Dark and Darker Steam Next Fest
The Steam Next Fest generated a lot of buzz for some gaming titles that we can expect to play in the future. However, Dark and Darker, from developer Ironmace, was the clear favorite amongst the gaming & live streaming communities.
The Dark and Darker demo was released on February 6th encouraging both gamers and streamers to try out the new fantasy dungeon-crawler RPG. By the end of the demo’s first week of release, the game was able to generate 19M hours watched, and peaked at 360K viewers across platforms.
In another incredible feat, Dark and Darker actually peaked at #6 on the overall top games in live streaming leaderboard that week.
Games Discover Co. reported in their newsletter that the Dark and Darker demo saw the highest peak concurrent players on Steam for any game released during the Next Fest week with 108K players. That’s a whopping 105K more than the next game on the list, indicating a clear popularity winner for the week.
Games Discover Co. also reported that the game gained almost 34K new followers during Next Fest, putting its total Steam follower count at 139K as of February 13th.
Dark and Darker Top 10 Streamers
During the Next Fest week, Dark and Darker was especially popular amongst the Japanese-speaking and English-speaking communities; 8 of the top 10 streamers either spoke English or Japanese. Stylishnoob4, a predominantly Japanese-speaking streamer, generated the most hours watched with 1.13M hours watched that week followed by English-speaking live streamer sodapoppin who generated 889K hours watched.
Dark and Darker Twitch Chat Mentions
Dark and Darker chat mentions on Twitch skyrocketed to almost 15K mentions the day of the Steam Next Fest. From February 1-19 “Dark and Darker” chat mentions generated over 130K total mentions on Twitch.
What does this mean for Dark and Darker’s Release?
Live streaming has always had deep ties into the gaming industry with the majority of streamers on platforms like Twitch creating content around gaming. If you can get your game adopted by the live streaming community, subsequent content and hype around your game will be beneficial in increasing its shelf life and popularity.
Having early play tests and demos available to not only players but those in the live streaming community can help boost excitement around your game and get more people wishlisting it on Steam or other platforms.
Measuring live streaming can be a great stress test to see how the overall gaming community will react to your game post release, as well as identifying which specific communities will be more likely to adopt your game or not.
To learn more about how Stream Hatchet can help you with your game launch marketing plan, get a free consultation:
