As we careen towards the end of the week, time to get back to game analysis, and we’re starting with complex artillery sim Iron Nest, which did a lot of things right along the way to 250k sales on Steam in 3 days. Wha? We’ll delve into that…

But before we start, we’ve been fascinated by Horse Magnifier: The Full Horse on Steam, an expanded version of an Itch x Godot jam game. What do you do? You have to use magnifying glasses to match up pixel-y horse pictures. (Only open game distribution platforms make the ‘horse magnifying’ oeuvre a possibility, folks…)

[DON’T HAVE OUR PRO DATA? You can get a free demo of our GameDiscoverCo Pro company-wide ‘Steam deep dive’ & console data, inc. MCP by reaching out today - >110 orgs have it. Or, signing up to GDCo Plus gets extra newsletter and Discord access, plus more.]

Game discovery news: some ‘above-par’ wishlists..

First, it’s time to trawl through some more discovery links - and platform ones - starting with the following:

• Fruit Ninja creator Luke Muscat made a witty video about his offkilter title Normal Golf Game, with in-game illustration (above) of the game’s take-off to >40k Steam wishlists, thanks to a) shortform social media wins b) a Next Fest demo and c) a Northernlion video. It’s a fun watch…

• Checking the top Steam demos launched in the last month for unreleased games, per GDCo, autobattler roguelite Guildrun (#1) still reigns, but PvE dungeon extraction looter Expedition: Into Darkness (#3) and It Works: Electronics Repair Simulator (#4) hang with adorable & chill sand(castle)box builder Sandcastle (#5).

• You know how all big games are now platforms? Do Big Studios just “teamed up with PUBG Corporation to bring [Roblox megahit] Steal a Brainrot to PUBG’s new UGC platform, World of Wonder.” (It’s PUBG-ized in weird ways, but even more cross-game UGC ports are likely in the future…)

• PlayStation just surprise dropped Helldivers 2 onto PlayStation Plus Game Catalog, about 2 and a half years after its OG debut. (So, a sensible interval, then!) Also out for PS+ Game Catalog now: Kingdom Come Deliverance II, Vampire Survivors, Hell is Us & more.

• We don’t cover government subsidies for game dev much, but Chirag Vadhia just busted out a giant overview of them: “We looked at 79 listed games companies and 34 government schemes… in the accounts of those companies… dependence [runs] from a couple of points of profit at EA, to a credit worth more than the whole of Ubisoft’s.”

• Microlinks: Footprints.gg’s latest ‘trad media’ references are dominated by GTA 6, thx to that upcoming Netflix reveal; using Valve’s Lepton Android translation layer, more former Quest exclusives like Action Hero are coming to Steam Frame; even former physical stalwart Capcom has 90% of its games bought digitally now.

• Why are games like Call Of Duty trying to roll players into a ‘wrapper’ app across multiple franchise entries? So they can do things like pop-up pre-order ‘nags’ for Call Of Duty Modern Warfare 4 while you’re waiting for Call Of Duty Black Ops 7 to load, of course…

• We dig some of the visualizations on Totally Human Media/Vaporlens’ new Steam revenue report - particularly the ‘Galaxy’ view. (But the less-accurate ‘copies sold = 35x reviews’ and ‘no discounts accounted for in revenue’ means you should look at the mass takeaways, not specific games’ estimates…)

• Another vital (partially paywalled) Doug Shapiro mega-trends piece is on why “in recent years, almost all the value created in media has accrued to those who distribute content, not create or package it”, but “AI may partially uncouple distribution and coordination in media by introducing a new intermediary layer.”

• What % of the first 30 days’ sales do each of the Polden Publishing games have every day? And what’s their 1 month to 3, 6 9, and 12 month multiples? Kirill Oreshkin was kind enough to lay it all out in black and white for us.

• Microlinks: Stream Hatchet on battle royale’s live-streaming resurgence; Amazon Prime’s 9 ‘free’ games to keep for August include action RPG Steelrising; organic discovery differences between launching a free Android game in 2014 (13.6m downloads) & 2026 (single digit page visits, zero installs.)

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How Iron Nest Sold >250k PC copies in <3 days…

If you’re paying attention, you may have spotted that “brutal dieselpunk heavy-artillery game” Iron Nest ($20, launch discount to $15), created by Nick (Niewoudt) Talmers & Dominik Latos, just had a spectacular launch on Steam, hitting >250,000 copies sold in less than 3 days, and cresting at 17,500 concurrents on the service.

We’ve been following this game for some time. It made GDCo’s ‘trending wishlists’ charts, and its demo was a break-out hit at June 2026’s Next Fest, ranking #2 on Steam’s most-played demo list. Courtesy of the devs, here’s their daily Steam wishlist chart leading up to release:

The giant spike here is obviously Steam Next Fest, where they tell us >700,000 people played the demo. (The demo now sits at 876,000 players, with an impressive median play time of 2 hours and 19 minutes.) But with >400k wishlists even pre-demo, a lot of the initial WL spikes were short-form video ‘hits’, many organic and third-party…

We asked Dominik about how important short-form was, and he said: “Short-form videos were the first pieces of content that really started to go viral in certain places and gave Iron Nest that initial traction… [but] the closer we got to launch, and the more marketing beats we introduced - playtests, the demo, Next Fest, and so on - the more other formats [like horizontal video, Reddit & others] started becoming equally important.”

Just finishing out the data dump courtesy of the devs, Iron Nest (as of August 11th, 5 days after release) actually hit >365k copies sold and $4.7m gross, with a paltry 4% player refund rate (significantly below average):

Oh, and for the record, 29% of the buyers of this game were U.S., followed by China (10%), Germany (8%), the Russian Federation and the UK (5% each), Canada (4%), and France, Australia, Ukraine and Poland (3% each). (That’s expected-ish, with a bit of an Eastern European skew in places?)

What type of people are core fans of this game? We took a quick look in GDCo Pro at games that public players of Iron Nest have played more often than the median Steam user (high affinity mult!), and came up with a lot of high-tech, military-coded games:

Anyhow, if you look at our estimated ‘long tail’ multipliers, we’d expect this game to sell a million copies on Steam somewhere close to the ‘1 year after release’ mark (or earlier, possibly), and eventually gross $10-$15m+. Not bad for a two-person game that took just over a year to make, hm?

So that’s the results. Now, we’re going to talk about why the game has resonated so well, both in idea and execution, and end with a major question (caveat? conundrum?):

• Hook-wise, this type of ticky-tacky mechanical design is irresistible: look at all the gorgeous retro buttons & knobs. Don’t you want to push them all and see what they do? That’s a big key to its wishlist success - fulfilling dev Nick’s core fantasy, which is “operating from inside a battleship-esque turret” with “complex mechanical animations, sound design, atmosphere, and environmental design.”

• The actual gameplay was put together smartly and analytically: the meat of the game is around getting orders, manually plotting and triangulating firing locations and distances, and then adjusting levers. As Nick notes, it’s all about making “gameplay puzzles you [are[ solving using the turret.”

• Incremental, but interesting mission design in a self-contained space: A bit like a stage play set on one single set, because the game had a short dev time, it needed “a polished environment that had a lot of variety and replayability in the missions themselves, but without requiring any changes or additions to the environment.”

To give you a basic idea of why people dig Iron Nest, here’s one of the top-rated Steam player reviews: “This game is the poster child for good sound design. The deafening shots and every metallic creak make the Iron Nest feel incredible. Overall it scratches a very specific itch if you love big machinery and doing repetitive procedures efficiently. As the levels go on, you learn new ways to triangulate and you get your own workflow that feels really good.”

But to end, we do have to address the elephant in the room - a little game called PVKK: Planetenverteidigungskanonenkommandant, from the devs of Dome Keeper, which was announced in June 2024, and is now due out in 2027:

This game has the same ‘main’ hooks that Iron Nest does - controlling a large gun within a confined space where you manually manipulate controls. And to give them credit, the Iron Nest devs are clear throughout that they’re quite inspired by PVKK, though they also try to explain differences in a devlog:

“We both have big cannons? Sure... We both have fully manual control? Absolutely... But what you do with the cannon in IRON NEST is entirely different! We're huge fans of PVKK and, YES - it definitely inspired us. But our core gameplay loop revolves around ground-based artillery, which brings a completely different setup, mechanics, and challenges compared to an orbital gun!”

‘Completely different?’ Well… possibly not. I’ve actually been back and forth about how to feature Iron Nest because of this. But in the end: it’s the year 2026, and if your initial trailer >two years ago invented a new microgenre (‘small room x machinery x firing sim’), PVKK should probably expect other people to riff on the same concept*. This is an argument to prioritize ‘shipping speed’ after showcasing unique ideas.

(*I would have preferred it to be a more abstract riff, such as ‘torpedos in a submarine’, but you can’t deny that Iron Nest did a bang-up job of a more limited-scope, focused take on the idea, and def. has its own takes on art direction & atmosphere.)

It’s clear that players don’t mind, while understanding PVKK “seems to have a much stronger narrative and thematic campaign.” Many have also wishlisted PVKK - 26% of current Iron Nest wishlisters, according to GDCo Pro. And to end, here’s the reaction to both games existing on the PVKK subReddit, which seems… good for all parties:

This week on Steam: Vietnam, Servant, Sandustry..

Read more

We’re back - and reminding you that GDCo’s head of biz dev Matt Styles will be at Gamescom 2026, and has made the requisite LinkedIn post to attract yr attention. Plz interface with him if you’d like to learn more about our ocean-deep data goodness?

But before we start, here’s legendary Bubble Bobble/Rainbow Islands creator Fukio Mitsuji talking to aspiring devs in a 1989 Japanese game mag & imagining a AI/robot-controlled game design era (!): “When ordinary game designers are laid off en masse thanks to the arrival of the ‘Rip-O-Bot’… will you still have enough drive and originality left in you to beat robots like those?” (We’re not living those days…. yet.)

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

Game discovery news: Warrior Cats is, uhh, back?

Time to kick off the week with a little rummage through the garage sale of game discovery & platform news, as follows:

• Looking at GDCo Pro's estimates of 'trending' unreleased Steam games, Aug 3rd-Aug 10th (above), planeslopper Dear Passengers is still #1, with ‘twisted fairytale' Bayonetta-like action-er Swords & Slippers new at #2, and an ARPG based on the hit '00s Warrior Cats young adult novels (!) has quite a bit of initial interest at #3.

• Also trending? Bloody human-angel action-er Crimson Moon (#4), which confirmed its upcoming release date, as well as cyberpunk pawn shop sim (good angle!) Probably Stolen (#5), and just-launching first person colony builder Pax Autocratica (#6).

• Intriguing times here: “A third-party app called Asobi: Remote Play is now available through a Steam Playtest for Steam Deck, Steam Machine and other Linux systems. The software supports standard PS4 and PS5 Remote Play, but its more interesting feature is PlayStation Plus cloud streaming without requiring a PlayStation...”

• Steam had an unfortunate third-party data leak, as Valve “sent an email about a cybersecurity attack on CEVA Logistics, a shipping company for their Steam Hardware products to European users, that happened between July 29 to August 1st.” Exposed? Personal info like your email/address, but not Steam pw or digital wallet access.

• 2K’s boss Strauss Zelnick is signaling excitement about an expanded possible audience for games like GTA 6, which is launching solely on next-gen PlayStation & Xbox to start, expressing “optimism about streaming services over the next three years”, as well as praise for the rise of PC, saying: “We think the audience for our console and PC games could [in the future] be 10X or more the size of the business today.”

• Paid mods? Mod.io is making a bigger push into the space, with PC/console games like BMX Streets claiming a $10 ARPPU. (There’s also been The Sims’ move into paid UGC and Curseforge’s previous work with ARK, tho hardcore community reactions can still be mixed at times?)

• Thronefall co-creator Jonas Tyroller is being honest on YouTube again, this time on spending 6 months on - and then canceling - chill co-op game Dodo Derby: “When Paul and I made [Thronefall]… we spent way too much time prototyping random game ideas that weren’t backed by a proper fantasy.” (You don’t wanna be a dodo?)

• Which business is doing nicely at Xbox? That’d be Blizzard, according to a leaked internal memo: “In FY26 Blizzard ended the year as the top-performing studio in Xbox’s studios division” & the third-highest ever. “FY25 and FY26 were our first back-to-back years of growth since FY17”, led by Diablo 4: Lord of Hatred and Overwatch.

• GameDiscoverCo (it’s us!) looked at the popularity of Insomniac & Sony’s Spider-Man 2 game after that new Spider-Man movie launch: “We have the game at 404,000 daily active users (95% of them on PlayStation, thanks to the game being added to PS+ recently) as of July 25th, and a whopping 954,000 DAU (and rising) as of Aug. 8th.”

• Mobile platform news: “Starting with just a single option, Aptoide Games, the Google Play Store will host and install third-party app and game stores on Android. This applies solely in the United States and third-party stores won’t show up everywhere – they’re only accessible via links or direct searches.” Not that obvious at all, then….

• Culture microlinks: author Hugh Howey (Silo) on why he thinks most readers won’t care about AI-infused books; why even ‘established’ lifestyle influencers have to adapt constantly to the social video algorithm; this op-ed on why America is ‘atomizing’ talks about the “countless smaller tribes” we often reference here.

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5 key things to ask before putting your game in a showcase!

At GameDiscoverCo, we’re bullish on devs putting their PC/console game in a streaming game showcase - especially when you announce it for the first time. Why? You’re trying to break through ‘filter bubbles’ that divide you from your audience, and the right ‘appointment viewing’ showcase can boost your reach very effectively.

That’s why we’ve built a new Streaming Showcase Explorer (above) into our GDCo Pro data platform - more on that shortly. But first, we wanted to talk about the kind of questions you should be asking before committing to being in a showcase. And we’d focus on these five:

• How many games are there in the showcase? Some showcases such as the PC Gaming Show & Future Games Show have up to 80 - tho more recent ones are more like 60-70. Galaxies seems to hit ~50, The Game Awards & Summer Game Fest about 50, and Triple-I Initiative 35-40. (Less is probably marginally better?)

• What’s the situation around co-streaming? There’s been some startling reach increases of big showcases when influencer (or outlet) Twitch & YouTube channels allow rebroadcast with live reactions & commentary. This mainly happens with the big boys - but all showcases should articulate a strategy for it.

• What percentage of debuts/reveals are planned? Even if your game isn’t a debut, the % of ‘memorable reveals’ in the showcase matters. This year’s Triple-I Initiative, for example, which skews more scrappy, had Graveyard Keeper 2, Don’t Starve Elsewhere, Machine Party & more. (And SGF/The Game Awards excel at this.)

• What’s the cost - or is it free for the right game? Some of our ‘top’ tracked showcases have inclusion costs from ~$1,000 to, uh, many hundreds of thousands of dollars. So you do need to do some math(s) on ROI here. But it’s also worth noting: if you have a v.strong reveal as an indie, you might get into a big showcase free. (Showcases need hot reveals, otherwise the audience will rebel…)

• How long is the showcase, overall? Partially related to number of games, but shorter, sharper showcases are getting much preferred by players nowadays, after one or two outliers (inc. a three and a half hour doozy!) The barrier to entry for streaming showcase is v.low - so the execution needs to be on point.

Before we go on, a word on ‘ranking’ of showcases: we foolishly did tier-ranking of showcases back in 2023, - we’re not going to make that mistake again! What we can say: our ‘top’ tab in GDCO’s Showcase Explorer includes the following event types:

“Day Of The Devs, Future Games Show, Galaxies, Gamescom/Gamescom ONL, Nintendo Direct, Nintendo Indie World, PC Gaming Show, PlayStation State Of Play, Summer Game Fest, The Game Awards, The MIX, The Triple-I Initiative, Wholesome Games, & Xbox Showcase.”

That’s 68 showcases since the start of July 2024 - and we’re tracking 385 (!) overall, including a lot of publisher and studio-specific showcases (Bandai Namco, 11 Bit, THQ Nordic, Capcom & more) - some of which obviously do decently.

And if you’re still interested in top ranks, we can do this - the showcases of the last 12 months with the highest median Steam wishlist gain in the 7 days after the show:

Footnotes on this: wishlists are estimates, games with no Steam page won’t register, already-released games won’t show wishlist increases ‘cos people can buy them, we can’t monitor console wishlist additions for Xbox or PlayStation. (Enough footnotes?)

But you get the idea: the Keighley-verse (Game Awards, Summer Game Fest, Gamescom ONL, w/Day Of The Devs), PlayStation/Xbox platform showcases, and the highly curated insurgents at Triple-I are the obvious leaders in the last year, followed by PC Gaming Show and Future Games Show/Wholesome Direct just below the fold…

The other advantage of having this data in our system is that we can make auto-annotated wishlists, such as the below one for co-op musou-like Tears Of Metal, which we’re estimating at >150k PC units sold since its July 22nd Steam release:

It looks like this game will eventually gross >$10m, and its showcase appearances reflect its promise - ranking above average (#14/81 in PC Gaming Show Most Wanted 2024, #12/35 in the 2025 Triple-I Initiative showcase) even before it released a demo in Oct. 2025 which hit #9/2966 (!) in Next Fest. (We also have ranked annotations for NF.)

A couple of caveats to end: first, not all games fit in all showcases, and each has a ‘flavor’. So maybe don’t be: ‘I just need to get in the one with the highest wishlist adds’, but rather understand how your game’s vibes intersect best with the audience.

And secondly, I do see some hints that the showcase market might eventually get overcrowded, just due to how easy it (mechanically!) to gather games and do a stream. Honestly, some parts of the year (not-E3?) feel overcrowded, and others (Gamescom, TGS, non-physical event times) feel sparser. So there’s still room for more interesting showcases here, if they’re shorter, sharper, and less ‘fourth trailer for X game’-y?

GameDiscoverCo Show: Miyamoto’s 2c re: console specs?

Finally this time, it’s The GameDiscover Show - fresh from going microviral on YouTube - with myself (Simon) and Post Games’ Chris Plante talking about game discovery goodness - sub to the podcast via Apple Music, Spotify & elsewhere (audio), with a video version on YouTube (above).

On this episode, we talk about Roblox's market-disappointing financial results, how to think about Steam 1.0 CCU peaks vs. Early Access, Shigeru Miyamoto's recent comments on console tech specs being less relevant, and get into Simon's 30 years (!) in the game biz. (Along the way, ‘discovering’ what Notch’s GDC party was really like.)

[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.]

What’s brown and sticky? A stick. These are exactly the kind of high-quality dad jokes you don’t get in other leading game biz and discovery newsletters. And all for the low, low price of free (for many of you!) OK, OK, we’re getting on with the content…

Before we start, apologies to those who tried to access Xsolla’s new white paper on selling PC games directly to players: a URL redirect issue in last Friday’s newsletter made it inaccessible. Here’s the correct link to the document, for anyone interested...

[DON’T HAVE OUR PRO DATA? You can get a free demo of our GameDiscoverCo Pro company-wide ‘Steam deep dive’ & console data, inc. MCP, by reaching out today - >110 orgs have it. Or, signing up to GDCo Plus gets extra newsletter and Discord access, plus more.]

Game discovery news: Switch 2 keeps on jammin’

OK, let’s finish off the week with a bunch of game platform & discovery analysis, starting with Nintendo’s results:

• As The Verge notes, “Nintendo has smashed its first-quarter earnings estimates… bolstered by strong games sales and [~$300m] US tariff refunds.” Switch 2 software sales were up 9.2% YoY and Switch 1 up 38.6%, but “sales for the Switch 2 console itself fell from 5.82m units to 3.82m” - tho they were up quarter on quarter (above) ahead of an upcoming Western price rise.

• There’s a useful Pierre485 thread on X with detail: Tomodachi Life now at 8m shipped, and: “Nintendo distributed 33.81 million Switch games this quarter (+39% compared to 2025).” Also: “For software with a physical version, digital sales now represent 50% (new record).” Share price is +18% in the last month - but -40% YoY.

• When does Steam’s Discovery Queue recommendations turn on for a game? The folks at Polden did some analysis, and reckon “a practical range of roughly 5,000 to 7,000 wishlist adds per day at the observed lower edge… aim for 6,000 to 8,000 wishlist adds per day and try to hold that pace for two or three days” to get those algo recommends.

• Max Power Gaming dropped the full info on the biggest Roblox games in July, with vintage title Brookhaven topping the ‘average CCU’ charts with 546k CCU. And as they note: “Animal Hospital, Grow a Garden 2, and +1 Speed Keyboard Escape each averaged more than 350k concurrent players during July” - it’s busy out there.

• Xbox’s Asha Sharma has been doing the ‘replying to fans on X’ thing again, indicating that Xbox is planning a PlayStation Platinum Trophy equivalent with Achievements. (Of course, ‘easy Platinum Achievements’ are what incented a bunch more shovelware titles onto PS4/PS5 - so you might want to avoid that bit, Xbox.)

• Microlinks: changes to UGC discovery in Fortnite include more personalized recommendations; Sony is putting warning labels on PS5 packaging about decision to ditch discs; weekly ‘trad media’ mentions are headed by Beast Of Reincarnation, GTA VI and Gears Of War: E-Day.

• We did our regular GDCo Pro look at trending demos for unreleased Steam games, finding titles we’ve discussed before - autobattler roguelite Guildrun (#1, 9k CCU), co-op road trip-er Nomad Drive (#2, 4.8k CCU), and multiplayer defusal puzzler Bombanana! (#3, 4.4k) still atop the demo charts.

• Valve did a little ‘explainer’ for the Grip Sense feature of the Steam Controller, detailing the two capacitive touch sensors: “Our driving motivation in building these was to provide another way to activate/deactivate Gyro quickly when you’ve moved it past your comfortable zone and need to recenter it (called “ratcheting”).” Clever.

• Steam 1.0 watch: survival sandbox-er Scrap Mechanic hit 38k CCU (its highest for 6 years!) at 1.0, and 3 million LTD units since 2016; cozy farm sim Fields Of Mistria just hit 27k CCU (all-time high!) at 1.0; first-person sim Waterpark Simulator (13k CCU) and action roguelite Sephiria (30k CCU) are also having super-strong 1.0s.

• Windows Central put out one of its traditionally ‘wide-ranging’ exposes on Xbox’s various moves onto PC games, nixing its own mangled rumor that Xbox might withdraw games from Steam, and noting that, at least pre-Sharma, “Microsoft and Blizzard have been planning to open Battle.net up to third-party developers.”

• Microlinks Pt. 2: Xbox Game Pass’ first August picks include Gears Of War: E-Day’s open beta, Date Everything! and more; the top mobile games in July include Pokemon Go (>$100m x anniversary x Scopely spending?) & Roblox; Xbox OS updates will include better achievement history, chat in ‘game captures’ & more.

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Game discovery lessons from 30 years (!) in-biz…

We’ve been dangerously data-heavy for the past few GDCo newsletters, so let’s end the week on a different angle. Because this month, give or take, is my 30th anniversary in the game biz, having started in Aug/Sept 1996 as a game designer at Simis/Kuju (hi, Ian & Jon!) in my native UK.

My first shipped title was 1997’s Terracide (above), a Descent-style 3D corridor shooter for PC which was an early ‘accelerated 3D graphics’ pioneer mainly known for being a tech showcase. (There was good $ made from bundling it with PC graphics cards. Sadly, I failed to pick up on the hint and buy hella Nvidia shares in 1999.)

Anyhow, I’m hardly a Mark Cerny-level veteran, but I’ve… seen things. So we’re going divide things into epochs (inadvisably themed around real eras of dinosaurs.) Then we’ll talk about how the game biz has changed during those three epochs:

Epoch 1: The Triassic ‘forming’

- Access to tools: low.
- Direct access to audience: low.
- Market competition: low/medium.

In the ‘90s, when I first started getting involved in games, some major themes evolve. Firstly, most dev tools were at the ‘blunt instrument’ level - engine licensing wasn’t a thing, and kludges abounded. (We actually made Terracide levels in a modified version of an existing flight sim toolkit the company put out. That was more than many had!)

And the other big discovery barrier was simple: physical distribution. Although PC ‘shareware’ games and BBS distribution had shown another route to market, PC & console boxes on shelves in stores was the chief distribution bottleneck. (A Steam featuring equivalent? The retail store endcap, of course.)

This also meant market competition was relatively low: MobyGames has 262 PC games released in 1995, scaling up to 1,100 in 1998, though some are freeware, etc. And the PlayStation 1 only had ~1,500 Western games over its entire life - of which I worked on two, Tank Racer & Looney Tunes Racing.

Epoch 2: The Jurassic ‘norming’

- Access to tools: medium (and increasing)
- Direct access to audience: medium (and increasing)
- Market competition: medium (and increasing!)

The middle epoch - which I got to witness after getting Superman-ed out of dev & moving to B2B media & events at Gamasutra, Game Developer magazine, GDC & the Independent Games Festival - was of tool & engine expansion and bold digital distribution experiments.

On the tools side, code and art toolkits were well established. But the rise of the licenseable engine - particularly with the initially expensive Unreal Engine (a pioneer from the late ‘90s), but later with Unity, which was explicitly announced in 2005 as “aiming to ‘democratize’ game development.”

On the distribution side, Xbox Live Arcade (starting in 2004) was a super-big deal for digital-first console distro, and Steam started distributing third-party games in 2005 - though didn’t expand more significantly until Steam Greenlight in 2012.

Of course, retail game purchases were still a big deal - especially on console, which was in a golden age. But the normalization of small XBLA/PSN downloads begat the rise of digital downloads for all. And the IGF started awarding genuine smash hits from small teams, esp. after 2010: Spelunky, FTL, Minecraft, Papers Please, and more.

It was an exciting but whipsaw-y time in games: I don’t think most of the indie devs involved realized how early to the table they were. I certainly didn’t. And since it was still the era when ‘social media’ meant friend groups, not ‘micro-targeted media for retention of your eyeballs’, focused trad media interest & less choice often meant major success for indie darlings.

Epoch 3: The Cretaceous ‘performing’

- Access to tools: sky-high.
- Direct access to audience: sky-high.
- Market competition: sky-high.

I had an inkling that game discovery might be an issue when founded this newsletter in 2019, while still VP at GDC’s parent company. But when I set up GameDiscoverCo formally in 2020, I’m not sure I envisaged the compounding effect on choice of the ‘no console reset’ era (backwards compatibility!) & decades-old Steam libraries.

You don’t need chapter and verse from me on where we are now. But for the record: it now costs $30-$100 up front to get a complete game engine (Unity) and all the basic code you need to make an FPS, Match 3 game, platformer, or whatever. That’s democratization at work (and Roblox & Fortnite is free to build in, too…)

With retail a husk of its former self, everyone has direct access to as much digital audience as they can scoop up*. (*With the caveat that social media is filter bubbles.& micro-scenes. So you’d better find some ways to smash the walls between those filter bubbles, if you don’t already have the audience - or your reach is going to suck.)

And competition: we’ve gone on about competition too much. There’s a lot of it, because of the above two points. And we don’t think that is ever changing. There’s sometimes talk of a momentum shift - and/or a single extinction event, which is ironically what ended the Cretaceous period. But no, there’s no 10km wide asteroid coming. There’s just, y’know, even more first-person shop simulators…

—

OK, we’re done here, and unfortunately, I’ve failed to winningly anecdote-alize 30 years in games. Where are the stories about seeing the Um Jammer Lammy stage show at TGS 1998, failing to stop Edmund McMillen wandering onstage to troll Andy Schatz during an IGF Awards, or attending a (non-scandalous, but very OTT) Notch mansion party at GDC? (Or ‘mm, crepes?’)

Don’t worry, those will definitely be in the memoir*. (*Which I won’t be writing, because I have a notoriously terrible long-term memory - sorry, any place I’ve been or anyone I met more than 5 years ago.) But look, I’ve enjoyed my 30 years in the biz, and thanks to everyone who helped me get this far. And GDCo will be around to help you work out WTF is going on for many years to come... (There is always something going on.)

Debuts on Steam: Big Walk, Tokon, ReStory do gud!

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This is a rare ‘non-Tuesday or Friday’ newsletter from GameDiscoverCo, with one simple goal. We sometimes hear from people who say: “I ain’t reading all that. I’m happy for u tho. Or sorry that happened” re: our newsletters. (Yes, we know they’re long - but there’s a lot going on…)

Anyhow, it occurred to us that some of those people - GDCo subscribers who don’t have full bandwidth for our newsletter - might not know that we have a new weekly pod/vodcast, The GameDiscoverCo Show. And we’re 5 episodes in now, so it’s a great time to get on board:

Briefly: every ~40 minute long episode has myself (Simon) and Polygon co-founder & Post Games’ Chris Plante talking about game discovery goodness. We keep things snappy and structured: discussing three platform/discovery news stories, one ‘main’ story, this week/next week’s big releases, and a special surprise question.

We actually delve further into news story analysis than the newsletter does. So there’s new analysis here for regular GDCo readers. But it’s also a good way to get a pulse of what’s going on from GDCo if, say, you have ‘commute to work’ or ‘work out’ audio/video time, but no more reading time. (Curse you, time-consuming words…)

So yep, you can sub to the podcast via Apple Podcasts, Spotify & elsewhere (audio, RSS), with a video version weekly on YouTube (below):

We’ll keep running weekly links to the latest GDCo Show episode at the bottom of our regular Tuesday newsletter, also. But this is your one-time reminder that The GameDiscoverCo Show does, and will exist.. please use it as you see fit.

[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 August kicks off, we’ll be the first to ask: who stole seven twelfths of 2026 so far - the time bandits? Well, since time has certainly elapsed, whether or not Sean Connery disguised as a firefighter was in the mix, we shall hasten on with today’s newsletter…

Before we start, remember when Sony was lavishly courting PC gamers? No, not 2025, this was back in 1996, when it took out a 16 page ad supplement in PC Gamer magazine to hype up its "PlayStation mega-hits" with "CD-quality audio." (Also, how crazy is it that surreal cult classic Eastern Mind was mentioned in here?)

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

Game discovery news: the Reincarnation of Walk?

Let’s kick off the week with the lightning of discovery news, followed seconds later by the thunder of some game platform updates:

• Looking at GDCo Pro's estimates of 'trending' unreleased Steam games, July 27th-Aug 3rd (above), planeslop standout Dear Passengers (#1) is now over 2 million wishlists, and multiple hot games releasing this week also make the Top 10, inc. Beast Of Reincarnation (#2), Big Walk (#6), Iron Nest (#9), and Marvel Tokon (#10).

• Also trending: much-discussed autobattler roguelike Guildrun (#5), and 'WWII from the Chinese perspective' FPS (!) The Defiant (#6). Brand new? Slick (& AI?) looking Gunfire Reborn-a-like co-op roguelite shooter Guns & Dragons (#9), with last week's horde survivor FPS Guns 'N Goblins (#7) also hanging in there.

• Info on emulated Xbox 360 games coming to PC has surfaced via a dev document - The Verge explains: “With [Xbox] 360 games developers… will have control over things like a game’s price and if it’s available on Game Pass.” It’s due 2027-2028 for Project Helix & PC, but more OG Xbox games on PC may hit by October 2026, after “the initial program announced in July included just four games.”

• Roblox’s results late last week weren’t stellar for the platform, as “daily active users (DAUs) fell 7% sequentially to 123 million in the second quarter”, and SeekingAlpha notes “decelerating monetization [growth and]… a decision to pull FY26 guidance, unleashing a flurry of [analyst] downgrades.” (Kid safety-related barriers are part of it, as well as viral game hangover from 2025 - here’s the full .PDF with more deets.)

• When we covered co-op sandbox hit Project Zomboid again in June, we ‘warned’ that the full launch of the much-delayed Build42 upgrade would prob. send interest through the roof. And indeed it has, with Steam CCU quadrupling after its July 29th debut, and an all-time high of 121k CCU set last weekend. Score!

• Steamworks text change alert of the week - when you prep graphical assets for your Steam publisher/franchise sale pop-up message, Valve doesn’t want you to put discounts directly on the image: “Please DO NOT include messaging like “Up to XX% off”. Steam will automatically show that message on the store.”

• A leak via a soccer game YouTuber suggests that EA Sports FC 26 had 9.8 million daily active users across PC/console recently. (GDCo Pro estimates agree on ~10m DAU, btw - the game’s #3 behind only Fortnite & Roblox across Steam, PS & Xbox, with >75% of the DAU on PS4/PS5 & only ~5% on Steam. Impressive!)

• More Xbox things: some of the regional Xbox hardware price increases are hefty, it turns out, with the UK’s Series X digital going for £620 (previously £450, +38%, vs. +25% in the U.S.); post-earnings, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella says they are “making the necessary decisions… to reset the [Xbox] business for long-term growth.”

• A new interview with Nintendo’s Shigeru Miyamoto has him saying: “I was happy that the Switch lasted for 8 to 9 years. I think that customers are no longer just looking for specs. I think the ideal is that ‘if you buy the software, you can play it on the device you have at home.’” (In other words: more horsepower ain’t the main thing, chief.)

• Here’s another micro-indie success on Reddit: “2 person [short incremental game], launched with 61k+ WL, game made in 7 months, 7 years of making games, Bills Must Be Paid is our first successful game, 100k+ copies sold in less than 72h.” Notably, the devs are ex-hypercasual mobile and web casual (CrazyGames, etc) - so they ‘get’ hook…

• PlayStation things: Sony says it’s been talking to retailers about its disc-free future, suggests U.S. retailers may still sell codes in a box; it also reiterated it has secured enough PS5 memory chip supply ​for the current financial year: “There is no change to our plan for ​hardware profitability for FY26 to remain similar to FY25.”

• This Naavik analysis of SensorTower H1 2026 mobile game trends is v.useful for context, noting - absent intel on off-platform (DTC) $ - “Downloads: -13% YoY, Android-driven… Revenue: -2% YoY, but not a healthy market”, and: “The market has become increasingly dependent on an aging base of long-standing incumbents.”

Creators.gg: free creator programs for studios

FirstLook just launched Creators.gg, the first free creator program tool for studios. List your program with no subscription, no per-seat fees and no request caps. Onboard creators and distribute keys at $0, paying only when you fund a paid campaign or add additional creator functionality.

You can setup a campaign in under 10 minutes, reaching 10,000+ creators. Get keys in their hands the same day. We already power the Esports World Cup’s $2M creator program,

Creator relationships are one of the most underrated growth channels in games. List your program free at creators.gg.

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

It’s back! It’s GameDiscoverCo’s top new Steam (& console) games of the month and more, powered by our Pro data - here’s June, May, April, March, Feb and Jan’s, if you missed ‘em in 2026 so far. This time out, July’s been ‘fine’ for new releases:

• The Assassin’s Creed Black Flag remaster proved we all love pirates: those scallywags, we’re not fed up with them! With >1 million units on the platform inc. off-Steam keys, plus at >1.4m on PlayStation & >650k on Xbox, this competent $60/$70 remaster of a fun 2013 original has been a palpable (>$200m gross) hit.

• Shift At Midnight was the inexpensive viral hit of the month: topping out at 37k CCU on Steam, and with great staying power, this $10 co-optional mashup of first-person job sim with creepy ‘bad customer’-identifier (a la Papers Please & Quarantine Zone) is also close to 1m sold during July on Steam.

• A vast diversity of games sold 200-300k for the month: games spanning extraction Souls-like Mistfall Hunter ($25) - which has serious CCU staying power - to sim game eSports Manager 2026 ($20), first-person tornado survival sim Funnel Runners ($15) & adorable shipping sim Cat Mail Co. ($15) topped 200k.

One trend we definitely seem to be seeing here is clustering of cheaper or mid-price games around breakout microgenres. (First-person sim is the obvious example this month, but roguelike twin-stick shooter Pathogenic ($10) also hit it out the park.)

If we look at the Top 10 new Steam releases by revenue for July (not including off-Steam key sales), you’ll see Assassin’s Creed way in front, and the more expensive hits crowding to the front: Halo: Campaign Evolved is #2 in this list with >$10m gross, tho with Mixed Steam reviews, with Master Chief Collection preferred by some.

Also popping up with a ‘just fine’ reception is Bandai Namco’s $70 action JRPG Echoes Of Aincrad (which has grossed >$20m, almost half of it on Steam.) And $30 ‘gacha RPG without the gacha’ DragonSword: Awakening is doing nicely & nearly at $10m PC gross, with strong continued CCU for a clever ‘alt Genshin’ angle.

Next, moving past new games on Steam and checking on all-game revenue, Valve has the top two, with its long-running MOBA Dota 2 (>$70m) joining Counter-Strike 2 atop the charts. (With the Assassin’s Creed remaster making it to #3.)

Immediately after them, Palworld’s 1.0 release catapulted it up the charts, with >$55m revenue and >3m units in July alone - we now have it at >20m units sold on Steam alone, and way over 30m players, cross-platform. Also notable: F2P-ers Apex Legends, PUBG, and Marvel Rivals all had good months. And Meccha Chameleon added $23m and ~5m copies, mainly early in July, to hit 14.5m units and $65m gross.

Since you liked it last month, we’ll briefly feature ‘all Steam games, #11-#30 by revenue’ again. It mainly shows chunky F2P games like Warframe and Wuthering Waves can make >$10m monthly, as well as now-discounted evergreens like Baldur’s Gate 3.

Finishing off this section by looking at PlayStation and Xbox top-sellers around new releases, there’s a bit of an eye-opener on the PlayStation side of things:

There wasn’t a ton of noise in our ‘filter bubbles’ about the Call Of Duty Black Ops 1 & 2 remasters for PS4 and PS5. But for core CoD fans, it was a huge deal. (Both were originally PS3 games, and got v.competent updates from Iron Galaxy at a $40 price point - with the price point dropping to only $20 if you have PlayStation Plus.)

We see online rumors that the two ports already sold >7m units combined as of July 28th, and we have them up at 11m (Black Ops II) and 3.8m (Black Ops) for the month. Too high? Possibly, but unlocking PS4 (& PS5) shooter OGs to replay BlOps games for $20 has been a huge win for both Activision and PlayStation.

Anyhow, EA Sports College Football 27 (at 1.4m on PlayStation and 1.3m on Xbox) was the other hefty new console seller of July, alongside the Black Flag remaster. And we have Halo: Campaign Evolved at a reasonable ~250k on PlayStation, with ~2m Xbox players in total, and ~250k of those paying $ outside of GP. Makes sense…

Oh, and scanning Switch Western eShop new releases for July briefly, first party Nintendo games dominate as per usual: Splatoon Raiders hit >350k eShop players & Rhythm Heaven Groove >300k. But there’s a biggish third-party hit: vampire farming sim (!) Moonlight Peaks neared 200k, and sold similarly well on Steam, a great result. (Not much else topped 50k in its debut month, a predictably ‘meh’ result…)

Finally, you may recall GameDiscoverCo Pro now analyzes Twitch monthly for the most popular games. And we’re contractually obliged* to show you the Top 20 across all titles (above), which shows how many of the OGs are still hot - tho Palworld surged due to 1.0, and Black Flag Resynced acrually made it into the Top 20. (*Not really!)

But the Top 20 most-watched new games on Twitch in July is way more interesting, and always a view that shows us some unexpected games:

The surprise for us in here is ‘darkweb’ hacking game Welcome To The Game III (#2), which had 4.3m hours watched from folks like MOONMOON and xQC, and sold ~30k units to date. Otherwise, we’d expect great numbers from Black Flag Resynced (#1) and Shift At Midnight (#3), and ineed we got them….

There’s a few other titles in here that are underdiscussed, though: always interesting to see Switch 2 exclusives do well (that’s Rhythm Heaven Groove & Splatoon Raiders, at #8 and #10.) And Photomaly (#11, 1.15m hours, 25k units sold) is “a PSX-style horror game where you manage a photo studio” - yep, looks horrifically streamer-appropriate!

GameDiscoverCo Show: compulsion loops… good?

Finally for this week, The GameDiscover Show is returns with myself (Simon) and Post Games’ Chris Plante talking about game discovery goodness - sub to the podcast via Apple Music, Spotify & elsewhere (audio), with a video version on YouTube (above).

This time out, we talk about whether your target PC/console device for dev should always be the PC, chat about vertical video taking over the Internet, the rise of 'compulsion loops' in games, and analyze new Steam demo hit Guildrun. 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.]

Welcome to the end of the week. And as the weekend happily looms, we’re back to announce an awesome milestone - 45,000 subscribers to the GameDiscoverCo newsletter. (Yes, we know 50k would be hotter - don’t fret, we’ll be there shortly…)

Before we start, shout-out to the Video Game History Foundation for the launch of its amazing ‘history of E3’ collection, inc. a detailed kick-off video, a bunch of vintage E3 show-floor footage, and even a podcast w/E3 OGs Doug Lowenstein & Carolyn Rauch.

[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: Xbox’s megatrends graph

Let’s go, we’ve got graphs and text and links on game platforms & discovery, and we’re jamming it all out for you now:

• Microsoft’s quarterly results are out, and as fanalyst John Welfare graphs (above), long-term Xbox trends aren’t stellar. He estimates: “Content & Services: ~$4.75b (-10% YoY); Hardware: ~$234m (-13% YoY).” Xbox rev. has been in decline for 4 straight quarters & annual revenue is back down to FY 2024 levels.

• Asha Sharma did have public comments, noting “‘over 200 million new players came to Xbox and our games’ in FY2026, but that the ‘business did not grow with our audience’ as a result”, promising a return to growth in FY2027. The immediate future, per CFO Amy Hood, is for Q1 non-hardware $ to decline “in the mid-single digits” YoY. (Ah, and an internal message from Sharma to Xbox has longer-term growth plans.)

• For our ‘trending Steam demos’ analysis using GDCo Pro this week, we thought we'd sort only by demos released in the last two weeks. Top demos: Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls (#1, 16k CCU) & Guildrun (#2, 14k CCU). Also hot: Low-Budget Repairs (#3, 2,500 CCU) & RTS Sanctuary: Shattered Sun (#4, 1,200 CCU).

• PlayStation’s results also arrived: PS5 sales edged up to 95.3m, up 1.6m for the quarter (flat QoQ, but down 36% YoY), with 125m active PSN users, up 2m YoY. Revenue was flat YoY, and profit was up 37% due to a weaker yen & U.S. tariff refunds. Also: Sony CFO Lin Tao also said that they are “cautiously” moving forward on physical game phase-out, & haven’t seen $ impact.

• Notable Steam documentation edit of the week? Changing the language from “First discounts, no matter how old the title, are not eligible for Daily Deal” to “First discounts tend not to be eligible for Daily Deals due to lack of performance data.” (But the next line is still ‘don’t submit until after your first discount’.)

• Microlinks: a new Steam client beta has Remote Play additions: HDR streaming to Steam Deck OLED and better-quality AV1 codec for Deck in general; GOG confirm they’re working towards shipping GOG Galaxy on Linux; PS+ Monthly games for August are Dying Light 2 Stay Human, Big Walk & Signalis.

• VR things: Meta’s push for VR games is fading, and Reality Labs lost $4.6b in Q2 on $431m in revenue ($ up 16% YoY - likely AR glasses-led!) And the Steam Frame just got FCC-approved. We’re seeing speculation the launch could be as soon as Monday, given ‘Frame-only on Steam’ games like Pavlov Shack are now popping up.

• Some say hit PC game ‘compulsion loops’ are getting a bit much, like Mathew Kumar, who wrote about Vampire Survivors: “It’s getting disturbingly transparent to see the slot machine and scratch card[-ish gameplay].. ‘come join us in the machine zone. [it] doesn’t even need you to spend all your money. Your time is good enough for us, here.’”

• Here’s Jason Della Rocca (filtered through Chirag Vadhia) on the partial pivot to project funding from $ sources in games: “A studio that has done its own validation already has its players, and what it is missing is the money to finish the game, which is all the funds provide, along with none of what it no longer needs.”

• Cheekiest ‘advertise to Steam devs’ hack we’d forgotten about? Linking to each Steam game every 2-3 days with a relevant URL to show your company’s name/info in their game’s UTM referrer screen in Steam’s back end? (Very clever, Adzap and Newzoo - but pleease nobody else do it.)

• Roguelike auto-battler defense game Slotbound, which has hit 50k wishlists & 2,900 peak demo CCU, is one of the first popular solo ‘overtly AI-assembled’ Steam games we’ve seen with the dev explicitly talking about it. (AI code use, obv. but also using Nano Banana for low-res pixel art - tho some is asset-store bought.)

• Microlinks, Pt.2: Footprints’ latest ‘trad media’ mentions are headed by Halo: Campaign Evolved & EA Sports FC 27; how Backrooms-ish ‘online fandom’ is rewriting the IP playbook; Xbox has added Ubisoft titles like Assassin’s Creed Valhalla to the ‘Xbox on PC’ store (tho you also need Ubisoft Connect.)

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How do player demographics change at 50 hours?

Since GameDiscoverCo launched its Steam Fan Snapshot data in April, we’ve been mining it and related surveys for ‘real’ Steam player data. And in chatting to a friend of GDCo (hi Eric!) about the 16,000+ player data points (tied to their Steam public profile, with their permission), he pointed out multiple additional analyses we could do.

Firstly, let’s remind you all of the baseline. Here’s a question we asked about how people think they find out about games - with an all-respondents answer (interesting in itself), followed by per-game answers for extraction hit ARC Raiders (above), RPG breakout Clair Obscur, and (for a counter-example) friendslop smash R.E.P.O.:

We have data on high hundreds to low thousands of players for each, and you can see interesting things, for example:

• The average age of player is somewhat higher for Clair Obscur (31), and significantly lower for R.E.P.O. (25). (Our averages generally span 25 to 35.)

• Who finds games via short-form video? 37.5% of the survey, but only 34.2% of Clair Obscur players, 39.4% for ARC Raiders, and. a whopping 50.9% for R.E.P.O.

• Conversely: 27.9% of people use trad media websites like PC Gamer to find new games, but a bigger 33.3% of ARC Raiders players, vs. a below-average 27.5% of R.E.P.O players.

Something we’ve found is that it’s worth comparing multiple games. Why? For recent hit releases, those title’s players will be paying more attention than our average respondent anyhow. So you want more comparison points. (If you see what we mean?)

Anyhow, that’s the base data. And to that, we’ve added two things - first, a ‘relative’ chart compared to the ‘all respondents’ view. This lets you quickly see, for example, that gender-wise, ARC Raiders skews male vs. our default sample:

But the neatest new view (yes, available to GameDiscoverCo Pro subs now) is one that allows you to see changes in survey response for longer playtimes on specific games. As a baseline, here’s the other devices that ARC Raiders players on Steam - in blue - say they use to play games for at least one hour per month:

What we’d glean from this: ARC Raiders players are def fans of Steam Deck (that’s a ~50% over-index on our default result for this cohort!), and are above-average players in general on console. (Although less committed to playing mobile games.)

Now let’s look at how the chart for ‘devices used for games’ for ARC Raiders changes by playtime, specifically for the three current-gen consoles:

Interesting. As you can see, high playtimes for ARC Raiders on Steam are correlated with reduced monthly playtime on consoles - particularly Switch (26.9% for all owners, 16.7% for >50 hour players!) but also PlayStation (23.8% for all owners, 16.7% for >50 hour players.)

We presume that’s related to the hardest-core player ‘maining’ the game, and spending less time sampling games across multiple devices. There are some other, subtler changes we spotted in discovery methods:

Looks like as playtime goes up, more players are likely to find games via livestreaming (40.6% at >30 minutes played, 44.5% at >50 hours), while text-based social media like Twitter/Bluesky comes down from 38.2% (>1 hour played) to 33% (>50 hours played.)

Now, let’s continue by taking a look at some of this data from Clair Obscur, starting with how player age changes with longer playtimes:

It’s relatively subtle, but looks like there’s an increase in 25-34 year olds playing the game for long periods (40.3% at >1 hour, 45.8% at >50 hours), and corresponding decreases for 35-44 year olds (25.5% for owners, 22.4% at >50 hours.) 18-24 year olds also increase with more playtime (from 25.5% for owners to 30.7% at >15 hours.)

You really have to jam on the game to play it for >50 hours, since the main story is more like 25-30 hours long. But you get the general idea: younger folks with less family obligations are likely those really playing these games for tens of hours…

Since Clair Obscur is a narrative game itself, we thought it’d be neat to see players’ other activities besides, you know, playing video games. Here’s the relative view:

Again, we can see an underperformance from this slightly older audience on watching short-form videos (-10.1%), but some hefty overperformances on reading books and manga (+21%) and listening to podcasts (+44%).

But look what happens with longer playtime: the percentage of weekly movie-watchers goes down (from 48.4% to 40.1%), and book-readers similarly (from 26.1% to 21.2%). (This may be tied to younger age groups, who do these things less, playing for longer, right?)

So: what this GDCo data is telling us - we think - is that info consumption shifts significantly with age and their generational peers. And understanding the potential age & media habits of your players may significantly change where you target them.

Steam debuts this week: Mistfall Hunter, Halo hit…

OK, let’s finish up by looking at the top debuts of the week (above), according to data from GameDiscoverCo’s voluminous Pro/Plus tool, available to our paid individual or company subs. Let’s examine… while trying not to clip over Gmail limits, yiikes!

Read more

Deepest, darkest summer is upon us, as we move away from data-heavy newsletters (lots and lots of graphs in the last couple) on to a game profile - of new Steam demo breakout Guildrun. Why? How? We talk to the devs, who are handily transparent…

Before we start, very important news: this wholesome Automaton Media story about the developer of Japanese butt-controlled fighting game Ketsu Battler collab-ing with the popular Granblue franchise mainly grabbed our attention because.. there’s a butt-controlled fighting game? (Yes there is, you tuck a Switch controller into your pants.)

[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: have you got Ringwyrm?

Let’s start out this week with a soupcon of discovery & platform news, which goes as follows:

• GDCO Pro's estimates of 'trending' unreleased Steam games by 'new wishlists in the last 7 days' sees ‘friendslop on a plane’ standout Dear Passengers at #1 again, followed by the shortly to be featured Guildrun, with the just exiting Advance Access today Halo: Campaign Evolved at #3.

• Surprise buzz subject Ringwyrm (#4) is a solo indie doing the 'lo-fi immersive 3D action horror' thing, rather well. The rest of the Top 10 is either shortly-to-release games with hype (Beast Of Reincarnation, Mistfall Hunter, Forsaken Realms and Machine Party) or just-announced franchise updates (hi, EA Sports FC 27!)

• We haven’t seen many Steam Workshop security issues, but Meccha Chameleon had multiple maps that try to launch command prompts and therefore malware, “installing a Remote Access Trojan (RAT) on affected systems.” The Meccha Chameleon devs have patched it, but not before the exploit took over one of their own computers and led to their Discord server getting wiped. (Ugh, bad actors.)

• Over at LinkedIn, I discussed Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls, which is getting a lot of complaints over performance for its PC open beta: “There's actually an argument to be made that all development should be PC-first at this stage, given the amount of issues that crop up with the crazy diversity of hardware out there for PC game players.”

• Ah, a success story: “We recently started posting about our upcoming game, Sandcastle, on Instagram Reels and TikTok and got 50,000 wishlists in the first week (165,000 total now!).” Turns out a relaxing ‘beach sandcastle’-making game with realistic water effects is complete catnip for short-form video, with 236k likes (!) on Instagram.

• In ‘vestigial limb’ stylee, we spotted some publishers like Capcom and Konami doing their ‘regular’ sales on their publisher page directly. (Reminder: “Starting July 9, 2026 at 10am Pacific, Steam will no longer be allowing “adhoc” Developer, Franchise, or Publisher sale pages.”) But without banners on game pages, they’re a bit useless?

• Effect on PC shipments of component shortages? Per PC Gamer: “New research from Counterpoint corroborates that the PC market has finally been impacted by the memory crisis.... In the second quarter this year there were 4% fewer global PC shipments than the same time last year. This backs up what the IDC reported earlier this month.”

• Are you paying enough attention to video/vertical video? Kirill Oreshkin reminds us: “The main source of [Steam game] traffic is influencers… for strategy games, tactics & roguelikes - long-form influencers first. For co-op & viral games - short-form influencers first.” Related: plz read The Verge on how vertical video has won the Internet.

• Xbox things: there was an intermittent Xbox Live outage from late Sunday into Monday which prevented some players from booting games; ex-Xbox staffers, inc. Mike Brown (former creative director for Forza Horizon 5) have been ???-ing about Game Pass: “I think the reality is not enough people have subscribed to it at the prices they needed to pay in order to make that business viable.”

• Really enjoyed this piece by Qi Lu on why ‘Steam players want..’ is no longer a good way to look at the market: “The shift from chart-based, editorially-curated discovery toward a tag- and behavior-driven Discovery Queue, combined with Steam Deck's session-based usage pattern and Next Fest's now-continuous demo pipeline, means the platform increasingly routes different audiences to different corners of itself.”

• The super-popular Game Maker’s Toolkit Jam has engine news on its 2026 iteration: “Well, it finally happened! After 9 years of Unity dominance, Godot was the most used game engine for submissions: 🤖 Godot - 47%; 🎮 Unity - 34%; 🛠️GameMaker - 5%; 🚀 Unreal Engine - 3%; ✨ Other - 11%.” (Here’s the last 4 years.)

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How Guildrun genre-mashed its way to ~300k demo players in 10 days

When talking to the devs of PvE autobattler roguelike Guildrun, which revealed with a Steam demo on July 15th, we figured: ah, it’s a bit early to feature. But then we looked again: it’s #1 in our ‘Steam unreleased demos’ chart with 14,000 CCU, and #59 (!) on GDCo’s all-game Twitch charts, with 560k hours watched in the last week.

So, we reconsidered, and have been chatting to Leyline’s Jonathan Hager, who has 6 people working full-time on the game (partly funded from German regional & national game funds) alongside the two founders, freelancers & key PR/outreach folks. And he provided this look at Steam demo stats, as of July 27th:

For a demo, Guildrun getting over 275,000 players so swiftly (hitting 300k shortly) is impressive, as is 3 hours 55 minutes median playtime in just ~10 days, with 25% of players already over 10 hours.

And this demo success - alongside big longform influencer interest - has led to some major wishlist wins for the game, which (as we accurately predicted above) already hit ~230k Steam wishlists as of yesterday. Here’s the breakdown:

The U.S. being #1 is unsurprising, but a couple of notes about this country split from Jonathan: “We expected Germany to do well… we know roguelike autobattlers do well here. Japan was very unexpected, especially because the game is not localized into Japanese yet. But… the art style resonated very well there, and articles [and social media] did great.”

OK, so people really, really like this game. But why do they? Let’s list the reasons:

• Guildrun is an expert roguelike spin on PvE autobattlers: We’d recommend looking at Northernlion’s first (sponsored) video on the game to grok the gameplay. At its base, it’s a PvE take on a game we don’t discuss much (partly because it’s not on Steam!) - Riot’s PC/mobile PvP-er Team Fight Tactics.

• The UI, characters, and design compete with Riot & Blizzard levels: this game has great-looking (complex, but readable) UI & really nice character art. And the lead designer is an actual ex-Blizzard & Riot analyst/designer with a lot of Hearthstone/’meta’ knowledge - if he wrote for Icy Veins, he knows wassup.

• The clever bit is the grafting of roguelike hook into autobattler ease: there’s a low initial skill level to play this game - you pick characters, upgrades, player positions, and hit ‘fight’. But the meta is crazy deep. Jonathan told us: “Combining autochess gameplay with roguelikes is something not that many games have explored.”

So the end result, per Jonathan: “The roguelike formula and the TFT-autochess loop felt like a natural fit, and like something we’d want to play ourselves: run-based structure, randomized rewards, finding synergies and adapting to each run.” And we all know how the human brain works - we all just love randomized build meta. (Ahem, Balatro.)

So it’s interesting - I didn’t see this type of game coming. But in hindsight, why wouldn’t skilled indies pull Riot & Blizzard-ish levels of complexity & polish into the roguelike autobattler space? And by removing PvP, you’re nulling out all kinds of a) technical complexity b) CCU scaling issues c) annoying opposing player behavior…

I’ll also note that this type of ‘classic’ fantasy art presentation is relatively rare (for whatever reason) in the roguelike or autobattler space. (Maybe because it requires something just beyond ‘micro-indie’ to create, resource-wise?) So - at least for me - the vibes for Guildrun feel fairly novel…

But let’s also talk about practical execution. What did the team do right on the rollout that made people fall in love with Guildrun? Here’s some notable wins:

• Early iteration of the core design loops for the demo, months ago: Jonathan noted “we started building a small community of friends, family and colleagues in December”, and targeted players, “speaking to players on Reddit… looking for TFT threads of people looking for a PvE experience and posted in roguelike subreddits.”

• Super-fast iteration of builds and proper ‘meta’ analysis: starting with 250 people in the Discord, and expanding with Reddit & ads, “from January, we started updating the [playable beta] at least once every week”, even analyzing winrates and pickrates weekly & tuning them. So: polish for months, with 3k community at demo launch…

• Good organic influencer outreach to strong niches: one big advantage with going for a ‘deep genre’ pick? Jonathan & team could reach out to roguelike and autobattler specialist influencers for organic pickup, which was very strong. (They also paid for some streamers, but note “organic traffic and creator coverage completely outpaced that floor”, and some paid influencers did organic follow-ups.)

One interesting thing about this game - in general, shortform video like Instagram Reels & TikTok was a not a big driver of interest for Guildrun. (We’re not surprised, because shortform wins are generally around more casual, high-concept games. So see: shortform isn’t always a panacea…)

One final thing of note: the ‘reveal the game and launch the demo same day’ is still relatively rare for PC games. Jonathan tells us they did so “because we wanted to market the game around the demo and concentrate traffic as much as possible.” And heck, it’s working for Guildrun. So maybe this is an under-used tactic?

But obviously, this requires you to have a super-polished demo ready at the point you announce the game, and that can’t be two months away from release. (Why? Because you won’t have time to scale wishlists and organic visibility.) Luckily, Guildrun is due out “in the first half of 2027”, so there’s still plenty of time to grow interest…

GameDiscoverCo Show: review meta, Gamescom…

We’re back again - The GameDiscover Show has returned, with myself (Simon) and Post Games’ Chris Plante jamming on trends: tell your friends & sub to the podcast via Apple Music, Spotify & elsewhere (audio), with a video version on YouTube (above).

This time out, we’re covering the deprofessionalization (?) of gaming, Gamescom 2026 (and why Gamescom and TGS’ attendee numbers have a ‘secret’), Steam’s changes to wishlist sorting & gifting, and GDCo’s research into what Steam fans think of reviews.

Also in there: our game recommendations for the week, a ‘surprise’ question, and more - come and check it out. 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.]

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

Read more

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…

Read more

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!

Read more

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 $.

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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.]