Does a Day 1 Game Pass debut make your game convert worse on Steam?
Simon Carless
Tuesday 24th May 2022
The GameDiscoverCo game discovery newsletter is written by 'how people find your game' expert and GameDiscoverCo founder Simon Carless, and is a regular look at how people discover and buy video games in the 2020s.
OK, so the rise of Game Pass (both Xbox and PC) from Microsoft has been a notable one over the past 3-5 years. We've devoted quite a few newsletters to it -- and Xbox has been doing a great job of picking high quality games for the service.
But one question that always comes up, talking to devs and clients is: When considering the options, does being in Game Pass lose you any 'juice' when simultaneously launching your game on other big platforms like Steam?
It's very, very difficult to work that out, because you can't A/B test for, uhh, reality. But GameDiscoverCo has now amassed enough data on Steam pre-release 'Hype' and reality that we have a potential answer. (Thanks to the client who suggested we do this, and was fine with us sharing the results!) The way we did this is as follows:
● We're tracking all 8,000+ pre-release games on Steam, and creating a 'Hype' score based on that game's Steam followers, wishlists, forum traffic and more.
● We then look at the game's first week Steam review number performance (a decent comparison point for sales for non-F2P games), and create a 'Hype conversion' number/ratio.
● The median number -- as you'll see below -- is approximately 0.15 for the median game that launched with at least 500 Hype score (maybe 10-15k Steam wishlists at launch?)
● However, there are massive fluctuations for big hits and big flops. (For example, in April 2022 on Steam, The Stanley Parable Ultra Deluxe had a 1.42 conversion rate - 10x median, and Uragun had a 0.01
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