Game Industry Biz Numbers, and Do Gamers Know Assets?

Also Game Awards Wishlist stats, and Awesome 3D looking anim made in 2D

Author

Code Monkey
December 22, 2024

Hello and Welcome, I’m your Code Monkey!

The Holidays are here, I hope you have a great time with your loved ones!

Also make sure to take some time for yourself as well! Do something fun or just reflect on the last 12 months.

  • Game Dev: Game Industry Biz Numbers; Gamers Know Assets; Game Awards Wishlists

  • Fun: 2D looks 3D

Game Dev

Games Industry Biz Numbers

Here is a very fascinating article by GamesIndustry.biz containing lots of stats on the health of the games industry.

In total there's no growth (+0.2% YoY) which is actually good news considering how this year the industry felt like it was crumbling apart, hopefully next year things are better.

I find it interesting how physical games have become so small at just 5%. Personally I haven't bought a physical game in many many years but I thought it was a bit higher.

On the Top Sellers charts we have Call of Duty: Black Ops 6, Helldivers II, Dragon Ball: Sparking! Zero, Elden Ring, Minecraft, Mario Kart 8 and lots of sports games.

Also nice stats on the Most Covered Games with Fortnite at the top, followed by Helldivers II and Call of Duty: Black Ops 6.

On TikTok Roblox is at the top, League of Legends got the Most Viewed Trailer (128 million views) and Top YouTube Influencers are a bunch of people I have never heard about (Lana's Life? Roblox)

I love stats and it's interesting to see them all together in one place. This year the industry has been tricky, so many layoffs, hopefully 2025 will be better for both people working at AAA companies and also for funding for indies!

Affiliate

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Unity is currently running their New Year Sale!

If you need assets to achieve your 2025 goals then check out what's on sale. Over 1500 assets so all the top ones are on sale plus a bunch of new ones.

I can highly recommend the usual great ones like FEEL (great for polish), Text Animator (perfect if your game has any text), Easy Save (for any kind of saving), Bakery (gorgeous baked lighting), Volumetric Lights (gorgeous visible light shafts) Asset Inventory (perfect for managing assets)

Plus you can get a bonus 10% OFF on orders above $120 with coupon NYS24.

Check out everything on sale HERE!

The Publisher of the Week this time is GameMaster Audio, lots of very varied sound effect packs.

Get the FREE Punch Sound Pack which contains 45 high quality punch sound effects.

Get it HERE and use coupon GAMEMASTERAUDIO at checkout to get it for FREE!

Synty has just published a really cool new pack, all about Police!

Right away this makes me want to make a Police Simulator game. Either one where you control a character in this person and stop crimes, or one where it’s a Tycoon/Management game with an overhead camera where you hire Police Officers and send them out on tasks.

Oh and also for the Holidays there’s a FREE Gnome pack you can pick up, very cute characters!

Game Dev

Do gamers recognize assets?

This is a question that pops up every once in a while, recently showed up on Reddit.

I've covered this topic in a video previously but it bears repeating: No, players do not care about assets.

Most players don't even know what on earth is a "game engine", they just want fun games to play and nothing else.

If the game is fun, then the player does not care that you hand-built everything yourself from scratch, or that you used 100 different asset packs and tools and put them all together. If the end result is great then that's all that matters.

As an example here are a bunch of games that very clearly are using very recognizable Synty asset packs and are still very successful with no negative reviews from players complaining about using assets:

Soulstone Survivors, 20,000 very positive reviews

No Plan B, 655 very positive reviews

Perfect Heist 2; 3,000 very positive reviews, literally just straight up used the Heist pack, players don't care

One-armed robber; 30,000 very positive reviews

Clownfield 2042, 4,000 very positive reviews, just Synty Battle Royale pack

Motor Town: Behind The Wheel, 3,500 very positive reviews

Clearly players do not care about Synty assets, or any assets, they just want fun games to play so focus on that.

I love assets, they help me plug skill gaps, I cannot do 3D modelling at all; and also help me save time, I could build a great text animator system in 100 hours, or I can just pick up Text Animator from the Asset Store for 20 bucks. That’s a very easy decision.

Don't be afraid to use all the assets at your disposal to make your vision come to life.

Game Dev

The Game Awards Wishlist Stats

The Game Awards was last week, and like I mentioned on the last Game Dev Report I was doing some research to make this video to answer the question: How many wishlists do you get from being on The Game Awards?

The answer is, between 9k and 400k!

The Big Winners:

Elden Ring: Nightreign > 400,000 wishlists in 2 days!

KYORA > 90,000 wishlists (a modern Terraria-like sandbox).

BLACKFROST: The Long Dark 2 > 90,000 wishlists.

Mid-Tier Hits:

Split Fiction > 70,000 wishlists. Co-op devs Hazelight Studios continues making great games for a specific audience.

REMATCH > 35,000 wishlists. From the creators of Sifu, it's definitely a curious switch to go from Martial Arts to Football but considering how good Sifu was it seems people are already interested in this one.

Turok Origins > 51,000 wishlists. Nostalgia + dinosaurs = success.

The Small Yet Impressive Results:

One Move Away > 9,000 wishlists. A cozy puzzle game, shown during the pre-show, still managed to perform better than most indies do in months.

I am always fascinated by the topic of wishlists and finding the best ways to get them. If you get a phone call from Geoff Keighley asking to showcase your game then definitely take that chance! Most indies struggle to get to 7k wishlists, these games got multiples of that in just 48 hours!

Fun

Insane 2D Animation that looks 3D!

I just saw something pretty insane! Here is an excellent animation, cartoony looking slightly 3D, except it's all in 2D!

This is made with Spine 2D, a 2D animation tool, and it looks absolutely amazing!

This animator has another video on another character that also looks super impressive, especially when you see all the gizmos that make up the 2D skeleton, impressive stuff!

I am someone with no art skills so I love to watch talented artists do their thing. It's super impressive how you can take some 2D images and layer them and move them in such a way to make it seem 3D.

Get Rewards by Sending the Game Dev Report to a friend!

(please don’t try to cheat the system with temp emails, it won’t work, just makes it annoying for me to validate)

Thanks for reading!

Code Monkey

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