GTA 6 Won Summer Game Fest by Posting a Box Art

The throughline of this week's Player Driven Live was uncomfortable for anyone whose job is to move a number up and to the right. Attention is not conversion. Moats erode. And the businesses winning right now are the ones that changed the model, not the ones defending it.

Rockstar invented post-marketing

GTA 6 opened preorders this week at $100, and Colan's take was blunt: Rockstar “basically won Summer Game Fest by putting out a box art, a preorder date, and then the preorder price.” No trailer drop, no gameplay reveal, no eight-figure campaign. They got more attention from posting three things than studios got from three weeks and millions of dollars of promotion. Colan calls it post-marketing, where the game itself is the marketing and the fanbase does the distribution for free. The catch he was careful to flag: almost nobody else can run this play. You have to be a game whose current title is still a top seller every month, years later. Realistically that is GTA, and maybe Minecraft. So the lesson for the marketing exec watching at home is not “stop marketing.” It is “you are not Rockstar.”

The wishlist is the new Facebook like

Steam Next Fest wrapped, and with it came the usual wishlist-growth victory laps. Colan's problem with the metric is simple math: wishlists convert to purchases at maybe 10 to 15 percent, often lower. If a number only pays off one time in ten, why is it the number everyone optimizes around? Because it is easy to understand and it goes up. That makes it a vanity metric, and the moment a public-facing vanity metric has money attached to it, you get bots, paid growth services, and a cottage industry built on making the number move. He has watched this movie before with Facebook likes and Twitch concurrents. The signal that actually matters is engagement, specifically time. How long someone watches, how long before they swipe away. Likes do not move an algorithm. Watch time does.

Valve lived long enough to become the villain

This was the centerpiece. Colan framed Valve through Ben Thompson's aggregation theory: Steam did not win by owning the supply side the way old monopolies owned the steel and the railroad. It won the demand side. Everyone is already there, all your friends are already there, and that network effect is the real moat. You cannot regulate it away, because you cannot tell consumers where to prefer to shop. The only way through is to change the business model, the way Spotify beat piracy by simply offering a better service. Which is what made the Steam Machine, the “Gabe Cube,” such a strange call. Valve priced it at the cost of its components, an underpowered PS5 for a few hundred dollars more, instead of subsidizing the hardware to sell more of the 30 percent-margin games that are the entire business. For a private, wildly profitable company, Colan's verdict was “what a miss.”

Poki quietly became a top-ten ecosystem

Greg brought numbers from Poki's State of Web Gaming report: 100 million monthly active players, up from 10 million in 2020. Roughly a third play multiple times a day, a strong majority rate the games as high quality, and a meaningful share have bought a game after first playing it on the web. Player Driven's own tool already ranks Poki as the eighth-largest gaming ecosystem in the world, sitting in a list with Minecraft, Roblox, Fortnite and GTA. The question Greg posed, could web gaming ever take on Steam, got Colan's favorite redirect: how does Poki monetize? Ads. A hundred million players on an ad-supported model is, in his words, a cash volcano waiting to explode. Which is exactly why he thinks anyone sitting on premium content and an ad engine, Meta especially, should be looking hard at this space.

Bungie had the worst day in the room

“Bungie basically died today,” Colan said, “at least severely injured, and then Xbox said hold my beer.” Most of the Destiny 2 team is gone. Marathon, by the secondhand numbers cited on the show, is hanging on at around 10,000 concurrents with most of its base on Steam, which is a dead game. The Final Shape was sold as the end and then was not the end, with no clear Destiny 3 behind it, one of the more confounding calls a studio has made. Colan does not buy the theory that Sony set Bungie up to fail. Sony lets Naughty Dog, Insomniac and Santa Monica do their thing and grades them on it. His read is more mundane and more brutal: Bungie is on a corporate PIP, a performance improvement plan, and step one is greenlighting a game that actually makes money. His longer-running thesis still holds. Bungie is unownable. They rebelled against Microsoft, against Activision, and now against Sony.

The pricing double standard

Xbox console prices are going up, layoffs are reportedly landing next week, and Microsoft is said to be mulling selling off parts. Against all that, Colan made the case nobody wanted to hear: Nintendo got pilloried for a $50 hike, its stock dropped 30 percent, and in the same breath it promised to discount its digital games. Everyone else is raising prices by hundreds and getting eight-out-of-ten reviews for the privilege. On the DRAM panic driving those hikes, he is more optimistic than most. Memory was never optimized for because it was always cheap, the incentive to optimize is finally here, and China will happily flood the market with cheap memory the way it has with everything else. Prices will not go backwards, though. We are just finding the new floor.

Where to find more

You can find Colan's Patch Notes on Substack and on playerdriven.io. New episodes of Player Driven Live every Thursday. As Colan put it, the two things that still bring America together are sports and GTA 6.