Returned, we have, for more video game discovery news, we have. (We hope you had a nice weekend, wherever you were.) And it turns out there’s plenty of things to discuss, yet again, including a lead story on a cozy title that’s fared pretty well on Steam.

Before we start, did you see the rare prototype ROM for Nintendo’s Punch-Out!! for the NES, as analyzed by the Video Game History Foundation? Some of the boxer names in this proto that never made it into the home version include Vodka Drunkenski (replaced by Soda Popinski in the NES version!), and, uhhh, Pizza Pasta?

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

Game discovery news: Triple I floods the charts..

Let’s check out the latest game discovery & platform news, starting with a look at the hottest unreleased Steam games:

• As we noted in GDCo’s latest ‘trending unreleased Steam games’ by 7-day wishlists chart (above), the Triple I Initiative showcase made for a busy time: buoyed by a giveaway on the original, Graveyard Keeper 2 is at #1, shortly followed by Don't Starve Elsewhere (#2), continuing Klei's hit spooky survival series.

• Also in Triple I: creepy farmer Crop (#4), AI-themed visual novel Prove You’re Human (#6) & macabre party game Machine Party (#7) - it’s 2026, we all like dark content now? Also: puppet-y co-slop Too Deep To Quit (#8) and creature collector Temtem: Pioneers (#9) Unrelated: also check Trees Hate You (#14) for a giggle.

• The Verge spotted this re: Game Pass: “In an internal memo to Xbox employees, [Xbox boss Asha] Sharma admits that ‘Game Pass has become too expensive for players’ and that Microsoft needs ‘a better value equation’.” Timed to rumors over Call Of Duty exiting Game Pass and all-’first party’ GP, we’re wondering what’s next.

• The Galaxies Spring Showcase is happening April 16th, with co-streaming bringing good reach to the streaming showcase founded by an ex-Twitch exec. IGN notes that “announcements and updates on over 50 games” are due, inc. Atomic Heart DLC and a new look at Supermassive’s Directive 8020.

• Ars Technica discusses the ‘SteamGPT’ leak from Valve, with a theory (after looking at source files!) that the company “may be looking to use AI tools to streamline internal evaluations of in-game incidents and sift through potentially suspicious [Steam] accounts.”

• Fresh from frustrating Valve with its ratings roll-out, the Indonesian game ratings board has also been leaking video/data: “A security flaw with the Indonesian Game Rating System (IGRS) had left gameplay footage exposed for many unreleased games”, including the upcoming James Bond game and Echoes of Aincrad.

• Despite I (Simon) not jibing with podcasts - one reason why the GDCo Podcast lasted a grand total of 4 episodes (lol), we consistently hear great things about the Gamecraft podcast with Mitch Lasky & Blake Robbins. And their new Season 4 ‘trends & predictions’ kickoff episode is a great place to start?

• Some new PlayStation Store Beta UI screenshots have revealed “a new-look layout for the storefront, complete with large Netflix-style tiles and a bunch of different filtering tags. You can see from the Starfield entry, for example, that the game is labelled as ‘Open World’, ‘Story Rich’, and ‘Cinematic’.” (Mm, new taxonomies!)

• Looks like Roblox has announced its new Plus subscription, with the $5/month sub giving discounts, private servers, and no-fee Robux transfers. (It’s an alt. for Roblox Premium, which is solely a Robux-based sub. Note the upsell: “soon after launch, we will offer multiple optional bundles—Plus 500, Plus 1000, and Plus 2000.” )

• This list of last week’s Japanese (and LTD!) console sales is fascinating: “Switch 2: 59,543 (5,011,059); PS5 Digital Edition: 12,141 (1,248,515); Switch OLED: 7,468 (9,526,329); Switch Lite: 4,807 (6,903,964); Switch: 4,067 (20,271,045); PS5 Pro: 840 (341,548); PS5: 558 (5,910,474); Xbox Series X: 525 (325,952)… Xbox Series S: 129 (341,622).” (Switch dominance, less recent PS5 gray market sales into China?)

• ‘PvP too toxic’ news: Dune: Awakening is “finally making Deep Desert and shipwreck PvP fully optional”, saying “over 80% of our lifetime players [are] exclusively engaging with PvE”; this interview with the devs of Windrose notes the game renamed and pivoted from PvP to PvE; stealth game Thick as Thieves also just dropped PvP.

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How Hozy sold 100k copies on Steam in 4 days…

If you didn’t spot it, Come On Studio & Tinybuild’s ‘clean, restore, arrange’ roombuilder Hozy ($15) has been a decent-sized hit, confirming 100k sold on Steam in 4 days, as the publisher tells us it launched with 500k outstanding Steam wishlists, and “has now sold over 175k copies.” (We imagine a Switch version could do well, too!)

Anyhow, we caught up with Tinybuild’s Vladimir Tolmachev & Vera Lubbers, who were kind enough to give us a whole bunch of insight into the game’s pre-release planning. Here’s some of the things we found most interesting:

• Hozy had decent organic wishlists from the very start: Tinybuild tells us that after the game’s announce trailer in May 2025, “the game quickly gained 24k wishlists, followed by a steady pace of around 250–270 wishlists per day.” We think the striking isometric visuals and clear ‘tidying x room design’ combo were key to this.

• The game announced a playtest from Day 1, helping hype: this is pretty notable - a playtest was announced on announce in May, even though Tinybuild only signed the game in late February. There were also constant tweaks & updates (inc. Halloween & Xmas-themed level redecoration!) due to player/influencer feedback.

• There was a big step-up in August due to a co-ordinated campaign: the game was in a Wholesome Games showcase & the Tiny Teams Steam sale, also updated the playtest version, and added paid shortform video campaigns around then too, targeting the majority female audience Tinybuild believed were the target.

You can see the first step-up in wishlist velocity from the following Steam graph - look how it takes off later in August 2025:

The Tinybuild duo also gave us links to some of the key shortform videos that helped this to happen. Firstly, here’s a paid shortform inclusion (via direct sponsorship):

But Tinybuild notes: “the results of the paid placements - combined with the updated playtest - encouraged creators to start making content organically.” Here’s one of those - which really shows off the great cleaning/renovating effects in the game:

We’ll be talking more about shortform video later in the week, but Tolmachev & Lubbers had two notable conclusions from marketing this shortform-friendly title:

• Shortform content takes longer to start driving wishlists, because “it depends less on subscriber bases and more on platform algorithms. That means it takes time for content to be pushed to its full potential audience.”

• A single level is enough to make a great TikTok or Instagram Reel: “Creators do not need [many minutes or hours] of new content in a build to show something fresh to their audience, unlike YouTube or Twitch.”

Anyhow, from there, the 8-person dev team at Come On Studio did a great job of finishing the game while providing constant playtest updates, with monthly (!) paid/organic campaigns ft. new content every time. (That’s not easy.)

Following the August inflection point, the game gained 1.3k average daily wishlists (whoa!) all the way up to its big public demo showcase in Feb 2026’s Next Fest, where it added 74k wishlists and then kept increased momentum until launch:

The post-launch result? 175k LTD units & 81% Positive reviews, with the U.S. (27.3% of revenue, 20.3% of units), Germany (12.9% revenue, 9.2% units) and China (6.5% revenue, 12% units) the Top 3 countries by revenue, and a pretty diverse geographical split beyond that.

Overall: the tactile-looking gameplay & relaxed, gameplay-lite arranging ‘flow’ made Hozy visually irresistable to fans of games like Unpacking. The game’s not perfect - it’s a tad short (3-4 hours) right now, unless you want to play in freeform modes. But that’s what post-launch patches and DLC are for, right? Congrats to all involved…

Why the ‘production point’ matters for all devs…

We’ve been enjoying Thomas Stewart’s YouTube channel, including neat things like an interview with the dev of A Game About Feeding A Black Hole. So when we saw him recommend an eBook (above video), Production Point from popular YouTube tutorialist Benjamin ‘Heartbeast’ Anderson (also physically available), we took notice.

Disclaimer: Anderson’s eBook was originally intended for indie/solo devs starting out. But it talks intelligently re: something that’s becoming more important: playable prototypes & iteration with small teams, and when/how to go on and make a full game.

Here’s an extract from Production Point’s intro on the subject. (Benjamin also produced a Substack post back in 2022 which details some of his ideas, btw):

“After looking back on my own experience and researching other developers, I was forced to acknowledge that committing too early leads to wasted money, time, and effort. This led to the realization that:

Effort ≠ Progress

Knowing exactly when to commit is paramount to making progress and finishing a game. The developers who can identify the correct point at which to commit are the ones who finish games… For these developers:

Effort = Progress

When I committed to [a previous title of his] Demonlocke, it was at the potential point. [He says earlier in the intro: ‘The potential I saw in the game had enamored me’.] Unfortunately, this is when most developers commit to their idea, and it’s a grave mistake.

Experienced developers know to avoid the potential point. Instead, they commit to their projects at what I call the production point. At this point, all the major uncertainties of a project have been addressed. These developers can safely commit to the idea and know that their efforts will lead to immediate progress toward a finished game.”

Given there are all kinds of game jams (with public voting) and other arenas to bounce off your ideas and ‘game hooks’, deeper thinking re: ‘when and how to move forward to complete games efficiently’ is well worth sampling.

Anyhow, that’s why we arranged with Benjamin Anderson to add ‘Production Point’ to GDCo’s eBooks section for all GameDiscoverCo Pro & Plus paid subscribers. We now have 10 titles in this section ‘free’ for company/solo subscribers, inc. Derek Yu’s book on the making of Spelunky, Kim Nordström’s biz book Up Down Up, and lots more…

Also, yep, we’re kinda behind on making new GameDiscoverCo first-party eBooks, so there may be a couple more ‘best ofs’ sidling into that page soon… 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.]

And we’re back in the room. This time, we decided to focus on a particular Chinese Steam-related mobile app because, believe it or not, it’s one of the services we get the most questions about. (We also touch on the Chinese PC game ecosystem in general…)

Before we start, did you know that the Emoji Standard and Research Working Group are now accepting new emoji submissions? As Jennifer Daniel suggests: “Aim for semantic density…. The Pig Face 🐷 is a masterclass in utility. It’s a literal animal, a symbol for hunger, a nod to the Lunar New Year, or a cheeky warning that the cops are nearby.”

[FREE DEMO OF GDCo PRO? You too can get a gratis demo of our GameDiscoverCo Pro company-wide ‘Steam deep dive’ & console data by contacting us today - >90 orgs have it. Or, signing up to GDCo Plus gets the rest of this newsletter and Discord access, plus more.]

Game discovery news: Indonesia’s (bad) ratings…

So, let’s take a look at intriguing bits of news that popped up since Tuesday, as follows:

• Our buddies at ICO’s Footprints.gg put out their ‘trad media’ coverage charts for last week (above), and Crimson Desert is still getting a ton of interest, thanks to guides & buzz. Also new? Starfield charts, thanks to an update and a PS5 version, Marathon’s patches get interest, and Tomb Raider (remasters, movie) adds articles.

• Niko Partners has an update on Steam’s mandatory Indonesian age ratings, which rolled out & then, uhh, un-rolled out again: “Following confusion from developers and backlash from players… Komdigi issued a statement clarifying that the IGRS ratings shown on Steam beginning last week were not final.” Here’s the Steam statement on it.

• We were pretty impressed with the ‘tude of the Triple-I Initiative streaming showcase yesterday. Here’s all the trailers from it and an overview of everything announced or updated, including a new Don’t Starve game and a grimdark Mario Party from Buckshot Roulette’s creator. And all in 45 minutes (minus post-show).

• Netflix things: the company announced Netflix Playground, a new all-in-one mobile app for the under-8s to “play, explore, and interact with their favorite characters, from Peppa Pig to the friends on Sesame Street.” And no linking-out to separate game downloads! Also: the Netflix controller mobile app - used for party games, etc - was U.S. trending during the Easter holidays, per Stephen Totilo.

• Steam wishlist email obsessives: as Valve continues to tweak email notifications, we got anecdotal reports that the # of games featured in emails to players - and the number of emails, for mega-wishlisters - increased earlier this week. (This is good, if you’re one of the games featured in said emails.)

• Slay The Spire 2 co-creator Casey Yano had a sympathetic comment on some of the China ‘review bombing’ around a nerf patch for STS2: “It's difficult for players to feel like they're heard by developers, so I understand why they choose to use Steam and do something that would impact visibility in the store to try to portray their feedback.”

• ‘Long dev cycle’ things: the devs of Eastshade discuss spending almost $2m (>50% their own salaries for 6-7 years) on witch academy RPG Songs Of Glimmerwick; Mewgenics’ Tyler Glaiel jokes: “turns out it WAS true, the best game dev advice actually was to spend 6 years making a 100+ hour RPG with infinite variety.”

• Valve just revealed a significant Steam Workshop browser update, with the game mod browsing interface getting “Wider page & bigger items… Faster filtering… Smarter filtering per-section… New Quick View.” It’s also now mobile and Steam Deck-friendly, which is nice…

• We’re also seeing the new Steam regional pricing recommendations trickling down to game prices, with Payday both simplifying and region-adjusting its franchise pricing, and Lorn’s Lure another example: “I'm sorry it took till now to adjust, but I had no reliable method to do so until Steam's new feature.”

• Microlinks: Xbox is updating its achievements look & feel, also allowing hidden achievements & a call-out for 100%-ed games; there’s rumors Steam will show estimated FPS for games on your system, based on its new review specs; Amazon Luna is removing its third-party subscriptions (like Ubisoft+ and Jackbox Games) & the GOG/EA/Ubisoft ‘bring your own library’ feature.

Inside the Chinese Steam/console ‘companion app’ you may not know

GameDiscoverCo has covered the Chinese PC game market multiple times, thanks to strong growth from ‘grey-market’ players on Steam Global. For example, in early 2024 we asked Spiral Up Games about key social platforms there, from Bilibili to Douyin to Douyu.

And a recent Reddit post from a successful Chinese indie reminded us that there’s one platform we get consistently asked about, the game-specific mobile app Heybox. It’s one of the more popular ways to access Steam info in China, with many millions of MAU, but we’ve found objective English language info on it to be lacking.

Obviously, we could have asked Heybox itself. But since it’s a commercial service which monetizes largely on the ‘margin’ it gets selling Steam keys it gets from devs, as well as in-platform ads, we thought it better to get a third-party overview of how the Chinese-language app works. (We understand it can be a non-trivial % of China sales.)

And the folks at Hidden Player, a China game consultancy co-created by the person who helped lead Cyberpunk & Dying Light: The Beast’s China marketing, were kind enough to provide a 15-slide presentation just for GDCo readers explaining Heybox. Going through the high level on how Heybox works, from Hidden Player:

• The platform is a much-used companion app for Chinese PC gamers: Heybox “started as a games forum”, but is now used to find out about “upcoming games, news, game stats, promotions” and more, per Hidden Player. So it’s not just a Steam key sale platform - which is often the context that GDCo hears about it.

• You don’t need an ISBN license in China to have visibility via it: the game database used on Heybox is “nearly all Steam titles (excluding explicit content), along with major releases on EGS, PlayStation, Switch and Xbox.” So it’s mapping to what players can get on the ‘gray market’, even console titles.

• Games have natural visibility even if you’re not working with Heybox: there will be people talking about your game and wishlisting it - if they care about it - even if you don’t have a commercial relationship with Heybox. (That is to say: selling them keys or working with them on ads or promoted posts is somewhat optional.)

Here’s another slide from the presentation, which explains how users customize their main app tab, by selecting subReddit-like topics to follow news about:

So Heybox is a platform with info feeds, user posts - which can be text, video links, etc, with a link to the game’s page - but also ‘official’ publishers and dev channels. (In the presentation, Paradox and CD Projekt Red are shown as two examples.)

But in addition to that, it’s a bit of a ‘shadow store’ for Steam, we presume in part because the official Steam mobile app doesn’t work easily in China for ‘Steam international’ users. And there’s some interesting details here:

• Heybox has its own best-selling charts & algorithmic recommendations: the ‘Game Library/Store’ section is “likely the second-largest traffic hub on Heybox”, and recommends you games and shows you offers, much like Steam. (You can buy games direct on Steam, or via game keys on Heybox if the dev provided them.)

• The platform has its own internal metrics for sales and wishlists: there’s a public ‘best-selling keys in the Heybox store’ chart, but also, interestingly, ‘most wishlisted games on Heybox’, using a platform-specific wishlist function which is separate from Steam wishlists.

• However, you can sync with Steam from Heybox, via Steam logins: as we understand it, Heybox has a ‘login with Steam’ function for players, which shows owned games and “enables its distribution partners to activate a wishlist sync feature, prompting players to sync with Steam when they add a game to their Heybox wishlist.”

Related: we at GameDiscoverCo noted that Chinese players seem to under-wishlist compared to other countries, even though they turn up to buy. We’re now wondering if it’s due in part to players ‘keeping’ their wishlists on third-party apps like Heybox.

We’re basically out of space, but there’s a lot of other interesting details in the full PPT - for example ‘mini-apps’ in Heybox (above), which include game stats tools for PUBG, and a free Steam game ‘claimer’ mini-app.

We were also interested to read about ‘H Coins’, which are an internal currency in Heybox which adds discounts to your key purchases, can be earned through “daily login bonuses, rewards from high quality posts, lucky draw events, and purchase rebates.”

Anyhow, what’s fascinating here? This is another example of the positive ecosystem effects that Steam has elicited for its platform by allowing Steam game keys to be given out for free to devs and publishers for resale, a profoundly unconventional idea. (I still see newcomers to the space ‘double-take’ when they hear about it.)

Keys definitely lose Steam a lot of direct revenue, and at times have fraud-adjacency issues. (Valve’s latterly cut back key allocations, and we wonder if there’s more changes coming.) But it’s also led to businesses like Heybox - which strengthen Steam’s market leadership - effectively funded by donated ‘platform cut’ margins.

[Thanks again to Jacky and Katya from Hidden Player for their work on the Heybox overview - we may run some more detail-first China-specific content from them in the future!]

Steam this week: Road To Vostok hits solo glory…

Read more

The latest GDCo data addition? It’s inspired by the lyrics to a Spinal Tap song: “In ancient times... Hundreds of years before the dawn of history, lived a strange race of people... the Druids gamers. No one knows who they were or what they were doing. But their legacy remains, hewn into the living rock... Of Stonehenge Steam.” Full info goes to 11, below…

But before we start, IGN has a funny headline: “After Hundreds of Hours, Some Crimson Desert Players Are Complaining That the World Has Become Too ‘Peaceful’ Because They’ve Basically Killed All the Enemies.” 100 hours in, one player says “zones are becoming ‘too peaceful’ to even try out most endgame builds or cool maxed-out gear variants.”

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

Game discovery news: Car Mechanic Sim tunes up

Let’s kick things off by checking out all the game platform and discovery news that happened since last time, like so:

• GameDiscoverCo's latest trending unreleased Steam games by 7-day new wishlists is headed by Car Mechanic Simulator 2026 (#1 with >200k wishlists), following up CMS 2021 (which sold >2.4m units.) And Wyldheart (#2) is a co-op fantasy ARPG with "bite-sized campaigns" ft. strong visuals and interest.

• Elsewhere, fascinating Garry's Mod spiritual sequel s&box (#3) has a confirmed release date later in April, hence new interest. And two other more 'chill' games round off the Top 5, albeit at lower wishlist increases: Boxroom (#4, design a room for your Steam library), and Sandcastle (#5, build relaxing sandcastles.)

• Sony is removing more ‘suspect’ publisher catalogs from the PlayStation Store: “it looks like all titles from GOGAME Console Publisher, VRCFORGE Studios, and Welding Byte (previously operating as RandomSpin Games) were removed… on April 2nd.” (Jesus Simulator - itself a clone of I Am Jesus Christ - is no more on PS5…)

• As spotted in our Discord, that new optimized Steam homepage beta deprecates Popular Upcoming as a direct link (although one of the Upcoming tabs still lists more popular games first?) There’s also a rename: New & Trending will just become Popular New Releases when this ships.

• Microlinks, pt.1: Lenovo’s Legion Go 2 handheld gaming PC has increased in price 36-48%, to $1,500-$2,000, thanks to GPU/memory shortages; Deconstructor Of Fun on how to build a ‘real’ Roblox business in 2026; Valve just added a native Steam Link app for visionOS, allowing Steam cloud play on Apple Vision Pro.

• Here’s a good piece on the “risks and opportunities of a contentious but rich design space” re: the rise of gambling-lite mechanics in Balatro-likes and Luck Be A Landlord, also noting the skill element in many roguelites: “With time, you’ll improve at gambling-likes such as Balatro and Raccoin; this isn’t true of slot machines.”

• PlayStation’s most-downloaded PS5 games in March 2026 were headed by MLB The Show 26 (U.S.) and Crimson Desert (EU), with Red Dead Redemption once again leading the way for PS4 downloads. And Netmarble’s little-discussed The Seven Deadly Sins: Origin is #1 in F2P, we estimate with >1m PS downloads LTD.

• The latest Xbox/PC Game Pass additions coming this month include Double Fine’s Kiln, a post-launch GP addition for Hades II, a day-one debut for Vampire Crawlers, Day-Z getting added on PC, and, uh, uhh, Microsoft Bubble? (It’s a PC only casual up-port, but there’s some even Xbox ‘port begging’ from players!)

• This ‘Two and A Half Gamers’ analysis of new mobile launch Last Asylum: Plague is worth reading, even if you’re not in mobile: big Chinese mobile firm does ‘plague hospital management => medieval 4X’ with strong execution, heavy gameplay ‘fast follow’ and AI ads galore. (It seems to be scaling impressively.)

• Microlinks: PlayStation debuted The Playerbase, a promo pilot project to 3D scan fans into games, starting with racing franchise Gran Turismo; a PC Gamer survey has 43% of readers switching to Linux for gaming (many via SteamOS?) now or soon; PlayStation re-arranged its corp website to slightly de-emphasize PC.

What Steam Fan Snapshot tells us about players…

Here’s a fact: we know people buy our games on Steam. But we actually don’t know much about them. How old are they? How do they find out about games? What else do they do with their lives? That’s why GameDiscoverCo decided to make the Steam Fan Snapshot, a new feature that just rolled out to all GDCo Pro subscribers.

So we thought we’d highlight some of the initial data from our opt-in player surveys in today’s newsletter. And first up, here is what the Steam Fan Snapshot is and isn’t:

• It is a large, increasing survey of core Steam game fans: incenting players via giveaways & other methods, we’ve got ~10,000 initial survey responses to 8 initial questions, and plan to scale response #s to 5-10x that over time.

• It does have individual data ‘cuts’ for every Steam game: with explicit player permission, we’ve tied in survey responses to a player’s Steam catalog, and anonymized & abstracted them. So you can compare any game to the average.

• It is a snapshot of a particular type of Steam player: everything is a ‘filter bubble’ - and this is no exception. The surveys are fielded only in English (so there’ll be Western bias), and 16% of our respondents own a Steam Deck, more than a 5x overindex on all Steam players. They’re fans, folks…

• It is not a replacement for more detailed player surveys: we designed Fan Snapshot to be high-level and instructive to understand general trends, like device usage, age/gender, and discovery preferences. This doesn’t negate more detailed surveys, playtesting, etc. It’s just an extra set of data points.

Anyhow, let’s bust out some real-world examples from the first set of Steam Fan Snapshot data. First, for reference, here’s the questions we asked so far:

For the purposes of this newsletter, we picked a large range of games to contrast - everything from newer, cheaper casual hits (Peak, Webfishing) through cozy standouts (Hello Kitty Island Adventure) through old school stalwarts (Civilization IV, Train Sim Classic), and even American football franchises (Madden NFL.)

Why? Well, if you compare just one game vs. the ‘all survey participants’ benchmark, you may see overperformance, due to it being a newer game being bought by a more active player. You need more data points to zero in on the key differences. Like so:

What’s interesting here? Well, gender-wise, Hello Kitty Island Adventure skews as low as 49% male. But these games also ramp as high as 93.5% male (Madden NFL 25), with the average on Steam Fan Snapshot being just over 80% male.

And then age-wise, the average age of all respondents is 30. But across these titles, averages go up to 36 (Civ IV) and as low as 25 (Webfishing.) And you can see significant, related changes in age ranges. 39% of Peak owners and 55% of Webfishing owners being 18-24 is a clear, interesting age split, showing in some newer hits.

As for devices used for games for >1 hour per month, newer games overindex vs. the averages (which include 16% Steam Deck players, 17% Switch 1 or 2, 16.5% PS4 or 5, 10% Xbox, 10.1% iOS, and 32.5% Android. Remember that’s ‘game playing’, specifically.)

The biggest overindexes of Switch players are for the cozier Hello Kitty Island Adventure (45%) and Webfishing (38%), with Train Sim players (13%) underindexing on almost everything non-PC. Oh, and Madden players try iOS games a lot more, we’re guessing ‘cos the U.S. is a heavy iOS country.

Here’s our question about the main ways people find out about games. Webfishing is a big overindex (69%!) on ‘word of mouth’, and short-form video usage for discovery varies by >2x across different types of game. There’s also interesting differences in usage for Steam as a platform, trad media sites, Discord/Slack, and more.

We actually think this data is actionable, both at ‘overall average’ and genre and game-specific levels. Why? You might want to know where your prospective audience is if you’re planning your marketing. (There’s nothing worse than data which looks pretty, but has no use case, right?)

And for this question, we thought we’d ask about what activities people did every week, in addition to playing video games! The big headline here is: Madden players do sport(s), and Webfishing players don’t? (Kidding - that’s probably not the big headline.)

But seriously, it’s interesting to see some of the generational differences, like manga reading vs. trad. text-based book reading for different player ages. And the same for shortform vs. longform video watching - it makes Steam players feel more ‘real’, and it may help you work out how to target players ‘where they live’, habit-wise.

Anyhow, Steam Fan Snapshot has data for every Steam game* (*tho some sample sizes may be smaller), and it’s available to all existing company-level GDCo Pro subscribers. (If you have GDCo Plus or, heaven forbid, none of the above, ping us and we’ll get you a free demo.) And we’ll keep putting free data from it in newsletters for everyone…

Top streamed March games: Requiem still goin’!

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

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

• The top 10 most-streamed have a lot of the ‘usual suspects’ in there: it’s worth re-iterating, but games like League Of Legends (#1, 155m hours watched), Grand Theft Auto V (#2, 141m), Counter-Strike (#3, 119m), and Valorant (#4, 74m hours) continue to do spectacularly in livestreaming, and it underpins their commercial success.

• Res Evil Requiem, Crimson Desert make strong Top 10 appearances: Requiem “soared to #5 this month with 59m hours watched”, per Mark, who says: “as a non-live service, non eSports game this is some outstanding viewership”, and notes it also had 25m hours watched in late Feb. Crimson Desert (#8, 47m hours) also did great.

• Blizzard’s Overwatch rebrand seems to have stuck its landing for now: the hero shooter’s switch from Overwatch 2 to Overwatch & related 10th anniversary promotions saw it hang out at 40.3m hours watched in March (#11), only down slightly from its Feb. high. (We’ll see where it goes from there!)

Other new games making the chart include Pokémon Pokopia (#13, 32.4m hours, outstanding for a game that’s trickier to stream as a Switch 2 exclusive), Slay the Spire 2 (#23, 18.7m), Marathon (#25, 17.7m), and custom Minecraft server QSMP II (#41, 10.5m), which is being tracked separately from ‘vanilla Minecraft’ at #6.

Stream Hatchet also took a look at the recent Hexi expansion for F2P standout Where Winds Meet, which drove an 8x initial viewership increase compared to baseline watchers, and saw hours up 77% to 4.75m viewed during March - not bad.

[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.]

Wow, there’s certainly a lot going out there in Discoveryland. And this leads to a special joint-lead newsletter, since we have monthly data and some timely Steam wishlist-related notification reporting changes to impart. So let’s get to it…

Before we start, did you see GDCo’s ‘special’ April 1st drop of our Insights Lab (silly), including real-life metrics like The Rage Index (“Steam tags sized by total negative reviews generated”), and The Abandonment Leaderboard (“most copies sold with a median playtime under 2 hours”)? Hey, GameDeveloper.com wrote a cute piece on it…

[FREE DEMO OF GDCo PRO? You too can get a gratis demo of our GameDiscoverCo Pro company-wide ‘Steam deep dive’ & console data by contacting us today - >90 orgs have it. Or, signing up to GDCo Plus gets the rest of this newsletter and Discord access, plus more.]

Game discovery news: PlayStation price context..

Let’s start out with a whole bunch of game platform and discovery news, as follows:

• The above U.S. PlayStation hardware price graph with inflation taken into account, as worked out by Kotaku, really shows how PlayStation 5 is running into hardware cost woes (due to AI-related component shortages, COVID-related inflation, and all that jazz.) No wonder console owner make-up is changing…

• Valve announced a refreshed Steam home page, now in desktop Beta, and it’s worth examining closely. There’s better hover-over context, bigger game artwork for discounts, Discovery Queue browsing from in-page, ‘infinite scroll’, and new sections to see your wishlists and available DLC. (All logical and positive.)

• More evidence that Pokopia’s launch helped the Switch 2’s sales? Chris Dring points out that “Nintendo Switch 2 UK sales jumped 154% in March month-on-month following the release of Pokemon Pokopia. Nintendo accounts for over 50% of all consoles sold in the UK so far this year (Nielsen IQ).” (Tho it was a 5-week month.)

• The folks at IGN (who have a big YouTube channel, as well as the written editorial they’re often known for) sent over this ‘how do indies get their games on IGN?’ .PDF. (It’s handy ‘cos it lists the specific email addresses you should hit up.)

• Game console sub news: PlayStation Plus’ monthly games for April include Lords of the Fallen, Tomb Raider I-III Remastered & Sword Art Online Fractured Daydream; Xbox debuted Barbie Horse Trails and Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 for Game Pass on the same day, which was kinda cute.

• Hushcrasher’s Antoine Mayerowitz has some views on PlayStation’s dynamic pricing experiments: “Sony's dynamic pricing enraged gamers, but it makes total sense… [but] I hope Sony uses these experiments to set better base prices, not to implement airline-style personalized revenue management... Doing so would change consumer behavior.”

• Max Power Gaming took a look at Roblox’s top competitive shooter Rivals & its increased popularity, noting: “The introduction of ranked [play modes], followed by Season 1 in the September 2025 update, appears to be a major inflection point… This transforms the experience from simply playing matches to pursuing longer-term goals.”

• Oddly, in a platform exclusive, Amazon Luna has an exclusive Masters Of The Universe-licensed roguelite deckbuilder coming out June 5th alongside the new movie. (Is this left over from Amazon Game Studios third-party publishing?) There’s also a bunch of ‘free with Prime’ games, inc. EA Sports FC 26, in April.

• Indie.io is trying a standalone PC indie game subscription service, Indie Pass, at $6.99/month. It’s a non-exclusive platform, and per The Verge, “Developers who put their games on Indie Pass will earn revenue based on ‘player time spent in each game,’ according to a press release.”

• Microlinks: virtual world/platform Rec Room is, surprisingly, closing on June 1st; Sony is buying Cinemersive Labs, which converts photos into volumetric 3D, for its “machine learning and computer vision” skills; Roblox is launching Makeup, a new category in the Avatar Marketplace - it can also be used for camouflage.

March 2026’s top new PC/console games are…?

Just as we did for Feb. 2026 and for Jan. 2026, we’re trying to keep you all up-to-date with what new games are actually selling on Steam (and console), according to GameDiscoverCo Pro data. And above are the top new releases for March 2026, newly incorporating a basic unit estimate for games played on Steam, but sold off Steam*.

(*We’re discovering some newer AAA-y titles have a surprisingly large off-Steam review percentage: Death Stranding 2 has 43% of all its reviews from off-Steam keys (!) We’re in the process of better integrating this into unit estimates, and will do an article about that shortly.)

Anyhow, the big winner for new Steam games by units in March 2026 was roguelike deckbuilder sequel Slay The Spire 2, at >5m copies sold. As we noted post-release: “The original has 10m players with 26 hrs median, 74 hrs average played, and the sequel has co-op. Game over?”

Also faring well was open-world ARPG Crimson Desert - 2.2m on Steam and >3m including PlayStation and Xbox SKUs, awaited extraction shooter Marathon (which did 920k units on Steam, but less well on console), and Death Stranding 2, which added >400k copies on Steam, and ~2.5m sold including the original PlayStation SKU.

On the more indie side, inexpensive lottery scratcher idle game Scritchy Scratchy zoomed past 500k units, character-festooned remake Poker Night At The Inventory frontloaded its way to >300k, and 100 v. 100 indie shooter Over The Top: WWI - as featured in a recent newsletter - also made the Top 10.

Revenue-wise, you may not be surprised to see Slay The Spire 2 (which is $25) at the top of the ‘new releases on Steam’ revenue charts, with >$110m gross. But Crimson Desert, at $70 (less in some territories!) got close to it, topping $100m on Steam.

Otherwise, it’s lots of the games you might expect, with only Marathon, Death Stranding 2 & the Monster Hunter Stories RPG spinoff exceeding $10m, and $20-$25 indies (Esoteric Ebb, Retro Rewind) sneaking in at the bottom, with >$3m gross.

It’s also worth contextualizing those new releases alongside the other top-grossing games of the month. Slay The Spire 2 & Crimson Desert slot in at #2 and #3, behind only continual F2P top-grosser Counter-Strike 2. And Apex Legends and PUBG Battlegrounds continue to make the Top 10.

Notable for its continuing success from previous months as a premium title? Resident Evil Requiem, which launched on Feb. 26th, added another $59m gross, for a total of ~2.5m and $134m gross (and >3m including off-platform purchases!) on Steam alone. We have it at >7m units and >$400 million gross, multi-platform - not bad, huh?

Finally, here’s a quick look at the top new PlayStation and Xbox releases in March 2026. Crimson Desert (>900k on PlayStation, <300k on Xbox) made the biggest splash, but baseball game MLB The Show 26 - which doesn’t even have a PC version. - still had a strong showing, topping 1m units, 93% of them (!) in the U.S.

Wrestling game WWE 2K26 also made it to 600k across all platforms, with more than 350k units of that on PlayStation, and with strong Middle East interest on PlayStation (around 15% of the players - we’re guessing WWE is huge there?)

Otherwise, Marathon didn’t do as well on console as some were expecting, with ‘only’ 400k of its 1.3m LTD units on PlayStation and Xbox. Why? This ‘deeper extraction shooter’ gambit plays well in North America (61% of Marathon’s PlayStation players), but less in territories like China, Brazil and the Middle East - which account for as much as 35% of Res Evil Requiem PS5’s sales, but only 4.5% of Marathon’s.

Finally, we didn’t graph our Switch eShop estimates, but we know Pokémon Pokopia sold 2.2m units in the first 4 days. And it’s the runaway new seller in March. Blue Prince approached 50k eShop units with its Switch 2 debut, and Monster Hunter Stories 3, Scott Pilgrim EX and MLB The Show 26 all managed in the low tens of thousands. (It’s a LONG gap up to Pokopia, tho…)

Steam wishlist emails: a notable notification shift?

Those who publish on Steam know that wishlist notification emails (and related Steam app notifications!) can be a lifeblood for players knowing your game is out - and/or discounted. So Valve’s announcement that they’re changing the wishlist notification stats needs a little analysis.

Our hypothesis of how this came about was: the 2026 Steam Spring Sale notifications appear to have been delayed or not triggered properly. (At least, they didn’t go out promptly on March 19th.) We think this led Steam to look into the system more generally, realizing the current wishlist notification stats weren’t the most descriptive.

As a result, they decided to change those stats, which live at the bottom of https://partner.steampowered.com/app/wishlist/XXXXXX/ - where XXXXXX is your game’s Steam AppID. Here’s an example for a real-life game:

So, what’s changing here? As Steam explains: “Previously, the number reported on the Wishlist Notifications page on the Steamworks Financials site was the number of accounts processed. This wasn’t quite the same as the number of notifications actually sent. There are a few reasons why we might process an account but not notify:

• The customer has opted out emails for discounts on wishlist items.

• The account has been disabled.

• The customer has over 25 items on their wishlist on discount, which is the maximum number of items we’ll include in an email.

With these changes, the number of notifications reported for a game will only include cases where the email was actually sent and the game was included in the email. The conditions around when we send an email to a customer have not changed, this is just a change to reporting.”

In other words, you shouldn’t have ever expected 175,000 people to get emails every time your game with 175k wishlists was on sale. (Our Steam Fan Snapshot data set of 10k players has a median of 87 games wishlisted, for example, way over the 25 limit.) But the notifications interface made it look a bit like that was happening….

What’s interesting about this change? Well, it may now be possible to understand if there’s ‘better’ times to discount where your game appears more often in actual emails, since you’ll see the real count here, vs. the ‘we’ve cycled through the process’ count. You may not know if it’s a big (headline!) or smaller (body!) mention, but it’ll be a real #.

Also worth noting: the email system seems to pick a subset of the games, so as to not overwhelm. (It won’t always go for the maximum 25 if a player has 25 games on sale, and there’s also cooldowns.) And don’t worry, your Early Access and 1.0 launches get a guaranteed standalone email, and always have (excepting the very occasional flub.)

This week on Steam: Raccoin pushes out a hit…

Read more

It’s time to look over the kingdom of game discovery, and ferret out not one but multiple notable topics today - from hit games to Steam platform pricing changes. We’ll cover them all, because we generally do, whether you like it or not.

Before we start, we wanted to highlight the VGHF’s digitizing of talks from 1989’s Computer Game Developers Conference, particularly the publishers’ panel where the discussion of "a lot of software" being a problem starts around the 12 minute mark, from Accolade's Peter Doctorow. (Too many games! In 1989!)

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

Game discovery news: Minecraft’s re-Dungeon-ed

Let’s kick the week off with a look at the latest game platform & discovery news, which are a bit like this:

• The latest unreleased trending Steam games, according to GameDiscoverCo Pro's 7-day wishlist charts (March 23rd-30th), has Korean zombie title Nakwon: Last Paradise at #1 again & Forza Horizon 6 at #3., But brand-new at #2 is Xbox's surprise announce of top-down ARPG spinoff sequel Minecraft Dungeons II.

• Last week's wishlist winners Cat Parents (#4) and Burglin' Gnomes (#5) are stll performing, but other new entries include mega-indie co-op dungeon crawler Debauchery & Magic (#6), newly announced first-person ARPG Hunter: The Reckoning – Deathwish (#7), and desktop monster-feeder WinMon (#10).

• As Thomas Reisenegger points out: “The ‘Event and Festival’ calendar from How to Market a Game got an overhaul, now includes: - event prices - tags for whether they'll likely get Steam featuring - tags for physical vs online events - can super recommend!!”

• Confirmed for April 9th this year, the Triple-I Initiative Showcase is again an intriguing streaming show, promising “announcements from games like Windrose, Dead as Disco, Solarpunk, Risk of Rain 2, Far Far West & many more, PLUS new game reveals!” And it’s all shoved into 45 minutes, which we appreciate - brevity/soul/wit.

• As we get into various Spring holidays, Steam hit a new CCU high again, with 42.69 million people online in the Steam client at the same time - up from 42.3m just a week or so ago. (Its in-game peak is still around 14m, though - relatively unchanged.)

• June’s Xbox streaming showcases are confirmed: “Xbox Games Showcase 2026 will air on Sunday, June 7, starting at 10am Pacific / 1pm Eastern / 6pm UK time. It will be followed immediately by a deep-dive into the return of one of Xbox’s most legendary franchises in the form of Gears of War: E-Day Direct.”

• Polygon’s Oli Welsh has an op-ed trying to define ‘outsider AAA studios’ - companies making high-grossing games like Cyberpunk 2077, STALKER 2, or even Stellar Blade from outside the trad publisher or geographic structure, suggesting different cultures can “reinterpret the most mass-market of genres in a distinct, culturally textured way.”

• Here’s an interesting micro-postmortem of Steam game Duskpunk, “a gritty dice-driven RPG in a steampunk city.” It’s “sold about 1,500 units since launch four weeks ago. It’s got 17,000 wishlists and a 91% positive rating on Steam. It cost about €100,000 to make, but I got a grant from the Vienna Business Agency for about €66,000. That means it needs to sell about 4,500 units to break even.”

• Xbox things: there’s a beta Game Pass tier only listing first-party Xbox games, making leakers wonder whether there’s a new GP plan under eval; Xbox explains that new CEO Asha Sharma “retired [the ‘This is an Xbox’ campaign] because it didn’t feel like Xbox… she is personally leading a reset of how we show up as a brand.”

• The high-end of AAA(A) game dev sure is expensive, still - Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier notes: “The numbers I’ve heard floating around AAA game dev these days are $300 million or more - sometimes much more! - which I think helps explain the current state of the industry.” That’s U.S./Canada games, largely dev salaries/overhead.

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Be kind, (retro!)rewind: to ~200k copies in 2 weeks

At GameDiscoverCo, we track popular new games - especially those with increasing concurrents, so we’ve been keeping a close eye on ‘90s video store sim Retro Rewind: Video Store Simulator after its March 17th release. Its creators revealed 100k copies sold on March 21st - and we think it’s nearing 200k copies already, at $16-$20.

So yes, that’s good going - the two-man team at Canadian dev Blood Pact Studios must be delighted. Since they’re so busy with launch, they couldn’t respond to Qs. But luckily, the folks at 80.lv presciently got a dev Q&A with them back in December, so we have plenty to go off. Firstly, here’s the very pleasant Steam CCU curve over time:

And, with the game close to the Top 10 new sellers on Steam in March by units, we wanted to take a closer look at what made it work. We’re detecting, in particular, the following:

• Smart changes to the Supermarket Simulator template: the ‘managing and expanding a store’ template led Supermarket Sim to sell ~3.5m on Steam since Feb 2024. This is similar, gameplay-loop wise, but as the devs noted: “we stay faithful to the timeline. For example, there are no credit card interactions at the checkout counter.”

• It’s prime nostalgia, but not just for older people: initial data from GDCo’s Steam Fan Snapshot (more on this soon!) indicates players are skewing 3-4 years older than average. But as we saw with ‘90s web sim Hypnospace Outlaw, which also had young fans, you didn’t have to grow up then to appreciate the vibe.

• Formula-led games like this with a little ‘character’ do better: now, that’s a subjective thing to say! But look at this top-rated review saying the game is ‘different’: “The fake VHS covers alone are worth the price of admission. They're all hand drawn parodies of real movies, and some of them are so good it's almost criminal.”

This particular subgenre has a pretty low initial barrier to entry, so it’s not surprising that there are multiple takes on it. Heck, the more friendslop-adjacent Rewind 99 - also retro video store themed - also came out in March. (Looks like it was a bit rough bug-wise for major scaling, though it did hit 1,100 CCU early on, which is decent.)

When we look at GDCo Pro’s Affinity data, sorted by the games with the biggest player overlap with Retro Rewind, but at least 10x more likely to be played than the average, you’ll see first-person sims in there, but not with overwhelming overlap:

For example, >60% of the players of Retro Rewind haven’t played Supermarket Simulator. So while there’s strong ‘you might like this, if you liked this’ overlap, you’re potentially bringing this first-person shop sim gameplay to a bunch of new people.

And if you look at the 80.lv interview, it’s a strong, iterated demo which helped scale interest and hone the game, yet again:

“With Retro Rewind, the demo has been by far our most valuable tool for both visibility and feedback. Making it forced us to define the core gameplay loops early and cut out unnecessary fluff that can quickly bloat a project. Once released, it provided rapid player feedback, and many of them joined our Discord to share their experiences and suggestions.

The demo served as a marketing tool, but it also helped shape the direction of the game. Most importantly, our daily wishlist growth jumped from an average of 10 to 300! We contacted multiple YouTubers and streamers to let them know that our demo had just been released.”

The biggest problem with Retro Rewind right now, which GDCo estimates has been played for an average of 8.5 hours on Steam (and a median of just over 4 hours)? Players running out of in-game content! Which is why the game’s roadmap now includes more storage and even stocking video games (the most-requested thing.)

What’s most notable here is, yet again, the ability of tiny teams to pull off something super-fun and competitive. The co-creator of this game is ex-Beenox (Call Of Duty co-dev) and (CG studio) Digital Dimension on the lighting/technical art side. So one presumes he was used to working as part of a massive machine.

But once again, we see people can move those AAA skills into a smaller projects using game engines (Unreal, this time!) as building blocks, with a lot of replayability and much less capital outlay. Thus, games like this are why the trad game biz is being disrupted. Why? Cos they’re low cost, pretty darn good, and very competently made.

Steam’s new regional price tips - how different?

In case you missed it, Steam announced a whole new set of regional pricing tools late last week with two major bullet points: “We’ve updated our pricing conversion data to better reflect current market conditions around the world…. [and] We’ve also added two new conversion methods to help developers choose how to price games.”

The question of pricing has been a hot topic for a while. And after we wrote a column about it last October, the folks at research outfit Hushcrasher coded a ‘better regional Steam pricing’ tool which has some similar elements to Steam’s current solution. (Which may have been developed in parallel - we not claiming causation, etcetera.)

Anyhow, the important point is that there’s now three different pricing methods that you can pick between when initially pricing your game - or deciding to change pricing later:

• Exchange Rate Conversion: “This method uses a simple currency exchange rate at the time indicated on the page.”

• Purchasing Power Conversion: “This method uses public data about the average purchasing power of customers within a given country and/or region.”

• Multi-variable Conversion: “This method uses multiple data sources for each currency, including local purchasing power, the expected cost of comparable entertainment goods, and exchange rate  (this most closely matches the method that was previously presented in the pricing tool).”

So, here’s an example with a base price of $19.99 USD. You can already see that the three methods differ a lot:

An anonymous buddy of GameDiscoverCo made us a spreadsheet comparing these to the old single-method conversion method, and we can confirm that the multi-variable conversion is closest to the previous. (For example, it was £16.75 before, and £17.75 now for multi-variable, in UKP - and Poland was 91,99zł before, and is now 84,99zł.)

So on the one hand, more choices are good! On the other hand, the choices are now very different. One r/gamedev commenter says: “[Purchasing power] seems right to me, it ‘translates’ the price into the local economy. [Multi-variable] is likely based on most of the videogame sales data in recent history, and is probably the optimal choice for profit.”

But not everyone will agree with that, and we suspect multi-variable (with tweaks!) will be the default for many devs. The folks at Hushcrasher also made a detailed spreadsheet comparing previous and new data, including some of their own ‘purchasing power’ calculations.

And, in noting that the multivariable prices are 5.7% higher than the old ones on average, Hushcrasher’s Julie & Antoine also added, for all you mega-wonks: “We really don’t understand how Steam calculated their PPP. We can’t find the data source they used: there are two main sources (World Bank and IMF), and neither matches. Steam’s PPP is lower than IMF’s PPP implied prices (-9% on average)….

The fact that multivariable prices went up despite PPP being lower… makes it harder to understand, as their… multi-variable conversion is supposed to be constructed with PPP. Maybe this increase comes from a high weight given to the ‘expected cost of comparable entertainment goods’ in their computation? Or… it may be built upon observed prices in those regions.”

Anyhow, here’s the tricky bit. If you go with multi-variable conversion, you won’t be fixing the complaints of markets like Poland and Brazil who feel like it’s all overpriced in their regions. But if you go with ‘purchasing power’ only, you may (arguably) be leaving money on the table. But hey, now you have choices, glorious choices….

[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.]

The rest of the week happened (huh?), and so we’re ending out the week with a bit of a ‘different’ main feature, alongside this week’s notable Steam debuts (for GDCo Pro & Plus subscribers), and of course, all kinds of news to skim, understand, and handwave.

Before we start, here’s a great piece on how the naming for Nintendo’s Donkey Kong came about - both ‘Donkey’ and the less-discussed ‘Kong’. Did you know alternate titles for the 1981 arcade classic included Steel Kong, Kong Boy, Kong Fighter, Funny Kong, and, uhh, Kong Dong?

[FREE DEMO OF GDCo PRO? You too can get a gratis demo of our GameDiscoverCo Pro company-wide ‘Steam deep dive’ & console data by contacting us today - ~90 orgs have it. Or, signing up to GDCo Plus gets the rest of this newsletter and Discord access, plus more.]

Game disco news: Crimson Desert gets chatter…

As we finish up, breaking news that PlayStation hardware prices are up $100+ in the U.S. and Europe: “the cheapest Digital Edition PS5 will [be] $599.99 / £519.99 / €599.99, an increase of $100, while the premium PlayStation 5 Pro console has seen a $150 price rise to $899.99 / £789.99 / €899.99.” Costs are spiraling, and this will be growth-affecting.

Elsewhere, here’s the notable stuff we noted in the game platform & discovery news for the rest of the week:

• The latest estimates on weekly ‘trad media’ mentions from ICO’s Footprints.gg (above) have epic ARPG Crimson Desert way ahead at #1 (as it hits 3m sold & players start to warm to it.) Also trending: Fortnite (new season, Epic layoffs), Minecraft (the Minecraft Live event announcements), and Res Evil Requiem.

• An interesting stat from Scopely’s co-CEO Javier Ferreira, referencing the maturity of the mobile game biz: “80% of our revenue comes from people that have been playing our games for more than a year.” While they are launching new titles, he agrees for their space: “The reality is that there’s less of a need for new games.”

• We did a fun GameDiscoverCo mini-data dump on LinkedIn ft. 2026’s Steam debuts with >100k units by median hours played. Epic samurai ARPG Nioh 3 was #1 (44 hours), with Dragon Quest VII Reimagined at #2 (~24 hours), and Slay The Spire 2 (~22 hours), Mewgenics (~17 hours) & Menace (~15.5 hours) also in the mix.

• We were struck by the second half of Chris Pruett’s ‘state of VR x Meta’ blog post we featured on Tuesday - “the teens of today are the core gamers of tomorrow, maybe.” It suggests “sophistication, polish, and production quality become more important to young audiences as they age up”, but social/unpredictable games may still appeal. (So, as Gorilla Tag fans age, they have more room for titles like Peak or R.E.P.O.)

• Sony’s dynamic store pricing on PS4/PS5 games is causing mass confusion with deal websites, with CheapAssGamer social media-ing a $26.99 sale (good deal!) for Astro Bot, but swiftly discovering it’s $39.59 when logged out - and for many other logged-in players. (Wonder if the upside is worth this type of shade.)

• Microlinks: Valve got served a new class-action suit alleging the lootboxes in its games violate Washington’s gambling laws; CI Games says Lords Of The Fallen broke even on its $81m budget, as it hit 2.5m copies since October 2023; the Nex Playground Kinect-like game camera device is going up from $249 to $299 in price.

• Xbox’s March ‘partner preview’ event just happened, with some new reveals (FPS Alien Deathstorm, first-person action game Hunter: The Reckoning - Deathwish), as well as STALKER 2 DLC, Hades II coming to Xbox with Game Pass Day 1, and more - here’s the full rundown.

• The latest update from Facepunch’s Garry’s Mod ‘spiritual successor’ s&box reveals: “We signed the new license with Valve this week, allowing us to allow people to export games from s&box's editor and ship them as standalone [Source 2 engine] games on Steam completely royalty free… The first out the door is likely to be My Summer Cottage.”

• Following Nintendo Of Europe’s lead, Nintendo of America has announced that starting in May, “new Nintendo published digital titles exclusive to Nintendo Switch™ 2 will have an MSRP that is different from physical versions.” What this means, per The Verge, Yoshi & The Mysterious Book is $60 on digital and $70 physical.

• Microlinks, Pt.2: PlayStation Portal recently added a system update with a 1080p High Quality streaming mode; Nintendo Switch is the second most popular brand name among Japanese teenagers; ICYMI, Fortnite is back on the Google Play Store for Android, finally.

How a banned PS dev ‘hacked’ console discovery

Following the news we ran on Tuesday that PlayStation is getting more serious about banning shovelware/achievement-ware publishers, we got interested in one of the two entities whose games were removed, CGI-LAB. Here’s all their PlayStation releases.

Why? Well, we actually think there’s some things to learn from their approach, even if their game icons (above) are largely AI-generated slop-piness, and the games themselves are perfunctory at best. That’s not the point, though - the point is the ways they were mining for discovery. And we see three major ways:

1. Using ‘open-source’ adjacent IP prominently

The Internet has created some really powerful IPs and keywords which aren’t actually owned by anyone. And CGI-LAB used these in its games. These included the creepy SCP Foundation mythos - used for SCP-087: The Stairwell Horror, and the liminal ‘backrooms’ spaces popularized on 4chan, and now the subject of multiple hit games.

And of course, the Italian Brainrot characters have been the source of multiple CGI-LAB games, including the skydiving Tung Tung Sahur Extreme, which GDCo estimated as by far the most popular CGI-LAB games at >60,000 copies sold (at 50c!)

Trademark or copyright can be pretty confusing with these IP - here’s a good El Pais piece on that. But one takeaway for regular devs here: more general concepts like ‘the backrooms’ or ‘brainrot’ might actually be a good subject for better-quality games! (You shouldn’t shy away from it just because a lot of people are jumping on that train.)

2. ‘Squatting’ on keywords for popular games

The other reason CGI-LAB went after this open-source-ish IP is there won’t be (m)any copyright holders complaining about using those keywords. And on console devices, having the right words in your name really help discovery.

From working with Ragesquid & No More Robots for some years on mountain biking game Descenders, I discovered that the game sold continually well on console, despite almost no dashboard visibility. Why? Players were just searching for its name directly.

So it’s not surprising that CGI-LAB uses words like Bodycam and Stray, both popular existing game titles, in the weirdly named Bodycam Stray Kitty. (Look, the cute kitty has a weird first-person camera strapped to it, OK?) Also notable: ONLY Sky Parkour: Island UP!, which is trying to capture players searching for ‘Only Up!’.

The ultimate ‘winning’ tactic here (if you’re semi-predatory) is to have the top result for a super-popular game which isn’t yet available on the platform. Example #1: a whooole bunch of devs jumped on after Supermarket Simulator lacked a PlayStation version, according to GameDiscoverCo estimates:

Anyhow, for all you non-sketchy devs out there, there’s nothing wrong with a ‘fast follow’ with a twist, in our view. TCG Card Shop Simulator is a great example of that. And maybe you can have the right words in your game’s title to show up partially at the right time? (This is a legit tactic, if you don’t take it too far..)

3. Use ‘easy Platinums’ to further incent players

This final issue is around ‘achievement hunters’ who play on PlayStation, are willing to buy games inexpensively, and then easily rack up a Platinum Trophy for getting all the achievements. Above is the top player on PSNProfiles, who has 18,600 completed games & today Platinum-ed Flying Candy in 5 seconds (PS5) and 21 seconds (PS4). Jeez.

To be honest, CGI-LAB doesn’t have as easy Platinum Trophies in most games as some of the other banned companies - here’s a trophy guide to Abyss Backrooms Pools Horror, which looks a bit fiddly. But it’s still relatively trivial to get Platinums in minutes vs. games like Balatro, which can take 200+ hours.

There’s no takeaways for regular devs with things like this, since ‘make your game cheap and easy to 100% complete’ isn’t a non-sus business model. But both Xbox and PlayStation have a lot of games that exist mainly for achievement stacking. (Last year, a bunch of Xbox titles added 1,000 Gamerscore via a loophole, for example.)

The main takeaway I’d have for this - which somebody mentioned in our Discord recently - boy, these games must suck up a LOT of internal time at PlayStation and Xbox for QA and approval. That’s time that should be going to non-achievement-first titles. Which is why it’s good that PlayStation is getting more proactive here…

Concluding: I know it’s a little weird to look at a bad actor to try to work out what the better actors should do. But there’s some interesting keywords and ideas in here - I kinda want to see a charming medieval take on Supermarket Sim that isn’t just this rote reskin. (Or is this just a ‘me’ problem?)

Debuts on Steam: Life Is Strange tops slow week…

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[The GameDiscoverCo game discovery newsletter is written by ‘how people find your game’ expert & company founder Simon Carless, and is a regular look at how people discover and buy video games in the 2020s.]

Hey! With a dash of pepper and soupcon of data exploration, it’s another busy week. Our lead story looks into a number Steam slipped into its 2025 year-in-review that’s been curiously underdiscussed - its actual platform payout by percentage ‘cut’ last year.

Before we start, we dug this Eurogamer piece on the voiceover guy for the PEGI ratings, an ex-ad agency guy who became a go-to VO person for the EU in Brussels (!) He claims: “I reckon the PEGI recordings - PEGI 18 in particular - are the most heard single recordings in history”, due to their trailer inclusions. (The Guinness team is on standby.)

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

Game discovery news: Cat Parents gets buzzy…

OK, time to hit those game platform & discovery links pretty hard, starting with the following:

• The latest unreleased trending Steam games, according to GameDiscoverCo Pro's 7-day wishlist charts (March 16th-23rd), have Cat Parents straight in at #1. (It’s a first-person cat rescue sim, so… c’mon!) Korean zombie survival game Nakwon: Last Paradise (#2) also had a lot of new interest via a closed Alpha.

• Elsewhere, a new trailer for medieval horror action-er Blight: Survival (#4) booster it, and the other new Top 10 entrant is Kage (#6), an anime co-op Megabonk 'fast follow'. Also in the mix at #14? First-person spooky game Hoarder (#14), billed as "a mundane cleaning simulator which spirals into a submerged nightmare."

• Fortnite and Epic Games Store owner Epic is laying off >1,000 employees, and Tim Sweeney’s note to employees cites “current consoles selling less than last generation’s; and games competing for time against other increasingly-engaging forms of entertainment” as key reasons. (Multiple Fortnite add-on modes are also ending.)

• We’re seeing new delistings of PlayStation ‘shovelware’-y publishers, with ‘easy Platinum Trophy’ kings Nostra Games saying “We’re unable to provide an exact reason because it wasn’t shared with us.” (CGI Labs, less Trophy-farm-y, but very clone-y and keyword squat-y, e.g. Bodycam Stray Kitty, also got its games pulled.)

• Slay The Spire’s 2 recent ‘review bomb’ for early card nerfing is a prime example of why Steam changed its review positivity % to be language-specific (the vast majority is from China!) Indeed, as PC Gamer notes, no access to Discord or Steam forums means that Chinese players often end up venting direct in reviews…

• As my colleague Alejandro noted on Sunday: “Spring just arrived, and with it a new CCU peak for the Steam platform.” Concurrents went up from 42.04m (Jan. 2026 high) to 42.32m CCU for ‘logged in to Steam’, and from 13.4m (Jan.) to 13.82m actually playing a game.

• Bloomberg is citing sources as indicating that Nintendo “plans to make 4 million units of [Switch 2] this quarter, a third less than the 6 million it had originally planned to produce.” It should still hit 20m sold this fiscal year, but there’s still behind-goal U.S. sales, despite good sellthrough of a cheaper, loss-leading Japan-only version.

• The latest Circana U.S. game hardware/select software charts of Feb. 2026 show spending up 1% to $4.6b, helped by Resident Evil: Requiem. Hardware rev was up 22% year on year (with Switch 2 up YoY, but PS5/Xbox down), and Requiem’s launch week dollar sales outpaced Resident Evil: Village by 60%. (Good launch!)

• Some notable changes upcoming in how brands (& dev studios dealing with brands!) work on Roblox: “Starting next year, Roblox will begin charging creators a fee to publish brand integrations inside their virtual experiences, with payments scaling based on the experiences’ user traffic and engagement.”

• We’re been getting/sending reports about a) slow ‘wishlist email’ sending for the Steam Spring Sale or b) slow Steam back-end reporting of sends. (It could be either, and emails are still quite important to sales.) You can see email delivery rates and conversions at the very bottom of your game’s wishlist actions page.

• ICYMI (since we did), Meta’s Chris Pruett has a pretty transparent blog post about Meta Quest’s 2025 results & plans. Notably: >100 VR games generated >$1m in gross revenue on the Meta Horizon Store, which ain’t bad. And overall revenue is still premium-first, “but IAP grew significantly in 2025, by over 10%.”

How Steam’s ‘24% cut’ in 2025 breaks down….

As trailed above, it was interesting to see a particular tidbit buried in Valve’s giant, multi-thousands of words year in review back on March 6th, and we wanted to hold it back and analyze it. Look, we’ll bold the interesting bit(s):

“Since the 2018 announcement of the 75% and 80% revenue share tiers, more and more games from developers big and small have reached new higher revenue share. The revenue share paid out across all non-Valve games on Steam in 2025 was 76%, and that does not include any revenue developers may earn selling free Steam keys outside of Steam.”

Valve has done very little public pushback on the ‘Valve stop taking a 30% cut, you’re horrid’ lobby - who are increasing, as mobile platforms make concessions and the biz is squeezed. And this - revealing that the ‘real’ Valve payout is 24%, is a notable one.

But how is that 24% broken down? GameDiscoverCo estimates the daily revenue of every single game on Steam, so we thought we’d try to break down all Steam revenue in 2025 by tier paid out. Yes, really. And here’s the estimates we got to:

• $16.9 billion: total gross revenue on the Steam platform in 2025.

• $1.95 billion: gross revenue for Steam’s own games*, mainly Counter-Strike 2. (*It’s difficult to work this one out, cos CS2 is #1 so often. Either way, it’s a big #…)

• $14.98 billion: gross revenue for all third-party Steam games in 2025.

So, remember, now we need to break this down by royalty tiers, given “when a game makes over $10 million on Steam, the revenue share for that application will adjust to 75%/25% on earnings beyond $10M. At $50 million, the revenue share will adjust to 80%/20% on earnings beyond $50M.” And here’s what we came up with:

We weren’t really sure what the shape of this graph would look like. But some immediate takeaways from it:

• The ‘30% royalty tier’ is actually the smallest of the three: ‘only’ $3.5b of the $14.98b that Steam got royalties on in 2025 (that’s 23%) is paid with 30% going to Steam. (Of course, that rate is what the vast majority of individual devs get.)

• The kings in the ‘20% royalty’ category made 52% of all Steam revenue: those whose game grossed $50m LTD (after refunds, etc) made up $7.74b (52%) of every dollar spent on Steam in 2025. (The ‘25% cut’ rate was, ironically, 25% of the total.)

So we can now see what Valve gets from each of these tiers, and we get to this:

According to our estimates, Steam is grossing about $1.05 billion from the ‘30% royalty’ tier, $935m from the 25% tier, and $1.55b from the 20% tier, for a total of $3.54 billion Steam platform royalty in 2025. And this is, it turns out, 24% of that total non-first party game revenue of $14.98b. (So we’re hopefully ballpark, here.)

Finally, let’s check out all of this 2025 Steam revenue by type in a nice stacked graph, for context:

So that’s the math(s). Now let’s talk about the vibes. It looks like Valve ‘gave up’ $770 million in ‘20% tier revenue’ and another $190 million in ‘25% tier revenue’ in 2025 - so almost $1 billion - vs. just sticking with 30% rates. That’s extremely non-trivial.

A reminder on why they did it, from the Nov. 2018 announce: “The value of a large network like Steam has many benefits that are contributed to and shared by all the participants… Successful games and their large audiences have a material impact on those network effects so making sure Steam recognizes and continues to be an attractive platform for those games is an important goal for all participants in the network.”

This was such a typically wonk-y reason for Valve to change its rates. And I think it made a ton of sense in 2018, when there was a proliferation of platform competition, and big publishers with changing platform strategies. I got my colleague Alejandro to compile a rough timeline of what happened, and it’s so good I’m just cut-pasting it:

Anyhow, in the more than 7 years (ugh, really!) since that shift, it’s safe to say that big publishers’ own platforms on PC haven’t done well. Steam is, more and more, the ‘main thing’ for PC games. Is it because the biggest games get better high-end royalties? We can’t tell. But that’s why Steam did it, and network effects are real.

So what’s next for those in the 30% tier who, say, want a lower royalty? You can’t really ‘make Steam do a 24% royalty for all games’ - putting the toothpaste back in the tube from the 2018 change - because there’d need to be public companies (big and small) at 20% perma-adjusting their profits, alarming shareholders, etc.

As for suing Valve - sure, some companies will yield to legal/antitrust threats, and we hear there’s still some of those suits ongoing. And I was reminded by this article on Google Play’s recent rate cuts that this had already helped small devs: “The actual win for the [small mobile dev] long tail happened in 2020/2021, when both Google and Apple, spooked by the [Epic] lawsuits, cut rates to 15% for the first $1M in annual earnings.”

However, we’ve got news for you - which probably isn’t news. ‘Changing the revenue tiers for the small guy, for PR reasons’ is the last thing Steam will ever do, because they’re famously not like that. (And to be fair, Steam revenue is much less top-heavy than mobile.) They need a logical, self-contained reason to do it.

What I will say is that, if our numbers are right, it’s ‘only’ $130 million per year - just 2.4% of Valve’s 2025 non-hardware Steam-centric revenue - to go to a 25% royalty as a maximum and eliminate the 30% tier entirely. And isn’t that worth it, just to stop me writing editorials about it constantly? 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.]

And we’re definitely back, before the serene mists of the weekend envelop us, to take a look at a bunch of news, a new hit game we weren’t expecting (always fun!), and - for Pro and Plus subscribers - the new Steam releases for this week.

Before we start, we shouted out Johnny Galvatron (Artful Escape/Mixtape) and his super-fun ‘Why Traditional Storytelling Breaks in Games’ microtalk at DICE 2026 last month, and hey, a video of it just went up on IGN’s YouTube channel. It’s on the ‘performance art’ side of conference talks - but that’s why we liked it.

[FREE DEMO OF GDCo PRO? You too can get a gratis demo of our GameDiscoverCo Pro company-wide ‘Steam deep dive’ & console data by contacting us today - ~90 orgs have it. Or, signing up to GDCo Plus gets the rest of this newsletter and Discord access, plus more.]

Game discovery news: SteamOS is going places…

And let’s check out the latest game platform & discovery news, which goes a little bit like this:

• Valve’s latest SteamOS 3.8.0 preview is here, and as The Verge notes: “Valve is adding genuine hibernation and ‘memory power down’ modes to the Steam Deck — though just the LCD model to start”, and Steam Machine and “lots of support for Xbox Ally, Legion Go 2” and others is also added. (Lots of forward momentum here.)

• The Game Business had a follow-up on those PEGI game ratings changes, notable because they’re up-rating ‘types of actions’ in games. For example: “Games that include paid battle passes where rewards become unavailable if certain objectives are not met will be rated PEGI 12.” This is a) new and b) partly to get ahead of government restrictions in Europe. (But the U.S.-based ESRB disagrees, apparently?)

• Switch things: there’s public U.S. online store data that suggests Pokopia’s release was a Switch 2 system seller, leading to a signifcant increase in hardware sales on Amazon/Walmart; a Japanese analyst estimates that the Switch 2 costs ~$400 to produce, so Nintendo’s losing $160 per unit wholesale for the cheap Japanese SKU.

• Two additions to ‘notable Godot engine games’ from Tuesday’s newsletter: the brand new Slay The Spire 2 (which we’re just about to add, but is the biggest grossing Godot title on Steam by 5x already!), and former Itch.io darling Buckshot Roulette - which isn’t quite so huge but is also in the Top 3. (Thx, Daniel!)

• The folks at Voyer Law incrementally updated their PC/console indie game publishing survey results for 2026, with a lot of good T&C detail, showing an average advance of $600,000 and a median of $270,000, across the 100+ surveys they looked at. (Here’s last year’s, with an average of $670k and a median of $300k.)

• A leaked message to PlayStation developers reveals an upcoming - Sept. 2026 - rebrand: “Sony Interactive Entertainment (SIE) has strategically decided to phase out the terms “PlayStation Network” and “PSN” across our platform.” (Or is this just a ‘de-brand’ to nothing? Magic 8-ball is slightly opaque on the new branding guidelines.)

• Two Horizon Worlds updates: first, Meta’s virtual world was being discontinued on VR, since they’re focusing on mobile. But a few hours later, Meta’s Andrew Bosworth revealed: “we will keep Horizon Worlds working in VR for existing games to support the fans.” (Related: the NYT has an obit for Meta’s, uh, OG verse.)

• The ‘too many games, not enough reach’ issue endemic to PC/console is also hitting Roblox, according to Hugo Dixon, who’s been making games on Roblox since 2012: “Games reach 1k CCU and 1M daily impressions, then fall off the following week instead of stabilizing or growing.”

• ICYMI: PlayStation is rolling out its PSSR upscaling tech to more PlayStation 5 Pro games, as the “AI library that analyzes each frame pixel by pixel as it upscales game visuals” now officially runs with Silent Hill f, Monster Hunter Wilds, Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, Crimson Desert, and more.

• Microlinks: the latest set of Xbox Game Pass titles include Disco Elysium, Resident Evil 7: Biohazard, Final Fantasy IV & more; Steamworks added a wishlist data API for your own titles, inc. wishlist totals by language for the first time; the latest Switch 2 OS patch inc. a big upgrade for Switch 1 games in handheld mode.

How Over The Top sold >200k copies in two weeks

In a week that’s seeing a giant launch for Pearl Abyss’ Crimson Desert - already at 2 million units sold - we can see the reasons for covering it prominently. But for most of us, the levels of funding to make a game like that - 7 years, hundreds of people - isn’t that likely. (We’ll still talk about it a bit below, though!)

But no, we’re going to focus on 100 vs. 100 World War I shooter Over The Top: WWI, which has sold ~200k copies on Steam (at $19.14 USD - appropriate price!) since its March 6th release, fueled by easy-to-pick-up gameplay and key influencers.

The game - created by 4-man dev (!) Flying Squirrel Entertainment and published by GG Publishing, also had an interesting ‘rising curve’ on Steam concurrents, maxing out so far at 7,000 CCU about 8 days after release, per GDCo Pro data:

So, we had a chance to chat to Henning Schmid of GG Publishing, and we identified some interesting things that helped the game succeed:

• The devs have had 15 years experience (!) making similar genre titles: when you keep working on things, you get better at them. So, starting with a paid DLC for Mount & Blade Warband in 2012, and continuing with a standalone American Civil War multiplayer shooter in 2022, Flying Squirrel kept working in the genre.

• World War I is a more commercial niche than the Civil War: Flying Squirrel’s Civil War game topped out at 800 CCU. But Schmid notes there are multiple hit WW1 games, both “WW1 as a core military simulation experience” (Verdun and Isonzo), and “player-driven sandbox games” (Holdfast). Over The Top blends both.

• There’s also a more unique mechanic in the mix - trench digging: you’ll see it called out in the below Steam player review sentiment analysis, but Schmid stresses the “the most obvious feature of Over The Top is digging trenches and building fortifications on the map.” And people teaming up to dig trenches does feel neat!

One major concern with games that require a large amount of players is the ‘cold start problem’ - the number of CCUs you need in order to not have people write ‘this game’s ded!’ Steam reviews. So for this title, Flying Squirrel made AI bots to “ensure that the WW1 atmosphere remained in place”, in case you don’t have 100 vs. 100 real players.

This is partly a learning from their previous game, but also makes sense, given this game is a bit more fun-first than skill-first: the idea, per Schmid, was to take “fun sandbox gameplay and enrich it with the WWI war machines like tanks and airplanes.”

One thing Schmid was disappointed with pre-release was the ‘trad media’ coverage of the game - he says: “most media are click-driven, and an update about the next Fortnite event or the big AAA game not delivering on expectations gets far more clicks” than Over The Top announces.

But good news - partnering with Andri Weidmann of Metaroot (publisher of The Farmer Was Replaced), who pitched in with marketing strategy and execution, the collective team was able to get great influencer reach and buzz at launch. How?

• A large, evolving set of playtests to get feedback and develop community: Schmid explains: “Each playtest was a little community event, with its own trailers showcasing the improvements and additions, and developers actively playing alongside the community and asking questions.” (It’s straightforward, but important.)

• Playing up the fun - and slight jankiness - of the core gameplay: the existing Steam audiovisual material was maybe a bit too polished, and Weidmann notes: “We strongly advised… to embrace the jank of the game and to show this on all the marketing material. People should know from the beginning what they will get.”

• Lots of manual work on reaching out to the right content creators: Weidmann said they “contacted more than 9k content creators and had one of the best receptions to this game we ever had in a campaign. Many quite big [streamers] then played the game like: LIRIK, xQc, Asmongold and jackfrags.”

The game is fairly North America-centric in sales, partly because of the streamers that picked it up - Schmid says “75% of Twitch streams are in English, and our sales numbers confirm that.” [GDCo Pro estimates 48% U.S. players of Over The Top, followed by the UK at 7%, Canada at 5.5%, and Australia at 4.5%.]

There were many other things that helped, such as Steam bundles with Hell Let Loose and Squad 44. But this game’s interesting to us because, well, a 4-person dev doing a 200-player World War I game that should eventually gross $10m+? That’s Steam in 2026, baby - unexpectedly low barriers to entry for genres, if you execute just right.

Steam debuts: Crimson Desert, Death Stranding 2!

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It’s the week after GDC, then, and the show’s 20,000 attendees from 85 countries (down from nearly 30k, with the Expo Pass - and a bunch of the expo - missing) is around where we expected. We still want to know the step count of the Dots.eco unauthorized giraffe, tho, who was shimmying all week like an ungulate possessed.

Before we start, this v.entertaining The Verge podcast with Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks - who seems smart, actually - did include this gem of a quote about toy testing scales: “We did carefully avoid saying six-seven around little kids in any play test labs. I think we purposely capped our rating scale at one to five and not 1 to 10.” (He’s joking, but hey…)

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

Game discovery news: Crimson Desert is here…

Let’s start out with a look at - frankly voluminous - game platform & discovery news, some left over from GDC:

• The latest unreleased trending Steam games, according to GDCo Pro's 7-day wishlist charts (March 9th-16th), are headed by Pearl Abyss' epic open-world ARPG Crimson Desert (#1), which is heading for a giant multi-platform debut. Also repeated winners: Forza Horizon 6 (#2), and the piratical Windrose (#5).

• New announcements? Open-world ‘alt Gold Rush’ title The Legend Of California (#4) looks hot, as does Digital Sun’s castle-defense roguelite where you play Dracula, ReVamp (#10). (And Kogama, once at #3, got announced & swiftly delisted cos it was using a pirated version of the Minecraft source code. Huh.)

• Nvidia’s latest “real-time neural rendering model that infuses pixels with photoreal lighting and materials”, DLSS 5, got announced at GTC, and is either incredibly impressive, according to Digital Foundry, or a ‘yassify’ simulator, for those who aren’t impressed with AI. (Take yr pick!)

• Last week’s awards shows at GDC saw upcoming ‘surreal strategy game’ Titanium Court pick up the Grand Prize in the Independent Games Festival awards, as “Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 won five categories, including Game of the Year” at the Game Developers Choice Awards, with Blue Prince getting the Best Design nod.

• Steam’s official top releases for Feb. 2026 - by revenue tier - are here, and we talked about most of the top titles already. But DLC is included, which we didn’t - this Age Of Empires II x South America DLC charted in Silver tier, as did an Age Of Mythology expansion pass and Battlefield 6 & Call Of Duty add-ons.

• Microlinks: Valve detail Steam Frame and Steam Machine Verified requirements at GDC 2026; Epic Games Store on mobile is “having a tougher time than expected breaking Apple and Google’s store duopoly”; Apple has reduced its App Store royalty from 30% to 25% in China, partly due to regulator pressure.

• Streaming showcases last week? The Future Games Show’s spring showcase was the big one (full set of announcements), inc. a Deep Rock Galactic: Rogue Core release date in May. But the much weirder Computer Worlds showcase - “a new showcase celebrating strange & distinctive games” - was also super cool, if niche-ier.

• Steam things: Valve’s got the FBI to take Steam game malware hijacks seriously, hence a page to report being targeted by them - Qs indicate the thieves were after crypto; Valve is facing another lawsuit over its loot box system, this time a U.S. class action suit over Counter-Strike 2 and pseudo-gambling.

• Google’s getting more aggressive with the PC version of Google Play Games, as Ars Technica notes: “The company promises its store will have more Windows titles, make those games easier to find, and help bring Android experiences to PCs (and vice versa).” More premium PC games on the subscription service sounds like a plan…

• We recently talked about Nintendo’s slower Switch 2 SKU approvals, and New Blood's Dave Oshry notes: “We're waiting for Nintendo to give us approval to actually launch [a 120FPS mouse-controlled Dusk on Switch 2] because they're still pretty cagey.” (We agree with Dave that they’re protecting against Switch 1-like “slop fests”.)

• Microlinks: a look inside the horror gaming streamer landscape, post-Res Evil launch; Apple’s adding Dredge - with all DLC content so far - and Unpacking to Apple Arcade in April; Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 leads UK BAFTA Games Awards nominations.

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Game engine usage on PC: the last 10 years?

Since we just added game engine & tech scanning for over 33,000 Steam games (and counting!) for our GameDiscoverCo Pro service, we thought now would be a great time to show you what we’ve found out. (As noted before, we adapted SteamDB-created tech to do this - all hail xPaw, and support him on Github.)

But why start this analysis with a Brotato trailer? Well, according to our file structure tracking analysis across a wide range of games, it’s the highest Steam revenue title ever created in up-and-coming open source game engine Godot:

[EDIT: after feedback, we need to add Slay The Spire 2, which we didn’t get to scanning just yet, and Buckshot Roulette, which is configured differently to our file scanner, to this list!]

It’s actually interesting to examine the earthy indie vibe of these titles, from Backpack Battles to The Roottrees Are Dead & beyond, and that’s actually ~$100m in gross Steam revenue between these ‘small’ games.

Overall, Godot is getting big for game jams - 39% of the GMTK Jam games in 2025 used it, up from 13% in 2021. But we wondered how it was faring in sheer numbers against Unity & Unreal, indisputably the ‘big 3’ of game engines that ‘regular’ devs use to make games nowadays. And that’s just what this chart shows:

This data is purely based on sheer number of games released, and it’s interesting for a couple of reasons:

• Godot has seen a significant market share uptick in recent years: it’s up from 0.9% of all the games we scanned in 2020 to 7.1% in 2025, the last full year we captured. And it’s 8.6% of all unreleased games we scanned. (Godot console is still a little messy, btw, since you probably need to use third-party middleware ports.)

• But that increase hasn’t come at the expense of Unity or Unreal: despite some business model woes at times, Unity has regularly had 50-51% of the total share of released games, dipping sliiightly to 49.4% by 2025. And Unreal is somewhat on the up, from 15% in 2020 to ~20% in 2025. (More like ~18.5% for unreleased games.)

• What’s been fading? The ‘roll your own engine’ approach: there are so many things to worry about, and engines got so cheap and good, so why make your own? (Many engines have packed Asset Stores with entire game templates in them, too!) Thus, ‘no obvious game engine’ is down from 27% in 2017 to 13% in 2025.

There’s some other smaller trends at play. For example, it looks like GameMaker lost ~2% of total market share in the last few years, we suspect mainly to Godot. Overall, our sample isn’t perfect, but it comprises all games with >$500k lifetime revenue on Steam, plus thousands of others, plus all games that are free or have a free demo.

So we can do things like ‘show me Steam game market share by # of games for all titles that made >$500k lifetime’:

What we definitely notice in this >$500k bucket is an increase in Unreal’s market share by game from 20% (all games) to 22.5% (>$500k) in 2025. But we also see Unity increase even more, from 49.4% to 53.7%! Those with reduced share are Godot (down from 7.1% to 4.1%) and miscellaneous smaller engines.

What we find particularly intriguing in that context is that in the GDC ‘state of the game industry’ survey for 2026, 42% of devs said Unreal was their “primary engine for game development”, with Unity polling at 30%. (This survey likely skewed towards bigger, existing studios, and larger teams may have had multiple respondents.)

We haven’t modeled total market share by revenue yet. (We have the data to do so, and may present it when we do!) And it’s very difficult to measure how much a game cost, and therefore ROI. But one thing we’re noticing is more smaller Unity-powered titles having breakout hits - due to the sheer amount & the ease of getting games running.

Almost 50% of the below top-charting new titles (listed by Steam revenue, launched in the last 12 months, Unity engine) are on the tinier team side of things, from Schedule I to Megabonk to CloverPit:

If you look at the same chart for Unreal-powered games (top new titles, last 12 months), we can only spot one game with a much smaller dev team - R V There Yet?, which is interesting, though the chart is higher-revenue in general:

Perhaps this shouldn’t be surprising, with Epic keen to get smaller creators building Fortnite Islands as opposed to standalone PC games, and Unreal being known as a) a bit more complex b) good-looking on high-end consoles, also a target for above games.

As a final data anecdote, the Top 50 new Unreal games released in the last 12 month grossed ~$1.8 billion on Steam, and the Top 50 new Unity titles grossed ~$930m. What does that mean? Can we make it all make sense? (Editor: nope!)

Well it’s complex, since we’re pretty sure those Top 50 Unreal games cost much more than 2x those Unity ones to make. But we can generalize: Unity’s got the mass market Swiss Army Knife approach, Unreal’s a higher-end choice that larger teams often turn to, and Godot’s a scrappy newcomer that’s grabbed market share - but not theirs, yet.

Roblox’s top titles in February: Rivals hits top spot

Finally, a swift look at February 2026’s top-earning Roblox charts (above), as worked out by David Taylor at Creator Games and Creator Exchange. Once again, we got a more detailed Top 20 (Google Drive doc) with average and peak CCU and average session length. But very briefly breaking this one down:

• Roblox’s predominant shooter Rivals hit the top-earning spot: the PvP title, an intense 1v1 to 5v5 FPS, hit an average CCU of 298k, the lowest in the Top 5, but is on fire right now monetization-wise. (Check out someone hiring an in-game ‘sniper coach’ for their YouTube channel, to get an idea of the vibes.)

• Escape Tsunami For Brainrots vaulted up to #1 in minutes played: we talked about this title last month. It’s brainrot-themed, with ‘avoid obstacles’ in a PvE environment, but has a collection mechanic. And man, Roblox players like collecting things. (Is this good? It’s what’s happening, anyhow.)

• 3D anime fighter Jujutsu Shenanigans hit Top 10 by minutes played: looking at YouTube videos of this one, it’s another of the ‘heavily unofficially inspired by an anime’ titles, with some interesting destructible environments and move sets, if all Roblox-coded. (It kinda looks fun, also.)

Well, I’ve comprehensively messed up my YouTube recommendations now, and am chagrined at my lack of Roblox expertise. But again - there’s a world out there that needs seriously looking at. Even Jujutsu Shenanigans is averaging 200k CCU across multi-platform Roblox players, for example - and that ain’t nothing. Toodles..

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

As GDC finishes up, we’re back to the text mines. Our verdict on GDC 2026? Great weather, good experiential show setup, & enthusiastic vibes from attendees (U.S., Asia, not so much European, & a tad student-first.) But it’s a deal-light environment (unless you wanted to meet Mario and talk MGs), as bootstrapped, agile hits continue to provide the only major ROI, outside of a chunk of outlying AA/AAA games.

Before we start, a shout-out to board game publisher Stonemaier Games, who do that ‘transparent sales #s’ thing we love. Their 2025 stakeholder report shows $23.7m in revenue and LTD sales of 2.64m units for their big hit, Wingspan, with its 2024 spinoff Wyrmspan at 450k. (It’s all about franchises, right? Tho Scythe also hit 600k units.)

[FREE DEMO OF GDCo PRO? You too can get a gratis demo of our GameDiscoverCo Pro company-wide ‘Steam deep dive’ & console data by contacting us today - ~90 orgs have it. Or, signing up to GDCo Plus gets the rest of this newsletter and Discord access, plus more. ]

Game discovery news: Pokopia, Res Evil still shine!

And let’s finish off the week by cramming in a bunch of the rest of GDC news - we have some left over for next Tuesday, though:

• The latest Footprints.gg estimates on weekly ‘trad media’ mentions show Resident Evil Requiem at #1 yet again, but the Pokemon life sim Pokopia a very strong #2 - it confirmed 2.2m copies sold already. Also notable: Marathon, the lurking, about-to-hit Crimson Desert & the still supreme Slay The Spire 2.

• Super interesting? Valve sent a comment to its New York-based players about the loot/mystery box lawsuit from that U.S. state. Read it carefully - it reveals that “the NYAG seems to believe boxes and their contents should not be transferable”, which goes against Valve’s ethos, and also pushes back against more player tracking.

• Also appreciate Valve’s shout-out to the ‘game shaming’ side-quest of the suit we also hated: “We feel the need to address comments made by the NYAG about games, real world violence, and children. Those extraneous comments are a distraction and a mischaracterization we’ve all heard before.” Amen.

• Discord is now letting developers customize the profile for their game, Discord-wide. Pre-requisites? “Your dev studio must have a (soon-to-be-verified) Discord server… your game must be on Steam, and the Steam store page must link to your Discord server… your game must be playable, meaning it’s available for download and play.”

• Epic announced that Fortnite is raising prices, since “the cost of running Fortnite has gone up a lot and we’re raising prices to help pay the bills”, with 80-92% of the vBucks now buyable for the same price. (Purchases still come with 20% back in Epic Rewards, cross-spendable on Epic Games Store - is that promo permanent?)

• European ratings agency PEGI just switched things up: “four new categories… will.. tackle elements of addictive design in games, unmonitored online communication, and - the big one - paid content in a game including systems like loot boxes.” This means a game like EA Sports FC, normally PEGI 3, “will now likely be age-rated PEGI 16.”

• Xbox’s Jason Ronald talk at GDC was notably beefy, with its next-gen Project Helix a big source of discussion: “The next-gen Xbox plays Xbox console games and PC games… Alpha versions of Project Helix will be sent to developers in 2027.” (With current hardware shortages, it’s gotta be non-cheap and dated for ‘later’, though.)

• Also notable from that keynote: “Ronald announces ‘Xbox Mode’ is coming to Windows 11 in ‘select markets’ starting in April. It adds features found on Xbox Ally to your PC and laptop. You'll be able to switch into Xbox mode to get that ‘Xbox feeling,’ Ronald says.” So multiplatform goodness, even as ‘This Is An Xbox’ gets erased?

• Looking at Nvidia’s GDC announcements, of which there are many, here’s one that stood out: “GeForce NOW users, from March 19th, can play at up to 90 FPS on virtual reality headsets, including the Apple Vision Pro and Meta Quest.” (And it’s their GTC event next week, although we imagine that’ll be AI-first, hah.)

• In ‘not the usual suspects are making great $ on games’ news, Bloomberg looks at some of the Roblox creators that have prospered recently: “Between homework and a part-time job at a Chinese restaurant, Colley invented Fisch… today, at 19, he’s collecting $400,000 a month for his creation.” (Many do so by partnering with ‘scalers’.)

• AI in games? Google’s DeepMind talk at GDC (per Stephen Totilo, $) explains: “Genie 3… has memory limits before the consistency of its worlds break down. It can remember.. pretty well for about a minute.” And per Circana: “US video game player sentiment around the use of generative AI is worsening” - 25% would skip if AI-ed.

• Microlinks: how Bioneers “reached 26,000 Steam wishlists in 5 months with no marketing budget for our upcoming Factorio-style simulation game about biology”; Save the World, Fortnite's original PVE survival mode, is finally going free-to-play after almost nine years; Valve sued by the UK’s Performing Right Society over licenses for in-game music on Steam.

What Steam’s 2026 biz update tells us about the ecosystem

Having got done with GDC, it was Valve’s presentation on ‘the state of Steam in 2026’, given both offsite and onsite at GDC, which we made a beeline for. These annual talks aren’t known for big reveals. But they do provide great context into how our atypical PC game distribution daddy looks after its rapidly multiplying children (that’s you?)

There was an ‘assets’ page given out by QR code at the end of Valve’s GDC talks, which gives you a good idea of the kind of thing discussed via links. (A separate Steam hardware talk does have a slide deck, but it’s a bit contextless. And the deck for the Annual Update would have been even more so, hence not being shared.)

But since we were there, here’s an impression of what Valve’s Kaci Aitchison Boyle and Tom Giardino said - besides a good Tom G. joke on the state of Valve’s hardware push: “If you have a line on a bunch of RAM, we would love to buy it from you!” Here’s what was interesting about the talk:

• There was a deliberate shift towards explaining how Valve thinks: rather than a list of new features, they wanted to go into how and why they make decisions. For example: Daily Deal improvements, where 1,500 games got Daily Deals in 2025, 69% never featured before, with $ from Daily Deals being up 274% year on year.

• How Valve thinks - they want to try to get out of the way: in the Daily Deal example, the duo also discussed things that they didn’t do - start scheduling pre-planning programs, charge money for featuring, or “become tastemakers” and pick the games themselves. They felt ‘self-serve’ was way more powerful.

• As a privately held, long-term focused company, their priorities are different: for Valve, it’s all about two things, players and developers, they say. Thus: no ads on platform, and as Tom claimed, not a company where “decisions are made around quarterly earnings calls… sometimes incenting decisions that aren’t good for the product.”

All of this is intriguing because, well, it feels to me like Steam hasn’t always tried to explain its ethos so clearly. At one point, Kaci said that “we really make decisions based on ‘exactly what your happiness is looking like’”. And I think they do try. And in many ways, the libertarian-adjacent Valve is oddly ‘pure of heart’ and selfless. (With some rich megabosses with superyachts, background playing up income inequality, ofc.)

Anyhow, the deliberate process the duo outlined of shipping a solution, getting feedback and iterating is frankly a joy, compared to many other platforms who don’t even have a clear input process for changes. And the pace of improvements to the platform in 2025 is pretty impressive.

GameDeveloper.com’s Chris Kerr has a write-up of the talk (and some live-BlueSky-ed pics), with a few more details, including Tom G. noting that Steam usage is roughly “double the peak concurrent and in-game users from five years ago.” (We do think that revenue on Steam has been up double digits almost every year in that time.)

More games doing better on Steam - that’s good?

But look, I know many of you reading don’t feel so great about what’s going on. In 2026, platforms are regularly punching bags for the people that develop or publish on them. Why? Because their new game isn’t successful or profitable. Which sucks.

Which is why two transparent, data-specific slides from Valve’s talk already caused a ruckus on the Internet. The first one (my pic, above) reveals that 5,863 Steam games earned >$100k USD in 2025, almost double the total for 2020.

And the second one (below) is a similar stat for games grossing >$500k USD in 2025. There were 2,395 of them, and again, that’s almost double the pace of $500k-grossers in 2020. Tom’s point was that “dramatically more games finding success every single year”, and such increases are “generally keeping pace” with user growth.

Are people happy about increased success, though? No, they are not. And the #1 complaint is that these estimates included games released in any year, and says nothing about how new games fared. Some people even think the graph is in some way deceptive.

This is actually super-interesting because Valve’s choice of graph reflects how they think of the ecosystem. The Steam algorithm doesn’t have significant bias towards the age of the game (and with many great games being updated for a long time after release, I’d argue that it probably shouldn’t.) So for them - line go up, good?

[There’s maybe a weird meta-discussion to be had about that: for example, is the fact that older games are equally favored by the Steam algo actually a curation decision? Please discuss this at your next grad lecture - we don’t really think so.]

Anyhow, we made it easy for everyone, and we used GameDiscoverCo data to estimate what we think the release year of games in Valve’s graphs were. It won’t be perfect, but it’s good enough. And here you go:

So your answer is - about 25-30% of the games in those charts were released in 2025, and the rest earlier - in some cases much earlier. Some swift extra math(s) on this, including year on year comparisons:

• For >$100k games: in 2025, 29% of the ~5,800 games = ~1,700 were released in 2025. (That’s 8.5% of all 20k games released in 2025.) In 2024, it was 24.2% of ~5,300 games = ~1,300 released in 2024. (That’s 7% of the 18,500 new games in 2024.)

• For >$500k games: in 2025, 25% of the ~2400 games = ~600 were released in 2025. (That’s 3% of all 20k games released in 2025.) In 2024, it was 21.6% of ~2,100 games = ~460 released in 2024. (That’s 2.5% of the 18,500 new games in 2024.)

If you can even read all the stats above without your eyes crossing, it means that Valve could have done a similar graph for new games, showing good year on year increases (at least from 2024 to 2025), and even the % of new >$100k & >$500k games going up YoY. That’s… good, right?

So why are individuals ‘steamed’? It’s really about ‘everyone making great games’ - the democratization of game dev. Open platforms encourage bootstrapped indies like Buggos 2 or Monster Care Simulator (plucking from the ‘>$100k in 2025’ list) that are great, but made by 1-2 individuals, not created by the usual suspects in offices. It’s - in our view - a lot of these titles that are supplanting bigger, more organized efforts.

For some devs, it may have been that 2015-2020 on Steam was operating on ‘easy mode’. You could make a decent game and it sold - less choice, less catalog backlog. (We think there was a bigger gap from ‘pro games’ to ‘non-pro games’ back then, too, anecdotally.) Now you can make a 2017-era ‘decent game’, and it can sell <1k units.

Coincidentally, Paul Kilduff-Taylor just put out an op-ed about these very graphs, in which he notes the ‘Indiepocalyse’ panic has been around for at least a decade, and he concludes: “What changes are we supposed to make based on this information? Trim budgets even further? Give up entirely? Personally, my career has been impeded much more significantly by pessimism and anxiety than by material market conditions.”

So you need to understand the environment you’re making games in. But two final pieces of contrasting advice, based on what we see: sure, listen to Kenny Rogers when he says ‘know when to walk away’, but otherwise, well, ‘Keep Calm And Carry On’.

This week on Steam: Monster Hunter Stories, hey!

Read more

And GDC week is upon us, notable for the timed announcements from game platform companies (see below news section). However, our lead story is some thoughts & data from top co-op ‘friendslop’ (fine, ‘fun with buddies’!) titles.

Before we start, mountains of Steam player review data lead to some amazing niche revelations, including the fact that “People who misspell roguelike as ‘rougelike’ consistently review everything higher.” Also: “It seems that roguelite players view gambling, repetitiveness, masochism, wasting time, and arcade more favorably than roguelike fans.”

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

Game disco news: smaller teams make hit games!

Looking at the notable news on this fine Monday of GDC week, here’s all the fresh stuff we can spot:

• Unity put out its yearly ‘gaming trends’ report, interviewing devs and crunching engine stats, and noting: “The majority of studios are shifting focus to smaller games… for Unity developers, project development time has decreased dramatically”, by 77% from Jan. 2022 to Dec. 2025. Lots of interesting data in there…

• As spotted by the PSPrices website: “Sony is running a large-scale A/B price test: the same [PS5/PS4] games are shown to different users at different prices - with discounts up to 17.6%. The experiment involves more than 150 games in 68 regions, and the test has been running for over 3 months.”

• Steam posted its developer year in review for 2025, including a ton of good recaps. One notable change: the original version of the blog said the company “must revisit our exact shipping schedule and pricing” for Steam Machine & Frame, but it was edited post-release to clarify “we will be shipping all three products this year.” Hm.

• Here’s a (quickly fixed!) nightmare on par with ‘I’m singing at Carnegie Hall but in my underwear’ - the retail version of RoboCop Rogue City on Steam was briefly replaced by an early build of an unannounced Hunter: The Reckoning game. (Please, everyone, ensure your build steps can’t make this happen.)

• Roblox is aiming to widen its dev base, launching two new programs: “The Roblox Incubator program will help experienced development teams turn promising concepts into commercially successful games… the Roblox Jumpstart program will help creators who are new to Roblox, or are exploring new types of games, publish on Roblox Studio.”

• As Aftermath spotted, Nintendo are one (of a large number!) of companies suing the U.S. government to get tariff money back - they’re “largely targeting refunds of the previously imposed tariffs [after] the Supreme Court found that Trump could not invoke the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977.”

• We’re highlighting this impressive Kickstarter - >$800k on a $115k goal for Wonderful Neoran Valley - because it’s a popular Italian-language Pokemon YouTuber deciding to make a “monster collector roguelite”. (Fan-bases for streamers can be redirected to fund similar games: obvious, but cool.)

• Given Indonesia has >280 million inhabitants, plz note Steam’s new mandatory content ratings requirement for the country: “We’ve worked with Indonesian authorities to update Steam’s built-in ratings system to generate the necessary age ratings to comply with these new requirements.” (No action necessary for most games.)

• Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella was keen to re-iterate the company’s long-term interest in video games at an internal Q&A last week: “The trickle from that excellence to the rest of the company becomes straightforward. I joke with [NVIDIA CEO] Jensen Huang, if it wasn't for gaming [NVIDIA] wouldn't exist. Think about it - without DirectX, I don't think the entire GPU revolution… would've happened.”

• Governments & games update: Australia’s age verification for R-rated games & websites just went into force, and remember that games like GTA Online are 18+ in Oz; back to Indonesia, where accounts on ‘high-risk digital platforms’ - including Roblox, YouTube & TikTok - will be banned for children under the age of 16.

• Microlinks: PlayStation gamers are using a glitch to make it look like they’ve played GTA 6 already; Feb. 2026’s top-grossing (on-platform $!) mobile games inc. Honor Of Kings, LastWar, PUBG Mobile, Whiteout Survival, Royal Match; this giant report on the state of the creator economy has ‘just’ 53 sections to browse.

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How two friendslop hits got audience format right

We’re starting this newsletter feature - ostensibly about video games - with a screenshot of Hitoshi Matsumoto’s Amazon Prime Video TV show Documental, which you may be aware of locally (it has 30+ regional versions!) under the name LOL: Last One Laughing. Why? Because it’s a global hit due to its clever TV format:

“Ten comedians stay in a living-room-style studio with hidden cameras for a few hours… During this time, they must try to make their opponents laugh in any way and by any means, while not reacting to their opponents’ attempts to make them break.”

This is a genius setup, for sure. But we’re not all virtuoso comedians - and we also don’t want to be locked in a room for 6 hours? However, what we can all do as players is a) watch streamers playing a game with a clever setup b) decide to try that game ourselves with friends, because we like the idea & it looks hella fun to play.

That’s why we like thinking of less expensive ‘friendslop’-adjacent game hits as carefully placed bets on ‘theme and format to have fun in’, a different branch of game design than the traditional Zelda dungeon map making. It still requires skill to get this right - but it’s flexing way different muscles than singleplayer game design. So let’s examine the success of two recent Oro Interactive-published games that nailed it:

Super Battle Golf - when ‘putting chaos’ reigns…

Firstly, let’s look at Brimstone & Oro’s Super Battle Golf ($8), which hit 500,000 units sold on Steam on Feb 28th, just 9 days after release, and is now near 800k sold, with 15-20,000 peak CCU daily. (Its top CCU was 9 days after launch, the sign of a viral hit.)

The dev team behind the game made some slick-looking titles, including 2024’s ‘chaotic co-op city builder’ Overthrown,. But they didn’t break out with that more complex $25 game, which topped out at 350 CCU. Yet Super Battle Golf has been a big winner. Some notes on why, with comments from the publisher:

• The underlying ‘format’ is correctly & deliciously subversive: everyone knows how golf works - you take your turn, behave politely, and follow the rules of the game. But SBG throws that out the window, and as Oro’s Hans Haave told us, its “naturally chaotic” nature twinned with party game vibes makes it shine.

• The devs took a co-op game engine and laser-focused the output: we’ve seen this before with RV There Yet?, also made by a team who had a bigger game/engine, but focusing on doing a simpler idea perfectly paid off. As Hans notes, SBG is “polished to a very high level, and that is immediately felt when looking at and playing it.”

• This is a rare friendslop hit which isn’t quite so co-operative: Oro’s Haave notes the basic pitch is: “PvP golf with bazookas, golf carts, physics, where everybody plays at the same time”, and yep, ‘friendly PvP’ is the vibe. Haave adds: “in an environment [with] a lot of co-op games… a game that offers an opportunity to compete and destroy friendships is perhaps refreshing.” (It’s weirdly Mario Kart-y, by abstract vibes?)

As far as specifics, Oro kindly share the Steam split by country (below), and it’s interesting that Super Battle Golf is more U.S/Canada-centric than some other ‘friendslop’ hits. (We have Peak at ~25% U.S. players, for example.) Is SBG’s skew cos of golf’s lack of popularity outside of the West, or a PvP thing, or streamer preference?

Anyhow, we’d expect this game to keep scaling to millions of players, especially at the $8 price point, and Haave notes of continued influencer wins: “We’ve seen streamers come back to play 5-6 times since launch three weeks ago. In other cases creators are setting up their own tournaments, playing in teams (even though not supported in-game).”

Oh, and it turns out Jimmy Fallon reached out before Super Battle Golf’s launch, which “was not on our bingo card” for Oro, and further underscores our earlier point about underlying entertainment ‘formats’ being relevant for different media types…

Roadside Research - aliens, gas station, fun…

The second title, developed by Cybernetic Walrus and again published by Oro (whom we profiled last May), is Roadside Research ($13), a “1 to 4 player co-op gas station simulator. Except you’re aliens. And undercover.” It also made the ‘Top 10 new Steam games of Feb. 2026’ list we put out last week, with 396,000 units sold (nice!) since Feb. 12th.

We covered the game’s growth to 250k Steam wishlists last September, with 903,000 uniques on the game’s demo (each playing for a median of 1 hours and 12 minutes.) The finished game itself has 3 hours, 10 minutes median playtime LTD, with 47% U.S. players, 10% Germany, 5% Brazil, 4% the UK and Canada, and down from there.

This title is much more of a collab, too - Oro’s Sam De Boeck notes to us: “We were part of the project from day 0. We worked with Cybernetic Walrus on Order 13 previously and had a great time.” So what can we learn from this title? Some thoughts:

• The hook was chef’s kiss for streamers and players: as Sam explains: “After a few brainstorming sessions, Cybernetic Walrus came up with ‘aliens running a gas station’ and showed an alien with a dad bod and paper mask as diguise. We signed it on a concept pitch.”

• A well-honed debut trailer showed off some novel presentation: Hans notes that Sam “came up with the idea to have the trailer start with a comedic interview intro like Parks and Rec or The Office, and have an alien describing the core loop with some funny gameplay.” And yep, it totally works.

• The game’s technically co-optional, but really needs more players: unlike Super Battle Golf, 1-4 people can play Roadside Research, but as this review notes, it’s very tricky without at least 2 (and ideally more!) players. The dev team is planning an ‘automation’ update to help with some of this, by the look of it.

So again, we’re talking about a strong format, this time closer to the first-person ‘simulation’ genre of games like Supermarket Simulator or goofy drug sim Schedule I. You also need good streamer outreach & high-quality trailers & social media, but you really need solid shop management gameplay to mask all the ‘alien abduction’ memes, and it looks like Cybernetic Walrus and Oro nailed that.

Finally, you can customize the silly human pictures the aliens wear on their faces, so Sam also wanted to call out “the amount and quality of face drawings shared on the Discord and Steam community. Some are true artists. We love to see the community having fun with this.” (See above for much silliness.)

In general, Roadside Research, like Super Battle Golf, is another example of the right ‘format’ for a viral social game. If you want to watch your favorite streamers playing, and so you want to pick the game up for yourself afterwards, it’s a hit! Is it as simple as that? Well, it kind of is - but finding the idea and getting the execution right isn’t…

Top streamed Feb games: hey, REvil, Mewgenics

It’s time for another chart from livestream analytics platform Stream Hatchet, with the Top 100 most-streamed games for Feb. 2026 across the big (non-China) game video streaming platforms like Twitch & a host of other medium/small platforms.

Once again, here’s the full list of the Top 100 (Google Drive link) with GDCo notes. And we joined forced with Stream Hatchet’s Mark Rowland to check out the trends:

• Grand Theft Auto V made it past League Of Legends to #1: GTA V (166.6m hours watched) managed to overtake LoL (159m hours) this month, thanks in part to big VTubers like Kuzuha and Kanae playing on RP servers on YouTube Gaming. But both games are still huge…

• Overwatch (2) managed to break into the Top 10 again: Blizzard’s hero shooter hit #9 with 45.8m hours watched, a 313% uplift from January (!) StreamHatchet did some detailed analysis, but a rename from Overwatch 2 to just ‘Overwatch’, new story content, and an eSports bootcamp in Korea all helping surge interest.

• New game winners inc. Resident Evil Requiem, Mewgenics: you may not be surprised to learn that Res Evil Requiem hit #16 (24.8m hours) with just two days of viewership, and other debuts Mewgenics (#32, 11.5m) and Nioh 3 (#34, 10.3m) also charted impressively.

Also notable? Creepy toy standout Poppy Playtime surged towards the Top 20 due to its Chapter 5 DLC, and debuts Marathon (beta), Reanimal, Diablo II: Resurrected, and Dragon Quest VII Reimagined all made the Top 50-ish. Finally, zombie survival-er HumanitZ hit 1.0 and chomped into the Top 100, with ~3 million hours watched…

[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 have returned - and before we get going, a mea culpa on the ‘wishlists added during Next Fest’ specifics in Tuesday’s newsletter. We’ve removed ‘em cos they undershot some wishlist increments, partly due to the big follower-to-wishlist multiples of Next Fest. (All the other data/analysis - uniques, CCU, followers - was just fine, tho.)

Oh, and if you’re actually in town for GDC in San Francisco next week, microtips from a local: the Nintendo Store in Union Square is open, Gott’s Roadside at the Ferry Building does a good burger, and the Kaws exhibit at SFMOMA is good-ass pop art. (There’s also playable games at SFMOMA on Thu/Fri via The MIX.)

[FREE DEMO OF GDCo PRO? You too can get a gratis demo of our GameDiscoverCo Pro company-wide ‘Steam deep dive’ & console data by contacting us today - ~90 orgs have it. Or, signing up to GDCo Plus gets the rest of this newsletter and Discord access, plus more. ]

Game discovery news: Resident Evil’s takeover..

We’re already rolling on to the next big launches (see our Steam section later), but let’s start our discovery & platform news section with last week’s biggie:

• The latest Footprints.gg estimates on weekly ‘trad media’ mentions show Resident Evil Requiem - which already hit 5 million copies sold, per Capcom, #1 by far. Also hot: transmedia franchises God Of War & Fallout, as well as Pokemon life sim Pokopia (Switch 2 exclusive, Dragon Quest Builders 2 co-devs, a lotta hype.)

• Xbox’s new CEO Asha Sharma re-engaged the fanbase via X/Twitter, revealing “Project Helix, the code name for our next generation console. Project Helix will lead in performance and play your Xbox and PC games.” More partner discussion at GDC next week, according to Sharma. (Expensive consoles for core gamers are back!)

• Just announced: new tools for developer and publisher homepages on Steam, including specialized versions for special occasions, new templates, new configurations and more. (This is a really nice upgrade, and comes with a 20 minute video tutorial on it - great stuff, Valve.)

• We got a full Jason Schreier piece for Bloomberg on Sony’s PC pullback: “Sony Group Corp. no longer plans to release its big PlayStation 5 games on PC… Online games such as Marathon and Marvel Tokon will still be released across multiple platforms, but single-player titles such as… Ghost of Yotei and… Saros will remain exclusive to PS5.”

• Next Fest follow-ups? There were 750 total AI-disclosed Next Fest entrants (21% vs 17% from the last edition), we forgot to mention on Tuesday. And some say the first coupla “unpaid labor” days of Next Fest game-tuning is like being “thrown into a pool of endless white noise” for players. (Could there be a pre-Fest to tune algo?)

• Big news in mobile royalty-town, as Google reduces most Play Store fees to 20-25%, to deal with Epic lawsuit ramifications and try to win back ‘we’re taking payments to our web store’ companies. M.G. Siegler wonders what this means for Apple ($), in particular, who are still holding out. (How about PC/console, too?)

• We got a nice note re: a Steam discovery tool: “steampoacher(), the free tool for viewing and downloading Steam capsule images just added support for screenshots and trailers, including download support for both. I guess you could call it version 3?” Great!

• Some interesting meta-thoughts (ha ha!) from Meta’s CTO Andrew Bosworth on ‘failing VR game fans’: “Many of the people who might say I failed them would say so because they loved things that I gave them, and are mad that the gravy train has come to a stop. But I still respect that.. the people that argue that I’ve failed are not yet VR gaming fans, who I think could be.” (So yes, it’s about market size.)

• FirstLook’s new whitepaper (free reg. req.) interviewed 250 devs about discovery success signals for PC/console games, with 78% of studios saying YouTube was a key platform for them discovery-wise, vs. 53% TikTok, 48% Twitch, and 41% Discord. (The answer, as always, is ‘all of the above’.)

• The Financial Times ($) says that: “The White House is debating whether to allow Tencent, the Chinese tech and gaming company, to maintain stakes in popular video game groups.” (The discussion is if a ‘security risk’ is created by the part or whole ownerships in Epic, Riot, Supercell & others - fun, huh?)

• Microlinks: The Sims 4 will open an official marketplace to let content creators sell mods for a share of ‘Moola’; Capcom says PC game sales account for approximately 50% of total units and they expect this % to increase; the UK Insomnia Gaming Festival is canned due to “reduced investment in live events from major tech and hardware brands.”

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Feb. 2026’s top-selling new Steam games = these!

It’s a whole new month - and following our look at Jan. 2026’s top new Steam games, headed by Quarantine Zone, StarRupture and LORT, it’s time to check out February. It’s a shorter month, but had three titles selling better than the #1 in Jan:

• Mewgenics made the top spot in our charts with 1.7m units: it’s a close call between it and Res Evil Requiem, but in our charts, “bizarre cat-breeding simulator” Mewgenics ($30) - which we did a full newsletter on already - is the top new Steam game of Feb. 2026. (Median time played is already ~13 hours, average >23!)

• Resident Evil Requiem launched late in the month & is a giant hit: it came out late on Feb. 27th, and we have it at 1.5m units sold on Steam in those ~36 hours. But Capcom’s horror sequel Resident Evil Requiem ($70-80) is over 2m LTD Steam units - and more than 5 million across PC/console. (It’s so well-executed, too.)

• Super Battle Golf & Yapyap show how strong co-op goofiness is: co-operative wizard-based ‘friendslop’-type thing YAPYAP ($10) is down off its 14k CCU heights. But its goofy likeability took it to >700k units, as anarchic golf cart/weapon mangler Super Battle Golf ($8) hit 500k in 9 days. (Streamers love ‘em.)

The above two ‘sloppers’ weren’t the only co-op playgrounds to chart - Roadside Research ($12) also made it into the Top 10. (We’ll have more on the trend next week - there’s a low technical/asset barrier to entry, but you have to really nail execution.)

When it comes to actual Steam revenue, the ‘new game’ charts look different, since we’re comparing $8 games to $70 games. (Of course, the dev costs varied a lot, too!) Resident Evil Requiem takes the lead with ~$75m on Steam, and has amassed a lot more $ since end of month.

But we also see ‘dark samurai action RPG’ Nioh 3 ($70) pop up into third place with >$25m, and some other titles like Diablo II Resurrected ($40) also jump up the chart somewhat. (We’re not sure what a good result for that remake is, but people liked it!)

As for overall top Feb. premium Steam game performers (in units!), you can see the new games we mentioned, but also big pushes from bug-infested shooter Helldivers 2 (+700k to 13.7m on Steam), thanks to a new cyborg invasion & discount, and Arc Raiders (+700k to 8.6m on Steam.)

Aggressive discounting (75% off, alongside a new desert biome) helped Ark: Survival Ascended (+500k to 3m Steam units) make the charts and hit $100m in gross Steam revenue, according to our estimates - though it’s been in Early Access since 2023.

Our revenue estimates across all Steam games in Feb. 2026 (including F2P titles) shows Counter-Strike 2 predictably hanging out at #1, with good months from PUBG (#3, thanks to Spring Fest), Apex Legends (#5, thanks to a new Breach update), and more.

Finally, as a bonus, we’ll check in on PlayStation, where we have Resident Evil Requiem at >1.6m units in Feb. (and >2m to date!) with Saudi Arabia (i.e. the Middle East), Hong Kong (i.e. China) and Japan the #2-4 biggest countries playing it, behind the U.S. (It’s such a global phenom vs. many other franchises.)

Also in this chart: Nioh 3 approaching 500k sold, and co-op horror game Reanimal (which also sold decently on Steam!) at nearly 300k, with Dragon Quest VII remake and the God Of War 2D pixel art ‘surprise drop’ between 150k and 200k units so far. Over-the-top sequel High On Life 2 managed 100k between PlayStation and Steam.

On other consoles: High On Life also added >1m Xbox Game Pass players, by far the highest for last month for a new GP game. (You may remember the original was the biggest ever third-party Game Pass launch, likely 5x that, in merrier days.) And we have Resident Evil Requiem at a respectable 300k til month-end on Xbox: people care.

Nintendo Switch Western eShop-wise, classic Pokemon games FireRed and LeafGreen are selling close to 1m, and Mario Tennis Fever hit 250k - and more on physical. For third-parties, Resident Evil Requiem was top, perhaps >100k digital, with Fallout 4: Anniversary Edition and Dragon Quest VII Reimagined also charting.

Steam debuts this week: hi, Slay The Spire 2 (& Marathon!)

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It’s the week after the week before, and so we’re back in your general area, doing the posting and the data and the results and the bibbedy floobidy. This time out: yes, we have all the Steam Next Fest data you ever wanted (and some you probably didn’t.)

Before we start, you may know video game YouTube essayist Ahoy from his videos on Doom, Quake & Monkey Island. But his latest video, ‘Brown’, surveys the history of top games’ color palette & saturation, discovering that 2016 was the brownest year for video games (Doom, Far Cry Primal), and 2001 (Halo, GTA 3) the least brown…

[WANNA CHECK OUT GDCo PRO? You too can get a free demo of our GameDiscoverCo Pro company-wide ‘Steam deep dive’ & console data by reaching out today - ~90 orgs have it. Or, signing up to GDCo Plus gets the rest of this newsletter and Discord access, plus more. ]

Game discovery news: yr Steam PC has wot RAM?

Let’s check out the top game discovery & platform news to start, which is going a little bit like this:

• As I posted over on LinkedIn, the PC debut of Resident Evil Requiem is a “good opportunity to see Steam's new 'show my tech specs' box in action within player reviews… in this example, a player is saying the game runs smooth on his machine, and you can even _see_ his machine specs.” Smart idea by Steam, huh?

• Journalist Pierre-Hugues Meyer kindly wrote up ‘how to get press coverage during Next Fest’ for us, and it’s very real on the high volume of incoming: “I received emails for 157 different [Next Fest] games. I received the first email on January 28, and the last on February 25.” Lots of good tips on transparency & timing in there…

• As spotted on BlueSky, the New York AG case against Valve on loot boxes has the following capper: “Although this case is about illegal gambling, it is important to note that Valve’s promotion of games that glorify violence and guns helps fuel the dangerous epidemic of gun violence.” (Really, New York? Who lobbied for this suit?)

• Nintendo’s latest streaming Indie World showcase snuck up on us, and the highlights (PR) inc. neat roguelite brawler Rotwood insta-launching as a Switch 2 console exclusive, the puzzling Blue Prince making it to Switch 2, Deadzone: Rogue, Denshattack! & more. (There’s more Switch 2-only indies in this batch.)

• ICYMI: yes, video games platform Netflix won’t be acquiring Warner Bros (& Warner Bros Games!), but Paramount (likely?) will in a few months, including Rocksteady, TT Games, Avalanche Software & more. (Given needs for cost cuts, we do wonder what’ll happen to the remaining in-house studios.)

• PlayStation 5 lead architect Mark Cerny has revealed that Resident Evil Requiem for PS5 Pro shipped with a more advanced version of PSSR, “an AI library that analyzes game images pixel by pixel as it upscales them.” (Digital Foundry is super impressed with the PS5 Pro version of RE, too…)

• The latest unreleased trending Steam games in GameDiscoverCo Pro’s 7-day wishlist charts (Feb 25th-March 1st) include open-world fantasy ARPG Crimson Desert (#1) getting a ton of interest - should be '(un)expectedly' big on launch. And Slay The Spire 2 (#3), which is out this week and adds co-op to a winning formula.

• Naavik’s done a great ‘deep dive’ on UGC game trends, which includes a ton of detail on Roblox and more info on Fortnite Creative than we’ve seen recently, noting: “Across the top three ecosystems we measured (Roblox, Fortnite, and Overwolf), developer payouts were ~$2.2B in 2025, a +47% increase over 2024.”

• Various ‘sources’ and readers of tea-leaves are claiming that PlayStation may be looking more carefully about its push into PC games, as it looks to make money in the most efficient way. (No specifics yet, and it’s vague AF, but we’ve noticed diminishing returns on peak Steam CCU as more PlayStation games hit PC.)

• Microlinks: Frank Lantz on why there hasn’t been any significant new AI-based game experiences so far; Roblox launches inaugural Global Parent Council for parent input; some data on why YouTube Shorts is working for Uncanny Valley: Checkpoint, with ~1 million views and 6,000 organic wishlists so far.

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

OK, we did it again. We’ve done deep-dives on Next Fest for ages - here’s our Oct. 2025 NF analysis, also June 2025, Feb. 2025, Oct. 2024, June 2024, February 2024, Oct. 2023, June 2023, and February 2023. And so it’s time to turn the Eye Of Sauron to last week’s PC Steam demo showcase, which had a whoppin’ 3,500+ games to try.

Before we start, Valve’s Top 50 demos of Next Fest - listed sequentially by unique players - is a great kick-off point, since it gives you a strong flavor to add to our super-detailed data on every single Feb. 2026 Next Fest demo (Google Drive doc) we’ve once again pulled.

We like using Valve’s Top 10 most-played demos (above) as a starting point, since it’s official data and gives you a strong aroma of what’s going on. Here’s what we sniffed:

• A lot of the Top 10 this time out are pretty… recognizable: top of the charts is Marathon, whose late-breakin’ ‘server slam’ hit 143,000 CCU ahead of this week’s release. But otherwise: ‘castle on wheels’ roguelite Wanderburg (#7)? We covered its 150k trailer WLs. We also looked at camper van explorer Outbound (#6), pre-NF.

• There’s even a top pick we’ve seen before, under a different name: we were briefly confused by great-looking ‘age of piracy’ survival adventure Windrose (#2), whose demo topped out at 22,000 CCU. But turns out it had a rename from Crosswind, and its early demos previously made our ‘trending wishlists’ chart.

• We’re seeing a LOT of co-op experiences in the Top 10: wishlist-trending pre event, robot cowboy co-op shooter Far Far West (#5) had a great Fest, as did the good-looking co-op shooter John Carpenter’s Toxic Commando (#8). Oh, and impending ‘friendslop’ hit Burglin’ Gnomes (#2) is chaotically co-op as heck.

• The ‘wildcard’ game of the Fest? Literally, it’s Vampire Crawlers: the folks behind megahit Vampire Survivors (Poncle) demonstrated Vampire Crawlers (#4), which is a Dungeon Master-style first person dungeon crawler with card-based combat actions and roguelike fun. Looks like deliciously distilled pixel-y fun to us?

In fact, the general feel we get from Next Fest is simple: games that already had interest are continuing to scale it, but you’re seeing less of the ‘Next Fest demo hit out of nowhere’. That concept may - or may not - have existed when there were fewer games in NF. But at 3,500+ games, the fractalization of attention is real.

Next, let’s take a look at GDCo’s wishlist increase rankings during Feb’s Next Fest (above). You’ll see a lot of overlap (50%+) with the Top 10 from Valve, but some different titles: for example, the Dynasty Warriors-inspired The Awakener: Battle Tendency (#3) seems to have focused interest from China.

Also notable in here: Diablo-y open-world isometric ARPG Darkhaven (#7) as ‘build your own data center’ automation game Data Center (#8), previously GDCo-covered airship survival title Guardians Of The Wild Sky (#9), and monster tamer x shooter (!) Voiding Bound (#10).

Above are the rest of the Top 30, according to us, and there’s a lot of super interesting titles in there. Examples? Capcom’s slightly enigmatic Pragmata (#12), one of the few very high-budget titles to enter Next Fest, as well as hand-drawn 2D adventure The Eternal Life Of Goldman (#21) & Disco Elysium spiritual sequel Zero Parades (#22).

For further visualization (thx Michael Chan for help!) we again have a handy chart based on the Top 5 Steam tags for the Top 15 ‘new wishlists’ games:

It’s an interesting mix, this time out. We’d highlight Base Building as a strongly shared tag, as well as Open World Survival Craft. But there are also strong games in sharply different genres, such as the Jagged Alliance-like turn-based tactics game Warhounds, and that automation game Data Center. (And Marathon, come to that.)

Oh, and a couple of titles above that we didn’t mention: Romestead is a co-op pixel art survival crafter about rebuilding civilization (interesting angle!), and Atmosfar is a ‘floating island’ survival crafter with more spaceship-adjacent vibes. And Armatus is a third-person roguelite shooter with a fast pace and pretty sweet visuals.

Next let’s come to concurrents. Here’s the Top 20 demos by top CCU during Next Fest, minus Marathon. (Because its 143k CCU would have royally screwed up the chart axes.) We saw three games (inc. Marathon) get >10k CCU, and seven get >5K CCU - all of which we’ve discussed already, except anime hero shooter Fate Trigger.

Oh, and the above chart is an opportunity to discuss my favorite-named demo of Next Fest - Everything Is Crab (2,600 CCU), a really fun-looking ‘evolve or die’ roguelite: “It's Spore meets Modern Roguelites”, apparently, which we really enjoy as a pitch.

Finally, we’ll do the ‘trends’ thing. With regard to number of games, at >3,500 demos, the Feb. 2026 Next Fest is 19% up on October’s, and 51% up on last Feb’s Next Fest:

It’s actually a pretty smooth upwards climb of the chart excepting Oct. 2024, which we’re starting to wonder we might have grabbed counts on too early. (Or everyone got overexcited about?)

Secondly, we used Steam follower increase to look at how well certain percentages of games have been doing over the latest 6 Next Fests - if you’re in the Top 1%, Top 10%, etc. Results this time show continued % degradation as the # of demos goes up:

This logically follows, due to volume, but: the top 5% of Next Fest entrants this time got ~350 Steam followers (probably ~7,000 wishlists), down from ~520 (~10k wishlists?) a year ago. The median game featured in this Next Fest? It added 11 followers and perhaps 200 wishlists…

And here’s stats from a new GDCo Pro feature tracking game engine/tech data, thanks to some SteamDB-originated file manifest sampling tech. (Reminder: sponsor xPaw on Github if you love his work, as we do.) Here’s the Next Fest engine breakdown:

What we’re seeing here in the 3,500 Next Fest games is 52.2% Unity engine titles, 17.9% Unreal, and 9% Godot, with unidentifiable engines at 12.4%. (With RPGMaker, PyGame, RenPy & more at much lower percentages - it’s a three horse race nowadays.)

Compared to all Steam games we scanned in 2025, there’s more Unity and Godot, and less Unreal. But this is more about the make-up of smaller studios entering Next Fest than a major change in the Unity vs. Unreal market share. (Godot is def. on the way up, though.) We’ll do a big multi-year engine comparison article shortly…

Anyhow, that’s all the Next Fest analysis we’ve got. Reminder: here’s the full raw GDCo data (Google Drive doc). And as a bonus, we recommend checking out Borys Trienin’s Feb. Next Fest analysis (57x slides!) done for rcp Games BI - lots more interesting views in there. 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.]

We’re doing a rare double-header newsletter before we hit the weekend, with some Kickstarter stats and some interesting Switch SKU data mixing things up. (Hopefully not so much that we overflow the Gmail max message length, haw haw.)

Before we start, we wanted to highlight this cute NoClip mini-doc about “the rise of Dance Dance Revolution across America and the various subcultures that exist across the modern DDR world.” It’s really just fans of the dancing arcade game talking about how they got (back?) into it, but it’s surprisingly wholesome.

[WANNA CHECK OUT GDCo PRO? You too can get a free demo of our GameDiscoverCo Pro company-wide ‘Steam deep dive’ & console data by reaching out today - ~90 orgs have it. Or, signing up to GDCo Plus gets the rest of this newsletter and Discord access, plus more. ]

Game discovery news: Roblox’s 2025 winners…

Let’s finish the week in style, then, with the following game platform & discovery news:

• GDCo partner Creator Games tried to estimate 2025 revenue for the top Roblox games (above), suggesting that “between Grow a Garden and Steal a Brainrot over $1B in revenue was generated” for Roblox - and $240m to the studios involved. The kicker? “Both were [initially] developed in less than two weeks.” Fun times!

• Windows Central had an exclusive interview with new Xbox boss Asha Sharma & CCO Matt Booty, and we’re definitely in ‘mission review’ stage, per Sharma: “Right now, I need to learn, candidly. About the 'why' of these [recent strategy] decisions, what we were optimizing for, and what the data says about the Xbox strategy today.”

• Discord is kicking off an apology tour for its global age checking rollout, confirming a delay to H2 2026 to get it 100% in order, including better partner transparency after some Thiel/leak adjacency, and re-iterating: “over 90% of users will never need to verify their age to continue using Discord exactly as they do today.”

• The BBC discusses AAA-adjacent games being priced cheaper, with Kepler’s Alexis Garavaryan saying of the $45-50 Clair Obscur: “We’ve seen a number of larger companies increase prices quite regularly. And we’ve kind of taken the opposite action… We try to think, ‘What do we think the price should be?’ And then we price it lower.”

• Matthew Ball’s new report is also making headlines over its game biz growth math, as “Roblox alone accounted for 67% of all non-China growth [in 2025], as its share of total consumer spending… across PC, console, and mobile exceeded 4.5%.” (Reminder that 80% of Roblox’s DAU is on mobile, 17% on PC and only 3% on console.)

• Is this hot advice or survivor bias re: your Steam page?: “If you’re waiting on a publisher to put your Steam page up, you’re donating leverage. I had a sales call this week where a studio told me: ‘We’ve held back the Steam page because the announcement is our biggest moment.’ But here’s the problem: momentum doesn’t wait for permission.”

• The folks at Nodal.gg have fun consumer-first Steam game recommendation visualization they have for here’s ‘games like Noita’, for example. (It uses both tag/metadata overlap and owner/player overlap from public profiles to visualize.)

• What happens if you make your game free on Steam for 4 days to help promote a follow-up? The folks who made Paragnosia tried that, and “more than 3 million free units were claimed, for 150K lifetime unique users”, with +6.5k wishlists in 4 days and 23k demo licenses to the new game, Paragnosia Museum.

• The U.S. state of New York is suing Valve over loot boxes in Counter-Strike 2, Team Fortress 2, and Dota 2, saying that “in Counter-Strike 2, the loot box process ‘resembles a slot machine’ and this design is similar to what casino games ‘use to entice players to spend money in the hopes of winning something valuable’.”

• There’s lots of neat GDC 2026-adjacent events, but we wanted to specially highlight this Ukrainian indie game showcase, with hands-on demos of 10 titles, borscht (mm!), and a charity auction benefiting Leleka Foundation, “a U.S.-based nonprofit delivering life-saving medical supplies to frontline medics in Ukraine.”

• Microlinks: PlayStation Plus’ monthly March games inc. PGA Tour 2K25, Monster Hunter Rise, Slime Rancher 2; Summer Game Fest confirms post-showcase events SGF Play Days (June 6th-8th) and Game Business Live (June 8th) in LA; Reboot Develop’s parent has been given a bankruptcy order - no bueno.

How a charming trailer took Gun Nose’s Kickstarter to 6x its goal

Funnily enough, we’d already seen the YouTube trailer for ‘action-mystery noir RPG’ Gun Nose, in which you’re a robot investigating crimes & fighting bosses, having a standout Kickstarter performance ($214k pledged on a $35k goal with 16 days to go!), before its creator Addy Valentine reached out to GDCo.

So it was great timing to talk with Addy about why this 3D pixel art game, abstractly inspired by titles like Super Mario 3D World and (the v.underdiscussed) Spectrobes, really took off on crowdfunding. For me, it points to two things: the rise of YouTube as a) the home of micro-scenes, and b) discovery mechanisms for indie games.

Firstly, the headline news: Addy’s YouTube channel was only getting about 60 views a day before his KS, despite some super-entertaining videos like his Berserk Boy anime trailer making-of, he said “the channel now has 1.3 million [views] in the last 10 days” - largely on the Kickstarter trailer (814k views) and trailer song (204k views).

Our view: as more and more folks watch YouTube like TV, with platform-generated playlist recommendations of high-interest videos, you can absolutely break out despite not having many channel subscribers. And that’s what Gun Nose has done, thanks to very stylish art direction & character design, and a standout theme song.

To give you an idea of how much the YouTube trailer powered interest, here’s Kickstarter’s ‘backer source’ screen for Gun Nose. 40% of all pledges are 100% trackable to YouTube, but we’d wager another 25% at least are due to seeing the trailer there:

By the time you’ve looked at the trailer, you’ll see why a certain demographic are going bananas for it:

• Great character design: Addy cites “the old Disney principles of appeal. Simple characters, simple shapes, accentuated and exaggerated features.” There’s Osamu Tezuka and Shotaro Ishinomori vibes, but it’s also its own thing?

• An amazing theme song: a ‘30s vamp composed & performed by Addy himself (!) and arranged by Scruffy, a (550k sub) music analysis & composition YouTuber who’s a great example of the YouTube ‘microscenes’ that quietly have great output.

• A good mix of pixel art cut-scenes and actual target gameplay: there’s enough of an idea of the ‘real’ game in here that you won’t be skeptical. (Though it’s not an obvious ‘comp’ for existing hit genres, so execution may still be a questionmark.)

One key point from Addy on why the trailer works so well: “I think visual storytelling… can be enhanced with contrast… The first time we see Gun Nose is he’s limping, and bleeding out, but we’re listening to something that sounds like a relaxing jazz standard. I think that contrast makes nice drama.”

So, like we said, YouTube as a discovery mechanism here is a big deal. For example, now I watched the trailer, I got a playlist add for ENA: Dating Oblivion, an animated project from the creator of ENA: Dream BBQ (22,000 Overwhelmingly Positive Steam reviews.) If i click on that, I’ll get similar playlist recommendations, etc, etc…

The tricky thing about these type of YouTube ‘microscenes’ is that they are very difficult to define and identify, cos there’s so many of them. But YT-native art and animation - think The Amazing Digital Circus - is a phenom that fits in adjacent to anime & creepypasta in the ‘digital native’ watcher bucket. This is all part of that, too.

In as much as he fits in, Addy’s been making pixel art & games since he was a kid, and professionally since 2014, but mainly with contract gigs, with his “most reliable income from video production with a focus in special effects and motion graphics for marketing.” Which explains why his YouTube videos are hella fun, despite not being giant.

The point here is: the digital natives are out there in their millions on YouTube, and they had to learn to do everything - Addy says: “I’ve always worn multiple hats: main artist, programmer, and lead creator.” So, fine, feel free to stare at the Warner Bros sale process. But the real story for me is ‘the rise of everyone’. And Addy’s a fine example…

Switch 1 & 2: how are players split between SKUs?

While Nintendo’s Switch 2 has got off to a record start, with over 17 million sold since June 2025, the fact that 84% of Switch 2 owners had previously owned a Switch 1 has meant some questions about which audience demographics have upgraded already.

There’s also a lot of confusion - and different approaches - from devs, given Switch 2 devkits can be difficult to procure. And if you do, you can either do a) free/paid Switch 2 upgrades for your games, or b) a standalone Switch 2 SKU, which is more common & better for charts. Or c) both, actually. (Ugh.)

Additionally, some of the above processes appear to be slow/manual. And Nintendo prefers Switch 1-only releases for most indies, since the games are also Switch 2 compatible. It’s… complex. (And additionally unfortunate if you can’t Switch 2, because the default top sellers in the Switch 2 eShop are Switch 2 SKUs.)

But we had somebody ask us about Switch 1/2 SKU splits, and we have some sales data gathered from the US/UK eShop rankings! So let’s hit it. Firstly (above), the general ratios for third-party Switch games with both Switch 1 and 2 simul-release SKUs: roughly 50% average and median, an equal split.

Secondly, by tracking chart rankings and rough Western eShop-only sales, we can get an idea of which games overperform on Switch 2 when released at a similar time:

Perhaps not surprisingly, it’s ‘core’ users of games like JRPGs (Final Fantasy Tactics, Rune Factory) that we see with the highest Switch 2 SKU % sales. The higher Switch 1 % tiers are for bigger games like Pokemon Legends & Silksong, or casual titles. (Deltarune is a weird exception because it’s true crossbuy. We think?)

Finally, here’s some smaller titles with the splits we spotted, by tracking rankings of the two SKUs separately:

Again, these seem to differ quite a lot. But it makes sense that more casual titles like NBA 2K26 have a bigger Switch 1 percentage, and the hardcore upgraders have favored Switch 2 for titles like Lynked or Dragon Quest I & II. But there’s infinite nuance - some titles also have Switch 2 upgrades, some forbid them… what a mess!

But our main takeaway is: try to get a Switch 2 standalone SKU for the top-seller eShop charts! It’s not possible to chart on that key page without one. And some Switch 2 exclusives - like Cyberpunk 2077, our top third party S2 exclusive, alongside Split Fiction and Fast Fusion - have done well adjacent to the first party hits there.

Steam this week: Resident Evil 9’s the only thing…

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Totally terrific, it’s time to tromp around the latest Steam NextFest, which has a whopping 3,400 demos (up ~50% year on year) to enjoy. We’re already spotting some delightful highlights, and will have a bunch more to say on it next Tuesday.

Before we start, love that Resident Evil Requiem partnered with a shopping channel to sell a game/pull-up bar bundle in Japan, complete with tongue in cheek infomercial & hilarious 30-second promo. As IGN notes, the “‘Dream Hanging Health Device’ is meant ‘to release tension after fighting off zombies and getting perplexed by puzzles’.”

[FREE DEMO OF GDCo PRO? You too can get a free demo of our GameDiscoverCo Pro company-wide ‘Steam deep dive’ & console data by contacting us today - ~90 orgs have it. Or, signing up to GDCo Plus gets the rest of this newsletter and Discord access, plus more.]

Game discovery news: Death, Windrose & Gnomes

Let’s start out with a look at the latest game platform & discovery news, filtered through our rose-tinted glasses:

• The latest unreleased trending Steam games in GameDiscoverCo Pro’s 7-day wishlist charts (Feb 17th-24th) see multiple Next Fest demos trending, inc. 'age of piracy' adventure Windrose (formerly called Crosswind) at #2, as well as 'friendslop' standout Burglin' Gnomes at #3. (Death Stranding 2’s #1 again, tho.)

• Other early Next Fest-adjacent demo standouts include fun/gory co-op FPS John Carpenter’s Toxic Commando (#7) and ‘you live in the air’ survival crafter Guardians Of The Wild Sky (#10). Oh, and much-awaited roguelike deckbuilder sequel Slay The Spire 2 (#5) surges, ahead of an early March release.

• Game Economist’s Phillip Black makes a good point here re: game biz trending: “Seriously, is no one ever going to adjust for inflation? Both Supercell's claim in Ilkka Paananen's letter… and Matthew Ball's The State of Video Gaming in 2026 report completely change when we adjust for conservative global inflation estimates.”

• Final Fantasy VII Remake director Naoki Hamaguchi has been talking about why they had to use a key-card for the Switch 2 physical version: “If you compare loading directly from a game cartridge (containing all game data) to loading from the Nintendo Switch 2’s internal storage, the load speed difference is roughly double.”

• Is Steam’s ‘notify wishlisted players’ email notification speed slower than it used to be? We’ve had a couple of dev reports of this, and we wonder if launch emails could be prioritized, speed-wise for algo reasons. (Maybe email is also becoming less effective & more people notice launches via the mobile app, etc? YMMV.)

• We linked one of their organic Instagram videos in a recent newsletter, but Jestr.gg also has an interesting ‘incented’ shortform video business where creators get paid out for creating viral game promos for you. (Not an endorsement: we just thought it was an intriguing shortform-first biz model.)

• Geopolitical tensions alert: a Genshin Impact expansion apparently inspired by Japan just got delayed & content shifted: “Players (and leakers) have argued that it’s a way to lessen the Japanese influence in the game during a time where political conflict between China and Japan have grown increasingly tense [re:] Taiwan.”

• Meta things: the company’s Samantha Ryan sums up the state of Meta’s VR & metaverse push - basically ‘you go for it on VR, third-parties, cos we’re “going all-in on mobile” with Horizon Worlds’; meanwhile, the Game Pass-like Horizon+ subscription service has reached 1 million active users.

• Talking of ‘price go up’, Circana’s Mat Piscatella pulled U.S. average sales prices over the latest 10 years for game-related items: “The average price paid per unit of hardware increased by 87% over that period, accessories jumped 121%, and software only 4% (which surprised me tbh).”

• Steam hype-y things: a game got 18k wishlists in 6 days after its YouTube shorts went viral - tho we wonder if there’s a gulf between ‘see trippy video’ & ‘want to play trippy game’; Chris Z suggests that launching games during quarterly sales is (counter-intuitively) good because it improves your New & Trending duration..

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Xbox: where it goes, post-Impossible (GP) Dream?

So yes, that big Xbox exec reshuffle happened. This Week In Videogames has a good round-up, if you missed it: “Phil Spencer, Microsoft Gaming CEO, will retire after 12 years of leading the division. Sarah Bond, Xbox President, will resign. Asha Sharma, previously the president of Microsoft’s CoreAI organisation, will take over as CEO. Matt Booty, head of Xbox Game Studios, will be promoted to Chief Content Officer.”

There’s been a multitude of analysis on this, including some good insider info from Tom Warren at The Verge, who indicates Xbox had to rush the announce because IGN was planning to run a story on it. He also discusses the incipient failure (under Spencer and Bond) to land the ‘Xbox is everywhere’ story with the public.

So, other than awarding Polygon the ‘silliest take’ award for interviewing Microsoft AI helper Clippy about the changes - “It looks like you’re confused about Xbox! Would you like help?” - what can GameDiscoverCo add to the cacophony?

Well, we’re linking Andy Williams’ smooth AF version of the song ‘The Impossible Dream’ (above) for a reason. As the lyrics say: “To dream the impossible dream.. To fight the unbeatable foe… This is my quest, to follow that star… No matter how hopeless, no matter how far.” And we think we’ve identified Xbox’s impossible Game Pass dream:

• A dynamic 100+ million subscriber Game Pass with engaged players: Netflix has grown from 25m subs in 2012 to 325m in 2025, and is a worldwide phenom. Why couldn’t Xbox Game Pass do the same thing for games, at even a third of those numbers?

• Every new release from an owned studio moved the needle: let’s not forget that most of Xbox’s dev studio acquisitions were originally done in a boom time when there were worries about platforms getting locked out of content. For TV/movie streamers, you can track subs/unsubs to popular shows. Each win compounds.

• Multi-platform success made Game Pass a truly ‘play everywhere’ win: there’s no question there’s room for playing games on platforms besides the good ol’ console. And with PlayStation winning the hardware market share war, why not change the playbook and get hefty PC, mobile & cloud sub revenue to add a moat?

And look - if you go back a fair few years, this all makes a lot of sense! Perhaps it could have worked, starting with just two things - ‘a dream, and six mbillion pounds’. But it didn’t, and we’re going to use three graphs - one per paragraph - to enumerate just why not. Let’s start with the idea of scaling to 100m GP subscribers:

The above graph is from ‘enpleinjour’ from the Install Base Forums, who made this graph & some commentary in 2024, when we discussed it. Allegedly, internal Game Pass leadership goals were subscriber accelerations to 35m in FY22 and 50m by FY24. And this just hasn’t happened - tho public data’s thin on the ground, as growth slowed.

We’ve talked about the ‘sleight of hand’ issue with Xbox Live Gold & Game Pass before -the fact that the cheaper Gold subscription (where many Game Pass subscribers were upgraded from) wasn’t included in sub numbers until v.late in GP’s growth cycle.

At the time, we framed this very much as ‘you’re playing the public’ on real growth numbers. But now we’re starting to feel it might also be a ‘you played yourself’ moment. The graph of ‘anyone paying a >$0 subscription to Xbox’ would look WAY flatter, and it would make no sense internally to forecast such aggressive growth. Numbers, huh?

Secondly, how about the concept that games from owned studios would constantly move the needle? Well, August 2025 Game Pass sign-up data from Antenna (above), via Joost van Dreunen’s analysis, does show subscription spikes for a handful of key first-party games. (And also third-party ones, including STALKER 2 & Expedition 33.)

There’s a general tailing-off (based on an index value in August 2024), even before the Oct. 2025 Game Pass changes which put Game Pass Ultimate up from $19.99 per month to $29.99 per month and no doubt increased churn in a major way.

Actually, having good quality first-party studios reliably deliver Game Pass bangers makes sense in a scaled model. With third-party content ever-more inexpensive to license, and Xbox’s hands-off approach to acquisitions (as discussed by Nathan Brown) leading to sluggish release schedules, the whole model’s efficacy is in question.

Finally, there’s the off-Xbox hardware scaling of Game Pass, the thorniest problem of the three. FTC’s Microsoft lawsuit revealed a bunch of internal Xbox planning around this, with a 2020 presentation (above) showing three expansion horizons:

“Horizon 1 (FY20): Console; Horizon 2 (FY21-23): Windows 10 (download & stream) + Mobile (companion & initial xCloud); Horizon 3+ (FY23+): Ubiquitous global access across devices.”

Well, it’s true that Microsoft got there, with a full Windows implementation, and - while unfortunately stymied by iOS and Android rules around ‘wrapper’ apps to play multiple games - at least SOME kind of Game Pass web app cloud streaming to mobile. (Epic’s lawsuits have sort of helped untangle this, kinda.)

The issue is the size of the prize. This graph has console-first usage as only 25% of the core Game Pass subscriber base at the end of Horizon 3, which we’re a couple of years past - meaning 75% off-console. But we’d be surprised if PC/mobile and off-console cloud usage is really >15-20% of total hourly Game Pass usage today*.

Why? Players on these platforms have lots of inexpensive ways to play games, both F2P titles and paid games on sale, and are more excited about owning large catalogs of titles than being tied in to a ‘play until you unsubscribe’ model. That’s just how it is.

(*Unfortunately, there’s no way to verify the 15-20% - it’s the impression we get. PC growth %s is up from a low number, and cloud usage got a decent boost, partly via the growth hack of adding free Fortnite on cloud. We think most of cloud is on-console UI ‘trying’ of games.)

What’s next for Xbox strategy, post-GP hangover?

So that’s Xbox’s strategy before the Activision Blizzard acquisition, an opportunistic (if huge!) pickup that turned into an unexpectedly protracted antitrust fight, as the markets started to downvalue game companies in the post-COVID comedown.

By the time that Jan. 2022 ATVI deal closed in Oct. 2023 (!), we’re pretty sure that it was clear internally that Game Pass growth was going sideways. Of course, Activision has a lot of standalone business parts, including mobile hits from King like Candy Crush. So it’s easy to say ‘this isn’t just about Game Pass’.

But with Game Pass not moving the needle outside of an Xbox console platform that’s on the decline, we’re really moving into the era of Xbox as a ‘generalized selling neat video games on multiple platforms company’ - albeit also with a multi-billion dollar Game Pass subscription business which isn’t dead, and will mainly grow on yield.

So the question comes up: how does this Xbox business - sans the breakout Netflix-like game sub success, with new Xbox hardware costs getting rocketed upwards by AI-related chip shortages - appeal to Microsoft on its current trajectory?

And look, we don’t think it does, much. Microsoft wants systems or SaaS-first, repeatable revenue, not hit-driven A&R-led businesses in a messy market. And Xbox’s trek to “fight the unbeatable foe… reach the unreachable star” on the repeatable subscription side is over.

Still, new Xbox management says they’ll “recommit to our core Xbox fans and players.” They have $ cover to do so - Microsoft’s other financials are stellar right now, with $38.5b in quarterly profit for FY26 Q2. Yet I think there will be a lot of analysis and recalibration behind the scenes. There’s plenty of great people, games & franchises in the portfolio. But there’s got to be a recalibration of intent & message.

As for the long-term - we would think an Xbox spinoff (to private hands?) was likely if MSFT had stopped at the Bethesda acquisition. The size of the ATVI deal makes the price of such a deal near-prohibitive, though, so we’re not quite so sure. In the meantime, it’s business as usual. Until it isn’t. 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.]

Almost da weekend, as we slide serendipitously into what’s next - apparently GDC 2026 in San Francisco in March. So: hit up Matt Styles or email us to chat GDCo Pro there. And premium GameDiscoverCo users, check the bottom of this newsletter for our GDC 2026 meetup plans! (Yep, we’ll be at Develop & Gamescom too, Europeans.)

And before we start, who would like to hear about sophisticated British author Martin Amis’ 1982 book Invasion Of The Space Invaders, written by the London Fields author as an early ‘arcade game addict’? This fun Infinite Review video looks into his sociological look at the ‘zonked glueys’ who play games, according to Amis. (It us!)

[WANNA CHECK OUT GDCo PRO? You too can get a free demo of our GameDiscoverCo Pro company-wide ‘Steam deep dive’ & console data by reaching out today - ~90 orgs have it. Or, signing up to GDCo Plus gets the rest of this newsletter and Discord access, plus more. ]

Game discovery news: Sparta, Kain, Reanimal hype

Let’s start things out by looking at some notable platform and discovery news since last time out, such as:

• The latest ‘trad media coverage’ charts from ICO’s Footprints.gg (above) is headed by surprise pixel-y shadowdrop God of War Sons of Sparta, followed by Resident Evil Requiem, new Legacy Of Kain games, and co-op horror hit Reanimal.

• You know we thought Valve’s Steam Deck ‘out of stock’ shortages were due to memory and storage shortages? (Thanks, AI.) Well, Valve confirmed that they were due to “memory and storage shortages”, so aren’t we feeling smug? (Doesn’t make the situation any better, though.)

• Reminder that Steam’s February Next Fest starts on Monday - we’ll have coverage of the top titles, after it all concludes. The press preview page currently shows >3,800 demos (!), and early top Steam demos by CCU as we near Next Fest include Burglin’ Gnomes, Windrose & John Carpenter’s Toxic Commando.

• Giant .PPT obsessive Matthew Ball has early released his latest ‘state of video games’ report, and The Game Business went through some highlights with him - from reduced investments, to console growth going to platform holders (via PS+/Game Pass) rather than directly to third parties. (So, lowlights?)

• Chinese livestreaming game hits in Jan. 2026, according to Niko Partners, were headed by Delta Force (277m monthly average viewers, wow!), followed by Valorant, Counter-Strike 2, Peacekeeper Elite & Crossfire. (A lotta mobile/PC shooters - Tencent’s new FPS Nizhan Future also made a new entry further down.)

• As Bloomberg spotted: “PlayStation is shutting down [70-person team] Bluepoint Games, the studio responsible for modern remakes of classic games such as Demon's Souls and Shadow of the Colossus.” This follows a canned God of War live-service game, as an internal Sony announce says it’s “harder to build games sustainably.”

• In ‘Valve did good!’ news, the company won a lawsuit against Leigh Rothschild and associated entities over a super-broad 'system and method for storing broadcast content in a cloud-based computing environment' patent, with a jury agreeing the patent holders violated an anti-patent troll protection act. Thumbs up.

• Late-breaking Circana overview of Jan. 2026 in U.S. game hardware/select software? Why yes: sales were up 3% YoY to $4.7m, with hardware spending up 16%. But that’s up to ‘just’ $248m, with Switch 2 spending increases offsetting PS5 being down 17% and Xbox Series down 27%. (Black Ops 7 was top game again.)

• Obligatory ‘don’t mess up your GDC meeting timings’ PSA via Mr. T. Bidaux: “For everyone in Europe and Asia booking meetings… keep in mind that the U.S. is switching to DST the Sunday before the event (8th of March). Book your meeting times using the local time zone to avoid confusion.”

• Microlinks: only 28 games recovered from a bad Steam launch in 2024 - what did they have in common? the Xbox ROG Ally PC handheld “had a nice month one and has come back down quite significantly since then”; Epic is acquiring Meshcapade, “a company that makes AI tech for animating digital humans.”

How is Mewgenics a million-seller? Cats love it…

Look, we get it, “bizarre cat-breeding simulator” Mewgenics ($30) already sold >1 million copies on Steam in just a week & hit 115k CCU (!). So we’re already seeing the hot takes and counter-takes flooding the zone on LinkedIn. (At >$40m, it’s the top Feb. 2026 non-F2P Steam game of any age, GDCo thinks - not just new games.)

Very briefly, for those who don’t know: versions of Mewgenics date back to 2011 (!) But the current version re-started in 2018, with offkilter indie edgelord legend Edmund McMillen (Super Meat Boy, The Binding Of Isaac) co-piloting the turn-based strategy roguelite alongside Tyler Glaiel (Closure, The End Is Nigh.)

Both McMillen & Glaiel grew up in the fertile Flash game scene of the ‘00s, which partly explains why the resulting title might be tonally disorienting to you. And as Garbage Day said: “McMillen sat down to make Mewgenics right at the start of the woke era and is now releasing it at what is, very possibly, the end of it.”

So, two big reasons for Mewgenics’ success (besides ‘cats!’) are almost too obvious to discuss: first, there’s a massive fanbase for McMillen’s work, particularly from The Binding Of Isaac, which was incredibly pioneering as an RNG-led action roguelite, and has had multiple DLC and expansions over the years.

So when you have almost 10 million players of The Binding Of Isaac on Steam with a median of 55 hours played (and an average of 190!), they’re going to show up to the next big thing McMillen releases - even in a different genre like turn-based battler. (We show 70% of Mewgenics players also playing Binding Of Isaac, 16.2x ‘normal’.)

Secondly, the quality and sheer depth of the game outpaced many people’s high expectations. The devs have been doing beta tests quietly for at least 2 years. And an early press embargo lift and 93% of critics recommending Mewgenics - often fulsomely - really increased the hype levels, pre-release.

So the game is really good and people love the creator(s) - big whoop? Well, there’s obviously more to it than this. First, we feel like people underestimate how good Binding Of Isaac is at giving you radically different RNG-based ‘runs’ based on the kind of items you get.

We asked McMillen about expanding this for Mewgenics, and he agreed: “It’s a much bigger version of the same idea. Isaac uses 700+ items to achieve this - Mewgenics uses 950+ items and 1200 abilities - 100s of events, mutations and many other things to create an infinite world.” Outcome depth as a ‘fun multiplier’, with breeding mechanics layered in.

And the unexpected item results are fun even for the devs, per Edmund: “There wasn't a week that went by that we all didn't experience an insane combo we never knew existed.. It's still happening now!” And this all works despite ‘run’ lengths for the game being on the high side for most roguelites at nearly 2 hours - tho McMillen did tell us they “chopped away at it a bit” during dev. But the ‘run’ and ‘meta cat-raising’ combo is irresistible…

Secondly, the Mewgenics team had influencer (& other marketing) strategy via Jake Kulkowski of Guillotine, something I was pretty surprised about, because I presumed there would be no external ‘helpers’. Things we learned via talking to Jake:

• Early cultivation of journalists majorly helped the buzz: Jake says the team “invited [journos] to a Discord server [a month early] to theorycraft, boast, chat to the devs, report bugs, offer condolences to slain cats… Ed and Tyler would read a bug and patch it almost instantly! Knew it’d be a petri dish for positive sentiment and the village was being built.”

• Managing Edmund’s appearances & own streams also added hype: 30+ podcast & stream appearances, including Dropped Frames, meant a gradual hype build, esp. for the core fans on Discord & Reddit. Jake says: “We built that up slowly between November ‘25 and launch. For the two weeks before launch, Edmund streamed daily… We hid an… ARG in the Features trailer and that was just for the die-hards.”

• Influencer outreach/pickup was strategic & insanely high: “We curated a list of 700 highly relevant influencers worldwide (mostly roguelite and tactical enjoyers, the top 180 Isaac creators too). Of the 700 targets, 554 responded with interest. Of those, 470 converted into organic coverage within 48 hours of launch.” OMG, that pickup rate…

Anyhow, we think Guillotine - a small firm who also led global influencer campaigns for Dispatch, The Headliners, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 recently - got its ‘Edmund as influencer’, ‘normal influencer’ and press campaign outreach spot-on. And it helped amplify what was already going to be a winning proposition. Good job, y’all…

Oh, and final bonus image is GDCo Pro’s Steam review sentiment graphs for Mewgenics, purely because the positive word cloud shows ‘Edmund, cats, Isaac, Tyler’ in descending order of mentions, if you wanna grok the vibes. (Still love ya, Tyler!)

This week on Steam: a Super Battle Golf Trek…

Read more

It wouldn’t be a post-event newsletter without various people having picked up some post-conference germs, and today’s no exception. *raises hand* - we’ll try to be cogent! Also: thanks to today’s newsletter sponsor, player relationship platform Firstlook.gg.

Before we start, did you know that Ghost in the Shell movie director Mamoru Oshii has played 10,000 hours of Fallout 4 while refusing to do the main quest, build settlements, or travel with anyone but your canine sidekick Dogmeat: “I’d much rather be beaten to death by Deathclaws”. (Wow - thx, PC Gamer.)

[FREE DEMO OF GDCo PRO? You too can get a free demo of our GameDiscoverCo Pro company-wide ‘Steam deep dive’ & console data by contacting us today - ~90 orgs have it. Or, signing up to GDCo Plus gets the rest of this newsletter and Discord access, plus more.]

Game discovery news: v.secure Belmont deaths?

Starting off, let’s look at the latest game platform & discovery news tidbits, courtesy of our news gathering largesse:

• The latest unreleased trending Steam games, according to GameDiscoverCo Pro’s 7-day wishlist charts (Feb 10th-17th), shows Hideo Kojima's Death Stranding 2 (already ~2m on PS5, GDCo estimates!) confirm PC and hit #1. Also PlayStation showcased? New 2D franchise addition Castlevania: Belmont's Curse (#2).

• Elsewhere, brand new 'friendslop'-adjacent title Totally Secure Airport (#3) is doing _great_ with streamers, as is Burglin' Gnomes at #6. Extra new & notable? Freshly Steam-added classic franchise PlayStation showcases Metal Gear Solid: Master Collection 2 (#5) and intriguing spinoff Silent Hill: Townfall (#7).

• A new Bloomberg report (relayed by VGC) claims: “Sony… is now considering pushing back the debut of its next PlayStation console to 2028 or even 2029” due to RAM price increases around the AI boom, also adding that “Nintendo is considering raising the price of Switch 2 later this year.” (We can believe it.)

• Takeaways from DICE? Tim Morten has a very handy set of bullet-points, higlighting VC funding in retreat and a ‘Wild West’ of non-publisher funding channels - but “substantially more sellers than buyers”. Simon Pullman also highlights 3 themes: “Funding models, Data, discovery, and audience behavior, AI.”

• As spotted by SteamDB: “Steam added the option to attach [PC] hardware specs when writing or updating a Steam User Review.” It’s optional and in the Beta versions of the OS update right now, but this could be genuinely helpful over time. (It’ll be shown to other users, and hopefully available to devs?)

• The latest thinkpiece from Martin Walfisz discusses current game biz instability, explaining the underlying structural pressures: “Competition is cumulative… Demand has fragmented… Consumer spending has concentrated… Discovery is volatile… Capital follows evidence.” The general idea: “back to normal” = not a thing.

• Circana’s comments on video game trends for 2026? The firm notes that “GTA VI holds the highest purchase intent ever recorded in Circana’s tracking history”, thus its Nov. release could be a big deal for hardware, also adding in general: “younger players are shifting more heavily toward PC and mobile”, vs. trad console.

• Elsewhere, Jordan Brown discusses the rise of ‘productivity games’ on Steam like Spirit City, which “typically include focus & productivity tools like a pomodoro timer, task list, focus music, calming sound effects”, as he notes: “9 out of the 34 games I identified have over 500 reviews, with 3 of them making over 1 million dollars!”

• Steam rolled out its official top 50 new releases of Jan. 2026, sorted in tranches of Gold, Silver, and Bronze, and interesting because DLC is also mashed up in there. (We spotted Dead By Daylight x Stranger Things Chapter 2, some pricey Dynasty Warriors DLC and the new Cult Of The Lamb DLC all in the Top 12.)

• Kirill Oreshkin (Polden) & Anton Slashcev (Playhero) put together an infographic on promoting your PC game via ‘marketing beats’ which we dug: for example releasing a demo 1-2 months before Next Fest (also our favored approach) & ‘scope is your biggest enemy: cut features, not quality’.

• Microlinks: PlayStation Plus’ Game Catalog for Feb. includes Spider-Man 2, Test Drive Unlimited Solar Crown, & Neva; Meta sold over 7 million smart glasses in 2025, effectively tripling YoY sales; new Xbox Game Pass additions include Kingdom Come Deliverance II, Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, and more.

[BTW, if you checked our Steam keywords research document from Friday’s analysis and it was empty, we accidentally set it editable, and somebody blanked it. Heyy! It’s back now…]

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Discovery success? Escape your filter bubble…!

At DICE last week, we had a chance to chat to some folks - in rideshares or just in Las Vegas as a whole - who are not (as we are) professionally consumed with video games. And it was fascinating, because it reminded us how ‘filter bubble’-based media is now.

That word itself can be read prejudicially, but we don’t mean it that way. Reminder: it’s the idea that “personalized searches, recommendation systems, and algorithmic curation selectively presents information to each user” as they access info online. And in order to make your game successful, you need to think carefully about how this all works.

For example, did you know both New Kids On The Block (above) and Backstreet Boys are playing Las Vegas? It’s ‘90s boy band heaven - for those who care. And why didn’t you know? Not in your filter bubble. So yep: there’s no longer a monoculture where everyone gets shown the same few games, movies, and albums repeatedly.

An example of a personal ‘filter bubble’ we ran into last week - from a non-attendee of DICE - was someone whose recent impressions of games was via listening to American Psycho author Bret Easton Ellis’ podcast (!), since Ellis’ partner plays games.

In terms of media consumption, everyone has viewing, reading, and watching habits which are - well - extremely personalized. So the real issue here is: how do you get on everyone’s radar?

And the key here is simple. You need to do something interesting enough with your game that it escapes the smaller ‘true fans of your title’ bubble, and makes it into more people’s filter bubbles. If people don’t know about it, people won’t buy it. And most people don’t know about most things. Some examples:

• We were chatting to Lyrical Games, and its upcoming roguelite Erosion has a great hook - “when you die, the world jumps forward a decade”. Look at its third-party shortform video hits from Jestr.gg (above) and this one from Dexerto.

• Even though its execution wasn’t on point, co-op ‘stay quiet IRL or die’ title Don’t Scream Together has now sold 400,000 copies on Steam in just over two months. Again, the idea is strong enough to punch through filter bubbles.

• The upcoming Darkhaven is from many of the Diablo/Diablo II creators, but adds open, procgen sandbox worlds with destructible terrain to the isometric grind of the OG ARPG. (Look, here’s a third-party TikTok-er getting excited about it.)

Of the above titles, the first is a traditional genre game with a big twist that may (or may not!) make the game interesting, but sure made you look. The second just makes casual players want to try it. And the third twins a familiar (and under-served) genre with some smart extensions of the formula. All are different. But all escape bubbles.

But the overall point here - and I hope this isn’t incredibly obvious - is: to spread your reach, you need to commandeer more strands of media that reach into everyone’s own filter bubbles. Otherwise they will never hear you! That’s why getting into NorthernLion’s playlist is a big deal. It’s a way in to people’s attention…

This view of the world is somewhat (or possibly very!) different to traditional push marketing. Shouting into the void - if you have the wrong underlying concept - won’t scale a thing. And it means that to succeed on PC/console, you may have to look more at crafting your game concept from scratch for this kind of filter bubble traversal.

Thus: the relevant question is: since nobody has enough reach on their own, which high-reach set of people will be talking about your game? Maybe you won’t get on Bret Easton Ellis’ podcast - esp. if Quentin Tarantino is on there talking about Toy Story already. But if you don’t have a plausible answer to this, you may have an issue…

Roblox in Jan.: hi, Escape Tsunami for Brainrots!

Finally, a quick look at Jan 2026’s top-earning Roblox charts (above), as documented by David Taylor at Creator Games. And you’ll see plenty of the obvious folks in top-earning (Rivals, Steal A Brainrot, Blox Fruits, Adopt Me!), but that one notable new entry - Escape Tsunami For Brainrots.

Why did it hit so big from scratch? David explains: “This wasn’t the first game of its kind. There were 10+ nearly identical versions launched before it. The core gameplay is simple PvE: players run down a path while an object hurtles toward them. Take cover in time or get wiped out and start over.”

Yet there was one key difference: “It was the first to introduce a collection mechanic for Brainrots, inspired by Don’t Wake the Brainrots - a game that briefly reached the top 30 earners last September but has since largely faded…. Recombining mechanics across games can reignite simple gameplay loops that players had grown tired of.” Roblox: always fascinating?

[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, crew, and we’re finishing a week in Las Vegas at DICE where we ran into excellent game biz folks, great microtalks (including one from Mixtape’s Johnny Galvatron that had much Passion[a]), and enough ‘dressed in white’ Backstreet Boys fans - they’re playing The Sphere - to convince us we’d ascended to The Good Place.

Before we start, here’s a blast from the past: the VGHF’s Phil Salvador is scanning a brochure for the E For All event, which happened in 2007-2008 in LA after the ESA temporarily downsized E3. (Spoiler: by 2009, E3 was re-constituted after publishers decided it was worth supporting again, and still continues to thrive today.)

[FREE DEMO OF GDCo PRO? You too can get a gratis demo of our GameDiscoverCo Pro company-wide ‘Steam deep dive’ & console data by contacting us today - ~90 orgs have it. Or, signing up to GDCo Plus gets the rest of this newsletter and Discord access, plus more. ]

Game discovery news: Nioh 3, Overwatch see buzz

And let’s finish out this hyper-busy week with a look at a lot of game platform & discovery news:

• The latest ‘trad media coverage’ charts from ICO’s Footprints.gg (above) are headed by the just-launched samurai ARPG sequel Nioh 3 at #1, followed by Overwatch at #2 (thanks to Blizzard’s decision to rename Overwatch 2), Grand Theft Auto 6 (generalized overexcitement?), Resident Evil Requiem & ARC Raiders.

• Congrats to the winners of last night’s 29th Annual DICE Awards here in Las Vegas, which included Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 (5 awards, inc. Game Of The Year), Ghost Of Yotei (four awards), Death Stranding 2 (two awards), plus Hades 2 (best action game), Blue Prince (indie game) & ARC Raiders (online game).

• Sony’s latest State Of Play streaming showcase dropped, and here’s a full trailer round-up: it was pretty packed. Highlights included a God of War Trilogy Remake (and a new GoW pixel-art game), a Kena sequel, the Silent Hill x Annapurna game, Death Stranding 2 on PC, a new 2D Castlevania from Evil Empire & more.

• Chris Zukowski discusses whether you should keep your Steam demo up after launch, revealing that “21% of 2025’s 1,000+ review games have a demo up”, and spotting that those games had +5% review score. But this might not be why, and he concludes that post-launch demos have “no clear benefit either way”.

• The folks at Upscale tested porting horror game Skinwalker to consoles with no attempts to boost its visibility, and say: “First 60 days of organic [3x console] sales: Total Revenue: ~$8,879; Total Copies Sold: ~1,800+; Marketing Spend: $0.” It was 51% Xbox, 41% PlayStation & 8% Switch by units. Fascinating baseline data…

• Microlinks: PC store GOG is already working on native Linux support; an analysis of Roblox’s rewarded video ads is fascinating; Firesquid & Hooded Horses’s TactiCon Steam event/sale is looking for ‘tactical reasoning’ games to feature.

• Steam hardware news: firstly just the Steam OLED, but now all three Steam Deck models are out of stock in the U.S. (memory price issues? something else?); Valve claims Steam Machine testing shows ‘the majority’ of games run on it at 4K and 60 frames per second via FSR - that’s the AMD tech for ‘cheap’ upscaling.

• More great Roblox analysis from Max Power Gaming: “Roblox kicked off 2026 with another viral brainrot game, and this one is already topping the charts…. At its core, Escape Tsunami for Brainrots is best described as a mash-up of Steal a Brainrot and Be Crushed by a Speeding Wall, an old-school Roblox survival experience.”

• The Xbox Excellence Awards for 2025 have alphabetically listed top games for last year, by categories including Store Rating (Clair Obscur, Lies Of P: Overture), Daily Active Users (Arc Raiders, Fortnite) and Units Sold (Battlefield 6, GTA V). (It’s a bit abstracted, but still good to see these generalized game lists.)

• A couple of minor corrections/updates: first, we accidentally put Fatal Fury: City Of The Wolves in Jan’s ‘new game’ Steam revenue Top 10, when it came out last April, cos its Steam release date got ‘reset’ to Jan somehow. We also confirmed that Quarantine Zone should have been #28 (12.3m hrs!) in Jan’s streaming charts.

• Esoteric links: it true, we love another Doug Shapiro piece (half-free, half $) re: whether we’re all solely consuming “content ‘junk food’”. He concludes such content has expanded massively, but it hasn’t “cannibalized higher cognitive load, higher agency content.” (This depends on your definition of the latter, of course.)

What game descriptions tell us about the rise of co-op?

We love data here at GameDiscoverCo - you know that. So for our latest data analysis card trick, we thought we’d go beyond trending tags on Steam (which many have covered before!), and dig deep into… keywords in Steam descriptions!

Here’s what we’re doing, as I explained it to one of my colleagues: “Take the current capsule descriptions* for ALL Steam games, and all games that have >$100k revenue (lifetime) that launched from 2020 to 2025… look at each word mention as a % of that year’s new game descriptions.” (*’Capsule description’ is the short paragraph under the game icon!)

Why did we do this? Because we wanted to see which words were mentioned more often in new games over time, implying game trends. And we also wanted to see if games that sold well had more or less occurrences of that keyword than all games.

The end result is a giiant GDCo-created spreadsheet with the Top 1,000 words ranked in it (Google Drive doc) - we’re giving away the raw data, for you to do as you please! But here’s a few interesting examples of words that have surged in popularity:

Firstly, you may not be surprised to see that ‘co-op’ has been growing significantly as a capsule description word. (We explained back in 2023 that we think co-op leads to “easier and more stable upscaling and downscaling” among friend groups than PvP.)

And woof, the surge in new games that grossed >$100k from 3.2% in 2022 to 5.8% in 2023 is notable. (Lethal Company debuted, and a stampede of ‘friendslop’-likes and co-optional titles, as people realized virality could be compounded by adding online co-op. Just look at the 23x sales effect on Project Zomboid, albeit in the former year.)

But the percentage of all games using the word co-op went up a tad slower - tho it’s latterly surging and is up by half from 1.4% (2023) to 2.1% (2025). What does this mean? Perhaps that making co-op games is hard(er), but those who can reap the dividends…

When it comes to ‘cozy’ games, there’s been an interesting - but much more linear - change. New games that admit they are cozy in the description went from 0.4% (2022) to 3.1% (2025) for titles that gross >$100k LTD. (And a similar, but slightly smaller percentage of all games.)

We think this is partly down to cozy becoming a familiar, inviting label for Steam (and console gamers.) There’s also more people making cozy games, of course. But part of it is just that a big audience react positively to the ‘cozy’ label. So more games use it! And it over-indexes in games that gross >$100k, implying it may be a decent theme.

Finally, there’s the ‘survival’ label, and this one is pretty interesting. It looks like the % of new games grossing >$100k LTD mentioning this word peaked at 5.9% in 2023, but has now come down to 4.9%, even as the ‘all’ percentage keeps rising close to it.

What does this imply? Possibly that 2023 was the best year to release a self-styled survival game, but the genre/theme/word is still a very fertile one. (4.9% of all >$100k games in 2025 is high, more than for ‘cozy’, and only just behind ‘co-op’.)

Finally, a quick whistle-stop tour through some of the keywords with the highest multiplier % of mentions in 2020’s new games vs 2025’s. You’ll see big rises for cozy (~700%), idle and clicker (500% and 300%), roguelike (256%), horror (203%, to a giant 6.5%!) and more:

And then the >$100k lifetime words - obviously cozy (620%), but also solo (450%) - we presume with the phrase ‘or co-op’ often attached - endless (311%), loot (238%), crafting (186%), and collect (150%). There’s lots of game mechanics-first words here:

Oh and sample size? The totals for all games went up from 9,000 (2020) to 21,000 (2025) titles, btw. And for >$100k titles, it increased from 950 games (2020) to 1,350 games (2025). So only 6.5% of the games we looked at in 2025 grossed >$100k. Fascinating.

This week on Steam: the rise & rise of Mewgenics!

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We’re back, and we hope everyone enjoyed the superb owl on Sunday. (We thought it was above average, but not quite superb.) Anyhow, we have things to discuss this week - starting with a close look at how Kickstarter works for video games in 2025/2026.

Before we start, do you know Garry’s Mod has a Steam achievement you only get if you’re on the same server as creator (also of Rust, S&box) Garry Newman? Since he’s re-appeared on the app a coupla times recently, completionist fans set up a Discord to monitor his Steam rich presence, so they can swarm a server if he joins. (*sigh*)

[FREE DEMO OF GDCo PRO? You too can get a free demo of our GameDiscoverCo Pro company-wide ‘Steam deep dive’ & console data by contacting us today - ~90 orgs have it. Or, signing up to GDCo Plus gets the rest of this newsletter and Discord access, plus more.]

Game discovery news: Poker Night, Wardogs shine

And here’s some of the latest platform and discovery news, which goes a little something like this:

• The latest unreleased trending Steam games, according to GameDiscoverCo Pro’s 7-day wishlist charts (Feb 2nd - 9th) sees surprise Telltale multiplayer remake Poker Night At The Inventory (ft. The Heavy from TF2, Max & Strongbad!) hitting #1, as 100 player tactical military sandbox FPS Wardogs (#2) also makes a splash.

• Elsewhere, co-op physics-stealth game We Are So Cooked (hide the body!) also has a strong start at #4, and Guerrilla’s multiplayer franchise continuation Horizon Hunters Gathering (#5) is also hotly awaited by players. Also notable: a strong surge for cat-heavy tactical RPG Mewgenics (#6), out today and looking huuuge.

• A useful new change from Steam for Early Access games? “We recently introduced a new field in Steamworks… providing a dedicated space to display the date when a game plans to exit Early Access and officially launch 1.0… developers have the option to share a specific calendar date, or a more vague timeframe if they wish.” Handy.

• Roblox’s latest financials were again impressive, with yearly revenue of $4.9 billion, up 36% year on year (Booking were up 55% to $6.8b.) Elsewhere: “DAUs were up 69% year-on-year to 144 million, with hours engaged increasing 88% to 35 billion.” 36.7m monthly payers spend an average of $20.18 each month - nice.

• Regional issues for PC game platforms? Turkey’s “Family and Social Services Ministry, as part of wider legislation aimed at restricting child social media access, has drafted legislation that would impose restrictions and intensive oversight on Steam, Epic, and other digital gaming platforms.” (Turkey is ~1.35% of Steam players, per GDCo.)

• Microlinks: Discord is adding adult verification features (via facial age estimation or official ID), tho all users will be presumed teen as default; there’s a PlayStation State Of Play on Thurs 11th for “third-party and indie games”; Sony-owned anime platform Crunchyroll is developing original sub-included anime-friendly games.

• January 2026’s top regional PlayStation downloads, according to Sony itself, shows ARC Raiders at #1 (U.S.) and #2 to EA Sports FC 26 (Europe) on PlayStation 5, with Red Dead Redemption 2 topping the PS4 game charts* (*also playable on PS5, of course!), and Fortnite & Roblox atop the F2P download charts, yet again.

• We never got around to a ‘why was ARC Raiders a megahit?’ newsletter, but this great interview with Embark’s Patrick Söderlund has a lot of hints: “When you build a game, and you structure it to a large extent with elements of a [mixed PvE & PVP] sandbox, the stuff that happens in Arc Raiders is just the output, which is incredible…”

• An interesting claim we missed from Epic Games Store’s 2025 round-up: “In 2025, players claimed 662 million titles through the program… This delivered a measurable halo effect across the broader PC ecosystem, including a 40% lift in Steam CCU while the title was free on the Epic Games Store.”

• An spicy opinion from the Mewgenics devs about Early Access? “‘We are launching a complete game. That is a weird thing now,’ Tyler Glaiel told The Escapist. ‘I’m really not a fan of Early Access,’ Edmund McMillen added. ‘I feel like it originated from people needing money fast. I’m not shitting on people who do Early Access, but it feels strange to change the experience after people have already finished it.’”

• Xbox things: The Verge details 2026 plans, inc. an “Automatic Super Resolution feature, which uses an NPU to upscale games” for Xbox Ally X & an improved Xbox PC UI; Windows Central looks into the next Xbox hardware, suggesting “the Gen-10 Xbox ‘PC’ will also run all of your current Xbox games, in addition to games from Windows 11 PC stores like Steam.”

What worked for games on Kickstarter in 2025?

Crowdfunding can be a bit of an enigma at times when it comes to video games. Why? a) an early craze, with Koji Igarashi’s Bloodstained raising $5.5m from 65k pledgers in 2015, came down to earth, b) board games have become the dominant crowdfunding medium & c) platforms like Kickstarter haven’t always made data access transparent.

But ICO’s Thomas Bidaux is close to Kickstarter, and has managed to get a full 17-year set of data from the platform for a new blog post he’s made. And the results are pretty interesting, with both 2024 and 2025 seeing ~$26 million raised for games on KS.

These two years have been the highest since 2015. But - we need context! Sadly, we weren’t able to get the % of failed campaigns compared to successes. But here’s the # of campaigns that made up that $26m, with multi-year trending, via Thomas:

So basically, comparing the post-2015 baseline with now:

• 2016 had 407 successful video game Kickstarter campaigns and $16m paid out, for an average of $39,000 pledged.

• And 2025 had 443 successful campaigns and $26m paid out, for a per-campaign average of $58,000.

That’s roughly a 7% increase in total pledged every year, albeit with a fairly flat number of successful campaigns (up ~1.5% per year, if we compare exact years.) And besides one-offs like Star Citizen ($900m pledged! really!), there’s not really another platform out there besides Kickstarter nowadays with significant scale.

Rather than just copy-pasting Thomas’ excellent blog post, we got a chance to ask him a few questions about the state of crowdfunding (since his team was involved in 3 of the games that grossed >$500k on Kickstarter in 2025!) Some top-level notes:

• You can crowdfund later in your product’s development life: the days of only crowdfunding to start development are over, and Thomas pointed to Prelude Dark Pain, a “dark fantasy tactical RPG” that raised $157k on a $47k goal, noting “a lot of the attention the campaign received was via content creators and media that had exclusive access to a demo version.” (Having a demo? A big boon!)

• Pre-promoting your Kickstarter via ‘follows’ got way more important: Thomas notes: “Kickstarter has been improving its pre-campaign tools in the past year, and the practice of a launching a Coming Soon page is more and more common”, with Autonomica launching with >10,000 KS followers - and ending with >12k backers.

• Paid marketing is a great way to take your campaign ‘over the top’: because of the large average pledge amounts, sometimes >$100 per backer, there are various paid ad options - including some Facebook agencies - to “easily track attribution” for positive ROI. But Thomas reminds us it can “only complement what is the cornerstone of crowdfunding, which is community building.”

Thomas also provided us all 2025 Kickstarters that hit >$500k: Elestrals Awakened ($1.4m); Autonomica ($1m); Animation VERSUS ($1m); Starfinder: Afterlight ($937k); Ahoy ($860k); STARS REACH ($817k); POSTAL 2 Redux Founder’s Edition ($645k); The Sinking City 2 ($607k); DungeonBox - A D&D Party Game ($594k); Windstorm: The Legend of Khiimori ($560k); Diesel Knights (USD $526k).

What is notable about these games? The diversity of genres & styles! It’s almost as if they all have their own communities & are using Kickstarter simply as a platform, huh? Thomas adds: “The style of games is quite varied both in terms of genres (sandbox MMO; mech-FPS; CRPG) and settings (sci-fi; steampunk; Lovecraftian).”

Thomas also chatted to us about other examples of interesting Kickstarters, such as “cozy crafting roguelike” Teamcrafter (€85k raised), which was made by a team that created a Final Fantasy XIV crafting tool, and pivoted that “qualified audience of craft-loving gamers” into backing their standalone game. Clever.

Also notable: The Witch’s Bakery from 2024 (€315k raised from 7.3k backers), where you “live a magical life as a witch-baker in Paris”, and Thomas suggests the team’s “ability to connect with the right zeigeist on social media in general, and on Twitter in particular” helped them thrive. (He also notes cozy titles often do well on KS, partly because cross-promotion with other cozy crowdfunders helps spread the word.)

To end, I asked Thomas about the historical skepticism from some players over crowdfunding games, due to high-profile delayed (or non-shipping!) campaigns. He correctly noted that most successful Kickstarters nowadays ‘appear’ more substantial:

“The further away that moment is from the launch of the game, the more it might evolve from the promises of the campaign… that uncertainty doesn’t sit well with everyone. And we do see that even in the core fans of a project, there are some that just prefer to wait for the full release and skip the Kickstarter altogether.” So - the more solid your plans, the better?

Most-viewed games of Jan: WoW, Hytale surge…

Livestream analytics platform Stream Hatchet is back, grabbing us the Top 100 most-streamed games for January 2026, analyzing the big (non-China) game video streaming platforms like Twitch & a host of other medium/small platforms.

Here’s the full list of the Top 100 (Google Drive link) with GDCo annotations. And Stream Hatchet’s Mark Rowland worked with us to analyze what happened this time:

• eSports led to some of the biggest boosts among the oft-static Top 10: League of Legends (#1, 171m hours watched) jumped over 50% thanks to LCK Cup 2026, and fellow MOBA Mobile Legends: Bang Bang’s M7 world champs vaulted it to #4 with 87.4m hours watched (over 3x increase from December!)

• ARC Raiders, World Of Warcraft & Valorant also excelled: extraction shooter ARC Raiders hanging out at #3 (90m hours) is seriously impressive, classic MMO WoW (#7) surged 56% to 67m hours watched thx to Beta streams for the Midnight expansion, (And another tournament helped Valorant boost to #8).

• Hytale & Arknight: Endfield were the standout new Jan. releases: off-Steam Minecraft-ish PC release Hytale hit #22 with 18.3m hours watched, even in early release form. And mobile/PC ARPG gacha title Arknights: Endfield debuted at #29, with 10.9m hours watched.

Otherwise, some other notable entries for January for live-streaming watchers include F2P launch Highguard (#58, 4.7m hours watched) and a big increase for Cult Of The Lamb (#67, 3.3m hours watched), which was due to the release of its Woolhaven DLC.

[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.]

OK, we’re back, what did we miss? Oh, like three console earnings calls, a streaming showcase or two, and a partridge in a pear tree. (Not that Partridge.) But fear not, we’re going to outline them, along with a look at January’s top new PC/console games…

Before we start: watching Raiders Of The Lost Ark with my 10 year-old, he just went obsesso over Indiana Jones Lego sets. Funny YouTube comment on this ‘flying wing’ Lego overview? “Lego: We will not make sets based on war. We are a family company and this would go against our values. Also Lego: Hey kids! Who wants to buy a Nazi fighter plane?”

[FREE DEMO OF GDCo PRO? You too can get a gratis demo of our GameDiscoverCo Pro company-wide ‘Steam deep dive’ & console data by contacting us today - ~90 orgs have it. Or, signing up to GDCo Plus gets the rest of this newsletter and Discord access, plus more. ]

Game discovery news: Resident Evil hype builds…

Kicking off with our customary look at the breaking game discovery & platform news, it goes a little like this:

• Checking the latest ‘trad media’ mentions from ICO’s Footprints.gg, Resident Evil Requiem continues super-strong momentum ahead of its Feb 27th release, as aftershocks from Highguard’s messy Steam launch continue, and Arc Raiders (new patches) and Dispatch (new Switch versions) also cause susurrus.

• PlayStation had pretty good PS5 holiday 2025 sales: it “sold in some 8.1 million… just 0.1 million less than PlayStation 4 managed during the same period of its lifecycle”, 1.5m less than last year, but more than Switch 2’s 7 million. PS5 now has 92.2m sold-in, and Ghost Of Yotei “significantly” contributed to Sony’s overall positive results.

• Analyst Serkan Toto told VGC re: Sony’s results, which included 132m MAU for PSN, up marginally: “Microsoft‘s continued focus away from hardware and rising prices in PC gaming of course helped [PS5]… it’s great for Sony that the biggest driver for hardware sales is still to come, namely the eventual launch of GTA VI.” Agree.

• A heads up from Ishtar’s Bruno Laverny, who previously warned us about fake YouTube channels trying to get free Steam keys, on “how key resellers create fake Twitch channels with 15/20k subscribers to ask free keys from developers.” (Different platform, similar problems - watch for no chat in the ‘real’ Twitch archives?)

• Steam has updated on its Steam Machine & Steam Frame hardware launch timing & price, explaining: “The limited availability and growing prices of… critical components [like PC memory & storage] mean we must revisit our exact shipping schedule and pricing.” They’re still planning for H1 2026, but ask for our patience.

• Take Two’s Strauss Zelnick has suggested re: claims that Grand Theft Auto 6 won’t be available in a physical version on Day 1 on PS/Xbox, “That’s not the plan.” (Next question: will there be a physical disc in the physical version, or will it be a redemption code in a box? We have no idea, but Battlefield 6 managed a disc fine.)

• Interesting to see the open-source Godot continue to increase engine market share for ‘jam games’ in a multi-year graph of Global Game Jam entries per platform: “Godot grew from 1.4% to over 25%” from 2019 to 2026, partly at the expense of Unity. (Godot hasn’t made it into as many fully commercial games yet.)

• Nintendo financials follow-up: president Shuntaro Furukawa acknowledged that “overseas [Switch 2 holiday] sales were slightly weaker than our expectations”, while exceeding estimates in Japan; he also said that there were no current plans to increase Switch 2’s price due to memory price surges. (Emphasis on ‘current’.)

• Some good Gamesight data on how influencers respond to game sequels: “Across [Ghost of Tsushima, Borderlands, Hollow Knight, Kingdom Come: Deliverance, and Death Stranding] and more than 8,000 creators, sequels outperformed original titles by +6.3 percentage points [in av. concurrent viewers] relative to each creator's baseline.”

• Mobile game things: this handy overview of 2025 game/app spending notes that downloads are “up just 0.8% year-over-year, while in-app purchases surged 10.6%” - it’s a yield play; Jan 2026’s top-grossing mobile games are headed by Honor Of Kings, Monopoly Go!, LastWar: Survival, Royal Match, Roblox, and PUBG Mobile.

• Microlinks: AMD says it’s ready to support Microsoft launching its next Xbox as soon as 2027; Nintendo’s Direct showcased Indiana Jones and the Great Circle & Fallout 4 for Switch 2, plus co-op exclusive Orbitals; Roblox creators can now “use a simple text prompt to generate a fully functional car, get in it, and drive it around.”

Jan 2026’s top-selling new Steam games? Yes!

Since we got to February, we thought we’d take our lead story to profile the top new PC game performers of last month on Steam. Jan. is traditionally slower, but there were still some standouts in early 2026, as our GDCo Pro estimates show:

• Quarantine Zone headed the charts with >650k sold: we covered ‘inspect for zombie infection’ Papers Please-like Quarantine Zone: The Last Check on its debut, noting: “the border-checking gameplay of Contraband Police showed you could bring the details checking microgenre into the very streamer friendly, ‘simulator’-adjacent first person perspective. And if you add the undead to the mix? Potent influencer catnip.”

• StarRupture & LORT also did great, hitting #2 and #3: we’re on top of the biggest games this month, huh, given we did a whole piece on first-person factory action-er StarRupture, which hit >500k and another one on co-op roguelite LORT, which managed >250k? (Both will scale handily over time.)

• Half Sword - and a late-breaking Cairn - headed the best of the rest: physics-based medieval combat game Half Sword released too early (tech & physics issues galore!), but still has a chance to redeem itself. And survival-climber Cairn (we covered its demo!) debuted at the end of the month, and has already hit 300k sales.

Overall, January was actually a month with a bunch of interesting, high quality original IP games from small and medium devs hitting the charts! That’s… good, right?

Next, looking at the top revenue non-F2P new Steam games in Jan, we still have StarRupture & Quarantine Zone duking it out atop the charts. But some more expensive titles including Code Vein II ($70-$100) did increase their chart rankings vs. units sold, as a result.

Moving into the overall top Steam games in January 2026 by paid units, it’s Embark’s extraction shooter ARC Raiders which is blasting it. GDCo has it at 2.1m Steam units for the month (and 3.8m for Jan. including console, hitting 15m units lifetime):

Also notable in this set of top-sellers: R.E.P.O. (850k more, 18.4m copies sold), Peak (700k more, 15.5m copies sold) and RV There Yet? (650k, 5.5m copies sold) are flying the freak flag for ‘friendslop’ in style. And the co-op addition for ARPG No Rest For The Wicked has skyrocketed sales - 1.5m copies LTD, and 650k more in January, according to us.

A lot of the rest of the Top 10 ‘all’ are new games. But that’s not the case if we look at top performers by total revenue in January 2026, since F2P/IAP dominates:

You’re seeing ARC Raiders at #2 with $75m on Steam, but also Counter-Strike 2 flexing its perma-dominance at #1. There’s also PUBG at #3, and Marvel Rivals (still a threat!), Warframe, and Chinese MMO-ARPG Where Winds Meet (doing great with an international audience) in the Top 10, starting at ~$15m and going up from there.

We’re covering console games only briefly this month, since January was incredibly slow for new paid games. On PlayStation 5, Cairn & Code Vein II were top new sellers but were <50k during January. And on Xbox, it was only late port Final Fantasy VII Remake Intergrade (also <50k so far) which stood out.

There was some interest in new F2P console games, though, with fighting game 2XKO, hero shooter Highguard, and ARPG factory-builder Arknights: Endfield each snaking towards 1m players in their first weeks of availability on PS/Xbox. (That’s not amazing, but also not terrible in today’s saturated F2P console space.)

Finally, on the Western Switch 1 & 2 eShop, GDCo estimates see Final Fantasy VII Intergrade approaching 100k there (and prob. better still worldwide, given Asia!) Other games doing decently: Suika Game Planet, Dispatch, Wizard101, and MIO: Memories in Orbit, which are >25k and trending higher. (Both good, but sluggish?)

Steam this week: Nioh 3 tops a busy set of debuts

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