How V Rising reached one million sales in just one week

gamesindustry.biz:

Simon Carless

Thursday 9th June 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.

When last we checked in on Stunlock Studios' V Rising, it had hit one million Steam players just a week after its May 17th Early Access release. That's... pretty impressive, right?

There was actually some significant indication that the game would do great up front, even if you hadn't personally heard of it. It was our top-hyped game on Steam for the week it came out, and No.33 (out of 8000+) in top Steam wishlists for unreleased games. But it outperformed even those lofty expectations.

For reference, here's a GameDiscoverCo Plus-exclusive back end view of the top-ranked Steam games released in May 2022, from a 'how did they convert their hype?' perspective. The approximate median for 'significant' games is 0.15. And V Rising did six times as well as we 'expected', despite having a big headstart on interest:

So yep, 'big game is big' is not news in itself. But we'd really like to puzzle out how the game got such good pre-launch hype -- and how it converted way above average. So we got a hold of Stunlock's community manager Jeremy Bearson, and worked with him to advance some theories, as follows:

If you lazily glance at the game's thumbnails, you might think V Rising is 'just' a top-down ARPG. But it's way more than that, as explained by GameRant recently when discussing how the game has ended up getting some yummy Valheim comparisons:

"With a new IP, you don't really have an old crowd familiar with your ideas, so we wanted places for people interested in our game to gather"

Jeremy