How the GameDiscoverCo newsletter launched a data product for game developers
Simon Carless carved out a niche in the gaming industry by tracking the metrics around game releases.
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There’s absolutely no way to predict with 100% accuracy how a piece of commercial art will perform once it’s released to the public. If that were possible, then book publishers would only put out bestsellers and movie studios would exclusively release blockbusters. There are just too many variables at play — including critical reviews, marketing campaigns, word-of-mouth buzz, and even macroeconomic trends — to determine ahead of time whether a piece of content will be a smash hit or total flop.
That’s not to say that the companies that fund this content don’t try to gauge the potential sales numbers of a project before greenlighting it. That’s why every book proposal is required to have a “comp titles” section where the author lists other similar books in the marketplace along with their sales numbers, and it’s why there’s a whole cottage industry of data analysts who try to predict the box office openings for films. It’s also why Hollywood is obsessed with making movies and TV shows that fit within already-existing IP; it gives executives at least some peace of mind that there’s an audience that’s expressed an interest in the property.
But what happens if you’re a video game producer who wants to set realistic sales expectations for an upcoming title? While some games are based on already-existing IP, there are hundreds launched every year for smartphones, desktop computers, and consoles that are wholly original, and the companies that publish them collectively spend billions of dollars to market those titles to potential customers. In order to ensure a good return on their marketing spend, they need accurate data on how similar games were promoted and discovered.
To get this data, many within the industry turn to the GameDiscoverCo newsletter. Launched in 2019 by a longtime gaming journalist named Simon Carless, GameDiscoverCo analyzes both public and private data around game releases and then distills it into marketing and sales insights. Carless monetizes the newsletter through a mixture of paid subscriptions and consulting, and he’s used his profits to build a platform that visualizes this data for paying customers. Think of it as sort of a Bloomberg Terminal for game developers.
In a recent interview, Carless discussed why he decided to quit his job to run the newsletter, how he grew his audience, and what it took to build out and run his own data platform.
Let’s jump into my findings…
Learning the ins and outs of the gaming industry
While Carless spent the last 20 years in gaming media, he actually got his start on the operations side of the industry. Specifically, he was a game designer in the 90s, working on a number of titles that included Looney Tunes Racing and a first-person shooter for the PC. “I enjoyed it, but I didn't really feel like I had a full skillset,” he said. “Like I can't really program, and I felt like that was sort of holding me back.”
Starting in the late 90s, Carless began writing about games for websites like Slashdot and Gamasutra, the latter of which was associated with a print publication called Game Developer Magazine. One of his earliest pieces for the site was a longform history of arcade fighting games. For the first few years, he freelanced for these publications while continuing to hold down his day job, but in 2004 he decided he wanted to make a full-time plunge into gaming journalism. “I basically went over and said, ‘Hey, I've been writing for you as a game designer. Can I come and write news and features about game development?’ And they were like, ‘sure.’”
For the next 16 years or so, Carless basically worked for the same company, moving up within its ranks as it got swallowed by larger and larger parent companies. Between 2004 and 2008, he served as the editor-in-chief of Gamasutra, which was eventually rebranded as GameDeveloper.com. Then he moved out of the digital content space entirely to run the company's various events, including the Game Developers Conference and Black Hat, which is an annual information security conference. Informa, one of the largest event companies in the world, bought Carless’s employer in 2018 for $5.2 billion. Carless was given the title of executive vice president and continued to run its events.
It was while working at Informa that Carless launched the GameDiscoverCo newsletter on Substack. In 2017, he had invested in a gaming studio called No More Robots that went on to produce multiple hit games, and his collaboration with them spurred an interest in game sales data. “I was very interested in this problem, which is that there's an increasing supply of video games and the demand for video games is going up, but there's also a lot of existing video games that continue taking up interest.” There was plenty of existing data for mobile game downloads — due to the fact that marketers acquired users through paid ads on platforms like Facebook and Twitter — but that wasn’t the case for PC and console games, both of which required a lot more guesswork in their marketing.
The idea behind GameDiscoverCo was that Carless would take publicly-available data from platforms like Steam and then combine it with private data furnished from his contacts within the industry, and from there he could shed light on why certain PC and console games found an audience. He began publishing the newsletter in 2019 and then basically ran it as a side hustle for the next several months.
That all changed in 2020 with the introduction of the Covid pandemic. Carless suddenly found himself running a live events business in a world where there were no events. By that point, his newsletter had about 1,500 free subscribers, and he felt it was as good a time as any to try something new. “I wasn't presuming that I could suddenly make the same amount of money or anything, but I wanted to try it because I felt like it would be sustainable and exciting,” he said. “I'm in my late forties now, and I figured that if I can build something for the next 15 years that's entertaining and where I own the whole thing, then that would be awesome.”
Paywall incoming…
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