Category: News

Remnant: From the Ashes has been out for a year now. Its simple pitch of “Dark Souls with guns” was certainly enough to capture attention in September of 2019, but it came with an additional unusual pitch: thanks to its random level seeding and online community, it had the effect of becoming a live game supported by DLC as well.

That’s turned Gunfire Games from the house that made Darksiders II into a new kind of live game studio, one that relies on support for a single game with some paid DLC, rather than microtransactions, to keep the doors open. After a year of successfully keeping players hooked in its grim, moody world, we wanted to know what’s gone right for the folks at Gunfire, and what other developers might be able to learn from their success.

David Adams, creative director and president of Gunfire Games, joined us for a quick conversation last week, to explain how the Texas-based game developer was able to break away from the broad standards of live games and woo players with a different kind of shared online world.

First, some tablesetting. Remnant: From the Ashes is comparable to Dark Souls in that it’s a linear hardcore action game with a monstrous setting that rewards player reflexes. But one of its core differences is that online co-op takes a more dominant role in the game, and that the levels players pass through are uniquely generated for each player, giving them independent access to different zones with different loot.

So if a player wants a particular item, they need to work with their friends or the online community to figure out who has access to a particular room with a particular boss that needs slaying. And since items are designed to be more unique than the “make numbers and colors go up” method other online RPGs use, the incentive to explore those areas is strong.

Adams says this model has worked for Gunfire over the year in part because the company has pushed far away from the idea that players should need to grind for loot. “The emphasis of Remnant was to make a game that you could play over and over again, and get different content,” he explained. Because content is so expensive to produce, many live games (justifiably so!) rely on a grinding loop to extend previously-made content while new players work on that.

What’s interesting about Adams’ perspective on this model is that it actually strays away from the “forever game” that’s attracted developers to the online RPG genre of late. Adams said there was some desire to make a game that players could walk away feeling satisfied from, with the hopes that new content would lure them back in to capture something like the original experience.

It’s shaped how DLC has informed the team’s long-term success. Since one player, on their own, can’t see all of the bosses or weapons a content has to offer, they have an incentive to not just clear an area, but check in with other players to get access to everything else Gunfire has made.

Factoring in that “away time” from Remnant has helped informed Gunfire’s post-launch decisions. “I fully admit that…we didn’t really design the game to be like, ‘you’re gonna play this literally forever,’ because we didn’t want a game built around the idea of grinding the same content. Once you’ve seen all the random content, and gotten all the cool collectibles and figured out all the secrets and puzzles, we’re totally okay with [players] saying ‘alright, cool, I played Remnant.”

This apparently has borne out in Remnant’s sales numbers as well. Adams explained that releasing DLC for Remnant over the last year hasn’t resulted in what he would call the most “financially optimized” formula for the value of each DLC pack, but continued support for Remnant by way of DLC has attracted new players to the base game. “You get a lot of people on the fence, and they see you’re advertising all this new content, you can bundle the base game with all that DLC and it gets to be a better value proposition for a player,” he pointed out.

Remnant’s unique social situation (players hunting for certain “rooms” to get certain “drops”) raised an interesting discussion about the game’s social factor. Cross-play has been apparently difficult to implement (it only exists between Epic Games and Steam currently), and Adams admits the fact that there’s no way to look for specific instances within Remnant creates a small communication barrier between players.

But Adams says that other social design considerations within Remnant have encouraged players to go online and build their connections there, on platforms like Discord or Reddit. He said there are other ways that developers can make social design considerations to influence player interaction in their games.

“We think about socialization in a way that’s actually counterintuitive to how some people think,” he joked. “I actually think friendly fire is a really cool social mechanic that makes the game more interesting.”

This refers to Remnant’s rule that players’ gunfire can in fact, damage other players, a trait that other team-based or cooperative games have been shying away from. “It requires you to coordinate a little bit more,” he explained. It’s a feature that can be abused, but it helped shape other design choices in Remnant that kept players attached and communicating with one another.

“It just requires you to be aware of your teammates. You can’t just blindly fire and not worry about it…and you can’t just run in front of someone blasting something because you’re gonna get blasted.

If there’s one critical insight Adams has about the time Gunfire spent working on Remnant, it’s the time the team spent “wasting time” getting the initial prototype off the ground. There was a moment where while the rest of Gunfire was working on contract work or other projects, the team behind Remnant just numbered a small few working away at experiments that might not pan out.

“It’s really hard, especially as an independent studio, to resist the urge to just dump everybody [working] on it,” he said. “But we did a good job of getting other contract work and making sure most of the team was employed in other ways, so that we could really have three or four people working on [Remnant’s prototype] as long as possible.”

“That’s extremely valuable, I think.”

The legal dispute between Apple and Epic Games will be settled by a judge if both companies get their way, with the warring pair keen to avoid a jury trial.

Earlier this week, Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers suggested the case should be put before a jury, and talked about the importance of “understanding what real people think.”

Since then, however, both Epic and Apple have discussed the matter, and have agreed the case should be “tried by the Court, and not by a jury.”

Both companies outlined their position in a filing submitted to the Northern California court handling the case, spotted by MacRumors, and seem to have finally found some common ground.

“Epic and Apple have met and conferred, and the parties agree that Epic’s claims and Apple’s counterclaims should be tried by the Court, and not by a jury,” reads the filing. 

“Therefore, with Epic’s consent, Apple hereby withdraws its demand for a jury trial pursuant to Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 38(d). The parties respectfully request that the case (including any claims and counterclaims) proceed to a bench trial on a schedule determined by the Court.”

As it stands, Rogers has found that Apple is well within its rights to ban Fortnite from the App Store, and is estimating the case as a whole will be heard in July 2021.

Sumo Group has acquired Oregon-based development studio Pipeworks for an undisclosed fee. The deal is part of Sumo’s plan to break into the U.S. market, and includes Pipeworks’ 134-strong team and original properties like Prominence Poker. 

Based in the UK, Sumo Group is the parent company of LittleBigPlanet 3 developer Sumo Digital and others including The Chinese Room, Red Kite Games, and Lab42. 

Pipeworks was founded in 1999, and has developed or co-developed over 100 games and technology solutions for notable clients including EA Sports, Wizards of the Coast, and Google. 

It has previously worked on franchises including Terraria and Madden NFL, and is currently working on an unannounced original project. 

Commenting on the move, Sumo chief exec Carl Cavers said the purchase will help the company produce more new titles and original properties in-house. 

“This is the largest acquisition Sumo Group has made since IPO,” explained Cavers in a press release. “Our underlying market is strong, and we see good opportunities for new games, including Original-IP developed by our talented studios.”

WWE 2K series maker Take-Two Interactive Software and its subsidiaries 2K Games and 2K Sports are heading to trial over allegations of copyright infringement after a tattoo artist claimed the company reproduced their work without authorization. 

As reported by the Hollywood Reporter, an Illinois federal judge handed tattoo artist Catherine Alexander a partial summary judgement after finding that Take-Two had copied her work by recreating them on WWE 2K’s digital representation of wrestler Randy Orton. 

Take-Two claimed its use of the tattoos was authorized by an implied license, a fair use doctrine which allows for their inclusion in the WWE 2K franchise. However, because it’s unclear whether Alexander and Orton discussed permissible forms of copying and distributing her work, the judge has dismissed that defense.

The company also asserted that its use of the tattoos is ‘de minimis,’which is legalese for minimal or trivial, but because Take-Two decided to copy Orton’s tattoos in their entirety, the court has also cast doubt on the viability of that argument.

“There is disputed evidence regarding the value of the copyright tattoo works to the video games. Defendants argue the evidence establishes that consumers do not purchase WWE 2K because of the tattoos. But other evidence shows that consumers did purchase WWE 2K for its authenticity to the wrestlers’ appearance,” said the judge.

“In particular, Defendants admit that consumer response is a consideration to their development of WWE 2K and the design choices made. They also acknowledge that consumers expect there to be authenticity in the video games and that WWE would have rejected Orton’s video game persona if it appeared without his tattoos or appeared with tattoos that were different than Orton’s actual tattoos.

“Additionally, Alexander’s expert addresses the importance of authenticity to drive sales and profits. Thus, an issue of material fact exists as to whether Alexander suffered actual damages based on the value of the infringing use, defeating summary judgment.”

In short, then, Take-Two has openly admitted to copying Alexander’s work, and because their defense isn’t water-tight, it’ll now be down to a jury to decide whether that amounts to copyright infringement.

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[The GameDiscoverCo game discovery newsletter, which you can subscribe to now, is written by ‘how people find your game’ expert Simon Carless, and is a regular look at how people discover and buy video games in the 2020s.]

Welcome back to another week of meditating on video games, platforms, and how you sell ‘em. This time out, I wanted to start with a semi-inspirational story, and link it to a discussion of your games’ long-term revenue possibilities. Avanti!

Wandersong – how it turned out nice again

Over on Medium, Greg Lobanov has written a postmortem of delightful singin’ story adventure Wandersong, two years after it first shipped. I remember when this game first debuted on Steam, and I was tracking its review numbers and realized… it just wasn’t doing that well. (I do think Wandersong lacks a strong initial hook, fwiw.)

Greg confirms as much in the article, noting “…our initial sales were way, way less than we were expecting/hoping for, which was crushing.” Using the Wayback Machine, we can see that the game had 71 reviews (albeit Very Positive!) three weeks after release. So probably very low single digit thousands of copies.

But good news – the game now has 874 Overwhelmingly Positive reviews, and Greg shares his (no Y axis) Steam revenue numbers below, noting: “What seemed like a scary and quiet launch turned out to be the beginning of a slower, different kind of success altogether… I guess I’d chalk it up to good word of mouth.”

Appearing on Xbox Game Pass in December 2019 also helped more people appreciate Wandersong (I played and loved the game because of Game Pass!). But on Steam it looks like the game carved out a niche regardless. And it did great when discounted, presumably because of both converting wishlisters and opportunistic sale buyers.

The point I took from this? Well, I was looking at sales ratios for Steam games I have access to stats for. It seems like a ‘base’ among these games is for Year 1 revenue to be 2.5x Week 1 revenue – for a positively reviewed game that had its fans clustering to buy when the game launched.

But another game I saw managed 2.5x Week 1 revenue in Month 1 alone, due to streamer featuring, and 5.5x first week in Year 1. Sometimes these are games that had Very Positive Steam reviews, ideally some updates, but definitely good word of mouth and ‘staying power’. GaaS-y games that start in Early Access can do even better – I’ve seen one with lifetime revenue – two and a half years so far – of 17x first week, for example.

Anyhow, what I’m trying to say is – I’m guessing that Wandersong’s total Steam revenue is now 7-10x (or even more!) than of its first week. So if you have a slow start, but your game is great – hold out hope and push for that Wandersong-style long tail. It wasn’t a smash, but it gave Greg and friends enough money to keep making games.

(Finally, I appreciate that Greg is honest about the mental strain of just, well, releasing a game: “Whether a game is a runaway success or a runaway failure, creators will always find a reason to feel terrible when their project comes out.” Please, both publishers and friends of people releasing games – support them, cos it’s a period of such intense stress.)

Demos/prologues – should we be questioning their value?

I have to admit I’m feeling confused recently by the value of making a demo (or standalone prologue) version of your game recently, particularly on Steam. Does just spamming out demos for your games on all platforms really, really help sales?

At least on Nintendo Switch, where there’s some obvious top-level search mechanisms for demos, it was at one point worthwhile for increased visibility. Here’s a clear example via Death Squared for Switch:

Here’s our first years stats and you can see that when the demo released the tail got fatter. We shared this on @rNintendoSwitch https://t.co/QTf16xndKq pic.twitter.com/YGkIDlH1r5

— SMG Studio (@smgstudio) July 4, 2019

However, can you make a Steam demo for your game that is succinct, doesn’t give away too much, will reach many new players, and leaves them wanting more?

I was chatting to SomaSim’s Rob Zubek (City Of Gangsters) about this recently, and he made a couple of good points: “Firstly, there’s psychological research that people evaluate freebies differently (as less valuable) than things that cost them something, even just a symbolic token amount. Dan Ariely’s ‘Predictably Irrational’ has good material on this.

Two: for systemic games, it’s hard to figure out how to slice it up in such a way that the demo is both comprehensive enough to be interesting, yet leaves the player wanting more. I have no evidence but from my own experience with demos, it feels like demos of systemic games leave me not wanting more.”

Apart from the ‘finding new players’ issue, think the biggest issue for me may be conversion rate. It’s possible that 10,000 demo/prologue installations on Steam will end up with a tiny percentage converting? Early in the development of Xbox Live Arcade, when it was demo-centric, the average conversion rate (from trial download to purchase) was 18% [PDF link].

But that was with limited inventory, and crazily high compared to PC casual game portals back in the day, starting at 1%, and “..the rule of thumb could be that very targeted games receive higher conversion rates, up to 2%, 3% or even 5% while more generic games, or games with severe competition may receive a .1% – .5% conversion rate.” So.. your Prologue with 10k downloads and a couple of hundred Steam reviews could lead to… 100 extra sales, if things go ehhh?

On the plus side, it looks like The Riftbreaker’s Steam prologue has further helped its case and has reached new audiences, who then added to the hype. But with a pre-release Prologue that No More Robots published, I feel like the demo/prologue was pretty marginal in terms of affecting the game’s success. (Many positive reviews from people who were already fans, so were planning to buy the game anyhow?) This may be closer to the default in the crowded Steam market.

I also think you can make errors with demos that can turn off potential buyers. And overall, I think demos are probably being over-prioritized as a marketing tool right now. But… demos may allow you to build Steam wishlists that you can get sale discounts emailed to? So it’s complicated.

(If you have opinions or data on demos, please ping me and we’ll do a follow-up column with thoughts from readers.)

Other stuff…

OK, am ending out this round-up with a few other notable data points, as per usual. (Feel free to tip me via email or on Twitter if you spot any we missed.)

• In ‘clever ways to do instant demos’ news on iPhone, iOS 14 has a new App Clip feature, which is basically ‘instantly playable <10 mb game snippet’. And one game – Phoenix 2 – has already got it working. Interesting, huh?

• Steam has released its top new 20 games of August chat (as well as the top 5 new free-to-play titles for the month – I was very amused to see Frog Fractions in there.) Quite a lot of Early Access -> 1.0 releases in there (Undermine, Factorio, Risk Of Rain 2), but also new debuts like Rogue Legacy 2 and Spiritfarer. And, uh, Train Sim World 2!

• So, who’s going to buy these newfangled consoles – at least in the U.S. – this holiday season? NPD’s Mat Piscatella pointed out this Civic Science survey on buyer intent, which is interesting. Xbox faring a bit better in aggregate than ‘core gamers’ might think?

  In case you missed it, check a look… “Intent to Buy New PlayStation, Xbox Consoles Neck-and-Neck This Holiday Season” via @CivicScience https://t.co/KQ2S41Epy5 pic.twitter.com/0cSKsEnK5Q

  — Mat Piscatella (@MatPiscatella) September 28, 2020

• Rise To Ruins dev Raymond Doerr just hit $2 million gross on Steam, and was kind enough to link his Steam back end summary page for the godlike village sim on Twitter. Things to note: net to gross was 84% without Steam cut – with an 8.5% refund rate & the rest going to VAT. (So that’s 58.8% net, after Steam cut.) Also, 320,000 units is a LOT for $2 mil gross – cheaper EA, and sometimes discount-driven? Impressive, though – poke around!

• So, you are going to be able to stream Xbox games to your iPhone. But rather than going with Amazon’s web browser approach (maybe they’ll do that later too!), Microsoft is rolling out a ‘remote play’-style streaming approach from your Xbox. And the cloud gaming options just keep booting up, here.

Finally, just to show how exceptional Among Us’ stats have been recently, Steam themselves Tweeted this out the other day. Seriously? Seriously:

📈👀 @InnerslothDevshttps://t.co/YoUEQfVRb4 pic.twitter.com/dZDNh9F4vC

— Steam (@Steam) September 27, 2020

[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? We’ll be launching a ‘Plus’ paid newsletter tier with lots of extra info/data – watch out for it soon!]

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