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The future of PC/console game discovery: a discussion
Game discovery—it's "bear-ly" an inconvenience.
[The GameDiscoverCo game discovery newsletter is written by ‘how people find your game’ expert & company founder Simon Carless, and is a regular look at how people discover and buy video games in the 2020s.]
Joyous Monday! The lead story today completes a trilogy that started with whether Xbox really intended to slice up platform cut as it doubled down on Game Pass. It continued by discussing if supply & demand mismatches were making PC/console games a trickier place to be of recent.
Now there’s a (slightly garbled) claim that Oddworld: Soulstorm’s PlayStation+ deal had a “devastating” effect on the game’s non-sub sales. If the game didn’t sell outside of PS+ or on Xbox, maybe it’s a larger supply/demand issue. And the PS+ ‘free’ effect wasn’t that direct? But still - the market is changing! Let’s explore this trilogy ender…
Subs & PC/console discovery - David Edery’s 2c!
Back in January, just after the Microsoft buying Activision Blizzard news hit, I spotted a Twitter thread from Spry Fox CEO and co-founder David Edery. I’ve known David for nearly 20 years, from back when he was game portfolio manager of digital console distribution pioneer Xbox Live Arcade in the mid-’00s.
David and Daniel Cook founded Spry Fox in 2010, & they’ve made games like Cozy Grove, Triple Town, the Alphabear series, and worked with funders like Apple, Snapchat, and now Epic, which is publishing their next game. (Did you know that Triple Town pioneered the ‘merge’ mechanic making billions on mobile, btw?)
Anyhow, back in January, I caught up with David on this - who intriguingly has co-run Spry Fox as a remote-only studio since its very beginning. We expanded the conversation past the original thread into this chat about the rise of subs & its ramifications: