#Thief simulator game steam plus

And some, like Cozy Grove, are deliberately designed to be a focused, limited daily play. When I think about games that explicitly give me an Animal Crossing vibe on Steam, there are few. But I think it makes the players appreciate what they've built and where they've come from.” He also makes a great point: “Having the player start with no items, on the lookout for predators and hunting for food makes the beginning of the game feel very different to other games in the genre… to be honest, this was kind of accidental throughout development. There is no penalty to players building where they want, which I hope leaves the game feeling more like a sandbox than other games in the genre.” The map itself is quite large, with different biomes that have their own plants and wildlife found in each. When we asked James about Dinkum’s USPs, he said “…a big map and the light survival mechanics have helped stand out. collecting creatures and fish with a museum like system… decoration”, but also deeper, more Stardew-elements like farming & cooking, mining, days being on a timer, and an energy system. There’s actually a really interesting top Steam review which lists the Animal Crossing elements to the game: “Villager system… Get your own house, go in debt like Tom taught you….

And although James referenced ‘luck’ in terms of him breaking through, I do think the surface Animal Crossing-like nature of Dinkum has really helped people notice it.

A hole in the market for deep, good-looking Animal Crossing-a-likes?įor me, ‘the game’ is the thing - not necessarily the marketing. The game’s wishlists were around 35,000 before those pre-release bumps, but around 80,000 at launch - also due to big pre-release YouTube videos from Raptor (and others) which James & friends sent early Steam keys to. However, he noted that he had some help with marketing in the last few months before release, which got him into IGN's Summer Of Games show and a small highlight in the Future Games Show. The only updates I would show were through Twitter videos.” I started with a Devlog that went from fortnightly updates, to monthly to no post at all for months. James admits: “I was very bad at keeping people updated with the development. (That’s in the top 2.5% of all Steam releases.) But it was almost all slow organic growth over multiple years. If you look at SteamDB’s followers chart for Dinkum - and ignore the post-release explosion, haha - you can see that the game got close to 6,000 Steam followers by its mid-July launch.

#Thief simulator game steam plus

(That’s a 55x ‘reviews to sales’ ratio on 6,279 Overwhelmingly Positive Steam reviews, btw - big games often have higher ratios.)īut how? Was it ‘nature’ (the game as designed) or ‘nurture’ (things James did while promoting it)? Why is Dinkum the #2 most reviewed new paid game on Steam in July 2022, according to our Plus data ? Here’s some thoughts: Dinkum had great - but not outstanding - pre-release momentum… It’s still getting 6-8k CCU daily, and he tells me it has sold around 350,000 units on Steam since its July 14th. I think it’s fair to say that James - who is a GameDiscoverCo newsletter subscriber - has been stunned by the success of the title. One of the tricky things about talking about success in PC/console video games is simple: what did the successful title do differently? There’s thousands of games released every year, and a decent percentage are high quality, well-crafted titles.īut why do some games just ‘go large’? In search of an answer, GameDiscoverCo talked to James Bendon about Dinkum, his Australian-themed ‘Animal Crossing meets Stardew Valley’ title, one of the breakout Steam games of 2022 so far. Dinkum: analyzing its smash Steam success… Random tip before we start: MIT Press publishes great (academia-tinged) books about video games, and this Humble eBook bundle includes Jesper Juul’s cultural analysis of indie games, Handmade Pixels (which interviews me!), and Bernie DeKoven’s ‘how people play’ classic The Well-Played Game, among many others. We were planning to lead with some ‘hardcore data’, but we managed to chat to Dinkum creator James Bendon, so that’s fast-tracked to be today’s newsletter. Welcome back to your mid-week madness edition of the GameDiscoverCo newsletter.