Switch cracks down (further) on extreme discounting 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.]

We start off this piece with a look at how Nintendo is dealing with eShop chart marauders in a slightly more proactive fashion:

Nintendo (apparently?) closes ranking loophole for ‘100% off’ games

So, somebody passed us along info that Nintendo may have further clamped down on loopholes - little tricks that have made the Switch eShop particularly prone to heavily discounted games.

You may recall that the Switch eShop chart ranks by number of sales over 14 days, no matter how much the game costs. So heavy discounts - sometimes of average or even dubious quality games - have been rife.

But Nintendo has made some effort to fix this. For those who aren’t aware, some of the historical changes include:

In addition to this, a particularly exotic loophole has been plugged - the ‘100% owner discount’ loophole. Basically, as carried out by QubicGames last Christmas, the fact that you can assign discounts to games if you own another game was ‘constructively’ used to vault many of the publisher’s games into the charts.

Here’s how it went down last holidays: “Ten games will be up for grabs to all Nintendo Switch owners from now until 24th December, and they'll be available as part of what QubicGames is calling a 'chain reaction' system.” Essentially, each game was discounted 100% if you ‘bought’ the previous game, which was also 100% discounted… wow.

And of course: “Each game in the giveaway will be "vastly discounted" for around three weeks after it was free, so you'll have a chance to pick up any that you missed.” So, after all these games got high up the charts with free giveaways, they stayed there for their 99c sale, which is where Qubic picked up their actual revenue.

We’ve seen this loophole used on more isolated occasions by other devs this year too. But no more. It looks like you can’t use ‘100% discount’ to get the games into the charts any more. Or at least, Qubic’s promotion this holiday is a fair more normal ‘lots of games are discounted, but the cheapest is $1.99’ type affair.

So what does this actually mean? Well, Switch can still be quite a discount-centric platform - especially for games that cost $20-$25 on launch. Even with these new rules, you can still do 80% and 90% off sales and sell games for $2 or more.

You may remember our recent newsletter with the example from my compadres at No More Robots, using gross revenue for Not Tonight (90% off sale) and Yes, Your Grace (40% off sale.) As seen below, you can see Not Tonight’s sales curve is helped by hitting the charts:

These two games won’t be affected by these changes, even after the shift, since Not Tonight was still $2.49. But some of the more exotic ‘these games are free if you buy other games’ or ‘games are only 9c!’ promotions are no longer going to be eligible for the top charts for eShop. Which is… good, right?

(Long-term, it would make more sense for the eShop to be ranked by revenue in real-time, as Steam is. This would also stop the ‘buying small games with leftover Gold Points and then having them chart’ issues that also contribute. Still hoping for that!)

The revamped Steam news section debuts!

The second notable Steam roll-out of the week is upon us. And it’s the new Steam news section! All Steam devs should have got an email from Valve about this, pointing to this Steamworks post. There’s also a public post for all regular Steam players.

But, excerpting from the dev post: “Your events and announcements are already showing up to players in the Steam Library, Steam Community, and on your store page itself. But now those posts will automatically also appear in the News Hub as well—where they’ll be shown to owners, wishlisters and followers of your game. The Steam News Hub also includes posts from recommended games to help your game get discovered by brand new players, too.”

So this is a really solid addition that helps discovery and consolidates useful game updates in one place. Players can also add a number of officially approved press sites to their Steam news page, if they want to keep up on game news that way!

The news page is also a good way to advertise upcoming events for your game, both in-game and otherwise. Here’s an example for Destiny 2, I wonder if you could use this to advertise big update/patch releases, too?

There’s still things to explore here. For example, I’m actually not sure how the ‘posts from recommended games’ feature works, since most of the news I see in my own news feed are from games that are already in my Steam Library. But if anyone knows, maybe drop us a note here at GameDiscoverCo?

One additional clarification from Steam, which I 100% agree with: “We frequently hear reports of confusion from players when they see Steam download an update for a game in their Steam Library, and find no recent news posted about the game. With that in mind, the Steamworks tools include a specific category for "Small Update / Patch Notes".

You can use this category to post information about even the smallest update that you are making to your game and it will appear in appropriate locations without getting in the way of your bigger updates or news.”

This is a good bandaid for situations where the dev doesn’t want to bomb their news pages with tiny bug fixes, but had actually pushed a new build. So hopefully lots more people use it.

The game discovery news round-up..

Finishing up here, there’s a whole bunch of other platform news happening, including the latest moves to make the $7 billion-dollar valued Discord into an effective revenue generator (don’t get me started on valuations for tech companies, haha), plus a bunch of other neat news you might have missed:

Until next time, thanks for reading, and I hope you found something new or useful to speed your day along as a video game creator - or creator-adjacent person!

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