Week 4 - Secondary Research: Marketplace and Platform Research

This week I continued my secondary research in the commercial side of the games market. I researched Steam and Epic Games, as the two main distribution platforms on the PC market. Steam has a considerably larger established player base and discoverability due to its system of wishlists and reviews as well as an algorithm-based storefront page. Epic Games has a smaller player base and has previously had a better revenue share for developers and has managed to draw players in through its free game give-aways. For an initial release by an unknown developer Steam’s discoverability would have been the better option for trying to build an initial audience.

I also looked at the player counts of my two reference games. NieR: Automata has had a twenty four thousand concurrent player peak on Steam historically, which is a small number by major release standards and tells us how quickly story-based games lose players after the story is over. They do not really give players any reasons to come back to the game after the main story arc has concluded. Zelda: Breath of the Wild had over thirty million copies sold over the Nintendo Switch, which shows what level of commercial viability open-world exploration titles have, when backed by a major fan-base for the platform.

This shows us in relation to my game that without some replayability features, no procedural content or any kind of multiplayer features or ongoing challenges, my game would also suffer the same fate as NieR. When the player has rescued their companion their part of the story is over and there would be no reason to come back to the game after this point, a future pass on development would likely investigate what could bring players back into the game after the main story.