The hidden Switch demo upside & more discoverability tricks

[Hi, I’m Simon Carless, and you’re reading the Game Discoverability Now! newsletter, a regular look at how people find - and buy - your video games. Or don’t.]

Welcome to the latest Tales From Discoverabilityland (this word is still very made-up), the latest in a series of posts that round up interesting data or trends around the game discovery space.

One important thing I’m putting up top - we’re still surveying your Steam launch wishlists & first-week sales until this Friday, May 22nd. We have over 30 responses (great!), but I’m particularly hoping some of the small or mid-sized publishers on this newsletter will participate further. It’s 100% anonymous, so go for it!

But I’m making a conscious effort to start this newsletter’s content not talking about Steam or PC game sales, haha. Like so:

The Hidden Power Of The Switch Demo!

We’re leading off this week with a great tip from Future Friends’ Thomas Reisenegger, as follows: “A demo of your game means extra visibility in [the] crowded Switch eShop: 1. FREE DEMO icon in listings, stands out 2. "Software with demo" is one of [the] few search filters 3. Only ≈300 games in this category (≈3500 total)…” All of which is a really good point - see his pic of Switch games with demo below:

But it was the final point that definitely made me stand up and take notice: “4. Demo players get newsletter when game on sale.” I was not aware of this. Given that ‘this game is discounted’ emails are a very strong driver of Steam game sales, this may be a really useful tool.

On Twitter, Chris O’Shea provided a screenshot of one of the newsletters in question, advertising a discount on Ape Out:

Now of course, you do need to actually make and submit a demo. And you need to make sure it’s attractive and doesn’t give too much of the game away. But maybe more of you should consider a demo to stand out in the increasingly crowded & discount-heavy Switch eShop?

Also, good news: the sole subject of this week’s other newsletter - coming out on Friday - is going to be Switch game sales. So please expect it!

(BTW, the image in the header of this week’s post is from Kairosoft’s Game Dev Story, which apparently has quite an extensive demo on the Switch eShop. And is actually about making games, heh.)

SteamDB gets neat new features!

For whatever reason, I haven’t talked about SteamDB that much on this newsletter. But it’s one of the oldest and best sources on Steam info, since it efficiently grabs & categorizes a whole bunch of information from the Steam back end. (It’s good for checking how often games have been in sales and for what % off, for example.)

But there’s two new-ish things I wanted to point out. As follows. Firstly as regards to the ‘Steam upcoming games’ list on SteamDB, Kris from Toge Productions notes:

Reminder: your Steam followers - which are public to all - are not necessarily a perfect reflection of wishlists, but are often 1/6th to 1/10th of the wishlist total. So it’s very useful indicative information.

Secondly, a note from the main SteamDB dev Pavel Djundik:

Since ‘long tail’ and continued player base is one of the most important things out there, this is indeed super useful.

Although I will note that in my experience with No More Robots, player count & sales don’t correlate super precisely. (Because some games are more replayable than others!) But again - it’s broadly indicative, not predictive.

Lots Of Other Goodness…

It wouldn’t be a ‘Tales From Discoverabilityland’ round-up without a whole buncha paragraphs of other useful stuff that people have sent me (or I dug up on my own). So here we go:

Well, that’s the updates for now - I’ll try to chime in with one of these compendiums every couple of weeks, since there’s always a lot going on in this space.