What the hey? Is it time for another GDCo newsletter already? It is, and this time, we’re going back to our our latest survey of ‘Steam fans’ (last tapped for questions about games and AI), to ask them about another key subject - Steam player reviews.

Before we start, we dig (haha!) The Data Drop newsletter making a visual (scrollable) guide to every block ever added to Minecraft. (The game started with 26 classic blocks in 2009 - and yes, obsidian was there from the start - and finishes up in 2024 with block types like, uh, ‘waxed exposed copper trap door’.)

[THE DEEPEST PC/CONSOLE DATA? You can get a free demo of our GameDiscoverCo Pro company-wide ‘Steam deep dive’ & console data by reaching out today - >110 orgs have it. Or, signing up to GDCo Plus gets the rest of this newsletter and Discord access, plus more.]

Game discovery news: GTA, Modern Warfare 4 go!

Let’s end out the week by taking a look at some of the top discovery & platform news since last time out:

• Our friends at ICO’s Footprints.gg again put out their latest ‘trad media’ coverage report (above), and GTA 6 will just be #1 until the game comes out, apparently. But next? Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 announced its Beta schedule, and Palworld’s 1.0 is going swimmingly, with peak Steam CCU now close to 1 million.

• Some notable Valve changes to Steam wishlist org for players, which we teased a few days back: players can now sort their wishlists by specific named categories (like ‘Next Fest’, ‘Wait For Reviews’, etc.) And categories can have customized wishlist notifications - or none at all. Most players won’t use this - but some will.(And games with demos are called out in wishlist view, with mouseover for trailer!)

• The above wishlist changes were done, in part, to support better Steam game gifting, including guest checkout “which lets a family member or friend make a gift purchase without needing to create a Steam account”, gift cards/games sent by email, and optional public ‘wishlist category’ lists for birthday/Xmas gifting. (All smart.)

• Amazon’s Luna cloud gaming service is “now available on Prime Video on Fire TVs in the US and UK… [you can] start playing in seconds right on your TV, using a controller or your phone.” Since it’s included with Prime, we imagine this could boost pickup - games include: “Hogwarts Legacy, EA Sports FC 26, and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle to GameNight party games like Clue, Ticket to Ride, and Taboo.”

• The Circana U.S. game hardware/software charts for June 2026 show total $ down 21% to $4.5b, mainly down to poor comps with Switch 2 launch in June 2025 (spending down 79%!) But software was down 12% to $3.9 billion, too, thx to console & mobile drops. (Xbox hardware units were up 86% vs. last June, tho..)

• As we’ll do every week, we looked at the top unreleased Steam demos by CCU using GDCo Pro data: PvE autobattler roguelike Guildrun is now #1 - more about it next week. (Co-op bomb defusal game Bombanana! slipped to #2, and slot machine-based autobattler Slotbound went up to #4.)

• Netflix has said it’s early days for its game biz a few times: well, it’s still “early signals” from a “small base” mode, with the Netflix Playground app getting 3x daily player growth, and Netflix co-CEO Gregory Peters saying “monthly active players for cloud games have increased 11x.” (No, we don’t know from where to where.)

• Xbox things: it’s launching Xbox Backward Compatibility on PC, with emulated OG Xbox games inc. BliNX & Conker: Live and Reloaded; it’s testing ad-supported cloud streaming on existing games for Xbox Insiders; the Meta Horizon+ sub service is getting a ‘starter edition’ of Game Pass with ~50 games.

• Gamescom 2026? It’s full of exhibitors for the allotted space (tho not all available Messe space, perhaps?), a bit like a hovercraft is full of eels. In addition: “Several [new] exhibitors have also joined the lineup, including Konami, Tencent Games, Embark Studios, and Level Infinite.” (It’s doing a good job of smooshing biz/consumer.)

• PlayStation things: this editorial from The Verge on no more physical PS discs notes that “Capcom… reported that an astounding 93 percent of its game sales were for digital copies in its last fiscal year.” And Mat Piscatella reveals that “7 [PlayStation games] have sold more than 100k physical units year-to-date.” But still people mourn…

• Microlinks: Bloomberg’s look at the creation of the new Steam Machine has a Valve engineer re: hardware component pricing: “Honestly, it’s still getting worse.”; new UK survey on kids’ online experiences [.PDF] Roblox/Minecraft stats & more; by Day 3, active creator accounts predicted FPS tier success “with 72% accuracy.”

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Will fewer people buy Steam games due to reviews?

As we showed with our recent AI survey, we’ve been having fun surveying ~3,800 ‘Steam fans’ - more committed players who respond to giveaways online, etc - about multiple subjects from June 25th to July 2nd, 2026. Why? There’s a lack of this type of ‘large respondent pool’ with granular data on how people interact with Steam!

And the second subject we asked these players was something that many of us pay a lot of attention to: Steam player reviews. But what do players say about reviews? Firstly, we checked their interest:

So yes, player reviews are a big deal on Steam. 40.5% of all respondents say they always check reviews before buying, and 32% say they do it most of the time. (From there, 19.4% say they check it sometimes, 5.6% occasionally, and just 2.5% never.)

Not really that surprising, perhaps - but good to see it confirmed. The really interesting question is the next one - which Steam player ratings make people think twice. Before we get there, let’s remind us of how Steam’s review categories work:

There’s been plenty of end-result data in the past showing that lower-rated games perform worse - particularly those with Mixed ratings and below (some of which will be just due to game quality, but there’s a knock-on effect!):

Given these graphs, we weren’t sure when people would definitely say ‘I’m less likely to buy this game with X rating’, which is important because it may significantly affect long tail. And here’s what they said:

Just listing it out: 20.3% of respondents said an all-time rating of less than Very Positive reviews (Mostly Positive or below) would make them “less likely to buy”. And 30.8% said ratings of Mixed or below would make them less likely. (So if your overall review is Mixed, that’s half of your audience looking at your game skeptically…)

From there, 34.9% of those replying said it would be Mostly Negative ratings or below that really put you off, and only 9.7% said that “no rating would make a significant different for me.” So: reviews - they really matter. But a Mostly Positive rating? Less of a death sentence for player interest than you might think…

Finally, we asked about ‘recent’ ratings, on people’s mind because other-language review bombs will still hit ‘recent’, even if the main rating is only showing English language reviews.

As you can see, 32.9% of respondents said that yes, if a game has ‘worse’ recent reviews than all-time, they’ll '“look very carefully” at recent reviews. 47.4% said they would maybe check it, but “understand there are sometimes short-term review complaints.” And only 14.5% said they wouldn’t pay attention.

We also asked open-ended text questions on ‘What do you find most/least helpful about the Steam player review system?’, and we got >2,500 usable responses (!!) for each question. So, with some Claude help, here’s the top ‘helpful’ things about reviews, alongside example actual player responses:

• Finding out about bugs, performance & technical issues (14% of respondents): “I only check to see if people report bugs… [and to] see info on performance, more than for the content quality of a game.”

• Overall score / aggregate player consensus for games (8% of respondents): “The overall rating percentage cuts through noise instantly. 'Overwhelmingly Positive' from 40,000 reviews tells me something no trailer ever could.”

• The ability to filtering, sort & drill down on data (7% of respondents): “The split overview with most helpful and most recent reviews. The ability to respond. The highlighting of developer replies. The graph with the distribution of positive and negative reviews.”

• Playtime display positively affecting reviewer credibility (6% of respondents): “The most helpful part for me is seeing the reviewer's playtime right next to their opinion. It really helps filter out knee-jerk reactions from people who barely played.”

Also mentioned prominently: honesty & authenticity from actual players, the ability of select reviews to go in-depth with both pluses and minuses, and the recent/overall split.

Unlike the positives, there’s a lot more consensus on ‘What do you find least helpful about the Steam player review system?’ around one particular subject:

• Joke/meme/troll & low-effort reviews (20% of respondents): "The joke reviews that copypaste the same review on every game - but there are less of them now since Steam made awards less useful, so there's no incentive to bait for awards in reviews.”

• Review bombing / brigading / off-topic drama (11% of respondents): “When reviews are coordinated attacks by groups of people over some trivial matter that they blow out of proportion, wasting your time reading about why the game now has bad reviews.”

• Fake, paid, bot & AI-generated reviews (6% of respondents): "Fake positive reviews from friend groups or purchased accounts still slip through. When a new game launches with 200 glowing reviews in the first 24 hours and each reviewer has 1 game in their library, something's off.” (We’re not sure re: ‘1 game in library’, but we still see it…)

Also mentioned: Bias, emotion & unfair negativity, inappropriate helpfulness votes & award farming, the binary thumbs up/down choice with no ‘neutral’ option, and reviews with lack of detail. But overall: player reviews are a big net positive for Steam…

This week’s Steam debuts: Shift At Midnight hits…

Read more

Happy, uh, Tuesday, is it? And almost August already? This year is flying by, and ‘too much news’ certainly seems to be part of it. (Look, we’re trying to catch it all for you, like Tobey Maguire/Peter Parker caught that tray. Hopefully not with 156 takes.)

Before we start, congrats to the winners of GameDiscoverCo’s ‘Scrappy Saves The Animals’ game jam with the Oakland Ballers on Itch.io! Check out video of the entrants, and you can play the top games - including the winner, Scrappy’s Rescue Run. Games will be showcased at the video game-themed Ballers game this Friday.

[THE DEEPEST PC/CONSOLE DATA? You can get a free demo of our GameDiscoverCo Pro company-wide ‘Steam deep dive’ & console data by reaching out today - >110 orgs have it. Or, signing up to GDCo Plus gets the rest of this newsletter and Discord access, plus more.]

Game discovery news: Paper Shredder, Guildrun?

Let’s start things out with a look at the various game platform & discovery news - stacking up like this:

• GDCO Pro's estimates of 'trending' unreleased Steam games by 'new wishlists in the last 7 days', July 13th to 20th, is, duh, headed by Dear Passengers. But all of the Top 3 are new, with first-person cleaning game Paper Shredder (#2) also getting a ton of short-form video love, and adding ~140k wishlists quick.

• The final new entry is super-slick, great looking autobattler roguelike Guildrun (#3), whose wishlists are arguably more 'solid' than the other top games, in that it has a playable demo which already hit 11k CCU on Steam. We've talked about other top titles before, inc. Soulframe (#4) and Dinoblade (#5, out this week!)

• Mainframe’s Sulka Haro did a big data dive on publicly accessible ‘Steam x AI’ data, revealing: “An AI-flagged game reaches a real modest-success tier (≥100 reviews ≈ ~3,000 sales) at only about 55% of the non-AI rate - and that ratio hasn’t improved in two years.” A second part adds: “AI games rate lower - but not catastrophically.”

• Steven Lake’s interview with Edmund McMillen reveals that after “Steam recommended we do this extreme 90% off sale” for The Binding Of Isaac Complete Bundle in the Steam Summer Sale, it had “close to 4 million” extra units sold, many at ~$5. (Catalog titles - you really want to be in that ‘90% off’ feature spot!)

• Academic and game maker Paolo Pedercini - ever provocative - has article-ized a talk on ‘A History Of Games Through Mass Extinctions’, and he notes: “Industry commentators* have been talking about a deprofessionalization of the Western game industry” (*me), adding: “Science Fiction author and futurologist Bruce Sterling has this maxim: ‘Whatever happens to musicians happens to everybody’. He sees musicians as the patient zero for the precarization of all cultural industries.” Spicy stuff.

• One of the folks hacking devs to inject malware into their Steam games & grab player crypto got caught. Here’s the full legal filing against him - he “infected the devices of some 8,000 people, the FBI said, gaining access to about 80 crypto wallets and stealing at least $220,000.” A 1 in 100 wallet success rate still pays off, eventually…

• Roblox things: they’ve announced the UGC-centric Build - “a new mobile-first creation tab within the Roblox app, and a new suite of AI-powered tools within Studio for creators of every level”; one investor claims successful Roblox creators get “terrible, predatory offers from deeply unethical hypercapitalistic companies on the platform who intentionally take advantage of stark deal asymmetries with 15-20+ year old devs.”

• The latest Xbox Game Pass titles to debut on the subscription platform include big titles (the awaited Halo: Campaign Evolved, Game Freak’s intriguing Beast of Reincarnation) and some trendier breakouts (Mistfall Hunter, Corsair Cove, Shift At Midnight.)

• Valve just dropped a decent-sized update to SteamVR ahead of the (presumed) Steam Frame VR hardware release. The updates “brings a good slate of standard Steam features to SteamVR [and] a more VR-native user experience, in part thanks to its new UI for SteamVR’s Dashboard”, according to RoadToVR.

• A mobile platform ICYMI: “Epic Games and Google… jointly withdrew their attempt to retroactively settle the lawsuit that’s changing how Android app stores work in the United States - and that means Google will be forced to carry rival app stores inside of its own.” (As soon as Wednesday, apparently?)

Before we move on, we wanted to show off a new feature in GameDiscoverCo Pro. We added automagic graph annotations for Steam demo launches, Next Fest and 190+ (!) streaming showcase events. Here’s a particularly good example, tracking the rise of co-op Scottish weapon brawler Tears Of Metal - out this week:

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What’s the ‘long tail’ for your PC game in 2026?

So your game launched on Steam. Your first week (or month’s) sales are in. That’s a good starting point. But how much money can you expect at the end of the first 6 months, or 1 year, or 2 years? We’ve covered this before, notably back in 2021 with a reader survey, but a GDCo subscriber pointed out we didn’t benchmark it recently.

Luckily, we have data estimates for every single Steam game. So we looked at a host of recent titles - all games launched from July 2023 to July 2025 (so they can accumulate at least a year of sales) with Month 1 sales of >1,000 units.

And here’s the headline numbers. Voila: the copies sold/revenue multiplier across all 5,000 games in that cohort, with Month 1 being 1.0x revenue and copies sold:

That’s a lot of numbers! But to simplify things: if you had 10,000 copies sold at the end of Month 1, the median result says you’d have 14,600 cumulative sold by Month 6, 17,900 by Month 12, and 22,700 by Month 24. (LTD median gross revenue multiple is about 7% lower after Month 12, and 12% lower after Month 24, due to discounting.)

We also know people like to use other multipliers in their calculations, specifically ‘Week 1 sales’ as a base, so we can easily show multipliers for common milestones:

As you can see, if you sold X copies in Week 1, you will - at median - have sold 1.39x those copies by Month 1, 2.59x the copies by Year 1, and 3.32x copies by Year 2. (And the revenue is slightly different - 1.42x the revenue by Month 1 (more, due to launch discounts expiring!), 2.46x by Year 1, and 2.99x by the end of Year 2.

Was this more than you expected? Less? The only thing we’ll note is that a median hides big swings. For example, Lethal Company has a 4.14x Week 1 to Month 1 sales ratio, Mouthwashing has a 2.54x ratio, but Fuga: Melodies Of Steel 3 had a frontloaded 1.04x, and Wargroove 2 had 1.08x. (Still, it’s a great starting point…)

And the important point is this: if you see ‘hey, X game grossed $1 million in Week 1’, it’s quite likely to gross $3 million in the next couple of years - and eventually stretch out to $4-5 million or more. (Unless horribly frontloaded.) So there’s some significant residual revenue to arrive there, that you should plan for…

Since we know people love using Week 1 as their benchmark, here’s the same graph as above, but with Week 1 as 1.00x instead of Month 1. And perhaps unsurprisingly, long tail is down from the 2021 survey, when we had Year 1 as 3.05x Week 1 revenue. It’s now (well, as of 2023-2025) showing Year 1 as 2.46x Week 1 revenue, about 20% down.

(We’d expect that, because there’s been strong Steam revenue growth since 2021 - as much as +100% in aggregate - but the # of launched games is outpacing that. And that’s likely to affect decisions on increased choice made during the first year or two of release. We hear 2017/2018 was even more halcyon for fatter ‘long tail’. But that’s practically the Jurassic…)

Finally, we decided to look at the data through a few lenses. First, with the rise of cheaper games, we thought we’d separate out <$10 games from >=$10 ones, discovering that more expensive titles have slightly better long tail (2.7x Week 1 copies sold in Year 1, up 4% compared to the 2.59x median.)

Since most <$10 titles are more semi-professional and have less likelihood of appearing very cheap on discount, cos they’re already cheap, they fare worse. (Their Year 1 units sold long tail is 10% less than median, at 2.32x.)

Then there’s multipliers by total Week 1 sales, which show - perhaps unsurprisingly - that games that sell better on Week 1 have a better long tail. In the 1k-10k space, presumably affected by some hyped games that were received poorly, you only get 1.96x Week 1 sales in Year 1.

But if you sold 10k-100k copies in Week 1, you’re hoping for 3.16x as many copies in Year 1 (22% above the median), and if you sold 100k+ copies in Week 1, we show a huge median of 4.64x. (But again, viral outliers are going to be affecting this…)

Finally, we hear co-op games are hot, and therefore may have a more pleasant long tail, due to friends recommending to friends, better streamability, etc? Well, the data bears this out, with 3.53x Year 1 sales compared to Week 1 for all games that had co-op, online co-op, etc in their Steam tags.

That’s a super-impressive 35% up on the median Year 1 to Week 1 multiplier of 2.59x. We would consider designing co-op into your next game - if appropriate. (Seriously, it’s the #1 thing we ask people to be added, after seeing a promising idea.)

GameDiscoverCo Show: AI, refunds, Apple Arcade!

After a brief holiday/sickness hiatus, The GameDiscover Show has returned, featuring both myself (Simon) and Post Games’ Chris Plante. Reminder: you can get it on Apple Music, Spotify & elsewhere (audio), with a video version on YouTube (above).

This time out, we talk about GDCo’s recent AI survey, whether Steam refunds for short games are bad news & how the Apple Arcade catalog has settled in, over time. Plus we discuss where Meccha Chameleon fits in the Steam ecosystem. (And I find out I’ve been pronouncing ‘Meccha’ wrong…) Fun times…

[We’re GameDiscoverCo, an analysis firm based around one simple issue: how do players find, buy and enjoy your PC or console game? We run the newsletter you’re reading, and provide real-time data services for publishers, funds, and other smart game industry folks.]

We’re back, and we wanted to take the ‘intense interest’ in the the latest friendslop breakout and extrapolate it into: what the heck is going on with discovery for games like this, and what’s the risk factors of forging into that particular market?

But before we start, can we just say that Blink 182-izing Pac-Man for a San Diego Comic-Con collab is both a) cursed and b) perfect, no notes. “Fans can also pick up a blink-182 version of the PAC-MAN x 7-Eleven T-shirt famously worn by bassist Mark Hoppus at Coachella 2023.” (Everyone, esp. those alive in 1980, plz chant: what’s my age again?)

[THE DEEPEST PC/CONSOLE DATA? You can get a free demo of our GameDiscoverCo Pro company-wide ‘Steam deep dive’ & console data by reaching out today - >100 orgs have it. Or, signing up to GDCo Plus gets the rest of this newsletter and Discord access, plus more.]

Game discovery news: Black Flag, Palworld go big..

Let’s finish out the week with a little game platform & discovery news, a little bit like this:

• Our friends at ICO’s Footprints.gg put out their latest ‘trad media’ coverage report (above), and the two big winners are the Assassin’s Creed Black Flag remake (zipping over 3m units), and Palworld, which has seen Steam CCU crest over 800,000 again, as it hits 1.0 and (old & new) players come to (re-)explore it.

• We just added full Steam demo CCU sensing/analysis to GameDiscoverCo Pro, hence a new weekly post analyzing top demos for unreleased games. Bombanana! is #1 again (booring!), but roguelike autobattler Guildrun (#2), RV repair/explore sim Nomad Drive (#3) and Eggstreme Farming (#4) are new to us. (Megacomplex cave-exploration 2D survival sim Casualties: Unknown (#5) is also doing well.)

• PlayStation Plus’ included Game Catalog titles for July are pretty good, actually, including Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, Team Ninja’s Sony-published Rise of the Ronin (>2 years after its full-price launch), Firefighting Simulator: Ignite, Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: Rita’s Rewind & more.

• Chris Zukowski recently posted data on the overlap between Steam Next Fest demo players & wishlisters, noting that “the median percentage of players who went on to wishlist the game after playing the demo” was just 19.3%. This isn’t ‘bad’, just normal, and he suggests: “You can’t bring funnel logic to Steam.”

• Meccha Chameleon things: a Reddit analyst pointed out that Roblox clones of the ‘paint & hide’ title - some competent, some less so - swiftly topped 200k CCU; analysis of streamer support for the >10m seller shows it’s “#2 most popular new release of 2026 so far by first 30 days’ hours watched (behind Resident Evil Requiem).”

• Some analysis from me on LinkedIn: “Interesting to see Facepunch's s&box launch on Steam back in April, show transparent financials, and unfortunately fall on its face a little bit. (It's grossed $4.2m since Early Access, but only $57k so far in July, and CCUs are down to about 500 from 13k at launch.)” Why? I suggest the hardcore fanbase were looking for more Garry’s Mod-ish sandbox & don’t love the top, ‘slop’-y UGC.

• We can’t stress enough how important (in a ‘big brain’ type way) Doug Shapiro’s latest ‘mental model of media’ is. If it’s too abstract, just skip to (some of) the bullet points: “Time spent with media is stagnant… attention is fragmenting… the consumer definition of quality is shifting.. monetization per hour is under pressure.”

• A little datamining birdie told us Steam might be planning a change to wishlists to both a) allow you to categorize them b) allow you to decide which games you get notifications for. (Although it could also be a misinterpret, or a datamine of a feature they decide not to launch - YMMV, etc..)

• Hey, Anna Ott wrote about the other side of the publisher view, the ‘good devs, good ideas’ list: “You know your metrics and what they actually mean… The pitch deck includes a realistic roadmap and contingency plan… Devs really listen to their players… The team already has a plan for what happens after launch.”

• GameStop’s meme-y boss Ryan Cohen is saying “sales of physical games are ‘totally irrelevant’ to his business”, not worried about PlayStation dropping physical discs. (Software’s at at 18% of $ last quarter, but ‘collectibles’ - e.g. Pokemon card selling/grading - are at 42% and rising, due to scalping-adjacent pricing.)

• Microlinks: Steam announced its themed fests for the first half of 2027, inc. Desktop Companion, Witch, Mountaineering and Shopkeeper; some folks tried to estimate median Steam playtime from public review stats; there’s a new public list of game publishers & funds, available on Github.

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What 1 million wishlists for Dear Passengers says…

So, yep, we’ve been covering ‘friendslop’-adjacent games quite a bit here on GDCo, not least because at least 5 of the Top 20 games by unit* released on Steam in 2026 so far have that ‘jam with your friends in a shared world’ vibe.

(*That’d be Meccha Chameleon, Gamble With Your Friends, Yapyap, Super Battle Golf and, though it’s closer to a looter-shooter, Far Far West.)

So when Flexus’ Dear Passengers puts out one (1!) initial trailer - above - and rockets to 1 million wishlists - and around 30k Steam followers - in just 3 days? It might be time to bust out the ‘wtf’ GIF (from Blink 182, already mentioned today.) Let’s start with the simple - why did this trailer alone go so viral?

• Great visual presentation that has clear real-world ‘I could play this’: the ‘ugly but cute’ avatar style that’s established for friendslop is buttressed by a lot of good ideas (players buckling other players into their seats, shooting other planes from the wing, dangerous luggage loading.) The trailer’s ‘target gameplay’ tho, rite?

• Streamer soundalikes in the trailer makes it super ‘clippable’: making it feel like a multiplayer gameplay clip is very smart, because shortform video folks will absolutely ‘clip’ streamers with funny hooks. And look, lots of organic (we presume) shortform ‘look at this game!’ publicity ensues.

• Easter Egg edgelord-iness makes people feel clever: we’re sure many trad studios would not make Epstein & P.Diddy references in player usernames, or have a bouffant-y world leader thrown off the plane. But it plays well with the Internet meme crowd like the above ‘clipper’, and hastens virality, so… y’know.

The main thing the wishlist success (so far!) of Dear Passengers shows me is that people a) like friendslop games b) are very willing to consider rotating between low-cost ones. If you can go on holiday with your buddies to a new friendslop island every few weeks for $10 or less, why wouldn’t you?

But it also shows how wide-open the market is for PC newcomers. The Ukrainian devs of Dear Passengers, Flexus, are a 70+ person company with “300M+ downloads across 150+ countries” on F2P ad-supported mobile games, including the Splatoon-like Dye Hard, Mow My Lawn and tower-building idler Tower Craft.

As a result, they really understand hook (esp. for user acquisition), which helps explain why the trailer is so on-point. (Though they’re having to defend against AI accusations in the Steam forums, since they use AI visuals for mobile ads/IAP, as everyone in the space seems to. They’re not using AI in this, tho, afaik.)

Of course, the success of Dear Passengers will depend on the execution of the idea, now the premise has been carefully laid out. We see multiple elements in the trailer (esp. around hands) that won’t be easily doable in-game. And there’s no doubt a bunch of casual/driveby wishlists in that 1 million. But who doesn’t want a million wishlists?

And it got us musing: maybe friendslop fulfils a lot of the original promise of the metaverse? Which is, I think - you can hang out and have fun with people’s avatars online while accomplishing things together. Like, uh, throwing each other out of planes…

The other thing to remember, though? ‘Barrier to entry’ for friendslop titles is still spectacularly low, but you have to nail the execution. Somebody in the GDCo Discord noted a trailer for a different plane-based friendslop, Banana Airways, which arrived just after Dear Passengers. It has, uh, 11 followers so far.

So maybe you should look into the ultra high-risk, ultra high-reward world of friendslop for your next game. Or maybe you should try making games like Rogue Carrier, a roguelite colony management game that just announced, which we estimate has ~52k wishlists from dedicated core fans, and 4,400 Steam followers.

That’s a 11.8x ‘follower to wishlist’ multiplier, implying a steady, assured interest in the title & its latest news updates. As opposed to Dear Passengers, at a 35x multiplier, and set to ride a bucking bronco of expectation management to launch. It’s fun… if you like having a stress-related stomach ulcer? (But the payoff if you nail it? Pleasant…)

This week on Steam: SpiritVale, Ore Factory Squad

Read more

We’re back after a brief holiday hiatus - did you miss us? Just a little bit? Luckily, it’s the calm after the news storm - although there’s still a busy release schedule for new games we’ll touch on briefly, plus a lead story on a life sim that’s done v.well.

Before we start, a crazy stat from the COO of Facepunch (brutal PvP hit Rust): “Over 7 Million (PC) Rust players now have 100+ hours played… 37% of Rust's (PC) negative reviews are from players with over 1,000+ hrs played. Over half of them still play.” One reply admits they have 11k hours, left a negative review, but “if anyone asks, Rust is my favorite game.”

[THE DEEPEST PC/CONSOLE DATA? You can get a free demo of our GameDiscoverCo Pro company-wide ‘Steam deep dive’ & console data by reaching out today - >100 orgs have it. Or, signing up to GDCo Plus gets the rest of this newsletter and Discord access, plus more.]

Game discovery news: The Mound, Soulframe, hi!

And let’s start out by looking at a bunch of notable game platform & discovery news, as follows:

• GDCo Pro's 'trending' unreleased Steam games by 'new wishlists in the last 7 days' has bomb defusal game Bombanana! (#1) top yet again, with co-op horror standout The Mound: Omen Of Cthulhu surging to #2. And Soulframe (#3) charts thanks to playtest signups & news from Digital Extremes' TennoCon showcase.

• Also notable: plague-y Napoleonic extraction RPG Hunger (#4), down to beta tests, and much anticipated vampire RPG Blood Of Dawnwalker (#8), which just keeps scaling. New titles? Rogue Carrier (#7) is a roguelite colony management game where you "build and manage a city atop an ocean-faring ship" - sounds catchy.

• Steam’s Frame VR hardware may be near launch, given it’s still ‘shipping this summer’ and “Valve just published a new store landing page for Steam Frame content, which is rounding up all of the ‘best’ games and demos that are certified to work with the company’s soon-to-launch VR headset.”

• Xbox things: multiple outlets claim that Game Pass currently has around 30 million subscribers, down from ~34m reported in 2024; Bethesda’s head told its studios the new strategy was “shifting from a planning model primarily centered on what's next for each independent studio to one that focuses on our strongest franchises.”

• Some possible ‘red flags’ from a publisher perspective, from Anna Ott: “Wishlists without any visible audience signals… The pitch deck describes the game, but not the opportunity… The [publisher marketing] expectations are disconnected from reality.” (#2, devs not grokking “the game’s positioning & USP” is one we’ve heard from others.)

• Last week’s debuts? A rare AAA multi-platform success week, with Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced the biggie with >100k Steam CCU, and already at 2m units multiplatform. Also hot: Echoes Of Aincrad (20k CCU, doing better on PS), EA Sports College Football 27 (11.5k CCU, crushing it on console, despite IAP woes!)

• Bonus: there’s another four debuts with >5k CCU on Steam last week, inc. sim hit eSports Manager 2026 (10k CCU), cozy first-person sim Cat Mail Co. (9k CCU), vampire Stardew Valley-alike Moonlight Peaks (8.5k CCU, also doing great on Switch), and Chinese-first cultivation RPG Destiny Of Immortal (8.2k CCU).

• Steam’s 2 hour refund policy got called out again, this time by the dev of Paddle Paddle Paddle, who claims his 21% refund rate is majorly boosted by players completing, then refunding. (Hmm - we doubt it’s more than a low single digit % effect, and agree with IndieGameJoe that Steam’s refund policies are correcto.)

• Ronan Patrick analyzes the data to suggest that: “On console, new titles [that aren’t established franchises, sequels, and live services] have captured between 6% - 7% of total revenue every year from 2023 to 2025”, but it’s slightly better on PC, where “new-title share has grown from 10.3% in 2023 to 16.9% in 2025.”

• Interesting to see (no-longer involved) Id co-founder John Carmack get almost philosophical discussing Xbox’s layoffs at the Doom/Quake studio: “You can’t rule out the possibility that executives are idiots, but that shouldn’t be your default belief. I don’t think there is any obvious path that would have doubled the revenue from Id games.”

• Re: ‘are devs disclosing AI used in their games?’, we had an anon comment from the publisher of an indie game re: platform enforcement: “I submitted a demo to Steam and they accused me of not reporting the use of AI images. I went back to the artist (who had a ‘no AI art’ clause in his contract) and I found out that his background artist was using AI... Steam is checking. Steam is catching it.”

• Microlinks: Nintendo confirmed that Switch 1s no long being sold in Europe was due to an EU law change on batteries, UK physical retail group the ERA says no PlayStation discs is “a triumph of corporate convenience over consumer choice”, Dying Light: The Beast will skip PS4/Xbox One versions due to technical constraints.

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How Paralives sold 1m copies in its first month...

We last covered PC life sim Paralives back in early 2024, when the game hit 750,000 wishlists. And after they announced 1 million copies sold in just its first month on Early Access on Steam, we knew we had to come back to analyze the game’s success.

Once again, we got detailed insight from Paralives’ Gabrielle Boyer-Antoni & team. Initial context: don’t forget that this game added a Steam page in 2019 (!), and it ran a successful Patreon campaign of ~$50k/month to fund most of its multiyear pre-Steam development. (That in itself is rare, tho The Sims-related Patreons are a thing…)

Anyhow, the 15-person team that shipped Paralives, led by Alex Massé, and funded based on that ($3m cumulative) Patreon fan-base, really delivered in one of the trickiest competitive landscapes. Here’s their Steam overview screen as of last week:

Things to note: only 6.5% of Steam units refunded is significantly below the 9.5% median we surveyed for early in 2025, and 5 hours 30 mins is an excellent start for median time played, with 11 hours 40 mins being the average. (Also: 1.8m wishlist balance after 1.1m LTD sales will be great news for discounts & 1.0.)

We talked about some of the key reasons this game had potential back in 2024. But now it’s actually executed, let’s go back and revisit why we think it worked:

• Steady, long-term dev with a community of fans who trust the creators: the team clearly says “the game was made possible by the support of the community”, and also added - perhaps referencing The Sims 4 indirectly - they “will never have paid DLCs, only free expansions.” Good vibes ensue…

• Paralives passed the ‘too early for Early Access’ low bar: this wasn’t a given, due to the huge amount of content a Sims-like life sim needs (“Life sim games are basically 3 games in 1!”, the devs tell us.) But 90% Positive reviews is great for EA, even tho the devs joke that “our own Excel file compiling players’ feedback crashed on release day due to the amount of reports we were receiving.”

• The modding scene took off (unexpectedly?) quickly: life sims often have eager modders, but the devs tell us “the biggest [launch] surprise would have to be the amount of mods and custom content that players immediately started making! In the Steam Workshop alone, we reached close to 25,000 items… in the first month.”

We’re also impressed with the sheer depth of content created by modders - everything from camera control changes through ‘cozy starter homes’ to tattoo packs, and beyond. (Oh, and not content with being popular Lego sets, succulents & cacti are also hot in Paralives.)

Now the Steam version is launched, all Patreon pledges are paused, btw, and the devs tell us they “are working towards making the entire page history publicly available. Every weekly post since 2019 will be public and serve as a great archive of the project.” Neat idea.

The sheer amount the devs need to keep track of between environments, characters, the core NPC-centric gameplay & game interactions/choices is certainly hair-raising. And it’s difficult to compete with the insane depth of content of The Sims series.

But Paralives’ ‘slow and steady’ apprach has really resonated with core fans - while it may still be a bit early for people who have been paying less attention (like Raptor, who said “I think I’m really excited... about the 1.0 release.”) This is reflected in GDCo Pro’s ‘review sentiment’ analysis - positive, but has some ‘excited for later’ rhetoric:

Our gut is that Paralives will handle that a tad better than inZOI, one of the only other attempts to rival The Sims recently. (It built a lot of the right framework, and sold great initially, but seems a little less ‘sure’ of what’s fun.)

Overall, it’s tricky: players want a new thing, but they already have the giant (and successful!) old thing to return to…. and right now, Paralives is threading that needle pretty well, though getting the masses to turn up for patches & 1.0 is important. (It’s got a 4k Steam CCU peak in the last day, vs. 2.5k for inZOI and 32k for The Sims 4.)

Anyhow, let’s use GameDiscoverCo Pro (ping us for a free demo!) and Paralives’ own Steam data to round out our impressions of why this game succeeded. Let’s start with the ‘real’ Steam country breakdown, which really is U.S. centric, like other life sims:

Moving on, here are the top Paralives streamers LTD on Twitch, via GDCo Pro. Besides higher-average viewer ‘variety streamers’, there’s strong overlap between Paralives & Nintendo’s own Tomodachi Life (a kind of twisted The Sims-like which has been genuinely viral!), as well as The Sims 4:

The game isn’t giant on Twitch - it’s ranked #185 over the last 30 days. But it caters to a more casual, female-friendly players than your core Twitch watcher, we suspect. And it has great reach on YouTube - and shortform video in particular cos ‘cozy’.

Finally, we really liked this view of ‘daily wishlist actions’ from the Steam back end around Paralives’ Early Access launch, data you don’t always get to see:

We spot a couple of things: first, Paralives’ purchases from wishlist are impressively front-loaded (people were waiting for this game, hardcore, leading to 78,000 CCU on launch day!) But the wishlist additions from people who weren’t aware of the game are also impressive in terms of ‘long tail’ - 25k additions per day weeks after launch.

Conclusions? Paralives had built out enough, 7 years after starting its successful Patreon (!), to launch into this ‘ultra-high barrier to entry’ genre. It’s still got a way to go, but it was plenty enough to delight players looking for alternatives. So: thanks to the creators for being so transparent, and good luck for the future….

[We’re GameDiscoverCo, an analysis firm based around one simple issue: how do players find, buy and enjoy your PC or console game? We run the newsletter you’re reading, and provide real-time data services for publishers, funds, and other smart game industry folks.]

As we finished prepping this newsletter, we got news that Xbox is planning a ~3,200 person team reduction - inc. layoffs centrally, at Id Software & beyond, and spinning off 4 studios: Compulsion, Double Fine, Ninja Theory & Undead Labs, with Arkane also likely to go. It’s a big change, but largely expected after recent leaks…

One notable quote from Asha Sharma’s internal memo, though: “Platform teams are 40% larger than they were at the start of this generation, even as our player base and playtime have declined.” So expect a lot of structure simplification - “a flatter organization” - for Xbox as a platform going forward.

Some housekeeping: we have holiday coming up, so the next newsletter will be on Tuesday, July 14th (we’re skipping this Friday.) Also: the GameDiscoverCo Show will be on hiatus for a couple of weeks, back Tuesday, July 21st. Also also: our very own Matt Styles will be at Develop in the UK next week, ping him to chat Pro & more…

[THE DEEPEST PC/CONSOLE DATA? You can get a free demo of our GameDiscoverCo Pro company-wide ‘Steam deep dive’ & console data by reaching out today - >100 orgs have it. Or, signing up to GDCo Plus gets the rest of this newsletter and Discord access, plus more.]

Game discovery news: that dino park? Very safe…

Let’s kick things off with a whole bunch of game platform and discovery news, shall we? Hey presto:

• GDCo Pro's 'trending' unreleased Steam games by 'new wishlists in the last 7 days', June 30th to July 6th is headed by evergreens: co-op bomb defusal game Bombanana! (#1), JRPG Persona 6 (#3) and survival horror standout Resident Evil Veronica (#4). And alien Papers, Please-y checker XenoFeels (#5) is also thriving.

• But new things? Very Safe Dino Park (#2) winningly & wittily jams on the 'Jurassic Park x friendslop' space, and Guns Of Eschaton (#6) is an apocalyptic Western FPS with art direction by the late Viktor Antonov (Half-Life 2 art director.)

• Nintendo things: Nintendo of Europe has announced that it will stop selling original Switch consoles in early 2027, “after which point retailers won’t be able to order any new stock”; Nintendo’s shareholder Q&A is up, with largely anodyne answers, but Shigeru Miyamoto shouting out Pikmin Bloom as a reach-expander.

• Bloomberg has a piece on increasing European government restrictions around games, citing the EU’s Digital Fairness Act, the UK’s Online Safety act, and more. More restrictions for minors (esp. around loot boxes) are noted: “Governmental pressure is mounting as officials have seen mixed results from self-regulation.”

• It got easier to see SteamOS’ market share in the monthly Steam hardware chart for June 2026, and SteamOS Holo has 0.84% of all surveyed machines, vs. 70% for Windows 11 and 23.5% for Windows 10. (So sure, it’s a tad small, but Mac is only 2.2% across all OSes - when do we think SteamOS will surpass it? Or is that an if?)

• Both PlayStation’s official most-downloaded games in June and a reader comment (thx Saty!) remind us that Escape The Backrooms released on console at the end of May & topped download charts. (We estimate it at ~1m PlayStation units & way over 10m players multi-platform, inc. Game Pass - perfect timing with the movie.)

• Microlinks: some more Roblox lessons from the big recent algorithm change (whole genres are massively changed in visibility); PlayStation Plus monthly games for July are Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III, For the King II, CrossCode; some real data from F2P mobile devs - $13 eCPI, only 3.5% of installs ever pay $.

• It’s not been happening much, but the ‘red line of death’ is the Steam Machine’s equivalent of the Xbox 360’s red ring of death, or the classic Windows blue screen of death. In this Steam Machine’s case, “this particular code signals that the system has detected a GPU failure.”

• GI.biz has a good write-up on why physical game events in the UK aren’t very well. Reasons? Lack of big-ticket exhibitors, rising costs for venue hire & more, and the ‘gravity well’ of Gamescom: “Because people feel like they have to be there for the B2B side, it makes sense for them to extend their B2C reach at the same event.”

• You may recall that an eInk device as a front panel was used by Valve for testing Steam Machine? Well, good guy Valve open-sourced the code for the e-ink faceplate, with detailed hardware instructions, also promising “eventually we'll have an app up on Steam” to control it - there’s an AppImage to use for now.

• Microlinks, Pt. 2: GameFile notes that already-released physical PS5 games “will still be able to place re-orders” after Jan. 2028; here’s a detailed analysis of Epic & Fortnite’s ecosystem & worth; new Xbox Game Pass additions include Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1+ 2, The Planet Crafter, and Palworld 1.0.

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What Steam fans really think about AI in games…

After we launched our Steam Fan Snapshot data in April - surveying 10,000 ‘core Steam fans’ on discovery methods & demographics via giveaways - we ran into a hitch. What if people already gave us their info, but they enter a subsequent giveaway?

Luckily, we found a good solution - ask them other interesting questions for the newsletter. So after our second cohort (fielded June 25th to July 2nd, 2026) we have ~16k Steam Fan Snapshot participants in GDCo Pro, but also nearly 4k respondents to ask extra stuff about, among other things, AI.

As always, a caveat: this is “a snapshot of a particular type of Steam player”, more committed than normal. But here’s what ~3,800 of them think re: AI in their games:

Firstly, what do the fans think of buying games that show any type of AI disclosure? (PSA: all Steam games have to disclose this when they submit.) Well, it’s quite a mixed bag even now, with ~43% of players having no big issues, 26% being neutral, and around 31% viewing it negatively. (With 8% of those saying they just won’t buy…)

This headline result is still a little concerning for those who want to use AI more extensively in their games, and shows the public are still not that enthused. (It’s not just a handful of outliers…)

The actual AI disclosure on Steam pages requires a bit of study, since it’s often one or multiple paragraphs of text. So we wondering - how much do fans self-report as reading it? Turns out 44% say they look in detail, another 45% ‘glance at it’, and around 11% don’t even try to engage. (This seems just fine to us…)

One question that’s come up recently: since Steam games’ AI use info is necessarily self-reported, can we trust it? And yes, there’s public skepticism, not surprising given many recent news stories, with only 17% of respondents believing game devs are fully disclosing all audiovisual AI use in games.

From there, 25% say ‘many’ disclose AI use, 35% suspect that only ‘some’ do, and then 16% opt for ‘not many’ and 4% play the cynical side with ‘basically none’. Since the biggest answer is only ‘some’, we def. have a trust issue here. (The negative effects of disclosure probably incent devs to skimp on adding those AI disclaimers, right?)

Next, we covered a change back in January where: “Valve's making it clearer that 'AI powered tools' (like code helpers) do not trigger the need to disclose any use - ‘Efficiency gains through the use of [AI powered dev tools] is not the focus of this section.’”

So we asked players whether they think use of AI coding helpers like Claude Code should be disclosed. A significant 56% said they should be disclosed, and only 8% said they shouldn’t, with 37% in the ‘neutral/i don’t care’ category. Of course, if they were, a giant percentage of games would suddenly need disclosure…

Our final question was just asking players a freeform text question about “the kind of AI use you are OK with when buying a game on Steam or console, if any.” The results (Claude-analyzed, in part):

• Conditional acceptance is the order of the day: ~51% of the 2,100 analyzable answers accepted AI for some uses but not others, for example: “I'm fine with limited AI use for support tasks, not for replacing human creativity.”

• On the ‘acceptable’ side, the clear winner is coding/programming: code helper tools like Claude Code had ~239 mentions as acceptable. This was way more than other categories like prototyping & and placeholder assets (119 mentions), and/or tedious or repetitive tasks (101 mentions).

• It’s all pretty nuanced, and players care about it a lot: the amount of detailed, thoughtful comments we got was striking - we put 5 examples up in a LinkedIn post - everything from “I'm OK with AI being used in games as long as there is human review and oversight” to “AI must and should NOT BE USED in GENERATING CREATIVES AT ANY STAGE OR DEVELOPMENT PROCESS.”

Steam: our new monthly active user estimate..

Next: you may recall that Steam’s monthly active users (MAU) are a bit of a mystery in recent years, since the last official Valve announcement was an average of 132 million MAU back in 2021. (As a comparison, PlayStation Network - including PS4, PS5, and even some PC/Steam users - announced 125 million MAU as of the end of March 2026.)

Anyhow, thanks to NobodyInteresting from the SteamDB Discord, we were reminded that if you’re in the European Union, you can see Steam’s Digital Services Act notice here, revealing 31.1 million MAUs in the EU in H2 2025 (roughly.) Look:

How can we use this regional number to extrapolate worldwide MAU? Well, we do have the Steam bandwidth chart, which has a global Steam traffic map for the last 7 days. And look, here’s some GDCo-captured data on region share for the last 3 years:

In this case, Western Europe + Eastern Europe = 19.2% of the world’s bandwidth on Steam in the last week. Taking away non-EU countries: the UK (2.7%), Norway (0.3%) and misc other non-EU European countries (let’s say 0.5%?) gets us to 15.7%.

And if 15.7% of Steam bandwidth equates to 31.1 million MAUs, then Steam had 198 million MAU in H2 2025 - and likely a bit more now. Incidentally, that would put China at 48 million Steam MAU and the US at 39.5 million Steam MAU, based on bandwidth extrapolation* alone. (*Due to broadband speed differences, isn’t 100% sound.)

Another view: Steam does show concurrent on-platform users, which have grown from ~25m in 2021 to ~40m in H2 2025. With simple extrapolation of CCU to MAU, this would put Steam’s monthly actives at ~210 million by the end of 2025, not that different on a macro level. And yes, the scale’s impressive: ~2.5% of the world as MAU.

[We’re GameDiscoverCo, an analysis firm based around one simple issue: how do players find, buy and enjoy your PC or console game? We run the newsletter you’re reading, and provide real-time data services for publishers, funds, and other smart game industry folks.]

As we head into the July 4th weekend here in the U.S., let’s buckle down for a little hardcore video game data reporting, before we disappear for a burger or two. (Grilled meat is, at least, something that unites many of us on the political spectrum...)

Before noshing, a reminder: the most American game to play for the 250th anniversary of the USA is, of course, FromSoftware’s objectively insane mech brawler Metal Wolf Chaos (trailer), an additionally piquant act because it was actually made in Japan….

[THE DEEPEST PC/CONSOLE DATA? You can get a free demo of our GameDiscoverCo Pro company-wide ‘Steam deep dive’ & console data by reaching out today - >100 orgs have it. Or, signing up to GDCo Plus gets the rest of this newsletter and Discord access, plus more.]

Game discovery news: GTA 6 is all, all hail, etc..

Let’s finish off the week with a little bit of that game platform & discovery analysis, then? As follows:

• Our friends at ICO’s Footprints.gg put out their latest ‘trad media’ coverage report (above), and it’s GTA 6 that looks oversized, thanks to its pricing and pre-order reveal. Also big: Persona (due to a live-action TV show in dev) and Star Fox for Switch 2 (thanks to its June 25th Switch release!)

• Sony confirmed that physical disc product for PlayStation consoles is ending in Jan. 2028. That’s all physical discs, inc. those printed for third-party publishers, boutique labels. So? It’s bad news for disc rental firms like Gamefly, and more pressure on Switch as the chief PC/console physical format that’s monetizable.

• Bloomberg games reporter Jason Schreier started busting out YouTube analysis videos, and several are relevant to us: this one on indie games being ‘lottery ticket-adjacent’ at times, and another on why big game companies have been obsessed with getting live-service game hits.

• The folks at MobileGamer.biz did some analysis of the top Apple Arcade games of all-time, based on our review # charts: “This top 20 [headed by Sneaky Sasquatch] shows that Apple’s decision to shift attention away from the indie-style Arcade games it pushed at launch in favour of licensed and family-friendly fare has been the right one.”

• This dev interview on RV There Yet?’s break-out explains why the team paused on a five-year game project to make it in just 9 weeks, quoting CEO Tim Badylak: “I think it was a good decision of us to do this game now, and we actively had the conversation about 'This might be irrelevant in a year’.”

• Microlinks: Xbox is testing a ‘disc to digital’ feature that digitizes a physical game collection; some more ‘easy Platinum achievement’ publishers are exiting the PlayStation Store with their games; indie data? “In 2019, my first Xbox game sold 1,508 copies in its first year. In 2025, my new one sold 542. Plus 15 on Steam.”

• One under-considered point mentioned in HowToMarketAGame’s analysis of the Steam Personal Calendar: “I can see that [later] in July and August there are only about 1-2 games showing up in each day… You should be setting your release date 2 months in advance so you can spend more time on the calendar.”

• One way to make $ fast in recent Steam Summer Sales? Make it into the ‘Featured Deep Discount’ box at the top of the sale page. These curated games are 90% off at least, and we see games like Binding Of Isaac: Rebirth & Don’t Starve Together hit an all-time highs of >100k CCU, due to the big player influxes.

• More PlayStation stuff: a Sony Q&A said PlayStation wants to deliver “a seamless experience that can be enjoyed naturally beyond the living room” with its next-generation platform. (More portable hints?) And they also said “we are not focused on MAU growth as our sole KPI.. [but] on achieving profitable growth.”

• Inflation & games? We liked this Jason Schreier comment on the situ: “A lot of people (accurately) point out that premium video games are cheaper than… 30 years ago thanks to inflation. But discussed less often is how much bigger the margins are for game companies now sales are 80-90% (soon.. 100%) digital. No more retail or packaging costs!”

• Microlinks: Sony also announced it’s closing the PlayStation Store on PS3, as well as on PS Vita this/next year; popular Next Fest demos see 1,600% increase in Discord messages after launch; Amazon Prime’s 12 ‘free’ games for July include critically acclaimed RPG Symphony of War.

June 2026’s top new PC/console games, revealed..

Once again, it’s GameDiscoverCo’s top new Steam (& console) games of the month, powered by our Pro data - here’s May, April, March, Feb and Jan’s, if you missed ‘em in 2026 so far. And it’s a lopsided view for brand new Steam games by units (above):

• Meccha Chameleon essentially broke our graph on units (thx!): at 11.5 million copies sold, the $6 ‘hide & seek x painting’ multiplayer game, which we covered in detail in Tuesday’s newsletter, is the breakout new title of the month by farrrr.

• Gothic’s remake did rather well - if frontloaded - on Steam vs. console: much beloved in Central and Eastern Europe, the 2001 fantasy RPG Gothic had its $50 remake sell 575k on Steam, largely to fans of the original. (It only managed another 80k on PS/Xbox, which makes sense, given geography & OG platform.)

• A real mix of other titles rounded out the Top 5: Chinese FMV adventure sequel Road To Empress II (627k, $18), friendslop standout Burglin’ Gnomes (409k, $10), and the inexpensive Early Access for the ambitious first-person fantasy game Fatekeeper (346k, $10) were all also in the mix somewhere.

We definitely feel like there’s a bit of a downward trend on pricing for some of these top-grossing titles. Another example: former Epic Games Store PC exclusive co-op roguelike 33 Immortals (#6) debuted on Steam at under $10 (via a launch discount from a $15 default), helping push it to 275k copies sold during June.

Ultimately, if we look at the Top 10 new Steam releases by revenue for June, it was a quiet month. (May 2026 had 6 new games at >$10m Steam gross, but June only two - release shifts due to Next Fest & Summer Sale are two key reasons for that.)

Moving up vs. units? ‘Walking mech fortress’ co-op PvPvE extraction shooter SAND: Raiders of Sophie (#4, $25), which grossed ~$5m in just the last week of the month, and has good CCU and daily sales momentum. Also: 3D shooter x monster collector Voidling Bound (#5, $25) is under the radar, but quite a lot of fans at >$3.5m gross…

Turning to the top $$ performers of June 2026 on Steam across all titles, you’ll see Counter-Strike 2 continuing to dominate (as it always does). But driving franchise sequel Forza Horizon 6 (#2) selling another $47m worth of product is notable. (We have it at >3m units LTD on Steam, and ~15 million players inc. Xbox - a result.)

Also in the mix here? isometric ARPG Path Of Exile 2 (#3, +$37m), which put up huge numbers with its Return Of The Ancients expansion, topping out at 408k Steam CCU. And then there’s the usual F2P stalwarts (PUBG, Marvel Rivals, Apex Legends, and an exiting Destiny 2.) Plus, there’s 007 First Light (#7, +$20m), which we peg at 1.3m+ on Steam & >3m units across PC/console, a great result in today’s market for $70 games.

We decided to add ‘all Steam games, #11-#30 by revenue for June’ this month - because it’s a really interesting way to view longer-term success for some of these games. You can see other F2P stalwarts, from Warframe to Overwatch, also lurking in here. (As well as ‘heavy IAP’ games like EA Sports FC 26, which fares way better on console.)

Of particular interest? F2P gacha stand-out Wuthering Waves (#12, $16m) had a very strong June in part thanks to a Cyberpunk Edgerunners crossover, and Subnautica 2 added another ~$10m to reach ~$110m (ignoring off-Steam sold keys) - it’s maybe looking a tad frontloaded in interest & CCU?

Finishing off this section by looking at PlayStation and Xbox, we’ve barely talked about EA’s latest mixed martial arts sequel UFC 6. The game has a EA Play trial version & had a closed Beta - so is trickier to estimate. But we think it did close to 1m units between PlayStation and Xbox - while skipping a PC release again, intriguingly.

Most other brand new console titles did a little marginally, tho PS/Xbox’s reputation as a ‘sports machine’ showed up with NBA The Run, a $30 NBA Street-style 3 on 3 basketball games - we reckon it’s sold a decent ~200k copies multi-platform so far.

Over on PlayStation Plus, Xbox’s own Grounded: Fully Yoked Edition which did the best in the Essential tier, adding >2m new players, followed by Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl 2 (nearly 1m) and Warhammer 40,000: Darktide (nearly 600k). New additions to Xbox Game Pass, headed by Solarpunk, didn’t top more than 3-400k in June…

Examining GDCo Pro’s Switch eShop estimates for debuts, yep, Nintendo’s own Star Fox remake tops the charts - many hundreds of thousands sold in the eShop, more physical? Next tier down, hitting the ~50k eShop units category in June? Devil May Cry 5, Rise of the Tomb Raider, eFootball Kick-Off! and Final Fantasy VII Rebirth.

Finally, now we’re tracking Twitch data in GameDiscoverCo Pro (get a free trial, if curious, of our full data suite!) - here’s what we spotted:

The Top 20 most-watched games on Twitch in June have a lot of the usual suspects, headed by the holy trinity of Counter-Strike, League Of Legends, and GTA V. Some impressive numbers? Dead By Daylight (#9, 25m hours watched) and Path Of Exile 2 (#10, 24.6m hours watched) both gained, and Meccha Chameleon at #11 (23.6m) is wild…

And here’s a great view we haven’t seen before - the most Twitch-able games newly released in June. We’ve talked about many of them, but not all - Fears To Fathom: Scratch Creek ($8, #4) is a casual co-op horror title, and Don’t Sleep With The Fishes ($2, #6) is a weird, sloppy survival horror microjaunt.

Also in the mix: floating island eco-survival game Solarpunk ($23, #8), which made multiple charts above, tho underperformed vs. organic shortform-impelled wishlist hopes - and Mole ($13, #9), a short(er) claustrophobic indie horror game. Great stuff!

Steam Summer Sale winners, next week’s notables

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Well, we’re back, fresh from our baseball faves the Oakland Ballers’ Phish night. (That’s how we roll - hanging with the Phish cover band ‘Chum!’, not grabbing lower-level Lakers tix like those too-cool-for-school Puck writers.) Five days left to enter our ‘Scrappy Saves The Animals’ game jam on Itch, btw…

And before we start, yes, Dbrand decided to make a neat Portal Companion Cube skin for the Steam Machine without licensing the Portal IP from Valve. One Reddit poster says: “You guys are f***ing stupid, you know that?”, to which the Dbrand Reddit account sadly concurs: “Yes.” We can only presume that somebody has a humiliation kink…

[THE DEEPEST PC/CONSOLE DATA? You can get a free demo of our GameDiscoverCo Pro company-wide ‘Steam deep dive’ & console data by reaching out today - >100 orgs have it. Or, signing up to GDCo Plus gets the rest of this newsletter and Discord access, plus more.]

Game discovery news: cat mail is the best mail…

Let’s take a wander around trending things, platform things, and discovery things, as follows:

• Here's GameDiscoverCo Pro's 'trending' unreleased Steam games by 'new wishlists in the last 7 days', June 22nd to 29th. And on the indie side, ingenious co-op bomb defuser Bombanana! (#1) is going giant from its demo, with heavy turret sim Iron Nest (#3) following a strong Next Fest with release date confirmation momentum.

• On the AAA side, Resident Evil Veronica (#2) continues as a juggernau & JRPG sequel Persona 6 (#4) is getting much hype too. Also: there’s multiple Next Fest games still trending, and first-person job sim Cat Mail Co. (#9) is tracking nicely ahead of its release. (Cos who doesn’t want to clean up a messy cat postal office?)

• In more ‘Steam Machine $ not extortionate?’ news, PlayStation head Hideaki Nishino confirmed: “It is not realistic for us to absorb all component cost increases [for PlayStation hardware]… as a principle, we do not intend to sell hardware at significant losses.” (Reminder: the PS5 Pro went up +$150 to $900 in April, and PS5s are $600.)

• An important PSA for a Steam Summer Sale change from me: “If you're getting complaints from Polish gamers over your Summer Sale discounts, it's not a bug. It's actually a Poland-specific implementation of discount %s… due to strict local laws on showing it compared to 'the largest discount in the last 30 days' if the game was off sale.”

• Roblox stuff: some excellent analysis of the company’s economics from a bear-ish POV - “a great business that captures little of its own economy”; how Roblox is rebuilding its UGC avatar economy; some real-life effects of its recent discovery algorithm changes - some games immediately down ~70% in CCU, others up.

• Third-party publisher launchers on top of Steam? In general, players haaate them, and Owlcat ran into that issue, rolling back its launcher within 24 hours: “Some players claimed that Rogue Trader wouldn’t even launch through it, [and] the launcher itself takes up more processing power from your PC.” (Unclear if true, but etc.)

• Xbox things: Windows Central is correct and Xbox has not frozen all third-party Game Pass license deals, despite viral reports to the contrary. (They may be cutting back, sure!) And CharlieIntel spotted that Activision is running ‘not on Xbox Game Pass this year’ text in ads for Call Of Duty Modern Warfare 4.

• Steam things: GameDiscoverCo Pro just added ‘Steam page creation date’ to its giant filter set - as we note, “this might be a really interesting way to track games for indie publishing signing”. Unrelated: we guess Valve officially changed the name of Advanced Access to Advance Access. (It’s the ‘pre-order and play early’ flag, ICYMI.)

• According to Circana, May 2026’s U.S. game hardware & software market “reached $4.2 billion… an increase of 3% when compared to a year ago.” 007 First Light topped the charts, hardware was up YoY, tho PS5 was down 43% in spending (& 58% in units), due to price increases, and Mat Piscatella notes: “Will be last month with [YoY] HW growth for a... while. Pricing and Switch 2 launch comp will be a nasty combo.”

• ICYMI: Grand Theft Auto VI got custom PlayStation 5 OS dashboard promotion like you’ve never seen, inc. “an entire screen takeover animation [on boot-up]… open the PlayStation Store and you immediately see the option to pre-order the game.” Even first-party titles never had it this good - here’s a video.

• Microlinks: PlayStation Plus is experimenting with spacing out new game debuts, but only in the US, UK, and Japan (what??); Valve will be hoping for more third party Steam OS-running Steam Machine-like PCs like this one; social media bans may not matter if badly enforced - “Four in five under-16s in Australia using social media despite ban.”

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Look, we have to talk about Meccha Chameleon…

When we do our end-of-month round-up for June’s top new PC games, you probably all know what game will be at the top, right? It’s Meccha Chameleon, the $6 ‘hide & seek x painting’ multiplayer game from a two Japanese indie devs, which has sold >10 million copies and grossed >$50 million since its Steam release on June 9th. Wooof.

We wanted to zig where others zag and skip discussing it, but… it’s just too big. So it’s worth going through some of the things the devs did right, to set themselves to even have a chance at this. But… we’ll get into why this is a bit problematic afterwards:

• They had an existing multiplayer game framework to build on: as they explained in an interview, having standalone Unreal Engine titles running allowed the devs to very swiftly stand up their new game. (It uses the free Epic Online Services for matchmaking, and has no dedicated servers, so it scales great and no-cost.)

• There was some ‘shipping and learning’ along the way: the devs have 6 games on Steam since late 2024, including co-op bridge building game Link Penguins from April, which sold about 5,000 copies. Epic also claims that “creators lemorion_1224 and Haganeiro spent years prototyping the camouflage and social deception mechanics inside Fortnite Creative.” (Mebbe? Epic’s getting $2.5m engine royalties, at least.)

• Bitesized price and good game legibility: look, it’s $6, easy to understand and get into, and you can understand what’s going on with the game immediately. For your other ‘why a hit?’ bullet points, Jon Hanson already did a piece on LinkedIn that’s pretty no-nonsense.

But let’s be clear - Meccha Chameleon is fairly far into ‘unforeseeable megahit’ category. Doing the above won’t make you have a similar sized hit, and I’m not sure that many publishers would have signed it, if it had been presented to them. (It just reads too ‘sloppy’ and gameplay-minimal at first glance.)

The actual inspiration for Meccha Chameleon was clearly a combination of things. And it’s been pointed out that Japanese variety TV shows are a partial antecendent, with stunts like celebrities hiding (& painting themselves!) in big environments:

But in explaining the game to a friend, I hit an epiphany: “It’s ‘Prop Hunt’, but paint to conceal yourself.. I gather the in-game paint program is fun, too, so you get to do art AND hide badly from your friends. It’s silly cos people can see your hiding character model by moving around in 3D space. Everyone disguises themselves super badly… but that’s the point!”

So yes, the game doesn’t have strong, rigid game design, but it works because of the situations it creates when people play it. If you look at the linked ‘Best Of’ video above, it’s clear Meccha Chameleon creates memorable situations. Above all, it’s a framework for players being funny, silly, and creative… and basically playacting*, which is such catnip for streamers. (It’s #3 on Twitch in the last week with 10.4m hours.)

(*That’s part of the charm here. Funnily enough, when my son was younger, he would insist on playing ‘hide & seek’ in a similar way. Me knowing where he was hiding - but pretending I didn’t - was a lot more fun for him than the actual act of finding him. )

This ‘playful novelty’ is tricky to aim for. And I’m going to suggest that even the devs might not 100% have planned for this happen. (Very few devs, with the exception of frequent flyers like Landfall, seem to have a recurring sense for this type of design.)

One big takeaway? We’ve previously discussed the idea of ‘friendslop as TV reality/game show format’ with regard to games like Super Battle Golf. Well, guess what? Meccha Chameleon is another game that’s close to a ‘TV format to showcase human ingenuity’ than a traditional game. It could practically be a Taskmaster challenge….

So are there takeaways? Is any of this rubbish actually actionable? Well, there’s thinking out there about how you play games. For example, there’s designer/academic Doug Wilson, who created no-graphics ‘playground game’ Johann Sebastian Joust, part of the now-free Sportsfriends PC/console compilation.

Back in 2011, I covered a talk he did at GDC Europe, where he said: “In a game setting like a party, ‘it's really fun to argue about the rules’, Wilson notes, citing a '70s theorist called Bernard De Koven, whose book 'The Well-Played Game' argues: ‘It's not the game's that sacred, it's the people who are playing.’”

Concluding: this whole area of games is sky-high reward, but ‘you have the same chances of making it work as being struck by lightning’-adjacent. (There are very few middling friendslop hits, unlike in some other spaces.) But if you want to go there, maybe ask: why would humans be enchanted about the experience you let them create?

GameDiscoverCo Show: hardware, Next Fest, more

Look, The GameDiscover Show is back (above), with me (Simon) and Post Games’ Chris Plante jammin’ on hardware expense, Next Fest & beyond in <40 mins. We also briefly hit something more ‘insider’-y - the restrictions on publisher cross-promo put in place by the ‘you can only have one publisher sale per year’ Steam change.

The second edition of The GameDiscoverCo Show is, once again, available on our YouTube channel (in video) & on Spotify, Apple Music & elsewhere if you’d like to indulge (audio). Like and subscribe, like and subscribe, etc.

SIDE NOTE: Google AI thinks that I present this show with Chris Zukowski of HowToMarketAGame (who we love, tiki drinks every GDC!), and not Chris Plante (our actual, awesome co-host.) Trying to work out why this is exciting to the cursed algo, or Chris P. is going to do a Mission Impossible-style ‘face off’ in a few weeks…

[We’re GameDiscoverCo, an analysis firm based around one simple issue: how do players find, buy and enjoy your PC or console game? We run the newsletter you’re reading, and provide real-time data services for publishers, funds, and other smart game industry folks.]

And we’re back, in what is a busy week in games - Steam Summer Sale kicking off, some unfortunate layoffs at the game studio level at both PlayStation/Bungie and over at Xbox. But nonetheless, we proceed, and it’s another bumper newsletter for y’all.

Before we start, the Video Game History Foundation’s searchable Digital Library just added Blip magazine, “a monthly video game magazine for children published by Marvel Comics” which ran for 7 issues in 1983, scrapped as the OG video game crash hit. (Yes, of course Stan Lee’s in it, helping Spider-Man play Atari 2600 Spider-Man in Issue 2.)

[THE DEEPEST PC/CONSOLE DATA? You can get a free demo of our GameDiscoverCo Pro company-wide ‘Steam deep dive’ & console data by reaching out today - >100 orgs have it. Or, signing up to GDCo Plus gets the rest of this newsletter and Discord access, plus more.]

Game discovery news: Steam Machine dream…

Let’s start out with some video game platform & discovery news - shaken, not stirred:

• You can view it above, but Valve posted their official video overview of the Steam Machine which is a slick look at unboxing and starting to use the console-like PC. (Notable: the video shows you can easily get to the Windows-like SteamOS desktop mode, and plays up the Steam Machine Verified program for games.)

• We know the Steam Machine is ‘expensive’, but on Aug. 1st the Xbox Series is also more expensive - “increasing by US$100 for 512 GB models and US$150 for 1 TB models.” (A digital Series X goes from $600 to $750.) And Apple just put up prices by ~20% on all its hardware except the iPhone, with that shoe to drop soon? Fun!

• Here’s piquant new Tim Sweeney thoughts - he says it’s “nearly impossible to move [an] entire group of friends from an existing game to a completely new one”, but his cross-game Unreal/Fortnite ideas might let ya “form parties via voice chatting with friends in Game B while connected to Game A, and encourage them to try a new game.”

• That Grand Theft Auto VI price? It’s $80 for the regular version and $100 for the Ultimate Edition (with extra in-game stores/apparel), folks. We knew it was PS5/Xbox Series only on Nov. 19th (PC later!), but it’s also single-player only, with no GTA VI Online info yet. And the physical version is purely ‘game code in a box’.

• Another unwritten Steam rule that’s now written explicitly into Steamworks docs? The curated promo slots (Daily Deal, Midweek Deal, Weekend Deal) are “generally restricted to once a calendar year, with at least three months’ gap between promotions.” So stop asking for them weekly, ya crumbsnatchers.

• Microlinks, Pt.1: here’s a good ‘explainer’ on the frontier AI-model created World Of Claudecraft; Brazil collectively fined a bunch of game companies $55m over loot boxes for teens/kids; the Nintendo Switch Online service is getting a price increase of ~25% in Japan - no news on elsewhere, though.

• GDCo Pro is tracking various most-streamed game charts now, and our look at unreleased games by 7-day ‘hours viewed on Twitch’ see Valve’s Deadlock at #1 (1.1m hours), with Next Fest titles coming next: Mistfall Hunter (#2, 546k hours), The Mound (#3, 153k hours), and Iron Nest (#4, 133k hours) are all doing great.

• Steam stuff: the latest client update added support for the Malay language (which is related to Indonesian); did you know Steamworks is now showing wishlists by language? (go look!); Steam is blocking LGBTQ+ category browsing in China, citing violation of local laws & regulations.

• Physical game sales in the U.S.? They topped out at $11.5 billion in 2009, and are now at $1.6 billion in the 12 months to May 2026, according to Circana data shared by Mat Piscatella. (Yes, that’s up 3% year on year - but we’re in ‘bobbling around’ territory here.)

• More tidbits from the Steam Machine announce: “Valve’s Pierre-Loup Griffais says his team is ‘collaborating with Nvidia very closely’ on SteamOS support for Nvidia hardware.” But don’t get too excited - expanding past AMD support might not arrive this year, since “it’s certainly something that we’re working on in the background.”

• Microlinks: Night School & Netflix’s new horror game Unhinged is an interesting ‘phone as in-game flashlight’ take on alt interaction; Google’s Play mobile App Store is making off-store payments way less attractive for devs (duh!); is Stop Killing Games actually about safeguarding game preservation, or?

How Small Spaces sold ~15x its W1 sales in Y1!

Our last analysis on ‘long tail’ in 2025 says Steam games with >1,000 Week 1 unit sales have a 2.7x ‘Week 1 to Year 1’ median revenue multiplier. So when the dev (Niklas Tomkowitz) and publisher (Pretty Soon) of apartment decorating game Small Spaces ($13) told us they had a 14.3x W1→Y1 revenue multiplier (& 14.1x units!) we went 👀.

Specifically, Small Spaces - which launched into Early Access in late May 2025 - did 9,980 units and $97k gross in Week 1, and 18k units and $180k in Month 1, but stretched all the way to 141k units and $1.4m gross in Year 1, an amazing result for a tiny title. We talked to its creators, and here’s why the game just ‘works’:

• Great genre, with a construction, not deconstruction focus: you know the ‘cozy room arrangement’ genre from hits like Unpacking and Hozy (which we covered recently.) But as dev Niklas Tomkowitz explains, those “focus on completing a level by restoring a space or unpacking boxes - Small Spaces is really about designing a space.”

• Less explicit objectives, more abstract creativity: Niklas notes he comes from a design background, was inspired by games like Townscaper and Tiny Glade, and “wanted to make a game that gets players in a creative flow effortlessly.” An inspo was YouTube channel Never Too Small*, showcasing small room interior design.

• The largest design issue was balancing accessibility and depth: he notes: “The biggest design challenge for me was to make it easy to get started while enabling endless possibilities as you play and unlock new content and features, like modular kitchens, different surface materials, more furniture, more levels.”

Niklas also did all the right things for today’s market, dev-wise: a Discord community, regular playtests, a demo six months into dev, and regular GaaS-style patches to improve the game. And due to its success, the dev team has scaled from just Niklas solo (with freelancer help) up to 5 people.

(*We wonder why more devs don’t look at what is popular on the rest of the Internet, and make construction games around them. For example, I’m enchanted by the micro-aquarium making YouTube channel Tanks For Nothin. So why not make a cozy aquarium builder?)

So - let’s talk more about that long tail? Pretty Soon’s Krzysztof Masternak was kind enough to put together some of the game’s monthly sales data, noting: “The game launched with roughly 85,000 wishlists, and sold around 10,000 units in its first week and around 18,000 units in the first month” - which is pretty conventional.

Yet the game’s played extensively - and organically - by influencers. This has led to continued monthly sales for Small Spaces, particularly after its devs decided to launch an ‘Unpacking Mode’ in Nov. 2025 - in which you can unpack and style room contents designed by the community (clever angle!)

From there, you can see an even higher units peak early this year. And that’s def. worth talking about, as seen in this Pretty Soon-prepared graph:

Other notable stats: the country-based sales of Small Spaces are 25% U.S., 13% China, 10% Germany (high!), 6% UK, 4% France and Canada, and 3% Brazil. And the playtime is 1 hours 37 mins median (a little lower, but it’s a casual game), but 5 hours 9 mins average (a large differential, showing some committed players!)

Pretty Soon’s CEO Jakub Radkowski and team can also take some credit for both of the spikes. Why? Sure, this game is perfectly pitched and is naturally ‘sticky’ with cozy game influencers and fans who spread the word - but:

• The Unpacking Mode update had a triple marketing whammy: in addition to the mode launch, a Steam Daily Deal was timed for the same day, and Jakub told us they reached out to ~700 new creators (plus thousands of pre-release ones.)

• Outreach to shortform creators paid off in February 2026: the creator Simmary - who is obviously The Sims-focused but plays other cozy construction games, and posts on longform and shortform platforms - had a huge hit with a video showcasing the game on both Instagram & on TikTok - 11m views and 1m likes!

• Reach was expanded by using a short-form influencer agency: you may have heard this trend is hot (it is!), but Jakub notes a “curated group of [paid] short-form creators… generated around one million additional views across TikTok and Instagram.”

In this case, we suspect the sales ‘chain reaction’ was partly due to reach expansion into fans of The Sims & other titles who hadn’t heard of Small Spaces. If you look at GameDiscoverCo Pro’s ‘affinity’ data for games that are also played by Small Spaces players, the data (highest overlap, >5 times as likely to play) shows strong Sims 4 overlap:

There was a lot more we didn’t get to in this overview, and we’ve included the full Q&A with the Small Spaces team (Google Drive doc) - which we recommend checking out for additional insight from both the dev and the publisher.

Concluding: whether you like it or not, a lot of less ‘core’ players in 2026 like systems to play with, not explicitly gated and goaled games. And the cozy & female-friendly (but not female-only) audience loving Small Spaces don’t get many games like this - even as we totter under the weight of shooters and puzzle platformers.

This week on Steam: SAND & Empulse both land…

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We are back, with lots going on: there’s a comprehensive look at Steam Next Fest’s diffuse results & an announce on a new audiovisual addition to GDCo. And don’t forget GDCo’s Scrappy Game Jam on Itch.io, starting in a few hours. (We have cash & GDCo subscription prizes for making baseball mascot mini-games, for funsies…)

Before we start, breaking news: Valve’s Steam Machine is officially pre-orderable via random lottery, and it’s $1,049 (512GB) and $1,349 (2TB) in the U.S. (And +$75 with a Steam controller.) It’s a gorgeous 6-inch cube PC with SteamOS 3 & a custom AMD chipset, but it’s as expensive as we feared. (It’ll sell out now, but not scale massively?)

[THE DEEPEST PC/CONSOLE DATA? You can get a free demo of our GameDiscoverCo Pro company-wide ‘Steam deep dive’ & console data by reaching out today - >100 orgs have it. Or, signing up to GDCo Plus gets the rest of this newsletter and Discord access, plus more.]

Game discovery news: EGS gets feature aggro…

Let’s get going with a whole bunch of game discovery & platform news, starting with the following:

• Epic Games Store on PC is making a concerted effort to bridge the game with Steam on platform features, with its upcoming feature list (above) including a host of things: “Player profiles and avatars… written reviews… universal Controller support.. spec benchmarking… third party communities & patch notes” - and lots more.

• Chirag Vadhia was kind enough to do the math(s) on what an Xbox spinoff from Microsoft could mean, suggesting a valuation range of $35 billion (bear) to $66 billion (bull) for the current business & concluding: “Microsoft most likely keeps Xbox, fixes the margin & never sells the business, because keeping is what Microsoft does.”

• Doubleclicking on the Steam Machine, The Verge’s in-depth review is one of the handiest, saying: “It’s the best attempt I’ve seen at a PC that actually fits into a living room, and far better than anything I could build from parts”, but warns on “lingering friction” that is non-console like to get the best AAA game performance, etc.

• One more thing on price & supply: Sean Hollister at The Verge notes that “Valve explains that it’s not subsidizing the Steam Machine because of its ‘beliefs about how healthy ecosystems are built’” and also: “Valve tells us it was only able to secure around two-thirds of its planned stockpile.” (It might look $$, but so will everything else?)

• When we talk about ‘record catalog revenue’ for PC/console games (at lower price per unit, obv!), Capcom is a prime example: Devil May Cry 5 sold 2.1m copies in its first fiscal year (2019) and has now sold 12.9m units, for example (!). And Resident Evil 4 started with 3.7m units in 2023 and is at 13.6m now. (Long! Tail!)

• As governments continue to express concern over under-18 Internet/game users, Roblox has rolled out its Roblox Kids & Roblox Select accounts globally, which “introduces additional reviews for games available to users younger than 16”, with game context & maturity checks, and all chat turned off for under-9s as default.

• Microlinks: this player survey of the top PS5 games of H1 2026 has multi-platform games populating the Top 3 (Res Evil Requiem, 007 First Light, Pragmata); the CEO of CI Games says that “Our projection is Lords of the Fallen 2 making around 50% sales on PC. We’re big console supporters but PC dominance is the reality.”

• Stream Hatchet put out an interesting piece on Dead By Daylight’s streaming strength over the last 10 years, revealing “roughly 75-80% of the game’s viewership on any given day comes from Twitch”, higher than others, and that the Jason Voorhees reveal hit “2.1m hours watched at an average viewership of 89k” on June 16th alone.

• There’s been a notable rewrite of the ‘hosting third-party Steam sales’ & sales overview page on Steamworks: a) no ‘adhoc’ sale pages & banner cross-promo (eek!) for dev, publisher & franchise sales created after July 9th (you still get yearly ones - the revamped publisher page is for adhoc offers) b) “discounted offers should be presented at the top of the page” - no up-top wishlist mining, folks…

• Indie publisher Polden are continuing to be the squeaky wheel in ‘experimental market testing’ for Steam, explaining: “We’ll sign [Aliens Took My Stuff] for publishing if it reaches 50,000 wishlists”, and saying so far: “Creating the trailer cost, I think, around $3k, and we paid $5k to influencers.” (How far will this go? Is it… good?)

• Microlinks: May’s top-grossing (on-platform!) mobile games include Honor Of Kings, Whiteout Survival, Royal Match & Gossip Harbor; an editorial asks why not all SGF games had a Discord & extra media assets set up; Xbox has rolled out a new label for console exclusive games, visible on your Xbox Series dashboard.

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Who ‘won’ June 2026’s Steam Next Fest?

Concluding yesterday, Steam’s June 2026 Next Fest once again showcased a host of upcoming PC game demos - over 4,300 of them, in fact, a record. So time for another deep-dive, following ones in Feb. 2026, Oct. 2025, June 2025, Feb. 2025, Oct. 2024, June 2024, February 2024, Oct. 2023, June 2023, and February 2023.

The format of Next Fest was pretty darn similar to the last one, by the way. An ‘exploration mode’ toggle at the top of the page - making it clear some of the picks were randomized* until Wednesday - was the only notable difference. (*Even before Wed, a chunk of the page is non-randomized, btw, inc. recommended tags & discovery queue.)

We track a host of info about all NF demos, inc. all-time high CCUs and follower and estimated wishlist increases, via our giant June 2026 Next Fest spreadsheet (Google Drive doc), But to start, Steam handily lists the Top 50 Next Fest demos by unique player, and the Top 10 is above. So let’s have a look at some themes:

• Dark fantasy, gritty visuals & co-op seem to be key: in depth co-op games like Souls-like dungeon extraction title Mistfall Hunter (#4) and cursed jungle action-er The Mound: Omen Of Cthlhu (#8) are creepy, good-looking and show what you can do with non-AAAA resources. (Quite a lot, it turns out.)

• But there’s still room for more ‘casual’ co-op standouts: the Keep Talking & Nobody Explodes-ish high-concept defusal game Bombanana! (#1) is the big example. And already hot co-op offroader Over The Hill (#5) also leans relaxing,

• There’s still room for singleplayer in the mix, though: there’s multiple standouts in here - including PVKK-inspired heavy weapons sim Iron Nest (#2), 'you’re playing in a MMO but it’s singleplayer’ ARPG Echoes Of Aincrad (#3), and Papers Please/Quarantine Zone-like XenoFeels (#9) that rock the singleplayer.

There’s also some straight-out wildcards, like Command & Conquer-y isometric real-time strategy game Dust Front RTS (#6), Titanfall-y 6 vs. 6 traversal shooter Empulse (#6) and Diablo-ish Korean MMO Embers Of The Uncrowned (#10). It’s a little bit all over the place…

Thus: the top games here are effectively unsummarizable as one big trend. Why? Because there’s no longer a monoculture*. We all have different media to tell us about each game, and each of these titles is desired by a different ‘filter bubble’ of players.

[*Music writer Joe Muggs has just been talking about this concept as the monoculture fractures: “[Oldskool music writers]… were always looking out for the new rock’n’roll, the next punk, the next hip hop, and dispirited and pessimistic when they couldn’t spot it.”]

Next, here’s GDCo’s rough Top 10 estimates of new wishlists during Next Fest. (These are underestimated in places, due to high ‘follower to wishlist’ rates, but indicative). And we match 8 of the top 10 ‘top unique player’ games: promising Souls-like sequel Mortal Shell II and quaint electronics repair shop sim ReStory are the sole additions.

The rest of the Top 30 by est. wishlist increase are a plethora of genres & game styles:

These include body-swapping robot co-op extraction (Grain Rot, #12), giant puzzle adventure (Order Of The Sinking Star, #15), Beyblade-y battletops sim (!) Slayblade (#22), cozy first-person job sim (Cat Mail. Co, #23), and a host of others.

For further visualization (thx as always Michael Chan for help), the ‘Top 5 Steam’ tags chart for the Top 15 ‘most new wishlists’ games is here:

Tags in common? We see a whole cluster of both co-op and ‘online co-op’, alongside Souls-like and ‘dark fantasy’. But as we discussed above, a lot of these games are pretty.. different…

Lastly for game-specific analysis, here’s games by the highest CCU (concurrent Steam users) during the event - although the Bombanana! demo surged to a possibly sketchy 40k CCU just after the period we were tracking it. These are largely the titles we already talked about, with longer playtime co-op games doing particularly well…

Finally, we’ll do the ‘trends’ thing, and Next Fest game numbers are going up up up - June 2026, at 4,382 demos, is 66% more than the 2,645 demos in June 2025’s Next Fest:

This means that while we’re guessing total game demo plays were up YoY, it’s tough to do as well as games used to, if you’re in the top 10% of games in Next Fest - because duh, there’s lots more games. Here’s our math(s) on that:

You can see that compared to last year, a game in the top 10% of all Steam Next Fest titles added +121 followers (and probably ~3k wishlists?), down about 25% from the +163 followers last June. There’s similar results for top 1%-ers: down ~25% from +1,759 followers (June 2025) to +1,330 followers (June 2026.)

Oh, and two bonus pieces of data. First, we scanned almost every Next Fest demo for engine. And across all games, no matter what budget, it’s open-source Godot which is gaining (up from 9.2% to 12.6%) for this Fest, with Unity & Unreal both dipping a tad:

Also: the number of Next Fest demos that have Valve’s AI content disclosure option enabled went from 750 (21.2%) in the February 2026 to 1,163 (26.5%) in June 2026, trending up. (That broad tickbox could cover a multitude of usages, of course…)

ANNOUNCE: the GameDiscoverCo Show is here..

At the GameDiscoverCo offsite a few weeks ago in Stockholm, one of my co-workers gave me a reasonable challenge: “Since we talk constantly about how (audio)visual media is the main way people find games online, why is GameDiscoverCo a 100% text based service?”

To which I said: fair point. And that’s why we’re here to debut The GameDiscoverCo Show, a weekly video/podcast about some of the biggest game discovery stories of the week. And it’s hosted by myself - Simon Carless - and, in quite a coup (if you ask me!) Polygon co-founder and Post Games/The Besties co-host Chris Plante.

As I say in the intro, I’ve known Chris for a long time, and my chat with him for Post Games reminded me of his boundless enthusiasm and knowledge for the space. For context, we’re planning this as a ‘let’s talk focused game discovery news’ duo-cast, rather than a ‘let’s bring on lots of guests’ schedule-fest, and we truly hope you like it.

The pilot episode - in which we talk about Summer Game Fest & its discovery ramifications for devs, as well as GTA VI's release, Epic's State Of Unreal showcase and UK social media-related legislation that may affect games - is available on our YouTube channel (in video!) & on Spotify, Apple Music & elsewhere (audio!) Enjoy…

[We’re GameDiscoverCo, an analysis firm based around one simple issue: how do players find, buy and enjoy your PC or console game? We run the newsletter you’re reading, and provide real-time data services for publishers, funds, and other smart game industry folks.]

We’re back, and we’re still keeping an eye on the top Steam Next Fest demos - official charts are here, full rundown on Tuesday. But our eyes were drawn by fascinating fallout from Steam’s home page redesign. So that’s the lead story for today…

Before we start, exciting news for ‘f the online casino’ fans: the sole remaining Sigma Derby mechanical horse-racing game (which we have a soft spot for, tho it has terrible odds) - was just paraded through downtown Las Vegas - accompanied by Shetland ponies and mini jockeys - to its new location, the Golden Gate Hotel & Casino.

[THE DEEPEST PC/CONSOLE DATA? You can get a free demo of our GameDiscoverCo Pro company-wide ‘Steam deep dive’ & console data by reaching out today - >100 orgs have it. Or, signing up to GDCo Plus gets the rest of this newsletter and Discord access, plus more.]

Game discovery news: GTA VI pre-order panic…

Here’s some notable platform & discovery news for the rest of the week, and it’s hoppin’:

• Our buddies at ICO’s Footprints.gg put out their latest ‘trad media’ coverage report (above), and there’s a lot of post-Summer Game Fest coverage in there: Gears Of War E-Day (release date, Xbox exclusivity), Fable (more hype, delay to Feb. 2027), Zelda: Ocarina Of Time (remake announce), & Resident Evil: Veronica again.

• Grand Theft Auto VI alert: we don’t cover individual games, but GTA is practically a platform, and turns out pre-orders start on June 26th “on digital storefronts and at other select retailers.” (Don’t forget it’s initially shipping on Nov. 19th only on PS5 & Xbox Series, and big hardware demand spikes are expected.)

• Further confirmation of PlayStation’s shift in exclusivity arrived via a translated quote from SIE CEO Hideaki Nishino, suggesting that “for single-player games developed in-house”, PS5 exclusivity will be more likely, but for live-service titles, “we continue to view releases on both PS5 and PC as the standard.”

• Epic’s State Of Unreal keynote had a lot of tactical elements, inc. Unreal Engine 5.8’s release, an MCP AI integration for Unreal, and a more formal announce on the ‘road to’ Unreal Engine 6, which is “unifying the two major streams of Unreal Engine development - UE5 and Unreal Editor for Fortnite - into a single product.”

• A spicy take on Unreal’s moves? Thanks, M.G. Siegler: “Sweeney is clearly terrified that [Roblox is] eating Fortnite and making the case that it's taking the whole industry with it. So he's calling on everyone else to link arms and fight for an ‘open’ ecosystem… only tangentially stated is his hope/belief that Epic will power all of this via their Unreal Engine and/or – more ideally – banding together with Fortnite directly.”

• Steam things: Valve added a more detailed timeline for Steam Controller orders, and tho it might change, “the current estimation for orders placed today forward indicate a 2027 date for shipping”, since demand’s so hot; the SteamOS 3.8 update inc. “initial support for upcoming Steam Machine hardware” is officially debuted.

• Microlink, Pt.1: the latest Xbox Game Pass additions include EA Sports FC 26, RV There Yet? & Winds of Arcana: Ruination; the iOS App Store is adding bundles of app subscriptions from different companies soon; smaller Roblox devs are having issues with being spearphished & their entire games being stolen.

• Simon Pulman has a good take comparing Xbox’s rationalizations to post-COVID TV streamer changes: “Subscription model temporarily divorces content from traditional performance metrics and measurement”, as “initial overspending… to hit critical mass of subscribers” kicks in, ‘til “eventually leadership… looks at performance numbers versus cost, starts asking serious questions about spend and creative choices.”

• The New York Times (who dat?) kindly quoted me a couple of times for this piece on ‘repetitive labor small-biz games’ like TCG Card Shop Simulator, Retro Rewind and Tiny Bookshop. As I said: “It’s all the fun of a gradually expanding business without the worries of going bankrupt in real life.”

• Legislation tings: the European Commission will ‘engage with the industry’ (rather than legislate) around the ‘keep online game servers live’ petition; the ESA has an editorial in a CA newspaper suggesting a similar proposed California act is bad: “Every dollar spent on outdated systems is a dollar not spent on building a new one.”

• Denis Krasikov is having fun with Steam player analysis, and the result is a series of personas - from ‘F2P strategists’ to ‘Wishlist Watchers’ and beyond - and a breakdown of which personas own and wishlist specific games. (It’s a bit slop-py, but it’s fun sloppy! F-loppy?)

• Microlinks, Pt. 2: better late than never, the Switch 1 eShop now runs radically faster thanks to an architecture change; how the split in Roblox genres breaks down; jailed FTX crypto mastermind Sam Bankman-Fried reveals he’s ‘maining’ prison tablet Android games in prison, mainly roguelike Shattered Pixel Dungeon.

How Steam’s personal calendar is blowing up…

We already did a write-up of Steam’s new homepage re-design, in which we noted that “the new Personal Calendar section is great, both the homepage excerpt & clicking through, to show games you wishlisted or could want, sorted by the last/next 30 days.” But more and more devs have been talking about the impressive wishlist effects of this section.

It’s true, if you read the Personal Calendar write-up, that games you wishlist appear in this section. But most recommends are for brand new games, based on “people with similar playtime profiles to you… [and] the games those players have been adding to their wishlist.” So it’s playtime-based rather than ownership-based, and ‘retrained’ daily.

The results have been some startling near-release wishlist increases for games. Briefly listing some on-the-record examples:

• Recent launch Solarpunk revealed that, pre-release, “since the Steam website update, our wishlists exploded: 14,000 wishlists in one day; 22,000 wishlists the next day; 35,000 wishlists yesterday.”

• The dev of NSFW title Vampire Syndicate said that it had: “65k wishlists before the Steam change… Getting 2,000-3,000+ wishlist adds for the past few days”, ahead of an upcoming June 25th launch.

• Even smaller titles are getting decent wishlist shifts, with a horror game dev “with ~1,000 wishlists doubled them in just 2 days.” The title is question - Karjala - is out on the 23rd. So it was within the ‘30 days before release’ limit for the extended calendar.

Now obviously, some of this was novelty - a brand new tool/launch for players to check! But there’s long-term ramifications too, because, as this Reddit post notes: “The [new] calendar is on the main page by default. People used to need to click on Popular Upcoming to see your game. Now… there it is right away, with barely any scrolling.”

GameDiscoverCo also has access to another title launching in this timeframe, and can - at least abstractly - detail what it saw:

• The game was adding 300-500 wishlists per day before the new homepage launch.

• It surged to 5-6,000 wishlists per day directly after the Steam homepage redesign (it was already <30 days from release), before returning to a more ‘normal’ 3-4k.

• When it made it into the actual front page inclusion (‘games out this week’) it went to 10,000 wishlists per day (!)

This game had 2,200 Steam followers and 65k Steam wishlists at the end of May, and recently had 4,100 followers and 163k wishlists. So the incremental from the Calendar (and launch run-up!) is 1,900 extra followers, but 100k extra wishlists.

These are extremely non-trivial numbers, but we’d expect similar for many releases in the future. So as a first takeaway: if you have decent wishlists, expect a big run-up in the 30 days before launch, due to the Personal Calendar. (And additional post-launch visibility, esp. via the full calendar.)

Of course, we’d also expect many of these wishlists to be drive-by/casual ones and less likely to convert on Day 1. (This is fine, cos you’ve banked them for later discount promos, etc. But a >50x ‘extra’ follower to wishlist ratio - partly driven by an easy one-click wishlist mechanism on the front page - implies as much.)

We’re also wondering if this will permanently alter median wishlist ‘conversion’ calculations, which we have at ‘Week 1 sales = median of 0.11x wishlist balance at launch’, with hilariously large vacillations. (Valve sez: don’t pay massive attention to wishlist conversions as a metric at all. And we get the cut of their jib there.)

Anyhow, metrics-related fretting aside, this is a very positive step. It’s boosting visibility for unreleased (& just-released) games on Steam’s home page in an intelligent new way. And with easy ‘mouseover for video/capsule description’ tech, it’s never been quicker for a player to get an impression of your game and WL/buy.

On tactics: we’d be surprised if the Personal Calendar is game-able. (Besides maybe playtime-heavy games like roguelites doing better than average, if the algo is playtime-based?) Overall, our current Personal Calendar mixes up small titles (Junkster, which topped out at 17 CCU) and some bigger ones (City Car Driving 2.0, 1,670 CCU) nicely.

Hilariously, the GameDiscoverCo Plus/Pro Discord already started discussing meta-strategy for this change, such as ‘is it better to release earlier or later in the week, if the front page Calendar widget shows Monday to Friday?’ Leading to this priceless exchange:

Following the general scheme of ‘UGC/crowdsourcing is hot right now’, Lucas has helpfully pre-written our conclusion: this is a nice new discovery booster, but “the calendar will not save you if your game lacks public interest”, and most boosts will be commensurate with your pre-boost interest. (Caveat emptwishlistor!)

This week on Steam: Zenless, Elliot, Application…

Read more

We’re back, and Steam Next Fest is live with just a ‘few’ demos (4,358, at current count) of upcoming PC games. (Reminder: the games you see will largely be randomized until Wed. morning - and then more focused, since Valve will use data to recommend smaller titles.) We’ll have more analysis on the winners & median results next Tuesday!

Before we start, we talk about cozy arrange-y games a lot. But how about Boxroom, which just came out & allows you to “design, define and decorate a room - a sanctuary - for your Steam library”? What a deliciously meta idea (which ran into some issues with Steam approving its box art scraping, if this message is to be extrapolated from.)

[THE DEEPEST PC/CONSOLE DATA? You can get a free demo of our GameDiscoverCo Pro company-wide ‘Steam deep dive’ & console data by reaching out today - >100 orgs have it. Or, signing up to GDCo Plus gets the rest of this newsletter and Discord access, plus more.]

Game discovery news: the Final Fantasy rises…

It’s the start of the week, so that must mean a sackload of new game discovery & platform news got delivered, right? Right:

• Our latest GDCo Pro 'trending' unreleased Steam games, June 8th-15th, overlaps with the tail end of Summer Game Fest. But Resident Evil Veronica (#1) has bigger staying power than other early SGF announces. Other Top 5 games - inc. Stronghold 4, Guild Wars 3 & 1666: Amsterdam - were in our SGF round-up on Fri.

• For newer material: brand new 'HD-2D' JRPG Final Fantasy Resonance hit #3 after a reveal during the Nintendo Direct. Other new entries we didn't talk about: narrative FPS Magicians: The Devils' Deal (#9), the return of Spyro (#11), and co-op tank horror game (!) Carcass Clad (#13), from Mouthwashing’s devs.

• Roblox just announced a major discovery update to amp up ‘meaningful’ longer retention vs. novelty: “Today, we’re expanding the Recommended For You algorithm from its previous 7-day view to a 28-day view that directly measures long-term retention.” (In testing, they claim higher DAU and better engagement across the platform.)

• Xbox’s pivot is what we’d call ‘rapidly moving’, with Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier reporting that “Several Xbox studios, including Compulsion, Ninja Theory and Double Fine, are negotiating with Xbox as they try to avoid closure. Some or all could spin off… Lots still in flux.” (There’s also talk of Xbox becoming a Microsoft subsidiary or JV.)

• Point of fact: Xbox “shedding millions of [Game Pass] subscribers” after the Game Pass Ultimate hike from $20 to $30 per month wasn’t necessarily the wrong move if you want to generate more total revenue. (But it was def. the wrong one for longer-term momentum, which is why the reverse ferret is continuing.)

• Everyone should pay more attention to the upcoming UK social media ban for under-16s (due early 2027) if you have any online comms in your game - Wiggin’s Pete Lewin has some initial comments: “The ban goes beyond social media, and will also block ‘harmful functions’ such as livestreaming and ‘stranger communication’.”

• We spotted this cool blog from Sibling Aesthetics explaining a mega visualization they made: “The Steam Map is a visual 3D presentation of the complete Steam catalogue, purely based on screenshots. It started out as an in-house tool to keep track of the horror scene on Steam, and over time grew into something much bigger.”

• One thing we didn’t know, which Matej Lancaric’s guide to mobile game direct to consumer (D2C) revenue illuminated: “Today: 0% platform fee on steered U.S. payments. Sometime in the next 6 to 12 months: probably 20%. Still better than 30%, but a third of the prize evaporates for traffic you haven’t habituated by then.” Gold rush!

• In-game advertising in PC/console games never quite ‘made it’, but EA is rolling out a new EA Advertising division, since “EA's games reach more than 120 million players per month” & sports titles have handy in-game billboards (& custom content opps...) Partners include Visa, Lowe's, Red Bull, Xfinity and Mountain Dew.

• RoadToVR passes along, re: Valve’s Steam Frame devices entering the U.S.: “As per the public records, Valve has imported some 32,000 kg (~35 US tons) of the VR devices in question, which was notably one week after the company imported 40,000 kg (~44 US tons) of “game consoles,” unmistakably its Steam Machine Linux-based PC.”

• Microlinks: Dutch gamers file €220 million claim against Valve around anti-competition law; Apple’s App Store saw 84% jump in new apps in quarter amid ‘vibe coding’ breakout; Nintendo temporarily suspends sales of the multi-region Switch 2 in Japan after suspected hoarding.

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What Twitch data adds to the game discovery pic…

Until recently, GameDiscoverCo has intentionally not analyzed anything except on-platform data. (Why? There’s an awful lot of that to keep straight.) But we’re diversifying, and after launching the Steam Fan Snapshot survey data in April, we’re now adding a ‘streaming viewers’ data set to GameDiscoverCo Pro.

This includes >10 years worth of Twitch data (hours watched per day, # of channels per day, top streamers) for tens of thousands of games and hundreds of thousands of streamers. Here’s our internal Discord notification on yesterday’s new data:

So yep, 14k different games are streamed on Twitch daily. And the biggest games such as Counter-Strike, League Of Legends & GTA have 15k-25k different channels playing them each day. But look - there’s a host of existing free & paid sites that ingest Twitch data. Why is GameDiscoverCo doing it any more interesting? Some thoughts:

• Due to good classification, you get accurate data for even smaller games: thanks to Twitch buying IGDB back in 2019 & streamers being mandated to select a game before streaming it, the metadata is ‘on point’ - unlike other key platforms (YouTube, shortform social video) where aggregating mass data is a real pain.

• We can apply cross-data lenses that other folks can’t: seeing wishlists and copies sold directly alongside Twitch streamer data is useful. Why? Some successes are very much impelled by the Twitch ‘flavor’ of streamer interest, and some very much are not. (This is interesting in itself!)

• ‘Cutting’ the data in different ways provides additional context: just listing the Top 5 most-watched games will show the usual suspects. But there’s all kinds of interesting ways to sort most-watched games, from dates to tags & more. Also: there are views of top Twitch streamers that provide extra context.

So let’s bust out some examples. One great one which is very core Twitch viewer-compatible is Diablo-ish ARPG Path of Exile 2, which has grossed $300m+ direct on Steam (!), is currently in the Top 10 for most-watched, and has big sales bumps (blue line) every time it releases new updates, like Return Of The Ancients:

But this GaaS-style stickiness is the exception on Twitch, rather than the rule. So the default situation is for something like Manor Lords. It has a huge start (with a pre release streamer-exclusive period you can see (below) via purple ‘hours watched’ spike with no accompanying orange ‘channel count’ spike), but then relative fallowness:

An important thing to note here - this isn’t bad, and will be default for most paid games. In fact, we estimate Manor Lords has doubled its on-platform Steam units (from 1.7m to 3.3m), even while not a bunch was happening on Twitch. (Lots of players are aware of the game, have it wishlisted, and are waiting for updates, 1.0 and sales.)

Next, to the chart views. It’s interesting, for example, to take a look at games released in the last 3 months (since March 16th, 2026), ranked by ‘hours watched on Twitch in the last 7 days’. You get a real mix of up-and-comers, premium games that were huge on release and are coming down, and surprising entrants:

Some standout takeaways here for us, in terms of things we did/didn’t expect:

• Viral multiplayer hits like Meccha Chameleon get great juice on Twitch: the $6 ‘hide & paint’ game just hit 3 million units sold, and 3m hours watched in a week is great. And lo-fi horror franchise Fears To Fathom went co-op only with Scratch Creek just last week, and multiplayer helped the $8 game sell 100k swiftly…

• Recent AAA hits do ramp down fairly gradually: they came out last month, but Forza Horizon 6, 007 First Light, and Subnautica 2 are still hanging out in the mix - albeit at a much lower watch rate per week than the last 30 days…

• Don’t count out ‘difficult-to-stream-on’ platforms like Switch 2: we’ve been super impressed with how streamable Nintendo’s Tomodachi Life is. The weird playhouse vibes make is irresistable to Twitch viewers, to the tune of 22m hours watched since launch. (And Pokemon Champions is doing nicely, too.)

We can also see most-streamed unreleased games, of course - and besides Valve’s Deadlock as a perpetual #1, we’re spotting survival clicker Don’t Sleep With The Fishes and Next Fest titles Mistfall Hunter and Mortal Shell II doing good. (More on top Next Fest titles in much detail next Tuesday…)

The final thing we did differently: we’re not (currently!) planning on making giant complex pages per Twitch streamer. That’s for other services. But we did want people to be able to see who was streaming particular games, and their general ‘vibes’.

So we created a leaderboard view which lists streamers with basic info (hours watched and streamed for that particular game in the last 7, 30, 365 and all-time days, channel followers, last streamed date.) And we added a lens we like - the top 3 watched games of the last 90 days for them. Here’s an example for Souls-like sequel Mortal Shell II:

What we notice here? A lot of Crimson Desert watcher overlap, as well as games like Gothic 1 Remake, Windrose, Elden Ring and others. (This all makes a lot of sense. And you can use this info to find comps, streamers to target, and gauge ‘general vibes’ related to the game.)

Showing a final example, we thought checking the last 7 days most-watched channels for lovingly made pixel art ARPG Mina The Hollower would also be interesting. It is:

What’s interesting? The top streamers aren’t skewing particularly cozy, but are definitely showing retro-first leanings, with Ace Attorney, Mario and Zelda games, Stardew Valley and Final Fantasy titles all in the mix.

Again, this is about the data, but it’s also about the impressions you get of where the game ‘hits’, genre and fan-group wise. Or that’s how we see it, anyhow. And we’ll include insights from this data in our regular analysis going forward. Toodles…

[We’re GameDiscoverCo, an analysis firm based around one simple issue: how do players find, buy and enjoy your PC or console game? We run the newsletter you’re reading, and provide real-time data services for publishers, funds, and other smart game industry folks.]

So, we’ve given up calling the period when E3 used to happen each June ‘not-E3’, and defaulted to mentioning Summer Game Fest. (Even though not all the showcases clustered around it are ‘officially’ part of SGF.) Why? It’s a game festival that takes place in summer, folks! And that’s the subject of our lead story today…

But before we start, we dug NoClip’s video about the history and future of game jams, not least because it showed great games - from Inscryption to Hollow Knight & beyond - originating in jams. (Psst: you can register for GDCo’s Oakland Ballers baseball league mascot game jam on Itch.io right now, you dirty animals…)

[THE DEEPEST PC/CONSOLE DATA? You can get a free demo of our GameDiscoverCo Pro company-wide ‘Steam deep dive’ & console data by reaching out today - >100 orgs have it. Or, signing up to GDCo Plus gets the rest of this newsletter and Discord access, plus more.]

Game discovery news: Backrooms x backrooms..

Let’s start out the newsletter with the latest game platform & discovery news, which goes a bit like this:

• As we noted on LinkedIn, “We've seen less talk about how games based on the Backrooms 'legend' have fared alongside the $220m success of the movie.” Looking at GDCo Steam sales & Twitch streaming volume data, Escape The Backrooms, already at 6.8m copies sold, “has added another 400k copies in just a few days, as the number of Twitch channels playing the game daily surged from 200 to 5,800 (up 29x!)”

• And what’s more: “Backrooms: Escape Together, which has the official in-game event for the A24 movie, saw the Twitch channel count playing it go up from 70 to 1,000 (up 13x), and added 250k copies sold to 2.75m copies, according to GDCo estimates.” It was a good few days to be in the backrooms business…

• Xbox foreshadowing: continuing the ultra-transparency, this internal Xbox memo put out by Asha Sharma notes scant profit (“We will end this fiscal year at about a 3% accountability margin, down year-over-year”) but high reach (1b players yearly.) The ‘reassessment’ of studio system/platform infra may be leading to significant layoffs in July, according to Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier.

• There’s more consensus that Steam devs dig the new Steam Calendar feature for pre-release wishlists, on the revamped front page, at least if you get on it: Solarpunk saw 14-35k daily wishlists pre-launch (!), and less well-known title Moon River added 700 wishlists to its ~7,000 thanks to the Calendar.

• The ESA got a bat-signal re: the proposed U.S. anti-deepfake law, and they showed up, saying it" “creates a level of uncertainty that poses a real threat to… the future of video game development in the United States.” Issues appear to be a) frivolous lawsuits and b) custom in-game avatar-creation tools getting limited?

• The Verge has a strong view on Nintendo’s current portfolio announcements & its remake and remaster heavy line-up: “At its very best, Nintendo finds the right balance between being conservative and being inventive. The Switch 2 needs a few more daring ideas to push the scale back in the right direction.” (Hardcore fans worked so far, but…)

• SteamDB spotted that Valve announced “Steam will no longer be restocking physical gift cards at retailers due to scammers.” The specific FAQ page about this links to the U.S. FTC page about gift card scamming in general, and from Reddit posts, it sounds like ‘your grandson is in jail’ dupes were using cards as a cash-out. Sigh.

• Country ratings boards are the most miserable way to get your game announce leaked, and Automaton Media claims that South Korea’s GRAC is a prime culprit because “the rating body is only able to accommodate game publishers’ confidentiality requests while submitted games are undergoing review. The moment a decision is reached”, they’re legally obligated to make it public. That’s.. dumb?

• Xbox hardware thoughts: CSO Matthew Ball noted: “We have no desire to move away from the console business… We are making an investment in… the console platform that is going to be strengthened by these exclusives.” But then Asha Sharma adds: “We must think about other ways to think about the cost construction of the console.”

• Being weirdos, we still track most-reviewed Apple Arcade games every month ($) for giggles! In May, two ‘+’ ports from the regular App Store were top, vintage puzzler Flow Free+ and shop sim Good Pizza Great Pizza+. (Next up, the Holy Trinity: Sneaky Sasquatch, Crossy Road Castle, Hello Kitty Island Adventure.)

• Microlinks: Russia has lifted restrictions on access to Roblox after ‘user safety’ for kids was addressed; the PlayStation Plus Game Catalog for June inc. Final Fantasy XVI, Sonic X Shadow Generations & Kingdom Come: Deliverance; if your game is on Itch.io, submit it for this North American ‘game biz/layoff hardship fund’!

Bonus: while we were researching the anti-(deep)fake U.S. bill, we made a typo on Google with such an epic AI response that we had to include it. (Sorry, faeries…)

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What top games, showcases hit during SGF 2026?

As we did last year, we’ve decided to go hardcore on data around the entire Summer Game Fest-adjacent showcase scene. And we’ve tracked 20+ streaming PC/console game showcases - including SGF itself, which had 62 million livestreams this year, up 23% YoY - but also platform showcases, Day Of The Devs & more.

(BTW, it’s interesting how top showcase livestreams are powered by co-streaming nowadays, with StreamHatchet estimating “nearly two-thirds of all viewership (64.8%, up 3.6% from 2025) came through co-streamers” for the main Summer Game Fest event.)

Anyhow, we have a lot of data to chonk through here. So here’s the giant GDCo ‘overview document’ (Google Drive doc) with 800+ games on. And here (above) is GDCo’s estimates of the Top 10 most-newly wishlisted games on Steam:

• The surprise Resident Evil Veronica announce topped the charts: the remake of 2000’s Code Veronica is at #1 with 803k wishlists added. And the Res Evil series was more than 50% of Capcom’s entire total game sales for FY ending March 2026. (Wow!) People can’t get enough, and Capcom is executing very well…

• The rest of the top five skew ‘gritty AAA action game’: ARPG x MMO sequel Guild Wars 3 (#2, +496k) was next, and Assassin’s Creed-y 1666: Amsterdam (#3, +494k) was also a smart surprise reveal, followed by ARPG sequel Lords Of The Fallen II (#4, +227k) and shooter reboot Crossfire (#5, +222k).

• Nine out of the top ten titles were Summer Game Fest-showcased: only first-person horror title ILL - which was in PlayStation State Of Play & hit #10 - came from outside of the ‘main’ Keighley-fronted SGF showcase. (But some first-party showcase games don’t have Steam pages and had interest, as we’ll see later.)

In case you missed the rest of the Top 10, HAEX (#6, +192k) is a very good-looking co-op survival shooter, you know what the Assassin’s Creed Black Flag remaster (#7, +191k) is, we presume, and survival horror sequel Alien: Isolation 2 (#8, +185k) and horror prequel SAW: Genesis (#9, +184k) rounds out these games.

You can grok the vibes here, but in case you’re confused: epic, gritty titles (some open-world, some not, many co-op) with elements of either a) medieval/historical b) post-apocalypse or c) horror seem to be floating to the top, for this PC/console audience.

Does the escapism continue in the rest of the Top 30 by most-wishlisted during SGF & friends (above)? By and large, it does, but w/licensed titles from Gundam (#11) and Star Wars (#14) punctuating the Top 20. (And hilariously, Star Wars Zero Company actually has the word ‘gritty’ in the first line of the Steam capsule description.)

Other trends we see in here? There’s not much pixel art or generalized cuteness on display - with even Dave The Diver spiritual sequel Bancho The Chef (#29) still being a tad whimsical, but almost looking Yakuza-like in presentation. (But Nintendo titles don’t wishlist on Steam, of course - the Rayman Legends reboot (#21) is closest…)

Most of the Top 30 is either from a) established teams, like Stranger Than Heaven from the Yakuza crew, or b) established franchises, from Onimusha through Halo to Gears Of War & Tomb Raider. Takeaways from any that aren’t? Last Harbor (#13) is an open-world multiplayer zombie fishing game, smooshing two great tastes together.

It can be difficult to extrapolate precise Steam wishlist increases (which GDCo has to estimate.) So we’ve also provided Steam follower increase accounts (a real number - how many people opt in to get news about specific Steam games) in the linked document, and here’s the Top 10 (above).

You’ll see some differences here, since core strategy games - which have more news updates and have more ‘core’ Steam fans - tend to vault up the follower charts. Hence you’ll see Guild Wars 3 at #1, and medieval castle sim sequel Stronghold 4 (#4) and the JRPG remake Persona 4 (#7) also in the Top 10.

But Steam isn’t the world! (What?) And ~40 of the 860+ games we tracked in these showcases don’t have a Steam page yet. So we asked our buddies at Footprints.gg - who cover ‘trad media’ mentions - to pull the top mentions for the last week:

As you can see in here, the PlayStation 5 exclusive franchise continuation God Of War Laufey got the most mentions in ‘trad written online games media’ , followed by Xbox’s shooter reboot Gears Of War: E-Day (possibly due to its ‘late Xbox console exclusive’ move), with the next Tomb Raider and Halo titles also in the Top 5.

It’s an interesting, more franchise-led view, as we’d expect from a media who needs to interest people, many of whom are attracted to ‘things they’ve actually heard of’. (This is part of the value of known franchises in today’s too-busy media landscape!)

Finally, a couple of other views put together by GDCo’s spreadsheet whiz Alejandro. Here’s a look at platforms that each of the 800+ titles were announced for:

Remember that this includes many hundreds of titles in smaller showcases, but it’s interesting overall, with Steam listed as a platform for 96% of all games (!), and PlayStation for 27% - with Xbox only 1% behind at 26%.

It’s also notable that Switch 2 made it to being named in 13% of all game SKUs - although Switch 1 was in 12.6% of them last year, so there’s not much uptick going on. We suspect most of the changes are due to even less mobile SKUs than last year (down from ~5.5% to ~2.5% - SGF is no place for mobile, as MobileGamer.biz echoed!)

And the ultimate graph is one you’ve all been lusting over. Which showcases provided the biggest median increase in Steam wishlists? There’s no YoY comparison because we used different start and end dates, but here’s what we’ve got:

Yep, the ‘main’ Summer Game Fest showcase is top, with +72k wishlists as a median, followed by PlayStation’s State Of Play (+52k) and the Xbox Games Showcase (+46k), with the PC Gaming Show (+21k) & Day Of The Devs (+20k) rounding out the Top 5.

That’s followed by the Future Games Show, Wholesome Direct, Nintendo Direct (which was very late in our window, and has Switch-exclusive titles in it, of course), and then a host of other showcases. And we appreciate every one of you…

[UPDATE: we actually combined Future Games Show - median of 18,700 wishlists added - and its sister, smaller ‘FGS Live From Los Angeles’ event (median of 5,500) for the above chart - we wanted to list them again separately, to avoid confusion.]

[BONUS: some game engine data? Among the 100 titles with most additional wishlists during Summer Game Fest & friends, Unreal represented 52% of all games, with Unity at 14%, other custom engines at 12%, and Godot at just 1%. However, over the entire set of showcase with 800+ titles, we managed to detect or extrapolate game engine technology across ~470 games, and of those, 44% were Unity and 31% were Unreal. Just 5% were Godot. Interesting, huh?]

This week on Steam: Meccha, Solarpunk, Gnomes!

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And we’re back. Hope everyone is having a pleasant time, as we center today’s newsletter not on the highest-profile sales winner, but on a stalwart zombie title that’s now grossed 9 figures (!) by being the deepest, most moddable experience around.

Before we start, does anyone remember ‘the Boxleiter number’? We referenced it back in 2020 - it was early Steam sales estimates, using review multipliers. Nostalgia hit over it because Mike Boxleiter announced his new game, co-op shooter Lazy River - set in “the galaxy’s most unregulated waterpark” - during SGF. (Don’t pee in the pool.)

[THE DEEPEST PC/CONSOLE DATA? You can get a free demo of our GameDiscoverCo Pro company-wide ‘Steam deep dive’ & console data by reaching out today - >100 orgs have it. Or, signing up to GDCo Plus gets the rest of this newsletter and Discord access, plus more.]

Game disco news: some games got announced…

We have our proper Summer Game Fest (& friends) data post coming on Friday. But we’ll cover a few of the initial highlights in our news round-up today:

• As you might have spotted (above), we collab-ed with Geoff Keighley on data used kicking off the Summer Game Fest event on Friday, pointing out that although there’s >9k new games on Steam already this year, 10 of the 14 games that we think sold >1m copies LTD (above) were from independents. That’s good, rite?

• Oh, Summer Game Fest announces? They were pretty impressive this year, inc. Resident Evil Veronica (a Code: Veronica remake), new Cuphead games, Guild Wars 3, 1666 Amsterdam (from Patrice Desilets), a new PlatinumGames Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles game & a multi-platform (yay!) Final Fantasy VII Revelation.

• Remember that change to Steam’s top all-time wishlists charts to be more ‘trending’ we ran as breaking news on Friday? Uh, it got reverted 3-4 hours later (!) to once again show unreleased games with the most Steam wishlists, give or take. (So, either a genuine bug, or a change that Valve reconsidered after feedback…)

• Here’s everything announced in the Xbox showcase, inc. new Spyro & Senua games. But the big platform deal was Xbox console exclusives (not just timed - they’re ‘never’ coming to PlayStation) for Gears Of War: E-Day and Clockwork Revolution, a couple of mid/higher-profile Xbox releases for 2026/2027.

• Xbox’s Matt Booty went on GamerTag Radio to detail more on the semi-pivot: “Xbox console exclusive is about the desire to give players a reason to buy an Xbox… live service games will continue to be full multiplatform… previously announced ports will be honored for [those] platforms… Future games will be a case by case basis.”

• Want a spicy take on Steam’s algo changes? Patrick Seibert provides: “Steam's Popular Upcoming wishlists were worthless. Those were just numbers to make small indie devs feel good. They did not convert to sales! I stopped years ago optimising for time spent on Popular Upcoming… and instead focused on time in New & Trending!”

• Today’s Nintendo Direct is the final SGF-ish showcase, and here’s the lowdown - we saw a Legend Of Zelda: Ocarina Of Time remake for Switch 2, confirmation of Kingdom Hearts IV (multi-platform, inc. Switch 2 on Day 1), and a new Xenoblade JRPG. Oh, and Nintendo Switch Sports Resort, haha. (Decent overall.)

• The European Union’s possible crackdown on F2P virtual currency is getting lobbied against by major mobile gameco-s, with Supercell’s Ilkka Paananen telling the Financial Times: “Basically, [F2P mobile] games would become unplayable in Europe . . . Mobile games is one of the very few industries where Europe and the Nordics specifically can claim they are the leader.”

• In ‘platforms finally dealing with unfortunate side effects’ news, Delisted Games is tracking a whole bunch of ‘easy Platinum trophy’ shovelware publishers on PlayStation announcing the removal of their games. (Anyone know how Sony is phrasing their messaging to publishers? Looks like there’s a delisting deadline.)

• Nintendo things: Switch 2 hardware sales dropped 87% week-on-week in Japan after its price increase. (But there was a ‘buy before more $’ spike, so at 32k per week, it’s now at ~70% of the pre-price change numbers.) Also: Nintendo was hit with a €35 million fine in France over the long-running Switch 1 Joy-Con drift.

• We’ll cover this all more on Friday, but here’s all the games announced during Day Of The Devs, inc. a new Trine game & a Yooka-Laylee kart racer; here’s all the PC Gaming Show announces, inc. a Star Trek outpost builder & a new Cassette Beasts game. (GamesRecap has all of the trailers in one place, also check out the Story Rich Showcase, the Wholesome Direct showcase & more.)

• Microlinks: No Rest for the Wicked director says Xbox version won’t release alongside PS5 because ‘Series S is making that rough’; the game-related winners of the Apple Desgn Awards include Is This Seat Taken?, Blue Prince & Consume Me; Minecraft has added an affiliate program for influences to take a cut of IAP $.

OUR SPONSOR: Player.gg x Summer Game Fest

Discovery is broken. Algorithms show gamers more of what they already play, not the genuinely interesting stuff. Curators on player.gg is our fix: real people sharing the games they love, the stories behind them, and exclusive playtests for our community.

We just launched with lookingfor.game, a weekly newsletter from Lucy James (Friends Per Second, ex-GameSpot and Giant Bomb). It launched alongside our new Summer Game Fest partnership, exactly the kind of human-curated recommendation we built player.gg for!

Want your games in front of curators with real taste? Reach out with your interest, or take a look.

How Project Zomboid hit ‘evergreen’ stealthily…

If you have a good memory, you may recall we wrote a newsletter on co-op isometric zombie survival game Project Zomboid back in 2022, after it launched its online mode for the first time (after being on Steam since 2013!) and had a major ‘moment’, with its sales numbers spiking by 23x.

Well, we’re planning a series of articles on games that are quietly and massively ‘evergreen’, and realized that Project Zomboid is a prime example of this. Look how much the game has scaled, Steam copies sold-wise, since 2022:

So yep, GDCo is estimating Project Zomboid at >15 million units (!) sold on Steam alone, with a median playtime of >13 hours (& an average of >65 hours), and a regular spot in the Top 50 most-played games on Steam by concurrent users. It’s huuge.

A lot of this uptick has come with the co-op upgrade simply making the game a lot more streamable for group playthroughs, while new systemic depths have been developed even for single-player games, via the upcoming Build42 upgrade (as showcased by the above multi-hour ‘in-game narrative’ YouTube video.)

We can see the viral effect via an upcoming GDCo Pro data view, combining PZ’s sales with Twitch hours watched* (*more soon, we’re just honing it!) Not only is the game lodged near the Top 100, watcher-wise, the post-2021 streaming spikes are v.mighty:

For those who haven’t played it - Project Zomboid isn’t a ‘run around gunning down zombies in their thousands’ Vampire Survivors-like. Rather, it’s a painstakingly complex & brutal survival sim where individual limbs can be injured & planning bases, gear scavenging & escape routes is the order of the day. So why has it done this well?

Seven key reasons for Project Zomboid’s success?

To work that out, we asked Project Zomboid’s creative director Will Porter - who’s been working on the game as a co-founder of The Indie Stone for over 15 years - what he thought the ‘continuing sales drive’ for the game was. He had some great answers:

• Play it your way: “We are, overall, a sandbox game… if people don’t like something they can turn it off.” The title does have game modes, but “we are very much ‘Choose Your Own Zombie Survival Adventure’. This clearly is of great appeal to the zombie survival audience, within which are a range of very specific personal tastes.”

• The modding scene is vital: “Mods convert our game from being finite, if sandbox, authored content and turn it into a platform [of] itself.” Will cites “total mod magician Slayer” - check Week One - & “the amazing recent horse mod” as two key examples, noting that half of the current Zomboid dev team are ex-modders. He also notes a recent team re-org focusing on “how to improve the modder’s lot once B42 is out.”

• The game is oddly age-agnostic: “We always assumed that PZ was an oldie’s game – which I guess in the modern parlance would be ‘a game for uncs’. The look, the tone and the gameplay is as much Ultima Online, The Sims 1 and XCOM as anything else.” But as he says: “For whatever reason, generations younger than us keep picking [the game] up, hanging out with their friends in it (this is a big part of it) and streaming.” Indeed, GDCo’s Steam Fan Snapshot data for PZ has av. age slightly below the median…

Will adds on this subject: “We also see a lot of parents who’ve been with us since the beginning playing with their kids, husbands and wives - surviving together, etc. There’s quite a lot of wholesome going on if you peer beneath the surface of the death and fighting.”

But wait, there’s more! We pried another four reasons why Zomboid has such staying power from Will, and we like all of these, too:

• Some serious watchability: “Project Zomboid content is incredibly legible as a piece of watchable and consumable media.” Will notes there’s very little abstraction or cost of entry for viewers, and “it can be easily ‘narrated over’ by YouTubers and streamers. Beyond zombie hordes, there’s spread of fire, sickness, flashlights running out of batteries, vehicles running out of gas all at critical moments” - all very relatable.

• Epically complex in-game progression: “The game’s long progression continues to add to this, giving the character name weight in the story generated from long running playthroughs.” Combined with social betrayal and cooperation, and “permadeath raising the stakes”, there are so many anecdote-worthy situations and ‘runs’.

• Love from people who play nothing else but Project Zomboid: “Once upon a time players who’d played 1,000 hours would be an amazing curio… now it feels like the majority of people who directly talk to us with warranted praise, warranted criticism and (lots of) warranted bug reports have between 1,000 and 5,000 hours in-game.” Hardcore fanbase matters, folks.

• The game is ‘cheaper than it’s actually worth’: it started at 5 UKP and is even now ‘just’ $20 USD, it’s “an amazing deal – and we like it that way”, as Will says. He also adds: “They also appreciate that we don’t have a history of microtransactions, pay-to-win, spurious DLC and such.” (Not a luxury all game franchises have, but they got it!)

One thing Will said in answering this question vibed with us, so we’re just reprinting it in full. In effect, he’s recognizing his team’s privilege in being there early:

“I feel games born in earlier Steam eras have benefitted from slower discovery cycles, a stronger forum and community culture, and less saturation. We have noticed that older games like us have had more opportunity over time to accumulate long-term social capital, and mod ecosystems.

We still benefit from how it was in the past, and are buffeted by the same winds that carried the game in less crowded and more optimistic times. If we were new on the circuit today, it would perhaps be a very different story.”

On the other hand, maybe there are room for more games in this subgenre now! It’s very Zomboid-y, but HumanitZ has been doing decently recently - we have it at $10m gross. But it’s true - building up community when it was quieter really paid off…

How do you deal with a harsh learning curve in PZ?

If you look at GDCO Pro’s review sentiment overview for Project Zomboid - based on the most helpful Steam reviews in the last year - you can see it’s very positive overall, but you can see the phrase ‘learning curve’ loom even in the positive reviews. (And we don’t think it’s twinned with the phrase ‘easy’…)

And look, the game got so complex that it’s spawned Dwarf Fortress levels of absurdity in its patch notes, for example this latest one, which includes gems like:

• Fixed towels not getting wet in the rain

• Fixed players with wounded feet being able to accelerate when pressing Shift before WASD

• Fixed animal weight changing after being placed on a butchering hook and removed.

Wow! Re: patches/updates, there’s a separate convo about the (likely non-optimum) length of time that the major Build 42 update has been in an ‘unstable’ Beta branch - 18 months and counting. (Though the patches for it are big and frequent, and we’re guessing the Build 42 launch isn’t too far away - then we’ll see a giant sales spike.)

We talked to Will about that in our full Q&A, which we’re linking to on Google Drive in case you’re curious. (Spoiler: the devs are speeding to Build 42 release while focusing on “how best to keep the community fed and watered post-42, while also catering for more blockbuster versions with hopefully lessened wait times.”)

But for the newsletter, we wanted to drill down on learning curve. And we 100% dug Will’s response to whether this was a problem:

“Project Zomboid is a brick wall, but people love the feeling of colliding with it. The time at which you are repeatedly dying and (very slowly) gaining a feeling of mastery over the game is often hailed by people in the community as their ‘golden period’ with PZ that they’d love to be able to experience again.

As such, while our tutorial could certainly do with some attention in future, the learning curve isn’t something we’re too concerned about - beyond what we’ve done in Build 42 by making our in-game Survivor’s Guide more easily digestible and more explanatory.”

In other words, if you’re crystal clear about the game’s rule sets, and the game is ‘harsh but fair’, maybe there’s less of a difficulty issue than many might think. Sure, the game has permadeath, but you can start again any time you like…

Finally, we did ask Will about Project Zomboid’s ‘structures of play’, and he echoed some previous comments about why this game is so popular and evergreen. It’s because PZ is not precious about default rulesets, and provides a complexly modeled canvas for you to project your play styles onto. As he told us, to end:

“Everything about PZ makes it readily personalised to the zombie survival adventure that you want to go on. You can go action, or you can go prepper-stealth. You can play it in a forgiving landscape or in something akin to our nighmarish Extinction mode. You can use it as a base-decorating kit, or you can be a looting nomad. You can use it as a dosshouse with your mates or you can do some ultra-serious roleplay with highly detailed characters and interactions.”

[We’re GameDiscoverCo, an analysis firm based around one simple issue: how do players find, buy and enjoy your PC or console game? We run the newsletter you’re reading, and provide real-time data services for publishers, funds, and other smart game industry folks.]

Back again before the weekend, and hitting just before Summer Game Fest blows the doors off the June video game bloom in Los Angeles, it’s the GameDiscoverCo newsletter, your old friend, your old buddy, your very close amigo in game discovery…

First, some breaking news: as part of Steam’s home page redesign (see below), they’ve changed the algorithm in their oft-referenced ‘top wishlists’ page. It no longer ranks by total lifetime wishlists for unreleased games (w/a tweak!), but instead looks at ‘recent wishlist velocity’ for all games, much like the charts we run every Tuesday. [EDIT: 3 hours after we sent out this newsletter, it got changed back again.. fun times!]

Before we start, let’s get really old school with charts: this VGHF-scanned list of top arcade games in Nov. 1983, according to U.S. arcade operators, is topped by Dragon’s Lair (mm, laserdiscs), followed by Star Wars, Pole Position, and Sega’s relatively rare Star Trek arcade game (a vector-based joint, actually lists Paramount on title screen!)

[THE DEEPEST PC/CONSOLE DATA? You can get a free demo of our GameDiscoverCo Pro company-wide ‘Steam deep dive’ & console data by reaching out today - >100 orgs have it. Or, signing up to GDCo Plus gets the rest of this newsletter and Discord access, plus more.]

Game discovery news: 007 Calls the Witcher back

Finishing up the week before we retire poolside to the Hotel Figueroa c. 2008 to E3 people-watch* (*in our imaginary ‘max nostalgia’ brain), here’s what we got:

• Checking our buddies at ICO’s Footprints.gg ‘trad media’ coverage (above), IO’s 007 game is still getting hype, but so is CoD: Modern Warfare 4 (pre-orders and Oct. 23 release date), The Witcher 3 (a surprising & major new DLC), and Mina The Hollower (the Yacht Club retro pixel joint that’s selling well for that niche.)

• Steam’s officially expanding its Verified program to Steam Machine and Steam Frame - “both of which are shipping this summer”, Valve’s keen to note. (Some rumors have late June as an embargo date for Steam Machine coverage.) Good news for Deck-positive devs: “The requirements for Steam Machine Verified are nearly identical to Steam Deck Verified.”

• PlayStation’s State Of Play had a bunch of interesting content, headed by first-party titles God Of War Laufey, horror sequel Until Dawn 2 & Insomniac’s super-gory Wolverine. Also: “Runescape: Dragonwilds is coming to PS5… as a day one Game Catalog title.” (Chatter says SoP was a B++, tho ‘live service’ waylaid first-party.)

• We dig Victoria Tran’s newsletter about the difference between community & marketing, with Landfall’s Josie Fletcher noting: “Managing a community requires patience, calm, consistency, and a strong knowledge of your game. Marketing is fast-paced and needs a little more boldness.”

• Some interesting comments from Asha Sharma at a Bloomberg event re: Xbox exclusivity: “It’s a tough topic…. we’re the number two publisher in the world and in order to be a great publisher, you must have your games reach large audiences to play. At the same time, we’re increasingly becoming a platform, and in order to become a platform, you must have exclusive content and services.” (Here’s the full video,)

• Platform microlinks: Roblox is loading up on AI talent to apply to its platform, including “the acquisition of Morpheus AI's team and technology”; here’s the latest on what’s working for YouTube Playables; PC game platform GOG has added Turkish lira and regional pricing for Turkey.

• That Bloomberg report on Steam also had Gabe Newell’s antitrust lawsuit deposition mined for quotes, with him saying "customers have enormous choice" about where they buy games, and “many of our partners and many of our customers are quite happy with the service that we're providing.” (We hear all these quotes in a ‘Hello, I’m Gabe Newell - you’ve just achieved First Blood’ tone of voice.)

• Path Of Exile co-creator Chris Wilson has some interesting views on player feedback in a YouTube video titled ‘Don’t Survey Your Players’: “You should solicit feedback about specific topics.. but there's a big difference between listening to feedback and asking players to help you decide what your vision for the game should be.”

• The ESA’s yearly ‘Essential Facts About the U.S. Game Industry’ report concludes that 67% of Americans (ages 5-90) play video games “one or more hours per week”, and: “58%… of players downloaded a game for free in the past 12 months, while 43% purchased a game, 35% purchased a game subscription and 19% borrowed a game.”

• Console things: in the UK, per NielsenIQ, post-price increase “PS5 sales fell 50% in May. It only outsold [the Forza Horizon 6-launching] Xbox Series S/X… by 400 units… Switch 2 was easily No.1.” Also: Stephen Totilo mapped PlayStation first-party game sales, down from 58.4m (FY20) to 32.1m (FY25).

• Microlinks, Pt. 2: next on Xbox Game Pass is Starseeker: Astroneer Expeditions, Beastro, Undisputed & more; Nintendo confirms it will sell a new Switch 2 with replaceable battery in the EU; new data from Niko/DoF on the Asia/MENA market has “China, Japan, and Korea holding 88.6% of regional revenue in 2030.”

May 2026’s top PC & console games are… what?

Once again, it’s GameDiscoverCo’s top new Steam (& console) games of the month, powered by our Pro data - here’s April, March, Feb and Jan’s, if you missed ‘em in 2026 so far. Here’s the top-line from last month for new Steam games (above):

• Subnautica 2 blasted it to the top, despite only having half the month: after the court cases and drama over Unknown Worlds’ underwater survival game sequel, launching to 462k CCU and 4.4m sales answered its critics! (It is fairly early for Early Access, tho it’s down to 30k CCU already - plenty of updates to come?)

• Forza Horizon 6 had spectacular sales - and great retention, too: as of today, we see Xbox’s open-world driving game at >13 million players, including almost 3 million and $170m gross on Steam. And it’s got great retention (165k CCU on Steam today, median of 23 hours played) & continued sales.

• Gamble With Your Friends & Paralives were the indie hits of May: the co-op ‘casino crawler’ with a unique hook blasted it to 2m copies sold at $8, and the long in gestation The Sims-like has really nailed its landing, cresting 500k copies in a subgenre it’s really tricky to enter & maintain momentum in. (Thx, The Sims 4.)

Oh, and a bonus shout-out to Everything Is Crab, which goofed its way to 500k+ sales with a clever ‘Spore x modern roguelite’ hook where “you start off as a blob each run and evolve into many weird and wonderful creatures.”

Turning to the top new Steam releases by revenue, Forza Horizon 6 & Subnautica 2 made it over $100m gross in the month (and more by now!), according to GDCo Pro estimates. But the next ranks are taken up by well-performing multi-platform AAAs.

We see IO’s acclaimed Bond game 007 First Light at >2m units and >$110m across all three platforms LTD (PC, Xbox, PlayStation), with ~$40m on Steam by the end of May. (Our current unit estimates: >950k on Steam, >250k on Xbox and >900k on PlayStation, and still scaling nicely, since it launched on the 26th…)

In addition, LEGO Batman: Legacy Of The Dark Knight is also multi-platform popular (which most games are not!) having grossed at least $80m so far multi-platform LTD, inc. >$20m of that on Steam from 350k units. (It also sold 300k units on Xbox & 600k+ on PlayStation, and we have it approaching 1.5m units inc. Steam keys.)

Turning to the top performers of May 2026 on Steam across all titles, you’ll see a lot of the same games in there, since there were some big new hits. But we did see the OG Subnautica sell >1m new units, due to its bundling with Subnautica 2 and a 75% off sale. It hit an all-time Steam high of 51,000 CCU in the sequel’s launch window.

Also notable: robot co-op shooter Far Far West keeps selling after its April 28th release, and we have it at 1.3m copies (inc. keys), mainly sold in May. Heroes Of Might & Magic: Olden Era also crested 1m copies LTD after a late April release, and sleeper tidying hit Librarian: Tidy Up the Arcane Library! has now sold >750k total.

Just breezing through the top-grossing games of May 2026 on Steam, we actually have Forza Horizon 6 (inc. pre-order revenue!) making more $ than Counter-Strike 2 .(Tho it’s hella difficult to estimate CS2, since it’s in the #1 spot so much.)

Otherwise, it’s the top new games of the month with a lot of the usual suspects, like F2P games Apex Legends and PUBG. Plus we see Diablo IV, which sneaks into the Top 10 with >$25m thanks to the new $40-$80 Lord Of Hatred DLC, which is getting good reviews among battle-weary, normally cynical Diablo fans.

As for console, we already dealt with the big two non-GP PlayStation and Xbox releases (007 and Lego Batman) above. And horror title Directive 8020 underwhelmed a tad - we see it at <200k copies sold multi-platform, tho it still made these charts.

The big news on Xbox Game Pass in May (not pictured) was Forza Horizon 6, which topped 10m players overall - >2m of these were paid, we guesstimate. Also very big on Game Pass across Xbox/PC: Subnautica 2 (2.7m players). (Outbound & Mixtape also had interest.)

When it comes to PlayStation Plus’ Essentials for May, EA Sports FC 26 grabbed another 4.5m players to spend $ in other modes (lol), ARPG Wuchang: Fallen Feathers added 1m players, and even Metroidvania Nine Sols managed to add over 650k players.

Finally, on Switch eShop for debuts, first-party title Yoshi and the Mysterious Book sold >150k eShop copies (and lots more physical!); and Metroidvania Mina the Hollower is a late-in-month hit, with >130k by EOM & scaling (and >350k multi-platform). Also notable: Mixtape at >50k copies, and Outbound, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, and Poppy Playtime’s Chapter 5 all in the low tens of thousands.

Steam’s updated homepage: it’s good, we believe

Steam's new homepage - which has been in Beta since April - just rolled out worldwide across web, client and mobile - here’s the official announce. And we thought the change big enough to devote some paragraphs to the main takeaways:

• It all looks a lot nicer, especially on mobile: the folks at Valve have done a lot of clean-up, with bigger icons, better mouseovers, and a slicker look overall. (If you’re a dev, remember to provide them with updated assets.)

• New features to pay attention to - wishlist/DLC highlights & the calendar: a dedicated section for games on your wishlist or DLC for games you own is handy. And the calendar section is great, both the homepage excerpt & clicking through, which shows games you wishlisted or could want, sorted by the last/next 30 days.

• 'Popular upcoming' is skewing more... popular: the days of small games moving swiftly through the 'Popular upcoming' section are gone. Valve says it’s "been updated in response to player feedback… to better capture the most anticipated releases of the coming month" - and directs players to the calendar for granular views.

There’s been some dev concerns that they’ll be missing immediate pre-release Steam wishlists from Popular Upcoming’s change. But we don’t think those converted remotely well anyhow (and wonder if they were bot-heavy?) But it’s fair to question.

And yes, looks like Popular Upcoming is, roughly speaking, ranking by wishlist velocity for games coming out in the next month or so - tho we do get a game or two after 30 days, so it may be elastic. We’re seeing some niche titles on our Personal Calendar with better featuring, like Slaughter Void, so that’s what devs get instead…

Overall, we think this is a good change on Steam's part. It’s a slicker interface & even more personalization, which Steam already does well, and a truly iterative process. (Example: folks on our Discord spotted they got a lot of NSFW games recommended at one point in the Beta, and that’s been tweaked to ‘appropriate smut’ levels.)

This week on Steam: Gothic’s remake arrives large

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G’day, folks, and we’re back. Today’s lead story is on a bigger topic, but one that seems relevant: how long did that hit game take to make, who was behind it, and are they a professional game developer? (The answer is: they are, because they made a hit game!)

Before we start, yes, this is the week of Summer Showcase Season (aka Summer Game Fest, aka ‘not-E3’.) Thus: Steam has a special sale page up, and here’s another list of many of the streaming showcases. (We’ll be measuring the biggest SGF-y reveals later next week, via a newsletter…)

[THE DEEPEST PC/CONSOLE DATA? You can get a free demo of our GameDiscoverCo Pro company-wide ‘Steam deep dive’ & console data by reaching out today - >90 orgs have it. Or, signing up to GDCo Plus gets the rest of this newsletter and Discord access, plus more.]

GDCo news: mecha mecha Meccha Chameleon…

OK, let’s get going here, we’ve got lots of game platform & discovery news to get through:

• Our latest GDCo Pro 'trending' unreleased Steam games, May 25th to June 1st, sees 'hide and seek where you can paint yourself' title Meccha Chameleon (#1) piling on the wishlists again, as is sim sequel Planet Zoo 2 (#2) and 'survival sim with a smartphone' Online: 404 (#3).

• Alongside bigger, returning games like Hell Let Loose: Vietnam (#5) & Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced (#6), there’s pixel art 'laid-back wilderness escape' Wild n Chill (#4), clever first-person puzzle game Object Impermanence (#9), incremental game Fortune Mill (#13) and ambitious solo dev spaceship builder Starpath (#14).

• ICYMI: Nvidia announced the RTX Spark, Arm-based ‘complete computing chips’ which run Windows PCs and, per The Verge, let you “play the graphically intensive Indiana Jones and the Great Circle at a smooth 100fps at 1440p resolution.” Games are part of the pitch, with anti-cheat coming to Windows on Arm too. (Cost? The first machines, later this year, are “targeting the more premium price points.”)

• New site tip: Overworld.vg is a handy news aggregator for games that acts similarly to Techmeme (in the tech space) and Mediagazer (in the media space), by semi-programmatically rolling up multiple outlets talking about the same news.

• >$ game consoles? According to Circana’s U.S. retail tracking service: “During the week ending May 16th, 2026, the average selling price (ASP) paid for a new PS5 in the US was $671, as compared to $521 the same week last year (+29%). Xbox Series ASP reached $527 this year versus $433 last year (+22%). Switch 2's ASP was $451.”

• Hardcore Xbox fans want to go back in time, and Matt Booty confirming that Xbox Showcase game slates would include multi-platform availability info led to minor social media rioting and Xbox CEO Asha Sharma saying: “It was a miss, and I own it.” But was it? (There’s a lot of stakeholders to satisfy on the Interwebs…)

• It’s good that Steam doesn’t allow on-platform search ads! Why? Just check out the result of a recent second ‘sponsored result’ on the iOS App Store: “The ads themselves still work well. The problem is that many of these paid downloads seem to be users I previously would have acquired organically.”

• Slay The Spire 2’s multiple ‘review bombs’ in China got better explained by this Kotaku piece, transcribing a top Chinese player roundtable: “Top-level players and streamers from other countries don’t use save loading - or, as they would refer to it, save scumming. This… explains exactly why players in China did not like the Doormaker fight.”

• Bloomberg has a high-level overview of Steam as a ‘monopolist’, notable for off-the-record comments from a former employee of “brief discussions about exempting [platform cut from] games with less than $1 million of cumulative sales” that were rejected. (We’re still pitching a <30% cut on the lower end, though…)

• No, console devs, bad: PlayStation is removing another prolific ‘easy Platinum’ shovelware dev, and seems more attuned to keyword-squatting games. But not Nintendo, which proudly offered up Dead Gears - Space Of War in the eShop last week. (Limiting Switch 2 devkits doesn’t stop Switch 1 game misbehavior…)

• Microlinks: Discord has started social SDK integrations with Roblox games such as Steal a Brainrot & Brookhaven RP; HowToMarketAGame has a new Steam wishlist annotator tool (explainer) for pretty screenshots; Summer Game Fest is featuring Player.gg as a multi-platform discovery platform.

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Why ‘hobbyists’ are a bigger disruptor than AI…

Perhaps you are not paying attention to the world of train simulators, unless you’re a secret Francis Bourgeois fan. But the launch of Running Train ($20), a weirdly named (we knowww!) Japanese train sim on Steam, gives us a chance to talk about our thesis: it’s hobbyist/semi-pro game creators that are the main PC market disruptor, not AI…

Not that we think AI is inconsequential: for one, it equips programmers with tools to create games way faster thanks to tools like Claude Code. (And even allows non-programmers to make games more easily.) But our general point here - it’s not about ‘AI making games’, for us, it’s about skilled individuals making games in their niche.

And what’s fascinating about Running Train, which is powered by Unreal Engine 5 and looks gorgeous, is that it was created by a solo Indonesian developer, Rizky Nova, who’s clearly not got any funding - a recent Tweet notes he only has 16GB ram on his machine, and his “first [Steam] paycheck definitely goes straight to PC upgrade.”

We’re estimating this game at 34,000 copies sold and $550k gross already, and that’s after just 10 days in Steam Early Access. The $ may be a bit front-loaded due to the fanbase, but its gorgeous Japanese visuals may be attracting non-train sim fans too.

This type of success just wouldn’t have been possible 10-20 years ago. And here’s what we think changed:

• Availability of comprehensive, inexpensive engine tech: most top game teams are using Unreal or Unity to make games. Running Train is using the same tech too, and Unreal’s free to use, with a 5% royalty at >$1m. (Level playing field!)

• Asset stores allow massive amounts of pre-created assets: browsing on Fab.com, you’ll see modular Japanese town houses & a host of UE-compatible assets, cheap. ($30!) We’re sure this game’s got many custom assets, but there’s so much to use.

• Ability to market to niches: the game had 28,000 wishlists at its Steam launch. Its Twitter account has been live since 2017 tho, and a Patreon with access to the Alpha gave players access since 2023. (Again: anyone can market like this.)

• Immediate, global reach via distribution platforms: there’s no inherent advantage to being a large company launching a game on Steam vs. a tiny solo dev, by and large. If you get momentum, you’ll get extra algo recommendation.

Maybe this is all incredibly self-evident. But sometimes I feel like people who’ve been professionally in the game industry don’t see - or acknowledge - the increasing dissolving of lines. We had a Q in the GDCo Pro/Plus Discord recently about working out success rate of ‘serious teams’, discounting for hobbyists or ‘shovelware’.

My comment was that it’s not possible, because “the entire point is that hobbyist games and non-hobbyist games have merged in ways it's not possible to disentangle.” I have the same point when considering Hushcrasher’s innovative work on game budgeting, which I think has a lot of good indicators in it, but runs into these issues too…

So yes: this is a very specific niche. Though the behemoth in this space, the Train Sim World franchise, which has infinite DLC & also stuttering issues, is being knocked by the fact this game is running so smoothly, apparently by being conservative on UE5 features to work with low-end hardware and optimizing for a v.limited set of tracks.

But the point is: these type of ‘hobbyist/semi-pro makes a breakout title’ is happening quietly everywhere, in almost all genres. A great example we often cite is Dinkum ($23m LTD Steam gross revenue), which a Steam reviewer describes as: “like Animal Crossing and Stardew Valley had a baby and sent it to live in Australia.”

If you look at interviews with its creator James Bendon, who has since signed a deal with Krafton to expand the IP, he notes: “I was a hobbyist… my wife supported me for 5 years, while I pursued this pipe dream.” And the game looks and plays very competitively.

Then there’s huge solo breakouts like Balatro or Schedule I, which are by no means reproducable, but show the sheer amount of competitive material entering the funnel to be sorted and recommended by our clients - people who actually play video games.

So, while I see AI as potentially speeding ‘route to market’ for devs, here’s our general takeaways from the success of games like Running Train, which is much more about the rise of ‘everybody making games’ and how you compete vs. hobbyists:

• In the genre you’re building in, do you have expertise advantage? Deep knowledge of genres are a key differentiator (esp. in strategy & sim games!)

• How easily could the game you’re making be created by a solo dev? If it’s very straightforward, there will be a LOT of hobbyists, semi-pros & pros doing it.

• Do you have a scale differentiator, if you’re making a game at scale? If you’re putting out Blood Of Dawnwalker, the $ is visible onscreen, and people respond. But if you’re spending and people can’t tell vs. hobbyists: it’s a big issue.

In many ways, Running Train is an outlier. We wouldn’t have expected somebody to have optimized this good-looking a (non-collidable!) environment for low specs on Unreal Engine 5, and also roll out a good quality train simulator, 100% solo.

But in a world that’s increasingly outlier-driven, and anyone can publish on Steam if they pay $100, we keep saying ‘we didn’t expect this!’ And with the barrier to entry this low, it’s going to keep happening. So we all need to sharpen up, build our own communities, and get laser focused: otherwise we’re building our games for nobody.

[And literally as we were finishing up this newsletter, the rock steady compilation I was playing decided to cue up Train To Ska-Thedral. Tooot - that’s enough trains for today.]

Top streamed, May: LoL, Subnautica 2 do good…

Ending up, here’s the newest data via livestream analytics platform Stream Hatchet, bringing the Top 100 most-streamed games for May 2026 across the big (non-China) game video streaming platforms like Twitch & other medium/small platforms.

And here’s the full list of May’s Top 100 (Google Drive link) with GDCo notes. Once more, Stream Hatchet’s Mark Rowland joins us on commentary to check trends:

• League of Legends moved into the #1 spot with a big jump of 27.9%: 16 out of the Top 20 games had more viewers, but LoL in particular hit 185 million hours watched. This includes LCK Cup 2026 coverage among Korean streamers which has seen Chzzk rivaling Twitch’s daily viewership for the game.

• Apex Legends peeked into the Top 10 for the first time in over 2 years: it hit a 26% lift to 34m hours watched. Why? Well... it’s giant (and controversial) streamer TheBurntPeanut again. Last month he put Rust into the Top 10, and this month it’s Apex.

• For new games, Subnautica 2 and Forza Horizon 6 both made the Top 20: you’ll see them in Friday’s GDCo charts for May. So it’s not surprising these two hit #17 and #18 respectively, both with between 22 and 23 million hours watched.

Also notable? A surprise appearance here by Path of Exile 2 which hit #19, with 19 million hours watched. The reason, 18 months after a really great launch: a huge update called Return of the Ancients, also paired with a F2P weekend and a Twitch Drops event.

There’s plenty of other new titles in the Top 100, too, including late-in-month release 007: First Light (#26), as well as Gamble With Your Friends (#57), the new LEGO Batman game (#60), plus creepy horror title Directive 8020 (#69). Toodles…

[We’re GameDiscoverCo, an analysis firm based around one simple issue: how do players find, buy and enjoy your PC or console game? We run the newsletter you’re reading, and provide real-time data services for publishers, funds, and other smart game industry folks.]

As we meander towards the weekend, time to uncork some more insights for you wondrous GameDiscoverCo readers - with the main story poking at the state of the Meta Quest VR game market in 2026. (Which isn’t dead, but is certainly radically changed from its direction of travel 2-3 years ago….)

Before we start, there’s been a recent Tamagotchi tragedy, and yes, they’re still making those standalone electronic virtual pets: “Bandai Namco… reported that its latest Tamagotchi Paradise device was found to contain a glitch that makes the game behave unusually when pets in certain age ranges above 256 die.” (No ‘peaceful death’ for ancients…)

[FREE DEMO OF GDCo PRO? You too can get a gratis demo of our GameDiscoverCo Pro company-wide ‘Steam deep dive’ & console data by contacting us today - >95 orgs have it. Or, signing up to GDCo Plus gets the rest of this newsletter and Discord access, plus more.]

Game discovery news: 007, Forza top the hype…

Let’s have a careful look at the latest game platform & discovery news, which goes a bit like this:

• The latest ‘trad media’ coverage from ICO’s Footprints.gg is topped by Bond game 007: First Light, whose release is going down nicely. Also notable: Forza Horizon 6 (previously a smash, still a smash), Grand Theft Auto VI (on the charts til the break of dawn), and Destiny 2 (sadly stopping live-service content updates.)

• Since the last newsletter, Valve re-stocked the Steam Deck OLED worldwide, at $789 for the 512GB version (up from $549) and $949 for the 1TB version (up from $649), due to component shortages/costs. And even at those prices, it briefly sold out in North America. (It’s back in stock again as of us writing this, though.)

• In ‘which platforms is a major franchise picking this year?’ news, the next Call Of Duty title, Modern Warfare 2, “will be the first entry in the modern series to skip the PS4 and Xbox One”, while also launching on Switch 2 for the first time. (With this and GTA VI, will this be a big upgrade year for consoles, price/supply notwithstanding?)

• The Verge’s Notepad newsletter reports on an internal email from Xbox CEO Asha Sharma re: the Xbox Game Pass price cut: “Growth slowed down and subscriber loss accelerated after the pricing and SKU changes last year… Since our price reduction we have seen acquisitions grow and retention improve, which is a good first step.”

• A cute little UK physical game sales tidbit from The Game Business’ Chris Dring: “In a very rare sight, a new Xbox exclusive (Forza Horizon 6) outside a new Nintendo exclusive (Yoshi) in the physical UK last week. Emphasis on the physical. Don’t see they very often. LEGO Batman was No.1.”

• Discord just launched a ‘trending games’ page on their website, looking at the Top 10 games with the most new players (presumably via ‘rich presence’ data) and streams, with links to Discord servers. As they note: “Over 10,000 unique titles get played on Discord each month, and 55% of users try a new game in that window.”

• We found this LinkedIn rant from Tolga Coşkun interesting: “As much as it makes… business sense, Friendslop is one of the worst things that happened to Steam, especially for small studios. It lowered the bar for indie pricing… [and] it obliterated the technical barrier for entry [&] the virality is absurd.”

• Could paid ads for PC/console games within ChatGPT be a relevant new market? It’s certainly wacky, but with folks like Adzap getting access to the OpenAI Ads Beta (and other ad firms too, we’re sure), we’ll shortly see how programmatic ads perform within AI agents. (Tell us how it goes, if you try…)

• Good intel from Max Power Gaming after UGCon re: Minecraft & UGC: “The platform has roughly 400 approved creators… but entry into the program is essentially referral-only now… creators operate largely without support or meaningful feedback from Microsoft, and veteran devs have learned to be self-sufficient out of necessity.”

• Microsoft agreed to pay $250 million to settle, as Stephen Totilo puts it, an “increasingly ugly Activision Blizzard shareholder lawsuit”, which included some slightly bananas counter-allegations from Bobby Kotick, inc. that: “AP7 had brought the lawsuit to benefit the Swedish gaming company The Embracer Group.”

• Esoteric indie link: want to understand indie music band touring economics? Cult UK band Los Campesinos financially deconstructed their entire 2024 U.S. tour. (Spoiler: they lost $2,500 on tour costs vs. tickets, despite selling out almost all shows, but made $54k on merch. So… buy the T-shirt?)

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The state of Quest VR game discovery in 2026…

As you know, GameDiscoverCo normally covers PC & console game discovery. But we want to keep looking in areas others don’t. And we’re vexed at the lack of coverage of the VR game market, besides specialist outlets like RoadToVR or UploadVR.

We’re using some basic YTD 2026 metrics - like number of Meta Quest store reviews, and public store rankings on highest revenue and most hours played for games. First, let’s look at the F2P games with the most extra ratings in 2026 so far:

Some of these free titles are ones that have a lot of downloads, but haven’t managed to monetize super efficiently. But the vibes are clear. Meta’s Chris Pruett divided the Quest audience into three segments in his GDC 2026 talk:

• core VR enthusiasts

• teens and young adults drawn to social gameplay loops

• ‘casual adult’ users who gravitate toward entertainment and “prefer more natural input like hand tracking.”

And there’s a lot of Segment #2 in this chart, as the offspring of Gorilla Tag (the original ‘casual x friendslop x yell at your friends’ free Quest game) continue to spread. ~Half of these titles - even dino game UG - have you sometimes playing as a monkey…

There’s some other themes, though - Wizherd has you casting crazy spells and dungeon crawling together, Shark Go is an underwater riding/combat game, and VRFS is a soccer simulator. (Oh, and Vail is the rare F2P shooter, but looks like it has lots of younger players.)

One other insight from Pruett that tracks with the above: “The top games on our platform proactively seek out their audience on Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok. Though the titles that have achieved success in the last year have been diverse, one common element between them has been user acquisition through social video platforms.”

Another note: it’s clear there’s rampant issues with social misbehavior on the top titles. If you look at the top reviews for UG and also for Zombonk, there’s multiple “people swore, bullied me and/or took my items” complaints. (We presume the voice chat, pre & early teen audience and cosmetics-led gameplay leads to generalized havoc.)

As for the top paid titles by new reviews, there’s a lot of first-person simulator titles, in particular from New Folder Games, who have expanded the ‘I Am…’ series to include cats, monkeys, and security, and also have a taxi driving game in the Top 10. (They’re the spiritual cousins to first-person job sims on PC, really…)

One interesting thing: a few of these titles, including I Am Cat ($20) and Nightclub Simulator VR ($7), have multiplayer as paid add-on DLC. Otherwise, there’s some evergreen titles in here like magic skull sandbox Waltz Of The Wizard, plus newer titles like hardcore PvP shooters Forefront and horror game The Hole Never Ends.

Turning to the top-grossing title on Quest, which we’ve worked out by looking at the top sales charts every week in 2026 and assigning points for rankings, it’s this:

Notable? Seven of the top 10 grossing games on Quest so far this year are F2P, and the others are serious ‘evergreens’. (That’s Meta-owned stalwart Beat Saber, plus combat ARPG Blade & Sorcery and sandbox title Bonelab, which have unpaid mods galore and just missed out on our ‘most new reviews’ Top 10 at #12 and #16 respectively.)

You can also see a smattering of subscription-based fitness titles (like FitXR and Gym Class), as well as the Virtual Desktop app, and some other broader game platforms like VRChat and Roblox. As for top games by hours played so far in 2026, we get this:

You can see lots of the ‘co-op world spaces’ crowding up the charts, even including some like Rec Room which are just about to close. There’s also casual titles (amazing to see Job Simulator still in there) and one (uno!) core FPS game: Ghosts Of Tabor…

Mini-profile: Scary Baboon’s road to the Top 10…

As you can see above, F2P title Scary Baboon made all of our Top 10 charts for 2026 so far. And actually, the folks at its creator ENVER reaching out to us made us decide to do this ‘state of VR’ newsletter.

And having chatted to them, here’s our takeaways on how they’ve scaled that title. (We believe it has high millions of LTD downloads, and estimate MAU close to 1 million players in recent weeks, after an update):

• It’s another gorilla-like, sure, but mashed up with other things: the team noted that “arm locomotion had become one of the defining mechanics of VR”, and also: “light horror also resonates strongly with that same audience. Putting these silly, chaotic characters into a horror setting created a contrast that worked” great.

• Monetization is led by, but not defined by cosmetics: the folks at ENVER noted: “Cosmetics are a major part of the model because players care about identity, expression, and how they appear to friends in-game”, but concluded: “Broadly speaking, the model sits across cosmetics, functional items, and upgrade systems.”

• Social video, creators and Discord are ‘paramount’ to Scary Baboon: the team noted: “Scary Baboon naturally creates short-form clips: jump scares, chases, and players screaming and laughing together.” The company’s CEO Kyle Joyce is a YouTuber himself, and “creators like Erik1515 (almost 300K subscribers) and Parku (almost 200K)” are also vital. And the game’s Discord is now over over 200,000 members.

Part of the recent success of Scary Baboon, as noted by a new AndroidCentral article, is both recent popular update patches, and “the shift from ‘frustrating PvP’ to a friendlier co-op PvE experience.” So yet again, co-op rule, and PvP drools. (Are we seeing a pattern here?)

Steam this week: 007’s new Romestead Paralives…

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We’re back, and time to look into a question that isn’t really discussed that much, partly because of lack of data: how old are people buying specific games on Steam, and does that make a difference to how we target them?

Before we start, here’s a super-original game merch idea: climbing game hit Cairn has a personalized ‘your ascent’ physical T-shirt, which “can only be ordered from within the game”, and shows your actual in-game route up the mountain on it. Clever, huh?

[THE DEEPEST PC/CONSOLE DATA? You can get a free demo of our GameDiscoverCo Pro company-wide ‘Steam deep dive’ & console data by reaching out today - >90 orgs have it. Or, signing up to GDCo Plus gets the rest of this newsletter and Discord access, plus more.]

Game discovery news: Warhammer skulls it up…

Let’s kick off the week with a few notable game platform & discovery links, as follows:

• Here's GameDiscoverCo Pro's 'trending' unreleased Steam games, May 18th to 25th, as the Warhammer Skulls streaming showcase hyped 3 Warhammer titles: the new Chaos Gate turn-based tactics sequel (#1), pre-orders for RTS Dawn Of War IV (#2), and stealthy 2D platformer Age Of Sigmar: Deathmaster (#4).

• This week's releases also hit big, with Bond-like 007: First Light (#2) due shortly and The Sims-like Paralives (#5) already out & hitting good CCU numbers. New? Mobile-to-PC F2P gacha Neverness To Everness (#8), military RTS Battlespace Command (#14) and Alice In Wonderland-themed Souls-like Project Rabbit (#15).

• Take Two has some next-gen console totals in its financials, and it’s very unclear if Switch 2 is included or not (and there’s a weird decrease from last financials), but John Welfare guesses: “My take on 127M, IDG reports sell through and PS5 shipments were 92.1M 2025. Maybe they have ~90M PS5 and XBS would be ~37M.”

• Folks in the GDCo Plus/Pro Discord spotted that Steam has added the ‘personal calendar’ feature to the homepage of the Steam client Beta. ICYMI, it’s this feature: upcoming games, inc. those you wishlisted, but also those wishlisted by “people with similar playtime profiles to you.” More good discovery!

• Nick Heer wrote a good essay on ‘the metaverse fever dream’, explaining how far M. Zuckerberg (and M. Ball, atcheloi?) advanced the (non-achieved) concept of a singular shared digital reality, noting: “Many people - perhaps everyone, come to think of it - could predict the future if they got to retcon their predictions to fit reality.”

• Engine news: the Unity Asset Store (and Fab.com’s Unreal marketplace) are vital force multipliers for those game engines’ success, it follows that Godot is introducing an official asset store. (Though it only permits add-ons to be listed for free for now.) Oh, Unreal Engine 6 got revealed as the next Rocket League engine.

• A good view on Steam wishlist totals from randomly sampled Steam users via Ichiro Lambe (WeLoveIt): 36.2% have 1-10 games wishlisted, 45.5% have 11-100, 17% have 101-1,000, 1.3% have 1,001 to 10,000, and 0.1% (!) have more than 10,000. (Not sure if this tallies exactly with our samples, but it 100% makes sense…)

• According to a new Bloomberg report: “Nintendo Co. has asked partners and suppliers to assemble about 20 million Switch 2 consoles in the year through March, roughly 20% more than the public sales outlook it issued earlier this month.” (Doesn’t mean it’ll sell that many, but always underpromise and overdeliver?)

• Correction: we didn’t include the correct link to the Inside Games piece on best practices at physical game showcases in the last newsletter. (BONUS: don’t forget that Game Conference Guide has a giant list of game industry events, though it tends towards B2B rather than B2C.)

• Microlinks: PlayStation Plus’ ‘monthly’ games for June are Xbox’s Grounded, plus Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl 2, & Warhammer 40,000: Darktide; Apple long-lists Inkle, Devolver, FuturLab, more in its annual design awards; Xbox “celebrates Global Accessibility Awareness Day with improved adaptive thumbstick toppers and more.”

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Player age, and game discovery ramifications…

We announced our GDCo Pro Steam Fan Snapshot data early last month - reminder, it’s “a large, increasing survey of core Steam game fans, incenting players via giveaways & other methods”, with 10,000 players currently part of the sample. But we didn’t get much chance to go deeper into the data.

So we thought we’d look much deeper into one particular data point - average player age. Why? Because it’s a stat that really hasn’t been available for analysis, and we think it has some really interesting ramifications for how we all market games.

You can see our data above, sorted only for games with more than 100 player samples for games that released after Jan 1st. 2020 and have sold >25,000 Steam copies. Some key things to note:

• Each data point in the above graph represents one game’s average player age: so when we list 0.2% of the games averaging 24, that includes a title like Five Nights At Freddy’s: Security Breach which has players both older and younger.

• The median player age of our ‘Steam Fan Snapshot sample’ above is 33: we’re not claiming that’s the median age of all Steam players, but that’s the median of those games’ averages. (We suspect that would be late 20s, inc. more casual players.)

• This year’s top-selling new games actually have decent-sized deviations: here’s the averages, as of last week: Slay the Spire 2 (29.7 years), Subnautica 2 (28.3), Resident Evil Requiem (30.3), Crimson Desert (31.3), Mewgenics (27.3), Windrose (33.4), Gamble With Your Friends (26.7), YAPYAP (26.5), Super Battle Golf (28.2).

While you may be ‘oh, a difference of 7 years isn’t a big deal’, and it’s also true that particular games may appeal to all ages, an ideal situation (!) But it’s good to look at the outliers and see what it says about different PC player demographics. First, here’s select games on the very high end of the ‘average age’ spectrum:

Is there any threads uniting these titles? Not exactly, but some things we noticed about them:

• Many feel like ‘old school PC’-y games, with retro IP: franchises like Titan Quest and MechWarrior, the Heroes Of Might & Magic-inspired Songs Of Conquest.

• Genres are strategy-first but not exclusively: including FPS (Wild Bastards) & sim (Parkasaurus), but also extraction & platformer (Zero Sievert, Axiom Verge 2).

• Most of all, they’re singleplayer-first titles: none of the top 5 Steam tags for any of these games include online multiplayer or co-op.

Our view on this: there are genres and styles of game for people who have been playing PC games for 20-30 years. And most of these type of titles don’t appeal to younger players. (But they’ve all sold fairly well, so perhaps that’s just fine!)

On to the much younger-average games - again, this is a sample of 10 titles picked from the lower end of the spectrum:

• There sure is a lot of friendslop and co-op in here: some of these titles are newer, but you’re seeing big friendslop hits like R.E.P.O., RV There Yet? & Peak in here.

• There’s also big ‘much-discussed on YouTube’ energy: titles like Five Nights At Freddy’s and Undertale follow-up Deltarune have big native fan communities.

• More broadly, co-op games attract a younger demographic: younger digital natives hanging with their friends also play Far Far West & Sea Of Thieves.

In fact, Meta’s Chris Pruett talked at GDC 2026 about players graduating from social meme titles into “social, unpredictable, co-op” games with a bit more sophistication. I think we’re seeing evidence of that here - and that older players are less interested.

For anyone interested in combing into the ‘Top 5 tags’ evidence further, here’s a Google Drive document with the Steam tag breakdown per ‘average age’ - so you can look at how things change over time:

One example takeaway: games with an average age of 28 mention Multiplayer as a Top 5 tag 15 times, vs. only 3 times for Singleplayer. On the other hand, games with an average age of 36 mention Singleplayer 7 times and Multiplayer only 6.

And the 36-year old game cohort mentions Strategy a whopping 16 times, vs. once for the 28-year-olds. Similarly, horror or psychological horror? 13 times for the 28-year-old cohort vs. 4 times for the 36-year-olds.

There are also important ramifications for discovery methodologies - younger consumers rely way more on short-form video & word of mouth. We’ll delve deeper into this another time, but here’s all participants vs. R.E.P.O. vs ZERO Sievert on this:

So sure, some of this data is proving out ideas that you probably had already. But it’s important to understand the PC & console market as a series of overlapping filter bubbles & target and market appropriately. (It’s not just a monomarket out there!)

Using agents to analyze data - is it a good plan?

The idea for the above newsletter came from a prospective client discussion about how to target specific demographics. And what was interesting about it was that, for the second or third time recently, I suggested using GameDiscoverCo Pro’s MCP (Model Context Protocol) server to get some of the data. (Yes, this is an announce.)

So yep, much like today’s newsletter advertiser (hi, FirstLook!), we’ve been enabling agents like Claude to let our paid Pro users access our data via gated login, as an option. Why?

• GameDiscoverCo has data that’s not always displayed in ways you need: for example, we have a one-by-one ‘compare’ screen for Steam Fan Snapshot, but no way to compare tens or hundreds of games easily in our interface.

• Perhaps a natural language interface is easier for access: GDCo staffers know where our carefully made data submenus are for specific things. But the average user may not - why not ask an agent to grab & compile it for you? (We do have a GraphQL API for bulk requests, but much programming knowledge needed.)

• Agents can include Steam web data dynamically: perhaps you want to take Steam forum sentiment into account in a query: we currently grab the # of Steam forum posts but not their sentiment. That’s something an agent could do. (You can also ask the agent not to include insight from sites that didn’t agree to it.)

I (Simon) personally don’t use agents, and exist in a bit of a filter bubble where my friends (with one exception, hi Keith!) don’t either. But I tried a couple of relevant searches using the GameDiscoverCo MCP, and wanted to show the results:

• Asking about whether ‘friendslop’ games had below-average player age: Claude had to search and define friendslop titles, which is did 90% well (not sure about Among Us?), and ran into some kind of tech issue to initially display it. But the eventual result (above graph) using GDCo data was broadly factually correct.

• Doing analysis on the top (& underperforming) releases of April 2026: the color analysis was pretty reasonable. Asking about under/overperformers was largely OK but a) it used current wishlists, not launch b) it thought 0.28x was an underperform, based on sampling top games. (That’s really a >2x overperform across all games.) Finding non converting high-wishlist games worked decently.

So what do we think? We like the agentic approach when it allows GDCo’s clients to collate data via API that they just couldn’t do via our interface, and ask more sophisticated cross-data questions. (We know of some folks doing complex revenue projection algorithms that way, to good success.)

Concluding: rather than a SaaSpocalypse, if you have unique data, agents may be a good alternative to access. But beware errant editorializing and content-’borrowing’ in ways that erodes the business of traditional content curators, as SparkToro just published a column about. (PSA: Pro users, look on the homepage for MCP info.)

[We’re GameDiscoverCo, an analysis firm based around one simple issue: how do players find, buy and enjoy your PC or console game? We run the newsletter you’re reading, and provide real-time data services for publishers, funds, and other smart game industry folks.]

As the weekend looms, perhaps it’s time to stop concentrating on the most obvious mega-sellers on Steam? We’ll go back to last month’s new games for a look into what’s sneakily doing well, a few weeks after release. (That’s our lead story…)

Before we start, GDCo is sponsoring our local baseball superstars the Oakland Ballers for a second year (support yr local community!) And after the Itch game jam we did in 2025 starring their mascot Scrappy the Rally Possum, we’re doing another jam, ‘Scrappy Saves The Animals’, on June 24th-July 5th, with prizes/featuring. Jam with us…

[FREE DEMO OF GDCo PRO? You too can get a gratis demo of our GameDiscoverCo Pro company-wide ‘Steam deep dive’ & console data by contacting us today - >95 orgs have it. Or, signing up to GDCo Plus gets the rest of this newsletter and Discord access, plus more.]

Game discovery news: Forza, Subnautica 2 hit it…

OK, let’s wander through the remaining discovery & platform news for the week, which goes a bit like this:

• Looking at ‘trad media’ mentions this week from Footprints.gg, it’s headed by Forza Horizon 6 (already at 6 million players & heading up!) and the well-received Subnautica 2, with GTA 6 (no pre-orders yet tho), Fortnite (Overwatch collab), and 007: First Light (out next week) also getting interest.

• In a surprise move, infinite-scroll .PPT fan & investor/consultant Matthew Ball is joining Xbox as its chief strategy officer, as Asha Sharma continues to shake things up. Also: Xbox fans “want exclusives, more backward compatibility, and free online multiplayer”, according to a new Xbox Player Voice portal.

• Circana put out its U.S. hardware/game estimates for April 2026, with hardware spending “[up] by 34%… to $261M. Spending on Nintendo Switch 2 hardware offset declines seen across Switch (-69% versus April 2025), Xbox Series (-43%) and PlayStation 5 (-30%).” PS5 is 2% ahead of PS4 (time-aligned), and Switch 2 up 11% vs. Switch.

• Also notable on Circana’s data: ‘content spending’ inc. PC, console & mobile was up 2% to $3.8b. PC/console wise: Tomodachi Life was the best-seller at $41m, including physical and ‘projected digital spending’ (new for the company, more info here). with Pragmata at #2 and MLB: The Show at #3. (Americans love baseball!)

• In adding a bunch of new monetization methods (custom power-ups, creator badge drops), Twitch is showing that gamification helps its game streamers earn. Even now: “More than a third of all viewer spending on Twitch currently goes toward Hype Trains”, intended to create a frenzy of viewer support.

• PlayStation has increased PS+ subscription pricing by $1 to $11/month for the lowest Essential tier, needed for online gaming on PS4/PS5. Also: IGN points out that the announce phrasing (‘prices will start at’) semi-obscured $2 increases (to $17 and $20/month) for the higher-tier Extra and Premium tiers, too.

• Valve has moved to dismiss its gambling lawsuit over Counter-Strike skins in New York, noting: “People enjoy surprises… Part of the appeal of many popular collectibles [like] baseball cards…. is the possibility of opening a sealed package and being surprised with a rare item.” tl:dr: Valve: ‘what, we banning Pokémon cards now?’

• One of the final PC Epic Games Store exclusives has been partially unwound: “CI Games has successfully signed a termination agreement with Epic Games. The agreement releases the upcoming Lords of The Fallen 2 from its previous Epic Games Store exclusivity obligations.” (Why? CI had $ and Epic’s got Fortnite-scaling fish to fry.)

• Inside Games has a long piece on best practices for showing your indie game at events, from unique booth decor (“baguette plushies and mini Eiffel Towers” worked) through having scannable QR codes, to ‘observing, not coaching’ players. (We think physical events can be low ROI. But if you do ‘em, you’ve got to do ‘em right.)

• There’s a lot of official and unofficial Summer Game Fest-related streaming events, and Jordan Curtis has compiled all 46 (!) of them in a LinkedIn post, from State Of Play through Wholesome Direct to Xbox showcases to SGF itself. (And good news: trailer collator Gamesrecap.io has re-activated for SGF season, too.)

• Discovery cosmonaut Ichiro Lambe has a good visualization: “That Burning Man map that went around recently inspired me to try laying out neighborhoods of Steam games like a little city. Here, each cell on the grid holds one game; contiguous cells with the same tag form a neighborhood.” Noms on which Steam game is ‘The Man’ effigy?

• Microlinks: the latest Xbox Game Pass debuts include Forza Horizon 6 (see above), Escape Simulator, Jurassic World Evolution 3 & more; Friday: Bundler.games is a new site for indies to cross-promote via bundles, etc; Ken Levine (BioShock) says there’s “diminishing returns” with over-the-top graphics.

Finding the ‘secret new Steam winners’ of April…

So, it’s May 22nd, and we have a good idea of what new Steam titles are top-selling this month (duh, Subnautica 2 and Forza Horizon 6.) But, idea: let’s go back to April’s top new releases in the GameDiscoverCo Pro front-end, and sort by today’s top CCU.

Why would we do that? Most Steam games will be at <10% of their peak launch CCU (or less!) by now. But there are titles that launched a little more modestly and have maintained or increased interest over time. And lo and behold, we indeed found four ‘hidden semi-hits’ to talk about. Check out the chart:

We’ve talked about the majority of these titles in our weekly or end-of-month round-ups. But we see four that we’ve barely mentioned, all with $5-$15 pricing: Librarian: Tidy Up The Arcane Library! (400k units), Oaken Tower (92k units), Demon Lord: Just A Block (100k units), and Pratfall (210k units).

There’s obviously caveats: CCU isn’t always the best way to eval success. And even with impressive unit totals, the gross is often only $1-$2m so far, after regional pricing. (Tho they’re all small indie productions, and should eventually gross 3-5x that or more.) But, like: this is what’s hot! So let’s whistlestop analyze each of ‘em:

Librarian: Tidy Up The Arcane Library - it’s a tidying frenzy?

Well, we know about the ‘tidying’ subgenre of games - everything from A Little To The Left to Powerwash Simulator scratches that particular itch. But this title has a really good hook - you start with a trashed occult library & have to reshelf every book.

As this Steam player review explains, it’s not just a monumental task (tho it also is!): “It was a different feel from the other cleaner games [with] more thinking and more searching and pattern recognition… As you go along you get more and more [magical] tools… The level ups here will point to a shelf or allow you to fill it at a range, or make linked books glow.”

Why it’s doing well: it’s absolutely killing it in short-form video-land, and multiple reviews mention coming across it on Instagram. It being a familiar first-person simulator view & a good cozy/mystical blend helps, too. Big key: strong visual hook.

Oaken Tower: async autobattler brings the game loop…

Not sure everyone is familiar with this subgenre, so a reminder from the game’s description: “Oaken Tower is a synergy-heavy PvP auto battler where your tower of items fights other players. Build deadly combos and scale exponentially. Every decision matters.”

What’s clever about the PvP here is that it’s asynchronous, much like one of its inspirations, Backback Battles, which we covered in 2024: “You are battling other players’ builds, but there’s no time pressure or worries about interacting directly with them.” (The Bazaar is another much-referenced, if higher-budget autobattler.)

Why it’s doing well: it’s solo-dev, but the depth and complexity of build making is OOC, the game loop is tight, and there’s ‘number go up’ endorphins coursing through the game. Key influencers like NorthernLion have jumped on, why wouldn’t you?

Demon Lord: Just A Block - big in China, intriguing

Demon Lord: Just A Block is interesting: it’s a retro pixel art top-down ARPG with a lot of roguelite power-ups, but is ‘on demand’ turn-based. It reminds us a bit of Crypt Of The Necrodancer without the rhythm element, and the dev confirms that inspirado.

However, it’s not really performed in English language (only 79 of the 1,489 Overwhelmingly Positive reviews are in English), and we see 89% of the reviews in Chinese. (Which makes sense, since it’s a Chinese indie dev.) So: Asia-first success.

Why it’s doing well: a really well-crafted roguelite - this Steam review says “hands-down my favorite mystery dungeon-style game ever. It's simple, yet incredibly deep. It's got a great sense of humor, it's adorable, and it's fair.” But it hasn’t had giant Western pickup.

Pratfall: extremely ‘reverse Peak’, but still cute…

Pratfall is described on Steam as “a co-op game for 1-6+ players where you fall, dig, and explode your way down a dangerous cave system to find your lost dog”, and this top Steam player review is even more succinct: “It's literally bizarro Peak with Deep Rock Galactic style digging.”

Not much else to say, other than - digging holes has become a whole (ha ha) hot game mechanic, between games like Donkey Kong Bananza and A Game About Digging A Hole (and Minecraft, if we want to go way back.) So it makes sense for friendslop.

Why it’s doing well: it’s reverse Peak with digging in it. It’s reverse Peak with digging in it. It’s reverse Peak with digging in it. It’s reverse Peak with digging in it. It’s reverse Peak with digging in it. (It’s also wittily made, which isn’t always easy.)

New on Steam: Forza, Deep Rock, Batman excel…

And that’s last month’s surprise ‘long tail’-ers. Now, for GameDiscoverCo Pro & Plus subscribers, let’s end by looking at the top new games this week on Steam. Can you name all three again? (Bet you can do two…)

Read more

We’re back, and thanks for holding down the fort by ‘doing things on the weekend’ and ‘actually relaxing’, before GameDiscoverCo shoves another few thousand words of PC/console game discovery analysis in your general direction. (We appreciate you.)

Before we start, apologies, but we’re not following XBOX’s lead & rebranding to GAMEDISCOVERCO. We do think Xbox’s new management should fess up to their true all-caps inspiration, though - Princess Donut from the Dungeon Crawler Carl series. (“I AM YELLING, XBOX”.)

[THE DEEPEST PC/CONSOLE DATA? You can get a free demo of our GameDiscoverCo Pro company-wide ‘Steam deep dive’ & console data by reaching out today - >90 orgs have it. Or, signing up to GDCo Plus gets the rest of this newsletter and Discord access, plus more.]

Game discovery news: shortform hits are trending

Let’s start things out by a look at game discovery & platform news, which goes a bit like this:

• Looking at top GDCo Pro ‘trending’ games by 7-day wishlists (above), Paid/organic shortform video promos' based on viral concepts are hot, as shown by 2-player asymmetric co-op title KingFish (#1), which builds on a Wandering Village vibe, and Meccha Chameleon (#2), a 'paint your player' Prop Hunt-style concept.

• Other new entries include roguelite FPS sequel Deadzone Rogue 2 (#5) and co-op 'sharks disguised as dolphins' friendslop Shark Mart (#11). Elsewhere, Hell Let Loose: Vietnam (#4) tops 800k WLs as it reveals a release date, and the Yakuza-y Stranger Than Heaven (#6), and Lego Batman (#7) are also cruising along nicely.

• As rumored, PlayStation is turning a dial that says ‘exclusivity’ on it and constantly looking back at the audience, per Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier: “PlayStation studio business CEO Hermen Hulst told staff in a town hall Monday morning that the company's narrative single-player games will now be PlayStation exclusive.”

• A sobering post from small dev studio CEO Jake Simpson: “Everyone keeps saying ‘Oh, if we can survive this year, pubs will need product; they'll open their purses when that happens’, and we've been saying that for 2-3 years.. and it's Not. Happened… try getting a budget of $3-4m out of anyone right now, see what happens.” (It largely true.)

• Looks like “a bill focused on maintaining long-term playable access to online games has passed out of the California Assembly’s appropriations committee, setting up a floor vote by the full legislative body.” But it needs to pass Assembly, Senate and gov signature. (BTW: the ‘chilling effect’ on server-based games of any size prob. needs debating..)

• GamesBeat has some interesting creator interviews on Epic’s UEFN payout changes, with January’s addition of monetizing based on in-island item purchases helping to “generate meaningful revenue from smaller experiences that wouldn’t have been profitable under Fortnite’s pre-existing engagement payout system.”

• Game consoles? Pricy and getting pricier, points out this GameSpot editorial, saying: “Consoles are becoming too expensive for all but the most dedicated gamers to justify - especially when gamers in their teens and early 20s have grown up in a world where a console is no longer needed to play the vast majority of games.”

• An interesting PlayStation 5 OS experiment: “a new Welcome Hub widget that’s currently in Beta… reveals the top ten games in your country, with total player numbers for the week”, and also has a ‘trending games’ option showing surging popularity (by %). Top 3 WAU listed at one point were: “Fortnite: 14.6m, GTA 5: 5.13m, Minecraft: 4.97m.” (We think that’s worldwide WAU - we’ll see if they keep this feature.)

• Today in mobile game UA insanity (efficiency?): even Royal Kingdom is running unrelated (some say ‘fake’) paid ads to get people to initially play it: “Welcome to 2026, where the top-grossing match-3 in the world won’t even show you a match-3 in its top creative.”

• Here’s a useful post on how to network/pitch games at video game events, explaining the formats (B2B matchmaking, pitching sessions, indie showcases mixers). Veterans may be fine, but for the newer folks, tips like ‘build buffer time into your schedule’ and ‘have a system for what happens after each meeting’ are handy.

• How popular are Steam third-party events nowadays? Very. Celine Tricart explains what happened when 1,371 games (!) applied to her ‘Out Of The Box Games’ showcase, noting: “At that scale, deep curation becomes almost impossible.” (Worth thinking about when Valve showcase applications go weird, maybe…)

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Early Access graduates in 2026: what happened?

Sometimes we build tools for GameDiscoverCo Pro and then move on. Mistake! We took a look at our new Steam Early Access ‘graduates’ data back in late 2025. But now we’re partway through 2026, we thought we’d check back in to see if any trends had changes, and highlight particular high and low (revenue and conversion) performers.

Above is the chart we auto-generate for games 1.0 released in 2026 so far, specifically gated to “Paid games with >5,000 copies sold or free games with >$10,000 revenue in first 30 days of Early Access”, so we don’t get insane outliers. And the takeaways are clear.

Specifically, 2026’s Steam Early Access Graduates thus far have similar stats to 2025: of the 91 games we tracked, they were in Early Access for a median of 1 years and 3 months (one month longer than in 2025), and only 21% did better at 1.0, revenue-wise, than at Early Access launch. (This compares to 20% in 2025 - very similar.)

But what’s really interesting is when you look at the titles with the biggest 1.0 release by raw revenue so far in 2026. Our estimates compare incremental 1.0 revenue (30 days post-launch) to their first 30 days $ in Early Access. We also included their total LTD Steam revenue, cos that’s important context:

Obviously, these numbers aren’t perfect (we trend somewhat low on revenue for some ‘core’ genres like strategy), but they give a good idea of games doing well at 1.0 so far this year. Some comments on them:

• There’s a lot of strategic games in the mix, which makes sense feature-wise: given that the best way to do Early Access is to build a ‘finished’ game but layer new features on top of it, seeing expandable games like Timberborn, Shapez 2 and Terra Invicta high up the charts makes sense.

• Outperformers at 1.0 are often good games that get recognized late: for titles like clever roguelite Sol Cesto and the deep, complex The Last Starship, it’s almost disappointing there wasn’t more interest earlier. (There’s exceptions, like the Project Zomboid-ish HumanitZ, which has motored on nicely the whole time.)

• These games represent a ‘hidden’ class of later success: when a game spikes up at 1.0, it’s not always that obvious or checkable. That’s why we like this view. Not all of these titles are profitable - for example, ARPG Dragonkin: The Banished surely cost Nacon a lot more than it’s made, even multiplatform. But they all have ‘legs’.

(BTW, one of the reasons that oddly little-discussed China-made survival game Soulmask is #1 is that it launched a $20 DLC alongside 1.0, and we’re including that revenue. It’s an interesting Conan Exiles-style survival title with some significant quirks that bears more poking-at, and may inspire other games…)

In general, we’re seeing a bit of a groundswell of skepticism on Early Access recently. The issue: a lot of people who want to go into EA do so because their game is ‘truly’ unfinished, which isn’t what most EA buyers want in 2026. And there’s no ‘pot of gold’ upside for 1.0 for most games. At which point, why even chance it? (A quandary.)

Of course, the two above Early Access reasons (‘game’s unfinished’, and ‘we think we can get two marketing beats’) are not the ones swarming the above charts - tho some do get noticed only at 1.0. The best reason to do Early Access is dev-first, and it’s “we can build this title successfully with the community, and they’ll be there with us.”

And when you get that right - as I think Subnautica 2 has, even though they have a soupcon of Reason #1 in the mix - the results can be winning. Just be aware that the surprise and virality of people playing your game for the first time can only happen once. (It’s just a question of when you want to push that!)

Steam’s tag changes: what should you know?

The crew at Valve does not change its game tags very often. In fact, there’s only been eight added to the SteamDB tracker since 2023, and a couple of those are internal to that site! So when Steam put out a bunch of edits yesterday, via a player news post and associated Steamworks dev blog, our ears immediately pricked up.

The tl;dr is that this is more or less a clean-up, “adding 17 new tags, removing 28, and merging/updating a handful of others.” But there’s still a few interesting things here. Here’s our take on the top ones:

• The only ‘genre’ to get added was the Vampire Survivors-like ‘Bullet Heaven’: this is ‘focus on upgrades while automatically attacking hordes of enemies’. One Reddit comment notes: “This is great for anyone who was annoyed by survivorslikes clogging up the Bullet Hell tag.” (Unfortunately, they’ll probably receive both tags.)

• A lot of popular secondary traits were layered in, too: some of these are genre-adjacent, like Desktop Companion (idlers that use part of your screen) & Wuxia (massive in China historical fantasy). But the bulk of the adds are support tags like Cleaning, Zoo, and Cult (there’s actually lots of cult-themed games out there.)

• We love whoever at Valve sneaks in the super specific tags: look, we like capybaras, too but Capybara as a tag seems almost as OCD as adding Birds (which happened in 2023!) But hey, it’s a cute secondary tag and the Capybara Mafia will be delighted.

There’s also some tag removals for a few reasons: duplicative (NSFW & Mature vs. Violent & Sexual Content), subjective (Well-Written, Masterpiece) and specific IP (sorry, Games Workshop, Lego, and Dungeons & Dragons), which are typically “already covered by the developers and publishers setting up franchise pages.”

BTW, this Steamworks post highlights a couple of important 101s on tags: ranking tags is important because “customers can often make assumptions about your game based on the order of your tags”, and “players can also apply tags*” after you put your game live. (*So it’s important to check back on order if you have a popular game, to tweak ‘em.)

It’s a little disappointing not to see ‘friendslop’ get a tag, but we all know that’s mainly because it’s a divisive genre name, implying quality issues. (And sadly, our plaintive pitch for ‘crewlike’ as a name for that genre hasn’t found much interest.) Toodles!

[We’re GameDiscoverCo, an analysis firm based around one simple issue: how do players find, buy and enjoy your PC or console game? We run the newsletter you’re reading, and provide real-time data services for publishers, funds, and other smart game industry folks.]

Finishing off the week as GameDiscoverCo gathers for its annual offsite (yes, there’s a SWOT analysis, no, there’s no trust falls), today’s newsletter looks at a creepypasta standout (for free subscribers) and Subnautica 2’s huge Steam debut (for Pro/Plus subs.) And yes, there’s plenty going down in the biz. (When is there not?)

Before we start, is there really a Steam controller Easter Egg that “the controller screams when dropped by about 3 feet (Big Picture Mode, about once every 5-6 drops)”? Yes there is. And is it also the infamous Wilhelm Scream, as used in movies from Star Wars to Indiana Jones & beyond? Absolutely.

[FREE DEMO OF GDCo PRO? You too can get a gratis demo of our GameDiscoverCo Pro company-wide ‘Steam deep dive’ & console data by contacting us today - >95 orgs have it. Or, signing up to GDCo Plus gets the rest of this newsletter and Discord access, plus more.]

Game discovery news: Forza Horizon 6 looms large

Let’s finish up the week by looking at trending news for game platforms & discovery:

• According to ICO’s Footprints.gg tracking of ‘trad media’ outlets, racing game Forza Horizon 6 was most-discussed thanks to its launch next week, followed by GTA 6 (trailer rumors that didn’t happen?), Crimson Desert (a new patch), and Resident Evil Requiem (a surprising free bonus roguelike mode.)

• More data mining (and insider intelligence) into Xbox’s plans from Windows Central: both Project Saluki, “a brand new Xbox Game Pass tier set specifically designed for the Chinese market” from a gov regulation/taste point of view, and Positron, which “could be some form of disc-to-digital entitlement program.”

• Steam’s weird bundle discounting UI - ft. a 393 Euro, ‘1% off’ bundle - has been getting some stick on Reddit, with Hooded Horse’s Tim Bender explaining in the comments: “Oh man, it's actually 52% off, base price is $819… that is telling you "This bundle is 52% off, but right now one game within it is on sale so it's an extra 1% off".”

• In the second Bennett Foddy (Getting Over It) mention this week, we liked his depiction of friendslop to PC Gamer: “You definitely feel that [it’s] still very big, and I think it has a lot of room in there. I don't actually think it's a genre… more a production style, or a production constraint”, noting scalability without dedicated servers.

• The latest PlayStation Plus Game Catalog additions for May are pretty decent, including Star Wars Outlaws, Red Dead Redemption 2, Bramble: The Mountain King, The Thaumaturge, and a version of PS1 lightgun shooter Time Crisis that includes “the original console-exclusive special stages and all-new gyro aiming.”

• Enjoyed this look at the big current Roblox shifts from Max Power Gaming: “Roblox is expanding its rights to UGC & data… ‘ads for everyone’ signals a shift to scaled media… AI moves from supplemental to core infrastructure… safety and moderation are about regulatory positioning… extended services introduce a more SaaS-like cost model.”

• Since it’s a platform launch on Steam, we’re keeping an eye on the Source 2-powered s&box, and it does seem like interest is tailing off, with troll-adjacent reviews getting voted up and the devs transparently discussing objections, which include ‘why isn’t this Garry’s Mod 2?’ and AI thumbnail/engagement farming woes. (It’s fascinating, because it’s showing what 100% open ecosystems trend towards.)

• Those data-slingers at Hushcrasher have a fresh dev budget analysis, suggesting: “It does NOT cost more to make games today. We just make bigger ones… Across every game category, scope expansion alone roughly doubled costs over the decade.” Lots and lots of numbers in the full piece…

• We feature initial CCU (concurrent users) in ‘this week on Steam’ quite a lot, and have been claiming - for games without heavy pre-order or idlers - that ‘Week 1 Steam sales being 20x peak launch CCU’ is a good super-rough guide. (We mention it again because a recent Steam release told us it was fairly accurate for them.)

• Microlinks: looks like the Xbox Elite 3 controller design has leaked, with new scroll wheel & ‘cloud mode’ buttons; April’s top mobile games by $, per AppMagic (just shock-acquired by Sensor Tower!) inc. Honor Of Kings & LastWar / Whiteout Survival; how a social deduction web game got to 130k MAU with no marketing.

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How Poppy Playtime made ‘free game, $ DLC’ work

Partly because of its alternative structure on Steam, we haven’t talked about single player ‘abandoned toy factory’ horror x puzzle title Poppy Playtime ($0 + paid DLC) that much since its launch in 2021 as a free game (first on Steam, later on console & mobile.) But four paid ‘chapters’ later, and some impressive grosses, time to check it?

Even if not paying attention, you’ve probably spotted how viral the creepypasta lead character, Huggy Wuggy is. (The New York Times wrote an article on it in 2023, saying: “Huggy Wuggy, a bloodshot-eyed video game character, is a favorite of young children, and knockoff vendors.” It’s just straight-up iconic, in a disturbing way.)

Just to give some further context about the game’s history and where Huggy Wuggy sits, its creator Mob Entertainment was founded by brothers who made 3D animated music videos for YouTube, and the ZAMination folks were also involved. So, already people who understand character design for Internet virality.

The NYT article includes this key passage: “[6 year old fan] Ezra’s father, Gareth Watkins, says he sees Huggy as part of an ‘extended universe’ of children’s internet characters. ‘It’s almost like the stock characters in commedia dell’arte or pantomime: Anyone can pick them up and use them for whatever they like and the audience will understand them,’ he said.”

This is actually a ‘problem’ that multiple of these characters - from Hello Neighbor to Bendy (& The Ink Machine) - have run into. They end up getting used in scads of YouTube videos as a sort of ‘Punch & Judy’-like stock character in Minecraft UGC & CG videos, but it doesn’t always mean people want standalone games featuring them.

But the fame is just so ‘off the charts’ in this case, that the folks at Mob Entertainment are absolutely getting great sales for Poppy Playtime Chapter 5, which debuted as $20 DLC for the free base game on Feb 18th, 2026 and led to a 52,800 Steam CCU peak. Here’s the stats they exclusively gave us on sales/downloads:

• Poppy Playtime Chapter 5 - which is only available on PC right now (and will roll out to console and mobile later, if precedent continues) has sold 408,000 copies on Steam and 19,000 on Epic Games Store so far.

• Since Chapter 5’s launch in Feb, there have been 2.76 million Steam downloads of the free, base game, Poppy Playtime Chapter 1. (And on Epic Games Store, Chapter 1 has seen 360,000 downloads since Feb. 18th.)

As part of GameDiscoverCo Pro, we’ve estimated the revenue from the four DLC attached to the free base game. And on Steam alone, we have it at >$30m gross, likely a marginal undercount, with Chapter 5’s release the biggest spike so far:

When you add in the console and mobile sales, which also seem sizable (we’re estimating at least 500k units for the console versions of Chapter 4, for example), you may easily be at a $100m franchise from the games (not counting the official merch!)

Anyhow, we chatted to Poppy Playtime game director Bryce Clark about Chapter 5’s release, and here’s some of the things we found out:

• The team does parallelize development somewhat to hit yearly DLC releases: Bryce noted that “each chapter has its own dedicated development cycle”, but to hit an annual cadence, “when one chapter is deep in production, we may already be in early planning or prototyping for the next one.”

• The free base game & paid DLC works differently on console & mobile: there, the extra chapters are actually standalone apps, as opposed to DLC in a free ‘base game’. (Partly cos they “want to make sure we’re taking up as little space on our players’ mobile devices”.) Nonetheless, the content’s the same, and Bryce says “letting people step into the world first and then decide if they want more felt like a natural fit.”

• DLC / ‘chapter’ pricing has trended up over time: if you look at the DLC on PC, you’ll see the Chapter 2 was $10, Chapter 3 and 4 were $15, and Chapter 5 is $20. Bryce notes that “each new chapter has become more ambitious in terms of length, complexity, and production value”, and so the shift up is really due to that.

So what you’ve ended up with is a bit of a unique setup, since the franchise is so huge with kids. It’s a yearly, episodic single-player set of standalone ‘chapters’ or scenarios, each getting absolutely giant YouTuber pickup thanks to the jumpscariness. (Five Nights at Freddy’s is probably the most obvious other franchise, at this point.)

And the Poppy Playtime IP does skew young. GameDiscoverCo Pro’s Steam Fan Snapshot data, across about 400 owners, is underestimating the younger players, we’re sure, but is a good general indicator:

Finally, there is sometimes an interesting question of what players actually want in narrative horror franchises like this. Is it chase scenes for quick adrenaline? Is it puzzles? Is it all of the above? We asked Bryce Clark about the trickiness of designing new chapters for superfans, and he noted:

“Puzzles create tension by slowing the player down and forcing them to think, while chase sequences release that tension in a more immediate way. What we’ve focused on over time is how to blend those elements more seamlessly…

For returning players, there’s definitely an expectation of variety. They want moments of problem-solving, moments of pressure, and moments of discovery. So with each chapter, we’re looking at how to evolve those ingredients without losing what makes them effective.”

So, yep - perhaps we’ve been ‘sleeping’ on this franchise because the ‘free game + DLC’ structure on Steam means it doesn’t always appear in our charts. (Also: the player base is younger and more casual, so it’s less on our radar.) But we do wonder - is there room for more titles in this space, or is it impossible to do another Huggy Wuggy?

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