The GOTY nominees that sold the most since their Game Awards nominations
We analyse how many copies The Game Awards GOTY nominees have sold on Steam, Xbox, and PlayStation since their nominations, diving into Game Pass cannibalisation, price cuts, and more.
The Game Awards is always a handy snapshot of the global critical consensus for PC and console games, but the real story for us always lies in the market’s reaction.
In one of our previous newsletters, we broke down The Game Awards nominees by overall copies sold.
Launch to date, Silksong is top by copies, but Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 and Expedition 33 made way more revenue, due to Silksong’s low $20 launch price versus KCD2’s $60 ($70 on console, variable pricing, baby) and Expedition 33’s $50.
For the second part of our TGA three-parter, let’s have a look at the immediate post-nomination sales performance of all the nominees on Steam, Xbox, and PC.
Expedition 33 leads by a significant margin
Since the nomination announcements on November 17, our copies sold estimates show that Expedition 33 has captured the most market attention, in terms of copies sold across Steam, Xbox (console, PC, and cloud), and PlayStation.
As you can see, Expedition 33 has sold almost 400K copies since its Game Awards nomination. That’s almost three times more than its closest competitor, Silksong – and at a higher price to boot.
Hollow Knight: Silksong and Hades 2, whose first outings are two of the most beloved games of all time, already boast established, loyal audiences. As highly anticipated known quantities, they’d already shifted a huge share of their copies sold in their first week on the market (or in early access, in Hades 2’s case).
Expedition 33‘s nomination rippled wider than the other games – even into mainstream coverage, as it received the most TGA nominations and is the clear frontrunner. Despite being the only new IP on the list.
But pricing is an obvious factor here, so let’s take a look at that.
Expedition 33’s minor discount and Game Awards: Use the force … multiplier, Lune
Kepler and Sandfall have been experimenting with Expedition 33’s pricing on Steam:
At the end of October, Expedition 33 was discounted from $49.99 to $39.99 This immediately drove sales to a then-peak of 19K copies in one day on November 2.
But the more interesting story is the more subtle $47.99 price point. This minimal $2 cut, kicking in on November 11, landed at the start of the Game Awards hype and marketing cycle.
The GOTY nomination itself happened on November 17th, while the game was at $47.99. Copies sold again spiked after stabilising from the original jump – and on a Monday, which is usually a slower day for purchases
The press coverage and widespread industry discourse that followed drove things further to another sales surge of 20K copies sold on November 22.
This peak, achieved with just a 4% discount, suggests that the Game Awards nomination hype and marketing boosted Expedition 33 copies sold regardless of the price drop. But together it was more powerful, a force multiplier.
Then finally, another $39.99 price on December 6 again spiked copies sold to almost 20K the day after. We’re expecting an even bigger spike following the event, so watch this space. (Edit: it happened. Read about it here).
Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 also used discounting to its advantage during the Game Awards hype window. But it did so on PS5, its secondary platform, converting an audience of interested consumers into a high-volume, immediate purchase outside of Steam, its core money maker:
Before its Game Awards nomination, KCD2 was consistently selling on PS5 at the full $70 price point. Just days after the nomination, KCD2 had a price drop to $41.99 (from Nov 21 to Dec 2) on PS5.
This aggressive 40% discount was its deepest yet, tripling KCD2’s daily sales from an average of 1K daily units to an average of 3.2K during the sales period.
It helped weekly KCD2 copies sold (and also revenues) on PS5 exceed Steam’s for the first time. That trend has shifted since the discount’s end.
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But two of the GOTY nominees launched on Game Pass (and are still available there), adding another wrinkle to this analysis.
The Game Pass paradox: Discovery vs cannibalisation
Since the Game Awards nominations, Expedition 33 has successfully leveraged its new visibility to add 107K new players via Xbox Game Pass, while Silksong gained 52K.
Want to see how day one-subscriptions affect things for yourself? Our platform has data on how many players accessed a game via Game Pass or PlayStation Plus. Reach out for a trial.
But this reach comes at a hefty price, as around 63% of Expedition 33’s copies sold since its Game Awards nomination came from Steam, 34% from PS5, and a mere 3% from Xbox.
The juxtaposition is critical. For every Expedition 33 copy sold on Xbox, 21 copies were sold on Steam and 11 on PS5. We saw similar results for Silksong.
Don’t get me wrong: this is rad for Game Pass subscribers (🙋) – or those of us left after the huge price hike – but it’s plainly cannibalising sales.
And yes – 107K new players is nothing to sniff at, but the discoverability is not worth the trade-off for developers anymore and was never really sustainable. And is certainly not in the time of big tech ‘‘efficiencies’’.
Xbox’s internal 30% profitability metric is one of the factors that have influenced Xbox’s lower Game Pass payouts relative to prior years.
Don’t expect too many third-party ‘’coming to Game Pass on day one’’ announcements at TGA on Thursday.
Speaking of those announcements, we’ll be covering which ones made the biggest splash on Steam this Friday. We’ll also look at how many more copies Expedition 33 shifts after its inevitable win on Thursday.
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