The GameDiscoverCo newsletter is a regular biz-centric look at how people discover and buy video games in the 2020s, featuring ‘how they sold millions’ posts, charts, and the latest game discovery & platform news. It’s written by GDCo founder Simon Carless.
We’re here: last stop for 2024, everybody off, the GDCo newsletter is heading to the depot. Before we quit for the annum, massive love to our increasing band of colleagues at GDCo: Alejandro, Avi, Matt, Tomek and Strale – building our game data and info platform right, behind the scenes. (Some exciting news about that in Jan!)
And the other set of people to thank? Why, it’s you! We have over 32,500 GDCo newsletter subscribers – up from 22k at the start of 2024 – and almost 3,000 of you have access to the Plus tier or higher, via individual and company subscription. Our boundless enthusiasm is fueled by yours, and we deeply appreciate the opportunity.
[FINAL BOSS: for EOY, please support GameDiscoverCo by subscribing to GDCo Plus right now. You get basic access to our ‘core’ Steam data back-end, full access to our second weekly newsletter, our lively – and entertaining – Discord, eight game discovery eBooks & lots more.]
Before we get into all the other chart goodness, let’s have a look around the game platform and discovery news since late last week, huh? Here we go go go:
Some of you may recall that at the end of 2023, GameDiscoverCo ran down the top new games of the year across PC and console platforms, according to our large and complex (and fun!) estimation algorithms. Well, we’re back for more in 2024.
Let’s start out with what’s likely the most important platform for the vast majority of game developers in 2024 – Valve’s Steam PC game launcher and store. We’ll have two views for this chart – copies sold and revenue. And here’s ‘copies sold’ for paid games:
Image: GameDiscoverCo
Some notes on this intriguing view? There are a few more surprises here than in the upcoming console charts, but:
Also notable in here – the ‘intricate first-person store management sim’ microgenre perfected by Supermarket Simulator (#7) spawned a second similar game in the Top 20, TCG Card Shop Simulator (#16) And there are other, smaller hits like Fast Food Simulator on the way. (This genre is catnip to streamers, in particular.)
Finally, to give you an idea of scale – all of the games in the above chart sold >1 million units on Steam, and further up, 4 of them sold >5 million, and 14 of them >2 million copies. (Over time, they’ll probably sell a lot more than that, of course.)
Image: GameDiscoverCo
We also thought we’d briefly feature the top paid games by gross revenue – which includes IAP/DLC estimates. That is partly why titles like soccer sim EA Sports FC 25 – a rare ‘bigger on console than PC’ title anyhow – shoot up from #14 to #7.
This view also pulls all the inexpensive titles off the charts, and grabs some premium priced, previously ‘just outside the Top 20’ games like Dragon Age: The Veilguard, Gray Zone Warfare and Farming Simulator 25 into the top list. Makes sense, huh?
Next up, let’s take a look at top new PlayStation paid games of 2024. BTW, we’ve decided to only show ‘# of players’ view here, because the revenue chart doesn’t differ much at all. (Most top PlayStation games are also premium priced.)
Image: GameDiscoverCo
Some notes on this chart, which we don’t think is unexpected – duh, EA Sports FC & Call Of Duty – but has a couple of small surprises, like the overperformance of Dragon Ball: Sparking! Zero (#7):
Units-wise, we’re estimating all of the above games to have sold >1 million units, with about 11 of them cresting 2 million LTD, and 5 selling >5 million units. That’s some handy context on the general size of the market for the tiptop new titles.
For more platform context: we didn’t do an overall Top 20 by DAU/MAU across all PlayStation games, regardless of age, in 2024. But you would have seen Fortnite, Call Of Duty, Grand Theft Auto V, Roblox and Minecraft as some of the key perennials.
Image: GameDiscoverCo
Let’s take a look at Xbox! And we’re ignoring Game Pass this year – for which the top 5 new GP games by download # were Palworld, MLB The Show 24, Little Kitty, Big City, Hellblade II and Indiana Jones, btw – and concentrating on paid games. Notes:
Finally, we already printed a bunch of Nintendo Switch charts last month. We didn’t have a chance to update them – probably MySims Cozy Bundle would be the only major new entry, if we did. But here’s the eShop new games chart we had:
Image: GameDiscoverCo
And that’s all of our gloriously calculated data. No doubt there’s a glitch or two in here. For example, Call Of Duty is very difficult to estimate due to its uber ‘CoD HQ’ app approach, and there’s gotchas with demo/trial versions of games (Skull & Bones?)
But we’ve done our best. Answers on a postcard if you can see anything we obviously missed or over-rated, and we’ll correct it in the New Year. And thanks for reading the 2024 chart jamboree!
Finally – GDCO’s adorable data packrat* (*we have several!) Alejandro decided to start working on a giant document looking at buzz from The Game Awards 2024 announcements (Google Drive doc). So we crunched data & teamed up with ICO’s great Footprints.gg ‘traditional media’ article tracking service for a second viewpoint.
Before we start – if you’re still trying to pick some of the TGA announcements out of your teeth, so many and complex were they, we liked Skill Up’s 30 minute summary of the whole ceremony (above). (Or if you just need Statler and Waldorf from The Muppets clowning on Geoff Keighley, we’ve got a highlights vid for you too!)
Image: GameDiscoverCo
So, our first view (above) of post-awards buzz is simply, according to Footprints.gg, which of TGA’s announcements – even those without any digital store page yet – got the most trad media interest. (It’s tab #3 in the document.) Short notes:
Image: GameDiscoverCo
The other views we’re championing using GameDiscoverCo data are TGA-related games with Steam pages, calculating charts by follower and wishlist increase. (For existing games with DLC, we’re just tracking the main game page.)
That’s in tab #1 and tab #2 in the document, and we’re just doing the ‘Steam follower increase’ chart above. Brief info on it:
There’s also plenty of other notable titles picking up interest here – from survival ‘spiritual successor’ Blackfrost: The Long Dark 2 to superhero workplace comedy (!) Dispatch. Fascinating to see what pops out, huh?
And that’s literally all we have for the year from GameDiscoverCo! We’ll be back in the first full week of January, and have a wonderful – and quiet – holiday. Toodles…
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