Nova Drift: the making of a Steam holiday 'sleeper' hit 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.]

You may know the devs from Pixeljam - an indie studio which is now 16 years old (!) - due to their earlier titles like Dino Run. This was originally a Flash title and migrated to Steam in enhanced form back in 2015. Anyhow, the team are veterans and do interesting work.

The most recent of these is a game called Nova Drift, which launched into Early Access in March 2019, and had been picking up positive reviews and minor (but not gigantic?) buzz ever since - Steam250 shows the game gradually adding 300 very positive Steam reviews per quarter or so since EA launch.

It’s an arcade space combat roguelite - so basically Geometry Wars meets Asteroids meets randomly generated ‘runs’. Great idea - grafting procedural things onto existing genres is often a really nice change of pace.

And as Miles Tilmann from Pixeljam told me recently: “Our holiday sales bump has been amazing - Nova Drift went from a baseline of 10-50 units per day to 100-500 units per day, even after the Steam Winter sale has ended.” You can see the effect in the above Steamcharts simultaneous user monitoring for Nova Drift - sharply up from averaging 100 simultaneous players for the past 18 months to more like 400+ in the last week or two.

So this is the dream situation for a lot of devs who’ve been working hard on Early Access games for extended periods of time. But how did it happen? Miles says it was ““…a perfect storm of Steam Winter Sale featuring us (in the space genre), follow-on Twitch activity, YouTuber videos (a few with 100K+ subs), and dumb luck. Never forget dumb luck. Although we've been working at getting Nova Drift out there for years, so maybe ‘luck’ is unfair.”

And having done some robust investigation, I agree that no one thing seems to have spiked the game’s sales - it’s all of the above. But when you start getting over 2,000 reviews or so on Steam of that positivity (98%!), the Steam algorithm starts taking you a bit more seriously.

And Pixeljam’s Tilmann does think that around Winter Sale time, Nova Drift got “…bumped up into a new tier of discoverability. Before, our game never showed up on the "more like this" section of the "top tier" indie roguelikes (Noita / Hades). But now it does.” Steamlikes is showing 2189 other Steam games recommending Nova Drift, which is only barely outside the Top 100 - very impressive.

And the YouTuber ‘halo effect’ - although this latest set started after the Winter Sales commence - is also a big part of spreading the word. Northernlion (a key YT-er in the ‘people actually buy games he streams’ space) tried the game back in December 2019.

This latest set of January 2021 videos hit a lot of the other variety YouTubers which I think Steam players take seriously, including SplattercatGaming, BaerTaffy and Retromation - the latter two doing video series, not just one-offs:

Oh, and the game being its joint largest percentage off ever - at $8.99 in the U.S. instead of $14.99 - obviously helped people smash that ‘Buy’ button after finding out about it. (Cheeky comment: that’s too cheap for the amount of gameplay people are getting, Pixeljam. Nova Drift feels like a $19.99 not-on-sale game at the very least. Hope you put the price up after it comes out of Early Access.)

Finally, Miles also noted that Nova Drift has a much better hook/buyability factor when you go to the Steam page than Pixeljam’s other games like Dino Run and Cheap Golf - at least according to his internal marketing stats of purchases after Steam page visits.

Anyhow, this all makes sense, and ties in to a discussion we’ve had in this here GameDiscoverCo newsletter recently. You have better chances of being ‘found’ again significantly after your initial Steam release if you have a) good replayability and b) strong development roadmaps.

But I suspect you need to already have a decent-sized fanbase for this to happen. Nova Draft already had 2,500 Steam reviews (pretty good!) when it got this extra boost. So don’t go expecting your game with 50 reviews will also do similar, I’m afraid. But.. you never know. (Slay The Spire was famously DOA for a few weeks before getting picked up by streamers and taking the heck off.)

The game discovery news round-up..

We’ll be back later in the week with another ‘the holidays went well for this Steam game’ feature. And in the meantime, let’s look at some of the game platform and discovery news that popped up while we were slumbering peacefully:

Finally, are you aware of just how well Nintendo Switch is selling in Japan, given the rest of the Japanese game market has largely shifted to mobile phones? It’s… pretty damn well:

If you look at the remaining Japanese console hardware figures for 2020, you’ll see that no other console shipped more than 550,000 units. Though the lack of availability of PlayStation 5 probably played into that a bit. Nonetheless, doubt it would have done a great deal more than it did. So.. keep looking at Japanese releases for those Switch games if they’re market appropriate, eh?

[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.]