Success metrics

Last month, the developers behind the Deep Rock Galactic Survivor (DRG:S) announced that they sold over 1,000,000 copies of their game since its February Launch.

DRG:S is an survivor-like (aka action-roguelike) (aka bullet-heaven) (aka Vampire Survivors-like) spinoff of the mega-popular 2018 co-op FPS: Deep Rock Galactic.

Shortly after its launch, DRG:S surged to have the most concurrent players of any Bullet-Heaven style Action-Roguelike outside of Vampire Survivors 

Peak concurrent players (CCUs) for top action-roguelikes (data from Steamdb.info)

  • Vampire Survivors: 77,061
  • Deep Rock Galactic Survivor: 56,943
  • Brotato: 32,216
  • Halls of Torment: 26,061
  • Soulstone Survivors: 18,854
  • Death Must Die: 13,131
  • 20 Minutes Till Dawn:12,953

TERMINOLOGY SIDE NOTE: From here on out I am going to call the genre “survivor-likes”. 

I spoke with the CEO of Ghost Ship Games Søren Lundgaard and CCO of Funday Games Anders Leicht Rohde to learn how they had such amazing success in a genre that is maturing. Ghost Ship Games is the creator of Deep Rock Galactic and they licensed the IP to Funday Games who developed it. 

Special Note: For the rest of this blog I am going to say “The Team” as a shorthand as the collaboration of the two companies. In a creative collaboration it is hard to pull apart who did what (that is why the Beatles credit most of their songs to Lennon/McCartney). 

How the game came about

Søren was an advisor for up-and-coming game designers when he first met Anders who was seeking mentorship back in 2008. Søren and Anders stayed in contact as they both opened their own games studios. 

At Ghost Ship Games, Søren first pushed his team to try a Vampire Survivors-like after reading my blog where I argued that developers should try making their own Vampire Survivors-likes. Here is an email Søren sent me a while back.

I am a huge fan of your blogs. And your blogpost on Vampire Survivors / Hyper-Hardcore was brilliant. In fact, it did partly push me to internally push for a Deep Rock Galactic take on the genre.

(Side note: I think on purely dollars generated for indies, that blogpost is tops. I wish that I got a commission on the number of people who read that blog post and then went on to make successful games.)

BUT at the same time Anders had a similar idea and pitched Søren on an actual game design that could use the Deep Rock Galactic IP. Instead of me just blabbing about it, Anders went out and built a prototype to prove to Søren that it was a good idea. 

You can see an early version of the prototype which already has the mining mechanic built in:

Søren loved the prototype and greenlit the partnership. See the Appendix at the bottom for more details about the timing. 

Studying the market

Whenever you take an analytical approach to studying genres and what is selling on Steam, some people scoff

You can’t study the game’s market! You can’t market test your way to success. Only pure inspiration and pure creativity can make a good game. To look at things financially is to defile the artistry that is video games. A true designer conjures worlds from the purity of her imagination.

An internet gamedev man

But here is Søren on their approach

“We started out by selecting some of the games from this genre we wanted to look at. We looked at one of the lesser known ones: Rogue Genesia. We looked at Army of Ruin later in the process, Not Another Zombies Survivor (which had a good run in Steam Next Fest). We picked some of these, played them, and talked about them. My main conclusion after playing 30 of them was, ‘don’t go complex on the controls.’ Most of the others are trying to mimic Vampire Survivors as much as they can and they don’t bring anything new.”

Søren Lundgaard

CZ Analysis:

I find the most successful studios are voracious players and study every inch of the genre from a financial and design perspective. They try every game: both the hits and the failures. 

When I consult for new studios that are struggling to get visibility, or released a game that had poor reviews, I often find they haven’t played even the biggest games in their genre much less the moderate hits or the failures. As a designer and company you need to play as much as you can because your players are. You must know every evolutionary branch and sub-sub-genre that is associated with your game. It is critical that you understand the environment that your game is getting released into. 

Dash debate

One of the major sticking points in DRG:S was whether or not to have a separate button where the player could dash out of the way to avoid enemies or pick up powerups. 

The main discussion was around: ‘should we add complexity to the controls or not?’ Is it only movement or can there be the dash? Discussion on whether there should be a dash or not got quite heated internally. It is part of many of the survivor-like games, but not all of them. We decided to stay as core to the concept as possible, only movement. I originally argued for the dash but turned against it because the Dash was taking away from the main mechanic which was mining. The mining means you can escape through the walls. But with Dash you could just run away.

Søren Lundgaard

Through the development of the game we added so much other stuff like the mining… the core gameplay is mentally so much more intense than just shooting. We tried other things like dash from manual aiming, to very complex missions, but every time we added things people were overwhelmed. What you play now is close to the maximum that we can have players do before mentally they crash.

Anders Leicht Rohde

CZ Analysis: 

The team’s debate about something as simple as whether there is a button to dash is so critical to their success. A game’s genre is so narrowly defined that adding a single mechanic can swing it out of one genre and into another, or even worse, throw it into a genre in-between-limbo-zone where there are no fans because the game doesn’t adhere to any expectations.

What the team was debating was really about how much to change the Vampire-Survivor-Likes-Genre. What is the core Anchor? Where should they innovate? I really think that a new game in a genre can only have 20% new content from the original source inspiration. It can’t be too different. 

Difficulty

The team settled on no dash button. They simplified the controls but doubled down on the complexity of gameplay and upgrades are also made the game very challenging. This streamer made a whole video about how hard it was:

Did making the game harder and more complex scare away the audience?

They may be complaining about the difficulty but they are playing a shit ton

Anders Leicht Rohde

CZ analysis:

Note how DRGS’s difficulty and dash debate seem to clash. Anders made the controls simpler because people were becoming overwhelmed. But, the design team made the game harder. Also note that Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor is an incredibly deep game. Watch this trailer. There are 4 classes, each with 3 subclasses, all weapons can be upgraded to create unique builds. 

If you are launching a game on Steam you need to understand the typical player. In general you should always err on going more hardcore. Now hardcore does not mean more difficult, it just means infinitely complex. When I wrote about Hyper Hardcore in this blog post, I was saying you can have very simple second to second gameplay (like an Arcade game) but you MUST supplement that with an infinitely deep meta-game. That was the core gameplay innovation of Vampire Survivors. 

The big mistake I see too many developers make is to say “We are making a casual game to get new players who are not typical gamers.” I think this is a mistake (which I wrote about here). Developers also often say “Oh we are making a short game that respects players time” Most Steam players do not want short games. Respecting their time means you give them endlessly replayable, endlessly deep, endlessly remixable experiences where 8.5 hours are the median play time (I wrote about this here.) 

Fun fact: Median playtime in DRG:S is above 10 hours

In general, my mental model of the typical Steam players that will buy your game are

  • Are ok with simple, approachable controls
  • But want difficult medium-term challenge (e.g. each round of a roguelike before dying is difficult)
  • With a deep deep meta game where you can endlessly replay and remix (e.g. what upgrades you buy after your rogue-like run)

In short, you are probably making your game too difficult to play, but you are also not making your game complex enough. Too often I find unsuccessful games have complex, difficult controls with a simple or nonexistent meta-game with no measurable upgrade progress.

Instant *magic*

When a game hits the right cord with an audience it is like *magic*. Everything you do when marketing a *magic* game causes it to go viral. People are begging you for more details. People are hacking your demo to get more content. You can tell really quickly whether a game is going to be a hit or not. DRG:S was no exception.

On March 2023, Ghost Ship Games held a big event to announce their new lineup of games they were publishing:

If you look just at the follower counts after the March announcements in the chart below, you can see that DRG:S was an instant hit that dwarfed (ha!) the other games they were announcing. 

This is a nearly perfect experiment where 3 games were announced at the same moment, under the same publisher, using the same marketing technique. The only difference was the types of games and the associated Deep Rock IP. Look at how important the type of game and genre is:

Scope creep

Originally, Funday planned to release the game in Early Access in June of 2023 (a perfect rapid release). However, with the huge success of the announcement the team decided to delay the launch until February 2024 so they could add more features and really make sure it was perfect.

In most cases delaying a game is very risky because it is really hard to increase sales enough to justify the increased cost of a longer development period. However, in the case of DRG:S it was clear there was something *magic* here. Extending the marketing period meant more wishlists, more polish, and a bigger launch. 

CZ Analysis: I have never seen the case where a game had a lack-luster initial reception, then was delayed and then became a *magic* game. I have seen multiple cases where a *magic* game was delayed and became more *magic*. So my advice here is if your game isn’t sparking that interest from the world, please don’t delay it and take up more runway that could be used for your next game that really does have the *magic.*

Fear of the end of the genre

Many indies fear that Steam moves so fast that delaying a game might mean the idea becomes stale or a genre is over. But the team wasn’t nervous about that because they studied the market heavily:

When I saw Soulstones Survivors, and Brotato (which was on the other end of the spectrum) and a lot of the smaller ones, I wasn’t really nervous that the genre would go away. I was convinced there would be staying power.

Søren Lundgaard

Audience overlap

DRG:S is a survivor-spinoff of a popular Co-op FPS with an established fan base. 

So did the millions of DRG:S players come from Vampire Survivors or did it come from the 9 million Deep Rock Galactic owners? 

This is a hotly debated topic among the team. But, based on third-party tracking tools, the team estimates that 76% of Deep Rock Galactic Survivor owners also own Deep Rock Galactic. 

It seems to be that the IP is doing the heavy lifting.

CZ: Analysis. 

If you have a hit game with a pretty strong IP, consider using that IP on a fast follow hit game. Can you make a roguelike Deckbuilder with Balatro style rules but set in the world of your hit game? What about an autobattler? 

DLC

One other interesting tactic the team used was to launch with a supporter pack DLC that is purely cosmetic (it turns all the characters gold colored). 

That cosmetic had an initial 20% attach rate at launch. That means up to 20% of all people who bought DRG:S spent an additional $4.99 to further support the team. Now that DRG:S has been out longer and more people have bought the game who are unfamiliar with the Deep Rock IP, the attach rate has dropped to 16%. 

This is a very high attach rate. I haven’t done broad surveys but I hear 8% or less is typical.

Even with the 16% attach rate, that is essentially an extra $798,400 the team earned by adding a gold texture to the game. Try for that Supporter Pack, what’s the downside?

Summary

So what do I think the big lessons are?

  • Study every single game in your chosen genre. You must find where the genre is going and provide a unique feature.
  • For Steam, you can make your game’s controls simple, but your meta-game must be deep.
  • Indie studios are not using their hit IP enough. If you have a hit game it is your strongest asset, consider taking risks by trying your IP in different genres (especially hot genres that flare up like vampire-survivors) It works for Nintendo. Your IP will give you that initial boost to get visibility on Steam.
  • Add a supporter pack DLC (but get ready for a <8% attach rate)

Appendix: Timeline

  • August 2022 – Gamescom 2022 Danish delegation and were talking Vampire survivors and ideas for collaboration. Funday Prototyping without a formal contract soon after
  • December 2022 – signed contract
  • March 2023 – Ghostship publishing announcement stream went live and DRG:S and 2 other new games were announced.
  • June 2023 – Original planned release date for Early Access launch. But, when the team saw the wishlists skyrocket they delayed.
  • October 223 – Steam Next Fest demo launched
  • February 2024 – Early Access Release of Deep Rock Galactic Survivor
  • March 2024 – 1 million copies sold