike elements, which launched in 2017) and ScourgeBringer (a 2D pixel sidescroller with roguelike elements, which debuted in 2020!)

He starts out with the most ‘shocking’ stat, see above. Though it’s perhaps not one that would surprise you if you’ve been listening to GameDiscoverCo’s comments that ‘Switch got pretty crowded, sales aren’t what they used to be just because of supply/demand disparities’.

As you can see, just comparing Steam and Switch, NeuroVoider - which launched early in the Switch’s lifecycle - had 91% of its revenue in the first 60 days on Switch - and 9% on Steam. But ScourgeBringer had just 14% of its 60-day revenue on Switch, and 86% on Steam.

Thomas adds some detail here: “NeuroVoider released very early in the [Switch] console lifecycle, and was pretty much alone [in the release schedule]. ScourgeBringer released during the most crowded month the console has ever known (while also performing super well on PC, vs. NeuroVoider’s bad PC launch).”

He also notes elsewhere on the extreme disparity: “ScourgeBringer did 4 times less [revenue] than NeuroVoider on Switch, while doing 10 times more on Steam.” FWIW, I think ScourgeBringer has a better ‘hook’ and is more enticing, so I get why it hit on Steam:

Next up, we have a wonderfully helpful chart duo - revenue sources for both games, including ‘deals’ (which he says includes ‘bundles [e.g. Humble], Prime Gaming, Game Pass, etc..’) It gives a good sense of the diversity of revenue you sometimes need to make things work.

Firstly, here’s NeuroVoider:

(He doesn’t name them, but it looks like Humble Monthly and Amazon/Twitch Prime were NeuroVoider’s main bundle revenue sources. And Limited Run did the physical edition of the game.)

Secondly, here’s ScourgeBringer - which has a PC/Xbox Game Pass deal, likely accounting for a fair amount of the ‘deals’ revenue slice on this graph:

But remember, we’ve heard that Game Pass is a single lump sum, unless renewed or fulfilling various other ‘performance bonus’ scenarios. Whereas the other revenue sources will keep trending up over time.

(Oh, and ‘Consoles’ means ‘individual game sales on consoles’, just to be clear. Some of the deals revenue also relates to console, just in a less attributable way.)

The final part of Thomas’ deconstruction is NeuroVoider’s lifetime unit share per platform, both including and not including bundles and physical editions. (Guessing its Humble Monthly/Prime Gaming appearances inflated its ‘bundle’ unit sales a lot!):

The similar data for Scourgebringer is a bit more abstracted, since it doesn’t show specific consoles. Remember that the console versions are very new, though - only having launched in October 2020:

As you can see, the charts show Steam being the vast majority of the individually sold units outside of ‘Deals’. But the subscription bundles/deals section is 68% of the total units to date. Not surprising, since ‘Steam and Game Pass’ is becoming a quite common mix for high quality non-3D AAA games like this.

What does it all mean?

Concluding: ScourgeBringer was a bit of a Steam hit that got slightly lost in the crowded Switch market, despite looking like it might do well on Switch, and getting a great NintendoLife review. And it got good penetration and revenue via its Game Pass deal.

(BTW, it still has time to make more Switch $ with discounts. It’s only been out for a couple of months there, so it’s early to evaluate lifetime results. This is why it’s so tricky to evaluate games side by side.)

On the other hand, NeuroVoider was in the right place at the right time in the Switch’s eShop lifecycle. Then it built up other useful revenue over time via a multitude of routes - bundles, physical, etc. Which you might hope ScourgeBringer would do too.

We’ll see if all of the same routes to success are still available, going forward. And thanks again to Thomas for providing all this info! (Bonus: here’s the players per country for these two games, per Thomas.)

GameDiscoverCo Plus - a sample newsletter!

So, some people have been asking - this GameDiscoverCo Plus paid subscription part of the newsletter which has all the extra info, what’s that really like, anyhow?

Welll, just for you, we’ve made the December 3rd, 2020 Plus-exclusive newsletter free for all, so you can see the kind of Steam game-analyzing shenanigans we get up to there. This was the week before Cyberpunk launched, so we were marveling about its amazing pre-launch interest.

But you can also see lots of analysis into smaller Steam games, both pre and post-launch. And since we published this Plus newsletter, we’ve started to look into other console/PC game platforms too, like Switch, Apple Arcade and Epic Games Store. So feel free to sign up if you’d like to support us.

The game discovery news round-up..

Since mid-last week, an irritatingly large amount of game platform and discovery news has built up (lol). So, we’ll leave some to the second newsletter of the week in a couple of days. But let’s see what amazing info has turned up since we last chatted:

[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.]