The Game Awards provides the perfect opportunity to launch a new blog series on Game Oracle; God Tier Games. In this series we’ll choose a hugely successful game and use our research tools to explore its nearest neighbours on the Steam Map.

Our first God Tier game is, unsurprisingly, Astro Bot which was named Game of the Year at The Game Awards 2024. This game has an undeniably large audience which may, in part be thanks to a publisher that needs no introduction: Sony.

Astro Bot utilises the unique abilities of the PS5 DualSense controller which immerses the player in a “supersized space adventure”¹ and was published to be played exclusively on the PlayStation 5.

We’re not here to analyse the success of this God Tier Game though, we’re here to look at the pool of similar games around Astro Bot and why they might not have seen the same success. Luckily, the fact that Astro Bot is exclusively published on Playstation.com is not a barrier to using our map of Steam Games. Our tool, Data Explorer, doesn’t just use titles for search, we can input descriptions to find games similar to Astro Bot that exist on Steam.

We approached searching for similar games from two different angles; game play mechanics and narrative. These two different definitions of what a similar game entails led to two very different descriptions being used for our search:

1. A detailed, mechanical breakdown of what’s behind the story and beautiful graphics:

2. An adapted version of the narrative description on the PlayStation Store:¹

Each yielded very different results and so we tightened our search by filtering by games with the “3D” tag and only focussing on games that had been released. Amongst the games with the highest peer rank and percentage of positive reviews, a surprising number of sea-creature related games popped up, but below are the three that we chose with a bonus fourth game (6 - Mon Adventure) that we’ll talk about at the end.

Title	Developer	Publisher	Total Reviews	% Positive Reviews	Peer Rank
I Am FIsh (2021)	Bossa Games	Curve Games	2,695	72.1%	1
Akimbot (2024)	Evil Raptor	PLAION	355	86.7%	9
Lumote: The Mastermote Chronicles (2022)	Luminawesome Games	Wired Productions	89	94.4%	21

In terms of main character and setting, Akimbot is the most similar, but while the main character might not be a robot in I Am Fish, this game uses unique controls to move through the game similar to the dual sense control optimisation in Astro Bot. In the case of Lumote, where you play a delightful sea creature, the visual style and feel is very similar to some of the sci-fi, neon accents featured in Astro Bot.

Gaming Platforms & Social Media Channels

On the surface, when you look at the functional differences between these games and Astro Bot, there is very little to explain the difference in performance. Each game has a publisher, multiple social media accounts and can be played on different platforms.

Based on the number of available platforms, Lumote should have seen the biggest success with the game being published on Steam, Nintendo Switch, Xbox, Amazon’s Luna and PlayStation to name the main ones. In contrast, Akimbot is available on PlayStation, Xbox and Steam, and I Am Fish is only available on Steam and the Xbox store. And then there’s Astro Bot finding huge success on a single gaming platform.

The same can be said about the social media channels each studio in the table above has chosen. There’s the usual Twitter, YouTube and Instagram mix, sometimes with Discord and TikTok thrown in there too, but nothing stands out as a channel that everyone else is missing. It’s only when you dig a little deeper into the content on these free marketing channels (also known as organic marketing) that the differences begin to show.

Marketing Your Game Matters

As we’ve seen above, the number of platforms available to play your game on and the social media channels you choose to market your game are inconsequential to success. From a marketing point of view, just having a social media presence isn’t enough to drive purchase intent.

Social Media Content & Partnerships

One of the most notable differences between each studio and their associated games is their follower count across the main channels they use (YouTube, Twitter and Instagram) seen in the table below.

Game	YouTube Subscribers	Instagram Followers	Studio Twitter Followers	Game Twitter Followers	Total
I Am Fish	28,500	5,666	18,300	1,975	54,441
Akimbot	1,000	212	593	4,040	5,845
Lumote: The Mastermote Chronicles	86	234	1,365	63	1,748

I Am Fish, who have the most reviews on Steam, unsurprisingly have the highest follower count out of the three games, followed by Akimbot and finally Lumote. Their total reviews on Steam follow the same pattern.

There’s only one thing that you need to attract followers and that’s compelling content and each studio had a different approach to what they put on their social media. I Am Fish posted content covering topics around the theme of their game which resulted in fish-related memes, fish facts, retweeting fan content about their game and praising people for completing the game in increasingly shorter time-periods.

On YouTube they had an 11-part walk-through from their publisher, developer diaries on Bossa Games’ channel, production announcements, videos about the release date, trailers and giving players the opportunity to get the game for free. Coupled with notable names like Markiplier playing their game, they got a lot of eyes on their game before, during and after development.

They even partnered with Whale and Dolphin Conservation (WDC) through their publisher, Curve Games, which connected with players through a meaningful interest and essentially helped to drive more sales. ²

Lumote attempted a similar scheme of tapping into players’ other interests. Luminawesome Games released a crochet pattern for fans to make their own version of the game’s main character³ as well as partnering with Printables to provide 3D models for purchase.⁴ The crochet pattern did drive a small amount of engagement with the game, but crochet and gaming, while linked by creativity and problem solving, is quite a tight niche to extract sales from. If they had partnered with a charity related to their game play similar to I Am Fish, they could have played to people’s desire to make a positive impact on the world while also doing what they love; playing games.

Except for reposting fans’ crochet creations on Instagram, Lumote stuck to posting directly about their game by tweeting about Sales, retweeting fan reviews and posts, and retweeting their publisher’s posts. On YouTube, activity was limited to trailer videos from their publishers and from the accounts of the platforms they released the game on, but the limited and inconsistent behind the scenes content for this game could have impacted their overall sales across all platforms.

Akimbot had no visible partnerships, but in line with their success on Steam, they did promote the game with core in-game footage posted on Twitter YouTube Shorts. In terms of longer-form content, they published trailers alongside Xbox and PlayStation. Additionally, PLAION posted multiple release-related videos on their channel.

While intriguing, this social media activity doesn’t explain the difference between Akimbot and Lumote. For that we need to dive into content published by other people.

Third Party Content: Streamers & Gaming News Media

Streamers and Press are commonly recommended marketing channels, but the extent to which these channels are utilised varies greatly between these three games.

I Am Fish received a mostly positive review from gaming media giant IGN ⁵ and other notable online publications such as PC Invasion, Finger Guns and Rock Paper Shotgun. Akimbot was featured on a similar number of publications like GameByte, Gaming Bolt and Gaming Trend, but Lumote arguably had the most media coverage with at least 12 online publications, including on Finger Guns, talking about the game.

Again, this doesn’t explain the distance in performance between Akimbot and Lumote. Apart from the difference in social media followers, Lumote has so far beaten Akimbot on many levels. Lumote was published on more gaming platforms, talked about in more online publications, engaged in players’ other interests, and was even selected for Indie MEGA Booth ³.

The real decider in their performance is ultimately Streamer activity as seen in the table below.

Game	Release Day Stream Hours	Peak Streaming Channels	Peak Streaming Views
I Am Fish	401,000	114	54,944
Akimbot	22,900	11	8,629
Lumote: The Mastermote Chronicles	0	3	564

Partnering with streamers to play your game undeniably increases sales and is one of the key differences between the marketing efforts behind Akimbot and Lumote, but I Am Fish shows just what can be achieved with streaming, which is reflected in its sales on Steam.

Streamers provide invaluable first hand experience of your game to potential buyers and offer a try-before-you-buy experience as well as peer recommendation which are invaluable marketing tools.

Despite being available on the most gaming platforms, Lumote saw no streaming activity on it’s release date and peaked at only 564 concurrent streaming views.⁶ This could be because they worked with their publisher post launch and additional gaming platforms were only added later, but as previously mentioned, the number of platforms does not correlate with success.

In contrast to Lumote, I Am Fish and Akimbot saw thousands of views and tens of thousands of streaming hours on their release day, which ultimately contributed to their commercial success.^7,8

The Recipe for Success

While the calibre of your publisher (if you have one) is a huge factor in a game’s success, what these three games show is that simply having a publisher isn’t enough and you can’t always rely on them to promote your game effectively. Similarly, being available on multiple gaming platforms and posting trailers on multiple social media channels does not mean that you will achieve higher sales.

Akimbot and I Am Fish show that having a balance of the following organic marketing plays a big part in the sales of a game:

• Engaging social media content that gains followers
• Meaningful partnerships that speak to wider interests within the audience
• Release day streaming content
• Good quality gaming news coverage

All three games show that social media followers (i.e. interest in your game) and streaming activity are both early indicators of a game’s success and suggests they should be included in the key metrics you keep an eye on in your marketing activity.

Of course we don’t know what the paid marketing channels for these three games were. Additionally, the content of each game differs enough that the size of the audience available to play each game may vary. However, the high quality of these games means that they all had a similar potential for success, but their approach to marketing was what set them apart in the end.

Bonus: 6-Mon Adventure

Originally, 6-Mon Adventure featured in our analysis because it ticked a lot of boxes for quality and similarity to Astro Bot. However, on closer inspection, we found that the publisher of this fun robot adventure is a French art school specialising in 3D art, animation for cinema and game development.⁹

This game was likely to be a project of one of the students and there was no dedicated marketing campaign to promote it, so we thought it was unfair to compare the marketing efforts for this game with dedicated gaming studios. The school promotes all sorts of projects on their social media, but their main goal is, understandably, to promote enrolment in the school.

Despite this, 6-Mon Adventure still managed to get 55 reviews and 93.2% positive reviews without much promotion!

Methodology

Data we gathered about I Am Fish, Akimbot and Lumote can be found here.

References

1. Playstation.com | ASTRO BOT, Sony Interactive Entertainment Europe
2. Games for Waves | Case Study: Curve Games
3. Luminawesome Games | Lumote
4. Printables | Lumote from Lumote: The Mastermote Chronicles
5. IGN | I Am Fish Review
6. Streams Charts | Lumote: The Mastermote Chronicles
7. Streams Charts | I Am Fish
8. Streams Charts | Akimbot
9. Objectif 3D | École des arts numériques