We talk about an important discoverability change for Discord servers, why average wishlist count increases in October's streaming showcases were slower than earlier in the year, the significance of a game citing dev costs in increasing its post-launch default price, and what Roblox's latest results say about the platform.
Join Simon Carless & Chris Plante in the latest GameDiscoverCo Show as they look at these questions and more. Mentioned in this episode:
An important visibility change on Discord - search engines will be allowed to index “Discoverable Servers… the most public spaces on Discord, with at least 1,000 members [that] their admins chose to list” as such. (This may be good for game discovery long-term, but feels ‘different’ privacy wise. “In the EU, UK, Canada, Brazil, Australia and South Korea, it’ll be OFF by default”, others can opt out by hand.) - https://discord.com/blog/making-content-from-discoverable-servers-easier-to-discover
Streaming showcase follow-ups: we have the Triple I Initiative’s Oct. showcase at ~15k median 7-day Steam wishlist increase, 75% down on April’s. (Still 4x any other Oct. showcase, which all have slower than earlier-in-year comps, tho. Why? Less ‘hot’ games to 100% debut, a lack of Steam featuring, and a v.busy calendar.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LVlyMMWeXfQ
The Talos Principle 2 has increased its default price from $30 to $40, specifically ‘cos “the cost of developing and supporting games has continued to rise significantly” - https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/835960/view/679639664218341868 - many games will raise their price, but fairly rarely by actually citing dev costs. (Let's discuss what is going on there!)
Roblox’s latest financials are again a weird melange: “ 138M avg DAUs (9% YoY); $1.70B in bookings (12% YoY); $1.57B in revenue (+16% YoY); $403 million paid to devs (6% YoY).” Notes from Ben Sarraille: “Q3 last year was a huge outlier (rise of Grow a Garden → DAU, booking spike). Everything looks kinda rough in comparison… APAC & ROW (Rest of World) have taken over [since 2019].” https://www.linkedin.com/posts/ben-sarraille-a71363119_roblox-earnings-day-as-always-a-fascinating-ugcPost-7521687185260003328-M4Rb/
Also discussed: last week and this week's new Steam releases, what's new or upcoming for GameDiscoverCo Plus & Pro data users since last time, and Chris' surprise question of the week for Simon.
