Well, just two months left in 2026 - luckily there’s just no major game releases left, so nothing to see here, folks. *draws picture of GTA 6 box on wall like Wile E Coyote does with a train tunnel and is surprised to get run over by it* But seriously, we do have things to discuss besides the grand thefting of automobiles… see below!

Oh, and heads up - we are 95% sold out of newsletter ads for the rest of 2026. But if you’d like to offer your product or service to GameDiscoverCo readers (>46k of them!) in 2027, please ping us & we can get you our specs, clickthrough #s & rate card. (Ads really took off this year - thanks to all the companies supporting us that way…)

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

Gamedisconews: Drawquarium, Hull Rupture arrive

Let’s start everything out with a look at the top game discovery & game platform news since we last checked, as follows:

• GDCo Pro's estimates of 'trending' unreleased Steam games by 'new wishlists in the last 7 days', Oct 26th-Nov 2nd sees AI-infused 'too many zombies' survival strategy game Ebbtide (#1, +140k wishlists) again going somewhere. #2 is Football Manager 27 (free demo) & #3 is 2D spaceship management game Hull Rupture.

• Elsewhere, there's a lot of former Next Fest titles dotted around the Top 10. Newer, though? There's 'draw your own fish & take care of ‘em' Drawquarium (#5), which has an adorable trailer, and first-person mech repair job sim (clever idea!) Bay 12: Mech Repair, brand new at #12. There's always new games to find...

• Physical game percentages? Even for Resident Evil publisher Capcom, they’re a tad desultory at this point: “Its Q2 results for fiscal year 2026 revealed that 92.4% of [unit] sales were digital copies”, split 57% PC and 35% console. (Remember this includes discounted back catalog which moves in higher numbers - nonetheless.)

• Are there more PC games coming out right now? ICO’s Thomas Bidaux points out 1,656 releases (!) last week on Steam, and “The number almost doubled from the previous record a few weeks ago (757).” Related: Itch.io says “The number of game pages being created per-day has doubled in the past 2 months [to ~6k/day].”

• PlayStation things: the latest PS+ Monthly games for Nov. 2026 include Dead Island 2, Tomb Raider IV – VI Remastered, and the entertaining Monster Train 2; it’s the 20th anniversary of the online PlayStation Store in a few days, so devs got asked their favorite PS Store games: Balatro, God Of War, Inscryption mentioned.

• Valve’s Tom G. had detailed comments at a Korean event re: Steam’s current clone/game flood worries & whether platform restrictions make any sense. Well, no: “Making Steam a smarter, more dynamic platform rather than restricting developer access is the starting point of our philosophy.” (Disclosure is their preferred approach.)

• In the same Steam Indie Connect meetup, Giardino suggested - in a kinda fair, but likely to be controversial point: “Rather than relying on a single mechanism that someone can easily copy… you [can] grow your game by adding features, personality, and creativity that stem from your own perspective as a developer.”

• What’s an alternative way to ‘AI disclosing’ games? That’d be VRChat’s decision to have no AI labels: “95% of survey respondents want some kind of label for AI usage, but there’s very little agreement beyond that… there isn’t one simple answer here.” (They’re thinking about having a “self-declared ‘Human-authored’ mark”, tho.)

• You have to be scrappy in today’s funding environment, with the Trash Goblin devs revealing that only about one-third of their game’s funding up to the 1.0 release of the game was from Kickstarter/game sales. (The rest was UK government funds & tax relief, at ~35%, platform support at 5% and own funding.)

• Meta’s newest financials? “Within our Reality Labs segment, Q3 revenue was $443 million, down 6% due to lower Quest headset sales, which were partially offset by continued strong growth in AI glasses revenue.” Also: Meta will ship new hardware iterations only when “we have major breakthroughs.” (No new Quests soon?)

• The latest Steam docs change? If you want to change your game name after store page review, you need to answer these Qs: “Why is this name change necessary?… Is there anything about the existing game name that you need to change for legal reasons?… Is the product that was advertised to customers changing along with the name?” (Aha!)

How Probably Stolen traded up to 750k copies sold in 5 days…

Recently, we were poking at the success of the demo of Questing Goose & Tinybuild’s “a cyberpunk shopkeeping simulator” Probably Stolen ($20) in the GDCo Pro/Basic Discord, just before the game shipped on Oct. 28th. Could the constant 10-20k concurrent users on Steam for it - spiking to 40k - really be reflective of interest?

Those numbers seemed preposterously high, leading us to start looking under the couch cushions for reasons. But then the full game launched - and immediately hit 85k CCU, peaking at 165k CCU earlier today. That’s for a single-player only, menu heavy inventory management game. It’s not fake. What on Earth is going on here?

Well, the CCU is definitely enhanced by long play times: Tinybuild told us that of their 180,000 playtest players, 45,000 spent more than 20 hours playing. (GDCo is estimating average playtimes for the full game zooming past 10 hours already.) But the game has sold 750k copies, as of yesterday, and is clearly going to do multi-millions.

So the Tinybuild team - publishing producer Artyom Safarov, global marketing lead Arnaud Richard, and Chinese marketing lead Dandan Ye - were kind enough to answer all our questions in a giant document, which we highly recommend you read. But if you don’t, here’s the gist on takeaways:

• Probably Stolen is a major rebuild of a game Tinybuild was pitched: you can still see the original title, Deepspace Emporium, on Steam. The publisher ‘couldn’t get enough’ of the demo’s gameplay, but existing art (from programmer/designer Bei Ning Pan) was ‘programmer art’ adjacent & the game had already been in Next Fest.

• The graphical rehaul was twinned with interesting new gameplay ideas: After coming on as publisher, Tinybuild got “a talented pixel artist who took charge and created a whole new visual style for the characters, environment and items.” Along the way, existing store management & counterfeit detection gameplay got deeper, with the idea of “sentient rogue AI” now controlling some of your customers.

• These new ideas pushed the game into the hot cyberpunk game space: look, people can’t get enough of cyberpunk games (see: Nivalis Nights and, uh, Cyberpunk 2077.) So Artyom noted: “Do we keep it a generic sci-fi or move to the cyberpunk which (arguably) is a more catchy setting?” The latter won out!

So what we have here is an already deep trading & inventory/item management game which also had counterfeit detection a la Papers Please, and now also No I’m Not A Human-style fake detection, and had a hot setting & developed a lot more depth (class systems, special ‘runs’ with weird goals, a ton of diverse customers & Easter eggs.)

This was all done with one solo Canadian dev, plus, per Artyom, “artists and contractors for music, sounds and UI. Depending on how you count, it’s either a solo project or a game made by a team of under 5 people, I guess. The team is remote, spread across Northern America, Europe and the rest of the world. They have never met each other in person.”

Just finishing off on what makes this game special, in our view: the busy inventory screens make it feel deep, there’s a lot of the classic ‘grinding and collecting’ in there, but there’s also always new things to see. Don’t underestimate how much a tiny team can add depth to a cleverly structured roguelite. There’s just an ocean of stuff to do…

Dandan Ye notes that “several interconnected systems, including production and crafting, inventory management, faction reputation, and narrative progression” are key: “Even a single item can present several choices.. sell it for profit, use it yourself, turn it into something more valuable, trade it for faction reputation, or even give it away just to feel better about yourself.”

Artyom adds, re: depth: “Do you know that you can genetically modify the plants? And that the water purity is actually simulated when you drop a chemical tablet in it? You can also breed rats by combining the specimens with particular features, and creating pure-grade drugs [using chemistry].” (There are detailed rat ranching guides on YouTube already.)

We have room for one more set of three bullet points, and the Tinybuild team wrote another 12 pages (with making-of art! go read it all!) But here’s what we found notable in the pre-launch & launch phases for the game:

• Despite being a late-announcing game, a lot of marketing poured in: this game was unveiled in late August, and still did this well? Blimey. Arnaud Richard notes: “There was organic momentum, but also a lot of work involved in understanding it and adapting the experience. By the day before launch, we had generated 578,528 wishlist additions, with strong growth both in China and elsewhere.”

• Non-obviously, China is a particularly strong market for the game: early momentum via Bilibili was key, and 51% of the 246k playtest activations were from China, with 17% from the U.S and no more than 3% from any other country. So working with Chinese publisher XD and marketing there has been vital.

• Pricing was carefully done, manual, and seems to have worked well: full write-up in doc, but a “mostly manual” approach to pricing has the Chinese price at just 55 yuan ($8.25), a 59% discount on the U.S.. Despite being more expensive in the U.S., “CIS, MENA, SASIA, and LATAM are priced around $7-8.” This approach semi-ignores Steam recommendations in favor of sentiment & seems to have worked.

It’s interesting - in digesting this last point, you can argue that yet again, an inexpensive, longer-playing game that’s $5-$15 in most territories is breaking out. (Despite it being a tad more, $17.99, at U.S. launch.) We’re getting to a new normal with this ‘cheaper but deep’ trend - and it’s not what I would’ve expected 3 years ago.

Finally: in a world where we thought 30-minute ‘runs’ are the normal for roguelites, one of the reasons Probably Stolen is being played for so long is that even speedrun-style runs are 2-5 hours, and full runs can be 10-15 hours. But the game hook pushes you through that like a knife through randomized butter - and everyone’s happy.

[Again, congrats to Bei Ning Pan and the Tinybuild crew for making a narrow-spec but super deep game & thx for sharing it with us.]

GameDisco Show: is Discord the new SEO Reddit?

Before we quit, here’s the latest The GameDiscover Show, ft. myself (Simon) and Post Games’ Chris Plante talking trends - sub to the podcast via Apple Podcasts, Spotify & elsewhere (audio), with a video version on YouTube (above).

The latest GDCo Show talks about an important discoverability change for Discord servers, why average wishlist count increases in October's streaming showcases were slower than earlier in 2026, the significance of a game citing dev costs in increasing its post-launch default price, and what Roblox's latest results say about the platform.

[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, devs, and other smart game industry folks.]

And… it’s the day before Halloween? If you celebrate, we hope you have a spooky time, and presume that you’re all dressing in 1983 Atari Asteroids Halloween costumes like we clearly are, complete with ‘crater face’…

Before we start, would you like to grok the game collecting trend landscape? Well, good news, Chris Kohler (ex-Wired journo & current Digital Eclipse editorial director!) did a talk at Portland Retro Gaming Expo 2026 which explains the ‘25/30 year rule’ for old physical game pricing, and why we’re edging in the ‘slab era’ of video games.

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

Game discovery news: Twitch x Phantom Blade…

Let’s check out the platform and discovery news for the rest of the week, going a little bit like this:

• Looking at GameDiscoverCo Pro's data for Twitch hours watched over the last 7 days, for games released in the last 3 months? Top 3 ain’t surprising - soccer, the brand-new & huge Phantom Blade Zero, and Wardogs. But look at the viral & incremental indies next: Moon Sweepers (now 70k CCU!), Scam With Your Friends and ‘can I offer you a nice egg in this trying time?’ (newsletter on ‘em soon!) Crack.

• Console hacking issues: Switch 2 security is taking a hit as hackers managed to unlock (limited!) homebrew access; there’s increased hacking of PSN accounts for PS4/PS5, with one ex-contractor (?) claiming: “The bad actors make [PSN] child accounts 17 years and [364] days old, buy a bunch of games on your saved [credit] card”, and then try to split off the adult account to abscond with the games. (Clever.)

• The top ‘trad media’ mentions for games, Oct 21-28, according to Footprints.gg, are topped by GTA 6 (install is ‘just’ 210GB), Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 (launched, people dig it), Cyberpunk 2077 (new update with console mods), and Phantom Blade Zero (brand new, huge, see below.)

• The latest Nintendo Indie World showcase (here’s the official PR) had various hit or high-wishlist PC games heading to Switch 2, including R.E.P.O., Raccoin, Slime Rancher 2 and Super Battle Golf coming across, and upcoming goodness like Haunted Paws, Witchbrook, Dumpster Gang (raccoon-maxxing?) & more…

• Microlinks: Nintendo eShop is launching in the Philippines on Nov.10th; Xbox cracks down on shovelware by targeting triple-stack achievement games; Amazon Luna’s reach has grown 5x since the relaunch (from x to 5x!); Roblox is “launching Web Play beta, which lets you play your own Roblox games in a browser.”

• Xbox’s results? Non-stellar, again as “Xbox content and services revenue specifically decreased by 2% to US $5.4 billion… Xbox hardware revenue also continued to decrease, this time by 14%.” On X, Asha Sharma noted “Minecraft and WoW Forever set records… console sales remain constrained by supply”, playing up their refurb push.

• Game-related tidbits: The Talos Principle 2 has increased its default price from $30 to $40, specifically ‘cos “the cost of developing and supporting games has continued to rise significantly”, mobile games like F2P megahit Block Blast are getting decompiled for monetization reveals - yes, it decides when you lose.

• An important visibility change on Discord - search engines will be allowed to index “Discoverable Servers… the most public spaces on Discord, with at least 1,000 members [that] their admins chose to list” as such. (This may be good for game discovery long-term, but feels ‘different’ privacy wise. “In the EU, UK, Canada, Brazil, Australia and South Korea, it’ll be OFF by default”, others can opt out by hand.)

• Roblox’s latest financials are again a weird melange: “👤 138M avg DAUs (🔻9% YoY); 📈 $1.70B in bookings (🔻12% YoY); 💰 $1.57B in revenue (+16% YoY); 👾 $403 million paid to devs (🔻6% YoY).” Notes from Ben Sarraille: “Q3 last year was a huge outlier (rise of Grow a Garden → DAU, booking spike). Everything looks kinda rough in comparison… APAC & ROW (Rest of World) have taken over [since 2019].”

• Here’s Meta Horizon’s pitch on ‘winning’ with prompt-based game creation, via Saxs Persson: “Roblox is very opinionated from an artistic perspective. Minecraft the same thing… we’re trying to fade into the background to provide the components for the games to be the center, and Meta to be the platform that helps the games get there.”

• Esoteric microlinks: this deconstruction of why Lego is popular is game-relevant: “just enough structure to make creation meaningful and just enough freedom to make anything seem possible”; ‘games as platform’-wise, is the Jonas Brothers performing live in Roblox’s Steal An Egg the most ‘2026 game biz’ thing ever?

OUR SPONSOR: Jestr.gg - The Creator Marketplace Behind Viral Games

Curious how games have been going viral on social media lately? Chances are they used Jestr! Our creator marketplace offers the easiest system for working with high quality, vetted short-form content creators on a performance basis.

Don’t believe us? 450+ studios are already on the platform and 15/50 top demos from Steam Next Fest used Jestr, including the breakout hit Abyssal Lapidary (check out our case study!) Jestr is built by a young team of content creators looking to make collabs easier for everyone.

So if you need creators talking about your game, learn more at jestr.gg.

The hidden, complex AI signifier in Next Fest?

OK, so as referenced in Tuesday’s Next Fest newsletter, Oct’s Steam demo showcase had about 40% more games in it that we expected (>7k vs. 5k), based on previous event trending. That’s enough to make us break our ‘don’t make AI the main character’ rule, and spend some time looking at the data.

The obvious step is to look at official Steam AI disclosures in Next Fest. Several outlets have done so, and we will also rotely perform this task. (We don’t think it’s really the whole story.) Nonetheless, AI disclosures went from 750 (21.2%) in the Feb. 2026 and 1,163 (26.5%) in June 2026 to 2,517 (34.4%) in October 2026.

We grabbed all the AI disclosures to summarize the percentages from the plain text declarations for us. After removing some odd categories, we get to the following:

So ~70% of the disclosures mention visual art and graphics in some way - though most of them are things like in-game or store icons rather than ‘all art in the game’, followed by localization (28%), marketing/store page (26%), music/soundtrack (19%), in-game text/dialog (17%), sound effects/audio (15.5%) & down from there.

We also looked at the CCU for the event alongside AI disclosure, and you may not be surprised to hear that the AI-disclosed games are generally clustered a bit more in the ‘less popular’ zone:

Looking at the highest-ranked games by CCU with more disclosed AI use, some of them like Bore actually appear to have suspicious CCU highs, and others like No Mortal Space seem quite Asia-first, where AI use is a tad more culturally acceptable? Most of the 52 with >100 CCU are disclosing fairly non-core AI elements…

So far, so… meh. I think this gives a general sense that ‘smaller/less popular games are disclosing they use AI’. But this is purely data on:

• what Valve says you need to disclose, which excludes ‘AI code helper’ software.

• ignoring people who didn’t disclose AI use, but actually used it. (Though Valve does have systems and/or manual checks to monitor for obvious AI art, we’ll note.)

Anyhow, we wanted another angle of attack, and we found it in our data on which game engines were used in Next Fest. We scanned file manifests for almost every demo (!), and discovered that some intriguing trends - such as the absolute percentage of Unity (~46%, still #1) and Unreal (12.3%, down to #4) games bumping down.

But we noticed two other things - Godot (#3) growing a couple of percentage points faster than we expected, from 12.6% to 17.4%, and ‘Game engine not detected’ shooting up from 12.9% to 17.7% (now #2!) It had previously been pretty stable for 2025 data & the last two Next Fest editions:

That’s not a smoking gun, but it’s very interesting. Folks in the GameDiscoverCo Pro Discord pointed out that a lot of vibe-coded games use frameworks like Three.js which aren’t detected by our current game-specific tools. And that Godot is used for vibe-coding extensively because it’s open-source and even has an MCP interface.

We then took time to split the engine use by the top games in the festival by peak CCU, and found just 7% ‘engine not detected’ and 6% Godot in the Top 100 games, with a whopping 28% Unreal and 53% Unity:

The percentage of ‘no engine’ and Godot keeps going up as we look further down the popularity list, with the Top 1,000 Next Fest games by highest CCU seeing the former up at 14% and the latter at 12%. (Of course, you can make games quicker in Unity too with code helpers, so that’ll swell the absolute numbers too.)

We did visually inspect ‘no engine detected’ games that topped out at 1 CCU, like Slime Glutton, Calibration Sequence, Ribbit Robber, Anomaly Grid, and Song Of Larithea, and we’re seeing just a ton of 2D bullet heaven, bullet hell and puzzle games. And on the Godot side, there’s an even wider set of genres being explored…

So here’s our view:

• There was a sea change when the rise of cheap/free Unity & Unreal engines made it easier for people to make games. But even with Unity & access to Asset Store assets, it’s still non-trivial to make for less skilled programmers.

• AI tools are, simply, an even lower entry point for certain genres. You can probably make a 1 CCU Steam Next Fest demo near-100% via prompts, without ever getting super-deep into the actual code. (You can even have it use asset packs or open-source art, though I presume a lot of the vibecoded games don’t do that.)

• The vast majority of these games won’t be troubling the charts or competing with your game. And we won’t be seeing AI-first titles at the top of Next Fest in the near future, though it’s obviously not quite as simple as that.

But where we see the real threat to the status quo is still skilled solo/tiny devs, enhanced by ‘code helpers’ or not, putting out great games quickly. (And judging by dev examples we’ve seen, the successes will be wielding AI code help like a scalpel, not a messy can of vibecoded spray paint.) AI may notably speed up ‘doing more with less’…

So: we do find a lot of the panic about AI and Next Fest a little curious. This Next Fest would have had >5k games in it, separately of what looks like a filling-out of small, vibe-coded games. Is 5k a ‘keep calm and carry on’ and 7k a ‘full-on freak out’ situation?

But we are going to see some wild release amounts on Steam in upcoming months, so please strap in. Lucien Parsons (thx!) just pointed out some big year-on-year monthly release numbers - Sept. 2026 was up 76% YoY to 2,875 games, and Oct. 2026 up 53% so far to 3,114 games. At those rates across a full year, we’ll see ~35k games on Steam in 2027, vs. 21k in 2025 & 23k in 2026 so far.

And just as we go to publish this, news is out that Claude has added a mandatory rule trying to crack down on cloning: “Do build original games, games in a genre, and games from the user’s own designs and assets. Don’t build a recreation of a specific existing game, even if it is renamed or called original.” Will this… work? So crazy out there right now…

This week on Steam: wow, Phantom Blade, Probably Stolen…

Read more

It’s the week of Halloween, and I’m currently sitting upstairs in my house trying to work out whether the spooky noise I’m hearing is a) from the ambient album I’m listening to b) the neighbors’ animatronic Halloween decorations c) a squirrel gnawing obnoxiously on a branch outside the window. (Spoilers: it was c).)

Spooky buds, before we start, LitRPG (audio)book hit Dungeon Crawler Carl has a new pinball machine from Multimorphic, and Pinball News recorded a full ‘making-of’ talk from the recent Pinball Expo. With Stern (Pokémon, Fallout) alongside a number of niche manufacturers, pinball is a) not dead b) having an interesting 2026, and we dig it.

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

Game discovery news: Ebbtide brings the zombies

Let’s get going here with some notable game platform & discovery news, this fine new week:

• GDCo Pro's estimates of 'trending' unreleased Steam games by 'new wishlists in the last 7 days' (above) sees zombie survival strategy game Ebbtide (+206k wishlists) #1 with a bullet - it’s fairly public about AI use, btw. And #3 is Phantom Blade Zero, the wuxia action Souls-like launching this week & looking very strong.

• Beyond Next Fest winners we’ll get to shortly (Probably Stolen, Abyssal Lapidary, ArcheAge Chronicles), we're still seeing Valve's own Deadlock solidly in the Top 10, nostalgia for Shrek 2 Remastered at #7, & soccer sim Football Manager 2027 scaling wishlists at #10, as a free pre-launch demo is about to debut.

• ‘Games as platforms’ news: shortly after The Witcher 3 did it, CDPR’s Cyberpunk 2077 now also has expanded console/cross-platform mods, though initial PS5 mods are modest in scope: “There are several new quests that reuse existing assets and lines of dialogue, and there are a selection of ‘Romance Enhanced' mods.”

• Steam officially shipped its Personal Calendar into full release, with a blog post and a related video with good tips: set your release (EA or 1.0!) date at least 60 days before launch; the more ‘real’ wishlists, the more likely you are to be on the Calendar. Oh, and DLC is only listed on Personal Calendar if the player owns the base game. (Seriously, watch the video, at least once.)

• Microlinks: the top PlayStation downloads for September, per Sony, were topped by EA Sports FC 27 & Wolverine on PS5, with Call Of Duty Warzone doing F2P #s; Game Pass is now a perk with more expensive U.S. T-Mobile phone plans; Epic’s running a $50k Unreal Engine/UEFN ‘AI Game Jam’ starting Nov. 12th.

• The latest Matthew Belloni x Puck newsletter ($, spicy) has some notes on new Netflix sub-boss Peter Rice: “Rice is said to favor less investment in video podcasts, games, and YouTube-style creators - the engagement-bait inning eaters that have diluted the premium roots of the Netflix brand and given members a ‘What the heck IS all this?’ feeling when they open the cluttered app.” Hmm…

• Streaming showcase follow-ups: we have the Triple I Initiative’s Oct. showcase at ~15k median 7-day Steam wishlist increase, 75% down on April’s. (Still 4x any other Oct. showcase, which all have slower than earlier-in-year comps, tho. Why? Less ‘hot’ games to 100% debut, a lack of Steam featuring, and a v.busy calendar.)

• Circana’s U.S. hardware & select software #s, Sept. 2026 was overall down 1% YoY to $4.8 billion, and Circana’s Mat Piscatella also documented a decent jump in PS5 hardware sales in the week of Wolverine’s debut, as console hardware as a whole was up 12% to a (still relatively modest) $362 million. (It’s a ‘meh’ market…)

• Surprising game milestones: Gaijin’s $25 PvPvE shooter Active Matter has 500k sold in 6 weeks multi-platform, inc. their own launcher, despite an initial 4.5k Steam CCU, thx to great stickiness; not a shock if you read our newsletter, but GDCo estimates the PS5 SKU of BeamNG.Drive at ~1 million sold in just a week!

• Microlinks, Pt.2: an Australian court ordered Fortnite to be put back onto the iOS App Store there; Pantaloon launched a boutique indie game subscription service, Playbill; 42% of U.S. gamers say they may be less productive at work due to GTA VI; there’s a late-breaking Nintendo Indie World showcase on Oct. 28th.

OUR SPONSOR: FirstLook.gg, Free Playtesters & Creators

You already know the drill: ad spend, cold emails, Discord recruitment, and the slow drip of playtesters who may or may not show up. Part of why we built firstlook.gg is to fix that.

Every FirstLook account comes with two cross-game networks, free. player.gg brings you real players ready to playtest, no ad spend. creators.gg lets creators come to you, from small streamers to established partners. 2,000+ studios use them already.

Eden (our CEO) will demo it himself. GDCo subscribers: 30-day free Pro trial, worth $1,599.

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

Firstly, yes, there are a lot of meta-questions about why so many demos - even compared to the 5,000+ expected - showcased Steam’s Oct. 2026 Next Fest, which just concluded. We’ll have a follow-up to this newsletter on Friday, looking into that…

But let’s put ‘that question’ in the corner for now, and do what everyone should do, which is look at what games were actually popular, and why! As they do recently, Valve put up its list of the Top 50 most-played demos, from the ~7,300 we’re tracking.

Anyhow, our GameDiscoverCo Pro data offering now has real-time updates on Steam Next Fests as they happen (below). But if you don’t have access to that, we’ve exported the raw data to a Google Drive document so you can analyze it at your leisure:

Two comments on this Next Fest - quite a lot of the trending games we see on wishlists already had strong demo momentum pre-NF, and a number of the top new unique player/CCU games are co-op/friendslop adjacent. Looking at Top 10 uniques:

• ‘Just playin’ around’ co-op had the obvious CCU blow-ups: we don’t rank them so high on wishlists (tho we’re possibly underestimating?), but asymmetric ‘naughty student’ game Worst Class Ever hit #1 on uniques, with 600k players, and ‘raft farting’ (yes, really, yes) title Fart Together was #4. This trend is very strong.

• Many other top titles continued strong pre-event interest: if you look at GDCo’s top demos CCU chart 3 weeks ago, cyberpunk shop sim Probably Stolen (#3 then, #2 in uniques now), anime desktop companion Character House (#1 then, #7 now), incremental-er Find The Needle (#2 then, #3 now) were all heavily in the mix. There’s an argument that Next Fest is now just a boost for existing demo trends…

• A handful of ‘brand new’ Next Fest break-outs did scale: we’re looking at you, gothic gem/jewelry crafter Abyssal Lapidary, which launched its demo just pre-Fest & hit #8 on uniques. Huge fantasy MMO ArcheAge Chronicles also timed its demo closer to Next Fest and hit #5 in uniques.

Our general comment on trends at Oct’s Next Fest, btw, is ‘there’s no major genre trend, just all the existing microtrends playing out in 10-15 different subgenres’ - crafting sims, shop sims, desktop companions, co-op ‘hijinks’ games, cozy builders & more…

Next, here’s GDCo’s Top 10 estimates of new wishlists during Next Fest. You’ll see a bunch of ‘top uniques’ games in here too, like cozy ‘sustainable MMO’ Loftia (#9), and round-based co-op zombie FPS (on procgen maps!) Mortuus (#7), also both great microtrend examples.

But there’s also some new entries including ‘deeper Stardew Valley x combat’ pixel standout Emberville (#4), which just smartly last-minute delayed release into Jan. due to Next Fest feedback. And ‘dark first-person fishing adventure’ Dreadmoor (#5), plus powered-train ‘mover’ survival FPS Frostrail (#8), both of which look v.good.

Part of the point here is - people already cared about these games way before Next Fest. (We estimate Frostrail already had 650k+ wishlists, for example.) But how many of you were following it closely? And that’s the point of Next Fest - it’s not a hype originator for most games, so much as a hype amplifier….

The #11 to #30 by wishlist increase during NF is a good look at other key titles, tho it spans +30k to +50k, down on June 2026’s Next Fest #11-30, which were +40k to +78k…

It can be difficult to visualize the diversity of games in this list, but there’s so much good-looking stuff - cyberpunk ARPG ReBlade: The Death Spiral (#11), clever soul-processing (!) incremental game Deadline: Afterlife Processing (#15) & early FromSoft-inspired first-person RPG Queens’s Domain (#18) being just three of them.

One other visualization we generally do (thx Michael Chan!) is the ‘Top 5 Steam’ tags chart for the Top 15 ‘most new wishlists’ games:

This includes a couple of remasters (The Wolf Among Us, Godzilla: Destroy All Monsters) that also charted in the Top 15. Other shared tag points include incremental games (Find The Needle & ‘reverse farmer’ Unharvest), crafting (a bunch of games!), and intriguingly, ‘Lovecraftian’ (Abyssal Lapidary & Dreadmoor.) Sinister vibes in effect…

It’s also worth printing out data on the Top 20 games by highest Steam CCU during the event, according to us. (You needed ~1,500 CCU to make the Top 20.) We talked about many of these, but not Just Volleyball (#5, simple co-op fun!) or creepy drilling game Bore (#12), which epitomizes the new skool co-op, horror, incremental trend.

Finally, let’s talk trends. Before the October Next Fest, I’d predicted we’d see just over 5,000 demos, which would continue the trend line. And… nope. Although some demos were pulled late, we still got to >7,300, up 66.6% (!) on June 2026’s ~4,400:

So yes, a startlingly large amount of these games are competent & handcrafted. But there’s something going on here - and it’s not easy to deconstruct it just with Steam’s AI disclosures, which are arguably useful but somewhat of a fig leaf.

Anyhow, as a result of this, the percentile chances of ‘success’ on a comparative scale to other Next Fests, you won’t be surprised to see, tanked:

We use Steam follower increase here, since it enables us to benchmark to more Next Fests, and: a game in the top 10% of all Oct. Steam Next Fest titles added +63 followers (so +1,500 wishlists, maybe?), down 48% compared to June (+121 followers) and down 64% on Oct. 2025 (+173 followers.) That’s fairly representative of all tiers…

Things might look better if we compared rankings directly. But I think more games are moving their ‘big demo reveal’ out of Next Fest as it gets too crowded, and Oct. has been a slower Next Fest anyhow. (For the record, the Top 10 in June had a median wishlist increase of +143k, vs. +80k in October, down 44%.)

We think - partly because it’s platform-promoted - Next Fest might have assumed an outsized source of importance or worry for many. It’s harder to get seen on-platform: but off-platform, if you can get traction, the world is still your lobster. But it’s a bit of a mess. And unlike Marie Kondo, we do not love mess. More trend clarity? On Friday…

GameDisco Show: played games, console hacks…

Of course, here’s the latest The GameDiscover Show, ft. myself (Simon) and Post Games’ Chris Plante talking trends - sub to the podcast via Apple Podcasts, Spotify & elsewhere (audio), with a video version on YouTube (above).

The latest GDCo Show talks about 2026's debuts that got played a lot by the average player on Steam, a survey into AI use at bigger game studios, Sony fighting back against the PlayStation console jailbreaks, and how often the average player actually buys games. (This might be less than you think….) 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, devs, and other smart game industry folks.]

Hey all - as we all take stock of the 7,000+ demos (!) in Steam Next Fest, we did a LinkedIn analysis discussing the AI disclosure percentage: 2,498 out of the 7,217 demos in total (34.6%.) That’s up from 21.2% of games in Feb's Next Fest and 26.5% in June's. (We’ll have larger-picture analysis this coming Tuesday, as we mentioned.)

After picking 5 random AI disclosures, they cluster around things like store page icons & placeholder localization. (We wouldn’t call these 100% ‘AI first’ games.) But as we add: “First, AI code helper use doesn't have to be disclosed.. and second, people may deliberately only disclose smaller things.” So it’s confusing: Schrodinger’s slop?

Before we start, maybe some nostalgic photos at this trying time? Great: the Video Game History Foundation just launched the Colin Williamson photography collection, “from a game journalist who was embedded in Japan from 1999 through the mid-2000s”, including TGS, Space World, and Akihabara pics from a golden age.

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

Game disco news: most-played games of 2026…

Let’s finish the week with another chunk of game platform & discovery news:

• We pulled an updated list of biggest median playtime Steam games in 2026 with >100k players from GDCo Pro & besides desktop idlers taking the top spots, Slay The Spire 2 is still a monster (52 hours, ~8m players!), w/newer entries including the latest NBA 2K & EA Sports FCs, plus Forza 6 and (impressively!) Wardogs.

• A new Fortune report on Xbox, filtered via VGC, includes plans for a “next-generation handheld device” by holiday 2027 and console by 2028, says: “As it stands, the price of the Helix console has internally been projected to cost consumers between $1,200 and $1,800… unless Microsoft decides to subsidize the cost.” That’s… non-cheap.

• Max Power Gaming took a look at the Roblox charts for September, and it’s that egg-stealin’ game again: “After finishing second behind Murder Mystery 2 in August, Steal an Egg surged to an average of 1.4 million concurrent players, more than three times the audience of its nearest challenger, Brookhaven.”

• The folks at super-popular YouTube analysis channel Bellular News took on the Steam Daily/Weekend Sale redesign, and this very missive is described as “an excellent newsletter”, as they agreed with us that removing ‘friction’ over how well devs know Valve with algorithms could actually work - if the algorithms gel.

• Xbox things: Xbox Insiders get to try ‘a la carte’ Xbox cloud playtime, which is 10 hrs for $4, 25 for $8, and 50 for $12; new Game Pass titles include Final Fantasy VII Remake Intergrade, The Séance of Blake Manor & more; the new Xbox Labs folks have been showing off (emulated?) oldskool Xbox bootup sequences on X.

• A Steam change spotted by our GDCo Basic/Pro Discord crew: you now have to tag at least 5 screenshots with ‘gameplay’ before launching your Steam page, and at least one video, too. (Steam always had a similar rule, and would reject if not, but didn’t set up their UI to explicitly have you tag/agree before submitting.)

• The consulting firm Vivrato have been surveying game execs about their firms’ usage of AI, noting: “94% use AI in at least one of nine production stages, but 52% rate how deeply it is built into their full production pipeline at three or lower out of 10.” (This ‘wider but shallow’ integration makes sense - there’s some posturing going on.)

• GameDiscoverCo took a quick look at most-watched unreleased games on Twitch in the last 7 days, and it's striking to see the relative lack of Steam Next Fest titles (so far!) Valve's perpetually in-beta 6 vs. 6 MOBA/shooter Deadlock is #1, and alt-history Napoleonic extraction RPG Hunger (watch this game!) is coming in hot at #2. (‘Next Fest x Twitch’ winners? ArcheAge Chronicles, Find The Needle, Loftia…)

• Xbox things, Pt. 2: AMD’s FSR 4.1 for image sharpening - similar to Sony’s QSSR - is due on Xbox Series X & S shortly; Microsoft is reportedly sending e-mails to lapsed Xbox console users to sell their consoles to Best Buy; the IGN x ID@Xbox streaming showcase included a co-op hole digging game & Arctic Eggs → Xbox.

• Well, that PHP vulnerability was a bit of a fire drill, huh? Among a host of websites, PC game platforms were seemingly taken down to patch, with a Steam downtime on Wednesday likely (?) linked to a fix, and GOG taken down for around four hours to remediate. Fun.

• Microlinks: Nvidia’s DLSS AI detail tech is coming to Hogwarts Legacy & Where Winds Meet; ; Google is adding a Game Finder discovery mechanism to Google Play; top ‘trad media’ mentions for the week inc. GTA VI, CoD: Modern Warfare 4, and Zelda: Ocarina Of Time (re: the remake.)

OUR SPONSOR: IsThereAnyDeal - video game market tracker

Looking for a way to track prices, bundles, and vouchers from legitimate PC stores for your games across several regions? IsThereAnyDeal has you covered!

IsThereAnyDeal is a convenient toolbox to check that shops are following your pricing strategy, track competitors, and research trends utilizing our detailed price history.

If you’re an indie dev, reach out to get your games featured on our front page Spotlight. (And if you’re a player as well, get notified about sales with your own customized price alerts!)

How Invokyr sold ~250k copies w/Jumanji cool?

It’s been a busy October for new Steam/console releases. But when looking for a game to highlight, we looked at ‘Oct. releases with the highest Steam concurrents’. And lo and behold, among much bigger titles like Star Wars Galactic Racer, we spotted Ludogram’s “co-op survival horror game about a cursed board game” Invokyr in the top 10.

This $13 (launch discounted to $9.74) title launched on Oct. 8th, and we’re estimating it at ~250,000 copies sold, perhaps a ~$2m gross, and topped out at ~10,000 Steam concurrents. Its CCU chart is impressively scaled/stable - and atypically spiky, partly due to China (co-published via Shochiku) being ~48% of players, according to the devs:

So while this may not yet be a $25m-grossing smash just due to its lower cost of entry, we’d def. expect it to hit $5-$10m on Steam over time. And in today’s crowded market, that’s a great result. So we talked to Ludogram’s Edouard Gaudel (CEO/creative director) and César Grislain (game director) - here’s some of our takeaway on why:

• The game mashes up horror, randomness, and cursed board games so well: go look at the RDC Gaming crew playing Invokyr ~100% incoherently - tell us it’s not fun to watch? Ludogram tells us they started with the idea of a RPG with an interfering GM, before getting inspired by actual ‘90s horror TV board game Nightmare/Atmosfear. (And later removing the VHS/TV element altogether…)

• The ‘creepy Jumanji’ board game hook is incredibly robust: it can’t be overstated how much a natural YouTuber & player comp to another popular thing can help your virality. And in this case, ‘it’s like Jumanji - the original movie’ 100% works. A lot of Steam player reviews mention it too, even tho it’s not in the marketing.

• There’s more roguelite in here than many similar titles: having a central hub board game & a) rolling to advance levels & get random quests/bad guys, and b) finding in-level dice with weird good/bad effects - differentiates it from other co-op. Ludogram’s other teams working on Monsters Are Coming & Ascenders both use roguelite mechanics, so they “are often part of our broader design culture.”

Invokyr didn’t have a particularly large dev team, btw, but also not a tiny one, spanning between 6 and 12 devs during ~two years of development. What they’ve managed to pull off has good fidelity at ‘above-tiny dev’ levels. (Side note: surely somebody will be tempted to license a movie adaptation of this concept?)

We also wanted to talk about the fact that Invokyr’s gameplay feels really well-polished at launch. Well - it is, and that’s because Ludogram did a ton(ne) of iteration. According to what Edouard & César told us re: the playtest process:

“Playtests & demos were a really important part of the creation process for Invokyr. The first playtest was in September 2025. Feedback was good, but we had issues with players not focusing on the board aspect of the game. We did 2nd & 3rd [smaller] playtests in February and April 2026, then a demo released in May, updated in July, a closed beta in September 2026.”

Maybe it’s getting a little tiring for some of you to see co-op and horror games take off yet again. But look - with Phasmophobia at 25 million copies sold as of July 2025 (we have 53% of Invokyr players as also owning Phasmophobia), there’s plenty of juice still out there for this type of title. (Maybe proficient takes on co-op horror are under-served?)

And proficiency is key - look at GDCo Pro Steam player review data for Invokyr. It’s pretty rare to see almost no red/negative bars in our review sentiment topics:

Some final notes: a) the Invokyr demo topped out at ~2,000 CCU, so there was some indication the full game was going to do well b) we estimate (a v.good!) 3 hours and 48 minutes median playtime so far, and we’d expect that to stretch up. c) Twitch activity is also jumpin’ - #67 from the 28,800 games we tracked in the last 7 days.

This week on Steam: CoD, FF Resonance, more…

Read more

As we start the week, yep, Steam Next Fest has launched, and has 7,100 playable demos (!), significantly up on the 5,000-ish that the ‘trend line’ predicted, and with a new navigation UI that helps filter the ‘random’ part of the Next Fest - Mon to Wed - by categories. We’ll have a full report of results next Tuesday, btw…

Before we start, an ex-Nintendo employee who grabbed about-to-be discarded art from a dumpster is now selling her trove, including the U.S. arcade art for Donkey Kong, some Disney-themed Game & Watch art and even the 1985 Nintendo Xmas card. (And we’d look great in the satin Nintendo jacket from 1990’s Winter CES.)

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

Game discovery news: heya, Phantom Blade Zero…

Let’s start the week with a whole bunch of game platform and discovery news, starting with this:

• We’re back looking at trending wishlists for unreleased Steam games, with plenty the same as last week (Squadron 42, Valve’s own Deadlock, which hit a >300k CCU high!), but awaited Wuxia ARPG Phantom Blade Zero at #2, adding almost 100k wishlists as it rapidly scales towards an Oct 28th release.

• At #4 is NetEase's 'extreme-sports competitive shooter' (!) ECC: Redline, already at nearly 100k wishlists, top-down extraction ARPG Vaultbreakers gets a demo & alpha and hits the Top 10, with almost 350k wishlists, and Russian roulette drinking roguelite Drunken Goddess Reflux - at #11 - we’ll talk about it shortly!

• We saw a report that Marvel Rivals’ European age rating increased from PEGI 12 to PEGI 16. And indeed, as trailed since June & finally happening: “Existing digital-only games that are currently rated PEGI 3, 7 or 12 and feature Paid random items, such as loot boxes, will have their age rating updated to PEGI 16 – Paid random items.”

• Game Developers Conference 2027 has confirmed it’s slimming down to four days, from March 1st-4th, not 100% surprising - Friday was always a wind-down day, anyhow. Expo (now Festival) Hall will be Tue-Thurs. “A deliberate step toward creating a higher quality, more focused and more valuable experience”, apparently.

• Steam things: regional pricing recommendations were updated as of this month based on fresh data, the first update since its March roll-out; some people didn’t spot that ‘wishlists by language’ is visible at the bottom of your game’s Steamworks wishlists page since this summer. (The localization doc page doesn’t mention it.)

• The finalists for the 2026 Streamer Awards are out, voting is open, and nominees are worth reading to get a sense of the big Twitch/YouTube Live winners right now in various game genres. ‘Gamer of the year’ nominees? That’d be this fairly shooter-heavy five: Feinberg, iiTzTimmy, Jynxzi, supertf, TheBurntPeanut.

• Good macro-research? Pew Research’s ‘Online Community & Connection in America’ report seems important to us: “Adults under 30 are the only age group in which more say online relationships can be just as meaningful [as offline ones]” - that’s 54%' ‘just as meaningful’, 34% ‘not as meaningful’, 12% ‘not sure’.

• IGN rounded up everything shown in the Galaxies Autumn Showcase last week, and the 50+ game showcase was heavier on launch trailers (Castlevania: Belmont’s Curse, Hellraiser) and updates to existing games (The Finals, Frosthaven). But new games like Satellite Odyssey: Jupiter and Afterzero also intrigued…

• Just as the ‘jailbreaking’ of PlayStation 5 consoles was getting concerning - someone’s even coded an interface for playing Steam games on PS5 via Linux emulation - Sony has changed it so you have to update to the latest 14.10 OS to play PS5 games online & use network features. (Yes, GTA 6 requires 14.10.)

• Circana’s survey of ‘normal’ U.S. video game consumers says “41% of US video game players buy at least 1 new game quarterly, compared to 36% a year ago.” But reminder - only 5% of these folks say they buy a game >once a month, and 13% around once a month. (Compared to 29% who buy less than once per year.)

• Microlinks: the CFO of Riot talks success %s for their games and why Arcane Season 2 ‘effectively’ broke even; Facepunch’s Garry Newman confirms s&box will go F2P towards year’s end, as part of “sweeping changes”; the Amazon Luna cloud-streaming bundled with Prime Video on Fire TV expands to 12 more countries, inc. Canada, France, Italy, Spain.

OUR SPONSOR: PWN Games — PC Paid Media Done Right

Advertise your PC game with PWN Games. With our CPA model, you only pay when a player wishlists, installs, engages, or pays.

250+ PC games promoted. 42M+ players acquired. 10 years in the PC UA business.

Trusted by top PC game publishers worldwide. Explore PWN Games today!

Should your game discovery plans change due to AI & decompilation?

Listen, we hate doing non-data or ‘case study’-based newsletters, but we’ve got to break into the programming here. There’s been multiple higher-profile games canceling or delaying demos due to concerns over AI ‘cloning’ of their concepts:

• ‘Roulette drinking roguelike’ Drunken Goddess Reflux (est. 570k wishlists) canceled its public demo, saying: “We are concerned that, based on the content of the demo, works imitating or replicating this game's presentation and gameplay could be quickly produced using AI or other tools and released ahead of the game's launch.”

• ‘Tower defensevania’ ReVamp (est. 250k wishlists) canned its Steam playtest & switched to a closed-ish test, noting: “We've been concerned by recent news of games being reverse-engineered, cloned and published before the original is even out. With launch still months away, sharing a build with tens of thousands of players felt like too big a risk for ReVamp.”

All this is going down alongside devs actually decompiling other people’s ‘clone’ games using AI to find stolen code in them, presumably grabbed via AI. (This example, which is Needle In A Haystack accusing A Game About Needle In A Haystack while filing a copyright claim with Steam, is believable but isolated.)

However, everyone - take a breath. We’re basically at the Peter Venkman explaining scenarios to the Mayor of New York in Ghostbusters stage of ‘AI x ripping off your game’ memetics right now. I’m going to suggest that’s a little bit overwrought:

So, some opinions. It’s fine to be worried about people ‘stealing your game idea’, but a) if you have momentum already, or b) if your idea is non-trivially complex and requires balancing and artistry (i.e. if it’s not super-low barrier to entry!), then the chances of someone having a smash hit and locking you out of the picture are low.

The worst-case scenario here is if you have a meme-worthy, but very low-lift idea, such as the mass proliferation of ‘needle in a haystack’ job/incremental games. Just to give you an idea - it appears* (*we think!) that Nas Nakarus from Studio BitDot was the originator of this concept, and released videos around it in late August.

There was no public playable (AI-decompilable) version at the time. It’s the idea, and the fact that people can copy the ‘descriptive’ (searchable!) name of it easily that made clones appear, quick. (We’re pretty darn sure most of these are non-decompiled idea ‘borrows’.)

Just for the record, here are the released ‘needle/haystack’ games - the gameplay is generally first-person, and about gradually automating the ‘needle search’ process:

What’s a little ironic is that a player review of A Game About Needle In A Haystack indignantly says, after the code plagiarism allegation: “i literally did not realize this wasnt the original game DO NOT BUY.” The… original?

Actually, ‘the game made by the guy who did the OGshort-form videos’ is #2 of unreleased titles in this new (?) micro-micro-genre (??), with ~200k wishlists. Everything else is pretty much nowhere, wishlist-wise:

So, just repeating: if you have a short, meme-worthy idea that’s a) great b) trivial to reproduce & has c) a searchable keyword, you will get clones, and within weeks. Most of these clones will go nowhere. The vast majority will not AI decompile you, at least not currently. (And the ‘original’ Needle x Haystack should still have a good launch, when it comes out…)

But when your game is complex, already semi-popular, and is called something else - like ReVamp, or Drunken Goddess Reflux - we don’t think you should delay demos. Why?

• There’s nothing in either of these games that indicates people could search and find similar games to them & be interested. (They’re not ‘one single idea’-y - and they have a lot of personality, design decisions, and players already bought in. And trailers have already been out there, if people want to hand-copy ‘em.)

• If a dev ‘fast follows’ your game on Steam, they’re likely not doing it via AI, they’re doing it majority by hand. The resulting game is also unlikely to have scaled wishlists or sales, since you’re the OG. And if it’s not popular… just ignore it. (Hey, it shows you are on the right track, people might find you via them, etc…)

• If somebody clones you blatantly by decompiling your actual code, AND it’s getting very popular (v. v. unlikely?), go de-compile theirs, document, and report it to Steam as a copyright infringement with proof. This shouldn’t stop you from putting out a demo that could be v. helpful to your discovery scaling.

It’s tricky - let’s not wave away legit concerns. But we need an action plan, rather than abstract dog/cat co-habitation fear. (For example: two potato-themed games fighting about who originated the potato concept.) The above three bullet points are what I think is a sane response to an otherwise all-consuming problem. YMMV.

Of course, if you do have a simple-to-make, casual-facing game with a dynamite idea that you think is going to go viral and cloned the second you reveal it (like ‘punch walls to escape’): you might want to decrease the time from ‘reveal’ until paid launch. (And the ‘moat’ is getting smaller and smaller for these type of games...)

However, that’s a specific - and smaller - subset of the entire Steam game landscape. For most games with significant levels of complexity, we wouldn’t recommend you change your route to market significantly. (Demos & streamer outreach earlier: still good.) Nobody is $ Steam-cloning e.g. Dead As Disco via decompilation soon…

Finally, a couple of recent links worth reading about AI & games: Sulka Haro on where the moats are for all of us in the age of AI: “Brand gets more valuable as supply grows… trust and accountability stay scarce.” And Dylan Collins on why he finds some of this new AI/games energy exciting - tho he does conclude, due to this avalanche of content: “existing games aggregator platforms are almost all undervalued.”

GameDiscoverCo Show: is AI coming for game demos?

Timed neatly to the newsletter, here’s the latest The GameDiscover Show, ft. myself (Simon) and Post Games’ Chris Plante talking trends - sub to the podcast via Apple Podcasts, Spotify & elsewhere (audio), with a video version on YouTube (above).

The latest GDCo Show talks about - yes - the surge in AI decompilation of games and whether releasing demos early is now bad, some learnings from Forbidden Solitaire from a long-term indie game dev, the state of the Meta Quest game scene, and if Epic's vibecoded Epic Games Launcher is going to change the velocity of the PC store.

[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, devs, and other smart game industry folks.]

We’re back for the end of the week. And this time, we thought we’d bring some cuts of our Steam Fan Snapshot data (from 16k+ keen Steam players) to talk about something we don’t see discussed much. Specifically: people often aren’t solely ‘a PC gamer’ or ‘a console/mobile gamer’, they’re… a blend of those things! Data within…

Before we start, via the indispensible 404 Media, we can’t believe the physical doll of our new favorite mascot, Bezzy, is sold out. Bezzy, of course, is a “plush data center toy that plays the high-pitched hum of a real AI data center when hugged”, made to promote a new album from music project Big Data. *static noises increase*

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

Game discovery news: are we bored of GTA 6 yet?

Let’s finish out the week with a whole heap of game discovery & platform news - ah, and Steam just officially announced its ‘achievement sets’ feature we teased earlier in the week - go look, devs, if you have DLC or archived achievements. Anyhow:

• Our buddies at ICO’s Footprints.gg keep printing their ‘trad media’ game coverage charts, and Grand Theft Auto VI keeps being #1! (This week: rumors over PC version in Q1 2027 helped.) Also hot: Gears Of War E-Day post-launch, Arc Raiders (thanks to F2P weekend, update & more) and Forza 6 (PS5 version in Jan ‘27.)

• Top new Steam demos for unreleased games, per GDCo Pro, as people start to launch Next Fest demos? Deadzone Rogue 2 (#1, 3,300 peak CCU) continues the popular FPS roguelite series, with co-op survival sim Arctic Drive at #3, party game Worst Class Ever at #4 & extraction fantasy RPG Vaultbreakers at #5.

• AI-aided decompilation of games is becoming a big subject of concern and discussion for devs: the decomps SubReddit shows a bunch of console exclusives getting unofficial PC or web ports, and Naavik did a good overview of the space. (The debate on whether this is a vibe-y slopfest or a ‘trend to watch’ continues.)

• Steam Early Access flags for… DLC? It’s true, Caves Of Qud got special Valve dispensation for an EA flag on its Diaspora DLC, out in December, because of the “unpredictable, emergent gameplay” of the base game and the fact “Caves of Qud development is slow.” (And looks like The Long Dark has one too for Iron Road.)

• Epic Games is hyping its new/faster PC launcher: “We vibe coded the Epic Games Launcher to be faster than the other guy.” The blog post, claiming ‘cold start to store’ is 46% faster than Steam, is a goofy ‘we just jammed this out’ vibe, leading to Internet snark. (But also: Fortnite’s coming to Linux alongside an Easy Anti-Cheat rebuild.)

• ‘Engine platform’ news: DayZ and Rocketwerkz’ Dean Hall has revealed the BRUTAL engine, a free to use, low-level custom framework: “You can make a game directly using it, like we have with Kitten Space Agency, or use it as the foundation for an entirely separate engine, like Ludeon have [in porting from Unity to their own Waylith Engine] with RimWorld.”

• Xbox things: there’s a surprise new $50 pocket-sized Xbox Nano game controller; the company is launching Xbox Labs, “a small group of game makers, engineers and scientists” to experiment with decompilation & more; Gears Of War E-Day partly solves the Xbox Series S memory issue by using its SSD as random access memory.

• We posted on LinkedIn with our update on the Meta Quest VR game charts in Sept/Oct, barely discussed nowadays. New F2P sandbox superhero game HERO x HERO is crushing it at #1, with 'chaotic social multiplayer beloved by pre-teens' F2P (Gorilla Tag, Scary Baboon, Animal Company) most of the Top 10. (The premium games in there: Beat Saber and Blade & Sorcery, btw.)

• Important HowToMarketAGame research here, concluding that in recent years on Steam: “wishlist counts have inflated (each wishlist sells fewer units), but wishlists predict* sales just as well as they did 3 years ago (the 0.05 difference is within the noise for this sample size.)” (*With ‘predict’ being median, and a very wide range of results.)

• A new Steam client update rolls out Personal Calendar to the Recommended tab on the home screen (increasing its profile further!), officially adds the Pyrowave video codec for “high bandwidth, low latency video streaming”, improved app startup speed, and a whole bunch of Big Picture mode fixes, among others.

• Microlinks: PS+ Game Catalog additions for October inc. Mafia: The Old Country & Horizon Forbidden West; Apple Arcade additions for Nov. are led by Crossy Road spinoff Crossy Road Rush; Steam Frame has reservations queued way into 2027; Sept’s top mobile titles by $ include Honor of Kings, Gossip Harbor, Roblox.

OUR SPONSOR: Xsolla Publishing Suite: Create a new revenue stream for your PC game

The PC studios still here in ten years will be the ones building direct relationships with their players now.

Selling direct means your own PC game store. You set the price, players buy from you, and you keep up to 95% of every sale. More than 1,000 PC games already run one with Xsolla Publishing Suite.

See how a direct channel works for PC games.

What other devices do Steam fans play games on?

We’re still expanding our Steam Fan Snapshot data, where-in GameDiscoverCo asked >16,000 worldwide Steam players (& counting - should be >20k shortly) a bunch of Qs about how they play games, and tied it into their Steam catalog, with their permission. (Data’s available for GDCo Pro subs - oh, and we redesigned our homepage!)

We have a bunch of free GDCo newsletters upcoming, ft. results from the current push - inc. data on co-op games, gifting, and Next Fest. But our ‘master’ set of questions includes a look at the platforms our worldwide-located ‘Steam fans’ play games on for >1 hour per month. And here’s the overall result:

We may have featured this once before, but the notable takeaway: even for these PC-first ‘fans’ (who we recruited by offering giveaways online), they also play games on a bunch of other game platforms - both mobile & console-centric.

It’s important not to have a monolithic view of the market, and this helps. A bit. But it doesn’t show overlap across all players in an intelligible way, given some people chose two platforms, and some ticked 4. So we grabbed that data and visualized it, as follows:

Ah, this makes a lot more sense. So, summing up the data on this chart:

• Of the 91.5% of our respondents who played PC games for at least an hour a month, 42.4% of those - just under half - only play PC games.

• Then we have 22% of respondents who play PC and mobile games (but no console), and 11.5% who play PC and console games (but no mobile.)

• Overall, there’s 15.6% of respondents who play PC, console, and mobile. That’s just under one fifth of the total PC players.

Again, we’re not saying this is perfectly indicative of all PC or Steam gamers. We’re surveying a more turned-on, online-savvy subset (and more international than many similar surveys!) But getting any of this data will give us all a better mental model.

Next up, we thought we’d break down the PC vs. console data in the same fashion. Here’s the results of that:

You can see that 64.4% of the 91.5% (around seven in ten) of all the PC players in our survey don’t indulge in console playing at all. But for those who do:

• Nintendo Switch is the top ‘PC & one console’ choice, at 7.5%, followed by PlayStation at 6.4% and Xbox at 3.2%. (We didn’t ask about console generations.)

• The biggest two-console overlap is PC alongside ‘PlayStation and Xbox’ at 4.3% - only about one in twenty of those surveyed who played on PC.

• The fabled ‘yes, I play PC and PlayStation and Xbox and Switch, monthly’ hardcore are at 3.2%, only about one in thirty of all PC players.

Finally you may have noticed that our Steam fans have an unusually large percentage of Steam Deck play, at 17% of the 91% - just under one in five. (This is a big multiple on our recent estimates of Steam Deck playtime at 2-4% of total Steam playtime.)

Which, fair enough, these are harder-core Steam players! But how does it compare to these same players’ Nintendo Switch (1 or 2) usage? Here’s what we’ve got:

In this demographic, Switch still has an edge, with 16.4% Switch/PC players of any kind, versus 13.4% Steam Deck/PC players. But the triple overlap of PC, Steam Deck and Switch players seems quite large at 5.5%.

We suspect there’s a fair amount of Steam players who have historically been attracted to the form factor of the Switch, but want the cross-compatibility and greater catalog available on Steam Deck*. (*Anecdotally: our 10-year-old, who spends a lot of time on Steam Deck & almost none on Switch, is one of those.)

So there we have it: visualization, from a PC-first end, of the fact that people play multiple devices! Of course, if you were to survey more ‘casual’ console players, you’d see way less crossover with PC. And the same for casual mobile gamers. But many of you here are targeting a core PC audience, right? So here’s what a sample are up to…

This week on Steam: zoo, scam, drive & Castle…?

Read more

As October wends on, we’re not done with the analysis. So today’s newsletter revisits some summer debuts on Steam to ask - though concurrent players aren’t the be-all and end-all for paid PC games, which ones are actually holding up, a few weeks later?

Before we start, we love it that the Pokémon Fossil Museum exhibition is visiting Denver in May 2027 - it’s currently at the Field Museum in Chicago. What is it? Check this YouTube video for a walkthrough, but basically, “real-world fossils and casts alongside life-size models of iconic Fossil Pokémon.” Those are some big bones…

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

Game discovery news: Squadron 42 pops up high..

Let’s start out the week with a look at the top game discovery and platform news, as follows:

• GDCo Pro's estimates of 'trending' unreleased Steam games by 'new wishlists in the last 7 days', Oct 5th-12th saw the Star Citizen devs’ single-player space adventure Squadron 42 at #1 with a bullet (+175k wishlists), with "2-player asymmetrical co-op rally chaos" game Left! Left! LEFT! (+133k WLs) up at #2.

• In the Top 5 again? That'd be AI voice job sim Scam With Your Friends (#3, +120k WLs) and cyberpunk shopkeeper sim Probably Stolen (#5, +80k WLs). Also brand new: 2D point and click sequel Machinarium 2 (#4, +110k), which was the leading wishlist increase-r from the October Triple-I Initiative event.

• Since PC games are hot, we’d be remiss in not pointing out worldwide PC shipments down over 20% in Q3 2026, according to IDC, “the second consecutive decline and a deeper one than the 3.8% drop in Q2.” That’s due to AI-related supply constraints and vendors stocking up ahead of price boosts, but nonetheless….

• Xbox’s brand new PC app got shown early to Windows Central’s Jez Corden, and he digs it - it’s “a lot faster than the previous app, particularly when it comes to loading in my large 1,400+ library of Xbox titles from across the years”, and has a clearer UI. (So basically removing the treacle from the app and starting again… hurray?)

• We dug Jake Birkett’s learnings after after shipping Forbidden Solitaire to 2,000+ Overwhelmingly Positive Steam reviews: “Ideas are worth a lot… [The game’s] core idea was ten times easier to market than anything else we have ever made.” Also, 500+ polish items got skipped cos “none of them would have impacted sales in any meaningful way.”

• Showcase alerts: AshleyRoboto & Jesse Cox’s Convergence Showcase last week featured 60+ games, with first-person dark fantasy Heathen (+30k wishlists) one of the biggest winners; narrative game Steam showcase with streaming panels LudoNarraCon is on right now, ft. a ton of interesting story-ish games.

• In ‘checking Steam doc changes to see what Valve’s being tested by’ news, folks, you can include ‘NEW UPDATE’ or ‘NEW EVENT/DLC NOW AVAILABLE’ text on your game capsule images, but “Text cannot include any other call-to-action not related to the new content, such as “Wishlist now!” or “Pre-purchase now!” or “Available Oct 4th””

• Circana’s August 2026 U.S. hardware & select software charts are here, with spending down 9% YoY to $4.3b, and console hardware a big issue: “August 2026 video game hardware unit sales fell 15% versus a year ago to 559k units, the lowest total for an August month since 2013 (423k units).”

• A couple of other high (low?) lights from Circana: “The average price paid for a new unit of [non-PC/mobile] video game hardware in the US reached an August record $541. The previous August record was $476, set a year ago.” Overall, Switch 2 is top (unit/dollar) in August and 2026 YTD, with PS5 ranked second in both categories.

• Our Steam datamining buddies says there’s an ‘achievement grouping’ closed dev Beta going on, with groupable & archivable achievements, groups that require DLC ownership & more. (It’s a clean-up, responding to ‘100% completion’ fan feedback - here’s some analysis of the underlying data from a different source.)

• To end: a ‘new media’ thing that competes with a) higher-budget efforts b) games? Vertical ‘microdramas’ - filmed TV shows w/microtransactions or subscriptions. And the New York Times has a good overview of the new stars coming up in this algorithm-first business. (More short, sharp disruption to the status quo, huh?)

OUR SPONSOR: Creators.gg, free creator programs in minutes

Finding creators is a grind. You email 200 YouTubers, hear back from six, and hand out keys with no idea what happens next. Creators.gg puts your game in front of 20,000+ creators looking for their next title.

Listing is free and takes under 10 minutes. Start with a key drop and auto-approval rules, then scale as far as you want: CPM campaigns, performance-based rewards, or a full Creator Battle Pass.

100+ programs are live right now, including first-time key drops: Start free today.

Steam games with CCU ‘staying power’ - how?

Obviously, GDCo really tries to tell you which games are doing well as Steam debuts in a particular month. But something we did earlier this year? Coming back to the charts a few weeks later, to see which games people are still playing. (Back then we found Librarian: Tidy Up The Arcane Library!, which has spawned a new microgenre.)

This time, we decided to look at August 2026’s top games, as of mid-October. If you look at our original round-up, the two top games - friendslopper How To Fish and co-op adventure game Big Walk - are still top by ‘today’s concurrent users’. (And Big Walk is at an impressive 30% of peak CCU!) But there’s some interlopers in here:

So we’ll pick the games that we talked about less at August month-end, but still have good CCUs, or have even grown them?) And we’ll get an idea of the types of games retaining interest*. (*Reminder: all these titles may eventually hit 3x (or more?) lifetime revenue, compared to right now. So we’re looking at some good wins, here…) Let’s see:

Survival Log: resource re-arranging x zombie survival?

Survival Log ($11) is a “zombie-apocalypse hoarding survival sim” that grew all the way to 13k CCU after launch, and is hanging out at 7k peak (300k units, #3 by CCU.). It’s interesting in that it’s heavy on the building & arranging and (relatively) light on the zombie survival, tho it has a tower defense-like ‘zombie protection’ part of the game.

Here’s a good Steam player review, explaining: “Resource management is front and center, balancing food, power, and maintenance materials to keep everything running… there are multiple mechanics that integrate the survivor PC with other NPCs in the game world through cell phone texts, drones, and support missions”

It does use AI heavily for in-game 2D item pictures, and interestingly is published by Chinese mobile company Lilith Games (AFK Journey), which helps to explain why 80% of players are Chinese, according to GDCo Pro. But it has Western interest too.

ReStory: chill electronics repair = smart angle

To be honest, we almost did a full newsletter on ReStory ($20), which is a “a chill, narrative-driven shop management simulator” where you “run an electronics repair shop [and] meticulously restore nostalgic Y2K-era devices.”

It’s still at #6 in CCU for August releases and we have it at >600k units including off-Steam keys (not included above), and likely >$10m gross on Steam alone. Its CCU is ~15% of peak, but it’s performed because it got two things right: the vibes (mm, retro consoles, cell phones and music players!) and the minute-to-minute gameplay.

We like quoting Steam player reviews, and here’s a prime example: “This is the perfect mix of cozy vibes, satisfying repairs, and the dangerous phrase “just one more job / day.” The gameplay is relaxing, the atmosphere is comfy, and somehow fixing imaginary electronics is more therapeutic than fixing my actual life.”

Sandustry: megacomplex pixel automation bliss

Sandustry ($15, often $10 on discount) is “a factory automation game where every pixel is a resource waiting to be mined, mixed, processed, or destroyed.” This is not - on its own - a very pretty game, but what it has is system and physics-based automation galore.

The point of the game is to derive gold from sand by shaking it out after excavating it, and then manage byproducts of the process - it’s a giant sandbox sand factory (ha ha!), and this genre actually does lack well-made, open-ended games like it.

This helped the game hit ~300k sold and is keeping its CCU at #7, even as some games that sold more copies dip in concurrent users. Why? One review: “I'll just check this out for 5 mins. It seems interesting. 6 Hours later... finally I've mastered this production chain....”

Combolands: why not a roguelike citybuilder?

Combolands ($10) is “a tiny roguelike citybuilder offering deep strategy in a bite-sized package”, and it’s a bit more modest, at least than 100k sold, but made it to #10 in ‘today’s top CCU’ for Aug. debuts, and is at >50% of its peak 2,000+ CCU - impressive.

This is a classic ‘go apply roguelike mechanics to a new genre’. And it’s been done really well/crunchily, as you place resource tiles from randomly selected resources, go to a shop, tweak things mightily, and see the results. It’s a really intriguing mashup, though not super heavy on the city-building complexity.

We liked this Steam user review from a ‘mid-40s dad’ who has little time for games, saying: “This feels spiritually a bit like when someone makes a 'faster paced' 4x.” So once again, we’re getting incremental/roguelike short runs & playtimes applied to historically slower, more complex genres. Feels like a… trend?

Finally, we wanted to mention - but not fully examine - Mimic Party ($7), which is “an online 1-5 player voice party game. You hear a sound. You get one shot to reproduce it with your own voice. A local AI grades how close you got.” It’s janky but has a really interesting underlying idea which is very streamer-friendly, hence the 300k copies sold & counting.

So it’s interesting: we’re not saying concurrent users a few weeks after launch is the only arbiter of success. (You can be a $60 game with low CCU now but a finite campaign, so you’ll keep doing great in sales and building big revenue off lower CCU.) But by cutting the data this way, you can feel the ‘vibes’ of emerging game styles that have more retention. And feeling the ‘vibes’: increasingly important…

GameDiscoverCo Show: how many Next Fest demos?

It happened again - yes, we have the latest The GameDiscover Show, ft. myself (Simon) and Post Games’ Chris Plante talking game discovery trends - sub to the podcast via Apple Podcasts, Spotify & elsewhere (audio), with a video version on YouTube (above).

The latest GDCo Show discusses the structure & amount of games lined up for Oct's Steam Next Fest, how making 'regular' trailers vs. short-form video influencer output differs, if Xbox is going to be making Minecraft more commercially minded & how games need to compete in the 'attention economy' with the inexorable rise of gambling.

[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 weekend looms, we have to ask: have you ever danced with the devil in the pale moonlight? We just like the sound of it. If not, no worries, but feel free to shimmy with this very newsletter, as we sashay around mucho PC/console discovery goodness.

And before we start, the fun subgenre of ‘you can look at classic 3D game assets on this webpage’ - of which noclip.website was a classic - now adds the Pardall Games viewer, which is cataloging PS1-era bangers, from Toyota Supra-s from the original Gran Turismo to almost everything in Final Fantasy VII (hi, Aerith.)

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

Game discovery news: GTA, E-Day, Witcher 3 hype

Let’s finish out the week with a close look at the latest game discovery & platform news, as follows:

• Our buddies at ICO’s Footprints.gg looked at the top ‘trad media’-covered games, and Grand Theft Auto VI is #1 yet again, but with different runners-up: Xbox’s Gears Of War: E-Day on its debut, and The Witcher 3 Remastered thanks to its Sept 29th free update. (With Star Wars: Galactic Racer placing next.)

• Veteran trailer maker Derek Lieu asks a key Q on YouTube: “Are game trailers ‘old news’ when one viral short [video] can make a game blow up?” (He looks at aspects of shorts (captions, voiceover) that differ from “a 60-90 second video crafted to sum up the game's experience/vibe”, and notes that most short-makers recut… the trailer!)

• PlayStation/Sony things: ahead of Grand Theft Auto VI’s launch, “GameStop and third-party resellers raise the used PS5 Pro price to $1,400 - a $500 markup on Sony’s RRP”; Sony “sells off dozens of XR patents to Meta in apparent pullback from AR/VR hardware [interests].”

• As demos appear ahead of Steam Next Fest, we thought GDCo Pro would capture the top Steam demos released in the last week by CCU (as of Thu!) And 2D IP update Castlevania: Belmont’s Curse is #1 (1,700 CCU), as slick autobattler Northgard Battlegrounds hits #2 and turn-based JRPG Epic Seven makes #3.

• We received a note from Mr. G. Keighley re: SGF 2027, as follows: “We’re happy to confirm that Summer Game Fest will stream live from the iconic Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles on Friday, June 4, 2027… once again be followed by SGF Play Days, produced by iam8bit, from Saturday, June 5 through Monday, June 7.” FYI!

• The packed Triple-I Initiative showcase was, indeed, full of stuff - here’s a breakdown of everything announced, which included a big new Risk Of Rain 2 DLC, surprise puzzle sequel Machinarium 2, a sequel to survival ARPG hit Outward, new co-op deities smasher Aftergods, with lots of playtest/demo CTA.

• Over at Fortnite/UEFN, per Brendan Stock, “games will now have much richer thumbnails and video previews”, inc. separate art & logo, gameplay video on your island details page, and more. Also new: benchmarked data to compare your game to, inc. on click-through rate, bounce rate, session length, and Day 1/7 retention.

• Everyone’s got an ‘it’s easy to make games using AI’ solution, and Google’s new one is Playground, an “experimental gaming platform that lets you create, play, and share custom games.” It also has an advanced-level hook-up with an upcoming Unity product: “For dedicated creators ready to expand their concepts, Playground will soon offer an integration with Unity Spark.”

• On X, Pierre485 pointed out some physical game-only platform splits for key UK charting games last week: “EA Sports FC 27 - PS5 (67%) / XB (14%) / NSW (8%) / PS4 (6%) / NS2 (5%); Minecraft Dungeons II - NS2 (70% ) / PS5 (22%) / XB (8%); Ace Combat 8 - PS5 (86%) / XB (14%).” (Physical’s dying, but the retail splits are still fascinating.)

• Xbox things: the head of Mojang is moving to run Xbox’s XP, “a new… division focused on how people experience our franchises beyond the games themselves”, inc. movies, theme parks, etc, as an ex-Reddit CPO takes over Minecraft; the latest Asha Sharma town hall said “we've started to return to growth” in first party; new additions to Game Pass include Battlefield 6, Valor Mortis, and more.

• Microlinks: an interesting streaming analysis of the popularity of GTA V RP (roleplay) content; Amazon’s Luna update for October includes Star Wars: Galactic Racer as a Day 1 stream; a YouTube video on Dread Admiral’s dev reveals ~$40k in out-of-pocket spend and $18k in gross Steam revenue so far.

OUR SPONSOR: IsThereAnyDeal - video game market tracker

Looking for a way to track prices, bundles, and vouchers from legitimate PC stores for your games across several regions? IsThereAnyDeal has you covered!

IsThereAnyDeal is a convenient toolbox to check that shops are following your pricing strategy, track competitors, and research trends utilizing our detailed price history.

If you’re an indie dev, reach out to get your games featured on our front page Spotlight. (And if you’re a player as well, get notified about sales with your own customized price alerts!)

How Dressmaker is ‘ready to wear’ for a big Steam crowd…

Veteran South African game studio Free Lives put out a funny LinkedIn post last week: “Free Lives has been making video games for 15 years. Usually, those games are irreverent, violent and usually designed to poke fun at people who deserve it. More recently, however, we made a game about very frilly dresses.”

And yes, that’s the starting point to discuss Dressmaker, the self-published $15 job sim from a new ‘Cozy Lives’ subsidiary of the Stick It To The Stickman, Anger Foot, Terra Nil and Gorn dev that - it’s safe to say - is a semi-unexpected megahit - though not 100% out of the blue, since it picked up >150k Steam wishlists by launch.

Why? Though the co-developed deckbuilder Shroom And Gloom with Team Lazerbeam & Free Lives’ trad publisher Devolver also debuted in Sept & is doing decently at ~100k units, we’re estimating Dressmaker at >500k sold on Steam in 2 weeks, scaling fast, and up to #5 by units in LTD sales of Sept. 2026 Steam debuts. (It converted 8.6x as well as ‘expected’ in Week 1, and is outpacing other titles right now.)

So what’s going on here? We caught up with the game’s co-creator Jonathan Hau-Yoon (Terra Nil), who originated the title with his partner and co-dev Sabrina Becker, who, per this excellent Engadget interview, “turned to games after a chronic illness, Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, forced her to pivot away from professional costume design.”

Here’s some key takeaways from our discussions with Jonathan:

• Though a cozy game at heart, Dressmaker has transcended niche: Jonathan told us: “I’ve had a number of colleagues describe the game as ‘niche’ pre-launch, where I’ve disagreed. I think that many gamers have long enjoyed playing dress-up, but just wouldn’t necessarily use that term. They buy their favourite skins in League, Overwatch or CS2, turn Monster Hunter into fashion statements, or look forward to seasonal events like Halloween.” (Even Northernlion has been into Dressmaker recently.)

• The game makes dress making into a sandbox creative experience: he noted: “Dressmaker is thematically more feminine, and uses ‘seamstress sim’ as a way to attract an under-served audience, but fundamentally is still about self-expression and creativity. We double down on that by making just about everything customizable, stopping only at technical limitations (and some cut features that we hope to add in future updates), and then try to make the creations easy to share.”

• Deep knowledge of the subject matter helped build out the ‘hook’: “Dressmaker was inspired by Sabrina’s real-world sewing experience, and her deep passion for clothing. So instead of ‘minigames’ that are skinned to seem as if they’re fashion-themed, each part is based on its real-world counterpart, even though we simplify these to make them better fit the game format. I think this allows our mechanics to feel fresh rather than generic.”

What we see with Dressmaker - which had a full-time core dev team of only 3, and started with an Itch.io playable prototype in July 2025 - is skilled devs and subject matter experts going beyond the typical job sim-style ‘let’s reskin Supermarket Simulator’, and carefully originating a lot of well-crafted gameplay & creativity tools.

Our other key takeaway from Dressmaker is that this was a novel idea for a game that the public already knew they wanted, based on the popularity of other media. Crafts are huge on shortform video, and the rise of Bridgerton-ish dramas and period romance has raised the profile of more elaborate vintage-style dresses.

In fact, according to the Engadget interview, a very basic (pre-Itch) prototype of Dressmaker’s ideas got “some 600,000-plus views across TikTok and Instagram, and was filled with comments of people asking what the name of the game was and where they could play it.” What a great example of early validation. (The Itch proto also got 30k downloads in a month, but more importantly, some big content creator videos.)

A few other stats from GameDiscoverCo Pro: we’re seeing a median of ~6 hours and an average of almost 10 hours played (just 2 weeks after release), and we’re estimating 33% U.S. players, 9.5% China, 9% UK, 8% Canada, 5.5% Australia, 5% Russian diaspora, 4% Germany, 3% Poland. (Fairly Western-first, in the grand scheme of things.)

Looking at GDCo’s Steam Fan Snapshot data, we’re seeing majority (52%) female players (rare for our core fan-skewing data), and an overindex in 25-34 year old players, who are >50% of the total, vs. ~35% normally. And notably, 48% of Dressmaker players own a Switch 1 or 2, vs. 19% of our entire sample.

Player ‘affinity’/overlap-wise, Dressmaker overindexes in players of games like House Flipper (42% overlap, 11x more than normal), Cult Of The Lamb (30%, 15x), Potion Craft (25%, 24x) and Librarian: Tidy Up The Arcane Library (23%, a whopping 46x more likely than the normal Steam player to own.)

Most of all, we wanted to say re: Dressmaker - we love it when a novel game (& creation tool) comes along that captures the zeitgeist in such a charming way. The game has Overwhelmingly Positive reviews, and if you look at the positive word cloud in GDCo’s Review Sentiment readout (below), it positively glows. Good vibes all round:

This week on Steam: Gears, Star Wars, Hellraiser, hi

Read more

As we start rounding the corner towards what many people will call the Grand Theft Auto VI holidays (ho ho?), GameDiscoverCo is back. And our lead story breaks down a busy month for new game releases across PC and console - which did the best overall?

Before we start, weird story: “Popular [mobile] RPG-dating sim Love and Deepspace issued a warning to players after announcing some fictional cocktails with potentially disastrous real-world consequences if actually consumed.” (The cocktails - theoretically in-game recipes only - included the poisonous & psychoactive datura flower, woops.)

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

Game discovery news: friend scamming is… hot?

Let’s get going, with some of the top discovery & platform news of the week so far:

• Checking GameDiscoverCo Pro's estimates of 'trending' unreleased Steam games by 'new wishlists in the last 7 days', Sept 28th - Oct 5th, Scam With Your Friends (job sim where you voice-chat with AI NPCs to defraud ‘em) is up to #1, with wolf-raisin’ sim Family Time at #2 and automation-er Find The Needle at #3.

• New or trending? Uh, Purble Place 3D (#4) is an (unofficial?) follow-up to some v. nostalgic bundled Windows puzzle games, and LitGirls: Bookbound Dungeons (#7) is a dungeon crawler JRPG starring classic literary heroines. (Less new? Valve's own Deadlock is trending at #12, thanks to a major new beta update.)

• Video game streaming showcase heads up: the next Triple-I Initiative showcase - the second one this year - is turning up on October 8th, and the upcoming Galaxies Showcase is hitting on October 15th. (Recap.games keeps a public schedule of upcoming attractions…)

• We’ve talked about video games getting more randomized rewards & divergent ‘runs’. And while games don’t come up in this NYT piece about ‘how everything became gambling’, the article underscores the fact that the attention economy is just getting ‘grabbier’. And games have to compete with gambling for eyeballs.

• Steam’s upcoming Next Fest (starting Oct. 19th) has its dev-only preview live. And reports say there’s a new interactive genre picker (using 2x ‘lead categories’ the dev picks) to help players choose, early on. (Also: currently >8,000 demos (!) queued for the fest - though that number will come down, as some games drop out late…)

• Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos commented on their video game strategy at Bloomberg’s Screentime event, saying: “We [are] much more interested in what you could do on the TV using your phone as a remote. And remember, in a kind of post-console world, there’s going to be all kinds of opportunities for gaming on the television.”

• More evidence Minecraft’s getting sharpened platform power? Tubefilter spotted a job ad which has a successful applicant “defending against competing platforms (Roblox, Fortnite/UEFN, Unity, Fab) through better developer experience, tooling, and enablement at portfolio scale.” (That doesn’t sound like cozy oldskool Mojang.)

• ‘Games as platform’ news: the free ‘remastered’ upgrade for CDPR’s The Witcher 3 comes with cross-platform modding support, with a number of interesting mods already available across PC & console - here’s a good overview on how it works now. (Easier to use UGC should really help long tail & community…)

• Two follow-ups from our S&box piece: we got reminded Facepunch is also OK with standalone Steam apps of S&box games, as long as Valve agrees & the player models get replaced. (Though none launched yet.) And the sausage-y characters got less sausage-y - yes, they have necks now! (This is news? Plz nod.)

• Microlinks: a closer look at the ‘local streaming’-optimized Pyrowave code Steam’s adding as a remote stream option; even in the ‘fast follow’-friendly mobile space, Oakever Games may be going too far; sitdown & redemption arcade games are getting some of the 'higher supply’ issues that PC/console games also have, huh?

OUR SPONSOR: PWN Games — PC Paid Media Done Right

Advertise your PC game with PWN Games. With our CPA model, you only pay when a player wishlists, installs, engages, or pays.

250+ PC games promoted. 42M+ players acquired. 10 years in the PC UA business.

Trusted by top PC game publishers worldwide. Explore PWN Games today!

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

We return, of course, to GameDiscoverCo’s top new Steam (& console) games of Sept. 2026, powered by our Pro data. Here’s Aug, July, June, May, April, March, Feb and Jan, if you missed ‘em. As for Sept’s top new Steam games by units, here’s what we see:

• Wardogs is the breakout of month & it’s not even close: we have the ambitious 100 player tactical FPS - now independent, but with significant Tencent funding in its past - at ~3.5m Steam units by the end of Sept. (And it’s still pulling ~200k CCU daily, down from a ~420k high, so no major retention issues - v.impressive.)

• Multiplatform AAA winners crowded the Top 5: in addition to perennial console megahit EA Sports FC 27 (#5, ~420k Steam units), the well-received new Onimusha game (#3, 730k Steam units, nearly 2m units multiplatform) & AA+ ($40m dev costs?) Blood Of Dawnwalker (#4, 650k Steam units >1m multiplatform) did nicely.

• Indie breakouts of the month? Bombanana!, Graveyard Keeper 2, Dressmaker: the chaotic co-op bomb disposal-er Bombanana! topped 1m Steam units at #2, while well-crafted sequel Graveyard Keeper 2 did >400k (#6) and late-month job sim Dressmaker - which we’ll profile on Friday - made it past 300k, fast.

In a pretty busy month for AAA-adjacent releases, we’re also highlighting Control Resonant (#8), which we have at >350k units by end of month, despite a later Sept 24th release. It’s scaling nicely on PC - and decently on console too (>200k between PlayStation/Xbox), though the IP may lack global ‘casual’ reach like some other brands.

Checking the Top 10 new paid Steam releases by $ for August (not inc. off-Steam key sales), it’s, well, a lot of the games we talked about already! So we have Wardogs at ~$110m gross, and Dawnwalker and Onimusha at ~$30m, followed by NBA 2K27 (which just missed the Top 10 by units) and EA Sports FC 27.

Other titles also in the Top 10: asymmetrical horror standout Halloween: The Game - which sold super-well on PlayStation, as we’ll see below - and very late-month arrivals Minecraft Dungeons II & Transport Fever 3*. (*Launching on the 28th: fine in real life, tamps down appearances on ‘calendar month’ charts, haha.)

Checking on all-game Steam revenue for August, we actually have Wardogs pipping Valve’s Counter-Strike 2 to #1 at ~$100-$110m each - though it’s probably close either way. The regular F2P stalwarts - Apex Legends and PUBG: Battlegrounds - are next up, followed by this month’s $60-$70 hits that we already discussed.

Two interesting results further down the chart, though? Total War: Warhammer III hit #8 with ~$25m thanks to the giant Lord Of The End Times expansion - actually playable without owning the base game, tho we suspect most do. And a giant free update for shooter Bodycam added >$20m. (We have it at ~$70m LTD Steam gross.)

As always, we include the all-game #11 to #30 on Steam (above), since there’s always things to gawk at. We spotted new gacha F2P creature collector Aniimo (~$15m, would have been #6 in the ‘new game’ charts if we included F2P!) and friendslop hit How To Fish, which grossed another $6.5m & is now at >8.5m units and >$38m LTD.

Examining GDCo’s estimates of (non-sub!) PlayStation and Xbox units for new games in Sept, it’s a super busy PlayStation release month, headed by sports evergreens. That’s EA Sports FC 27, which we have over 6m units for the month, and NBA 2K27, which topped 4m. (We have these titles at an extra ~2m each on Xbox, btw.)

Much-awaited PlayStation exclusive Marvel’s Wolverine hit #3 in our charts with ~2m units sold so far (and still scaling.) And Halloween: The Game did an impressive ~1m, edging ahead of Onimusha. (For the record, the next three notable debuts by unit were Blood Of Dawnwalker (~400k), Silent Hill: Townfall (~200k), and Control Resonant (~175k.))

We already covered the top Xbox games, since basketball & soccer are big for the U.S. and UK-heavy ‘casual’ player base of consoles. Halloween also did ~500k, and hockey’s #4. (Just imagine the hockey tie-ins if it had been Illfonic’s last game, Friday 13th?)

Finally, GDCo’s Switch eShop #s (based on U.S. and UK eShop charts): Nintendo’s own Fire Emblem: Fortune’s Weave did >500k units on eShop and lots more physical. Also hot: indie hit Meccha Chameleon (>200k), co-op exclusive Orbitals (>100k copies, more physical), while EA Sports FC 27, Diablo IV & Minecraft Dungeons II all charted.

And we’re skipping the ‘all games’ charts for GDCo Pro’s analysis of Twitch most-viewed for September 2026, but here’s the Top 20 hours viewed for new games:

Wardogs? Just an outright killer - 42m hours watched in the month is outrageous, and even beat out EA Sports FC 27. But Blood Of Dawnwalker (#3, 10.3m), Halloween (#5, 8m), Onimusha (#6, ~8m), and Aniimo (#7, 6.8m) are also big streaming hits, in a flat-out busy month, as games crowded in - partly to get ahead of GTA VI, we presume.

GameDisco Show: a bad name hurts a good game?

We keep keepin’ on, so we have the latest The GameDiscover Show, ft. myself (Simon) and Post Games’ Chris Plante talking game discovery trends - sub to the podcast via Apple Podcasts, Spotify & elsewhere (audio), with a video version on YouTube (above).

The latest GDCo Show talks the most generic names for games on Steam and whether it really matters what your game is called, a PvE mode in extraction shooter standout ARC Raiders, a lawsuit in Roblox exposing the (lack of) contracts behind many Roblox successes, and the question of Xbox/PS platform split on GTA VI getting spicy…

[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, with our lead story being a further musing on the late-breaking news from Tuesday that Steam is changing how games are promoted on its front page to be, well, even more algorithmic. Should we be excited?

But before we start, a quick PSA. After a multi-month process, our GameDiscoverCo data service has gone from ‘great data, the interface looks a little homespun’ to ‘great data, also nice-looking, contextual UI’. You can see the results for our Pro interface below:

Reminder: you get access to a subset of this data (formerly ‘Plus’, now called GDCo Basic, but same functionality!) when you sign up for our paid newsletter & Discord. And we do free demos of the multi-platform Pro service for interested parties. Thx for supporting us - we can work on the newsletter ‘cos 110+ firms use our Pro tools…

Game disco news: Witcher remaster, Resonant hit..

Let’s finish off the week by wandering through a whole range of game platform & discovery news, as follows:

• Our buddies at Footprints.gg tracked ‘trad media’ mentions for the week to Sept. 29th (above), and beyond GTA VI (duh!), the remaster of The Witcher 3, the launch of Control Resonant, and news from Minecraft Live (as well as EA Sports FC 27) rounded out the Top 5 most-mentioned.

• PC Gamer’s piece on why so many games have weirdly similar (and forgettable) names has a great Hannah Flynn quote - “suddenly everything's called Rise of the Bonelord: Origins of Dust” and also includes my 2c: “naming isn't that important, since most people buy a game based on video footage… or a recommendation.”

• YouTube things: around games, YouTube has quietly rolled out web gaming Playables to over 50 markets, with IAP testing planned for 2027; new creator features unveiled at Made In YouTube include interactive split-screen livestreaming, episodic shorts & more.

• GDCo Pro (it’s us!) analyzed the top ‘streamed on Twitch’ games released in the last 6 months, and the top 3 duplicate last week’s: EA Sports FC 27, Wardogs and Silent Hill Townfall. But rising entries further down include Minecraft Dungeons II (#6), Gears Of War: E-Day (#8), Dressmaker (#10), and Ace Combat 8 (#11).

• Praise The Verge for explaining this so we don’t have to: “Steam has been accused of being a PC gaming monopoly that extracts unreasonable fees… the 9th Circuit has agreed to hear Valve’s proposal to stop mass arbitration” under the name ‘Valve Corporation v. Users of Valve’s Video Game Platform, Steam’. (It’s complicated.)

• The European Commission is going after what it sees as ‘dark patterns’ in games: “Video games should not make you spend more than you want. EU consumer authorities are stepping up action against 9 video game companies, including those behind Candy Crush Saga, Minecraft, Valorant, Clash of Clans and For Honor.”

• We at GDCo took a look at the top unreleased Steam demos of the week. And cute anime desktop companion Character House won’t quit, hanging at 23,000 CCU, #2 is first-person search/automation game Find The Needle, which hit a whopping 21,000 CCU, and cyberpunk shop job sim Probably Stolen is at #3.

• If you developed a Steam Deck Verified game, it’s now possible to track FPS performance of your games: “The new [Steamworks] chart displays a distribution of framerates, using data from customers on Steam Decks who opted in [to] provide a clearer overall picture of what customers are experiencing with your game on Deck.”

• Xbox stuff: a sweeping New York Times feature on ‘em has Asha Sharma saying “Xbox is not for sale*” (*followed by “we will look at the right partnerships, the right operating model”); the Mythic Achievements update rolled out to Insiders; Xbox console users got a splash screen for Minecraft Dungeons II w/Game Pass upsell.

• PlayStation things: October 2026’s monthly PS+ Essential games are F1 25, Hunt: Showdown 1896, and the quirky Earth Defense Force: World Brothers 2; the regular PS5 will get a downgraded version of the PS5 Pro’s PSSR AI upscaling tech, as QSSR arrives on first-party titles Marvel's Wolverine and Ghost of Yōtei.

• We’re the weirdos who track the top Apple Arcade games by new U.S. reviews. And in Sept. 2026, regular App Store convert Block Blast!+ was the winner with ~4,400 new ratings; followed by Madden NFL 27 Arcade Edition, Sneaky Sasquatch (again!), Subway Surfers+ & fishing adventure Creatures of the Deep+.

OUR SPONSOR: Trapster puts creators on your Next Fest demo

A creator marketing service where gaming creators make short videos about your game, and you pay per view, not per post.

Studios use it to build Steam momentum before launch. Anomaly Control Simulator picked up 2,952 wishlists in two days, at around $0.79 each. Across 224 campaigns so far, creators have posted 15,000+ videos with 287M views on TikTok, YouTube Shorts, Instagram.

Heading into October’s Steam Next Fest? Set a budget, choose platforms and creator languages, and track every view and wishlist live.

See what your budget would reach → trapster.gg

No more (universal) Daily Deals on Steam... is that good?

So, as we trailed earlier in the week, the announcement is out. Steam is changing a notable part of its promotion for its PC game store to become more algorithmic. Breaking down the shift, with a little interpretation, here’s what is going down:

• Until now, the key Discounts & Events section on the Steam app/homepage is “made up of curated placements that are either scheduled directly by partners via Steamworks, or by us here on the Steam team.” (In Feb. 2025 there was a major Steam blog post re: the system expanding up to 6 Daily Deals, w/discovery wins hyped.)

• Today, everyone sees the same Daily, Midweek & Weekend Deals: if your game is featured, either by being invited by Steam or pitching them, you’ll see one single large revenue spike, as your discounted game is visible as a deal Steam-wide.

• The new system, launching in ‘early 2027’, will have ‘dynamic and personalized’ recommendations in this section, but no universal Daily/Weekend Deals. And Valve has already “paused scheduling curated placements” for Daily Deals - maybe the most surprising part of the announce. (Existing deals will still run.)

We spotted Valve doing tests of this change with Midweek Deals, starting a few weeks ago. And there’s also been a move since August to low-level algo-feature unlabeled discounts in that section more: Hooded Horse CEO Tim Bender expanded on this, suggesting those changes “took a source of traffic that was non-existent for niche indies, and suddenly made it the best source of traffic in the entire store.”

So, two big questions here: why is Steam doing this, and is it good? On the ‘why’, Steam says that in tests, they “were able to show 10x more games to customers in a given day in that section. As a result, we saw meaningful increases in store page visits, wishlists, and cart additions.” So, they’re saying: it’s a rising tide to lift all boats.

(The other reason, in our view, is that negotiation over deals in such a busy and tight market has become a real friction / inefficiency. Key comment from Steam’s announce: “Our goal is to let developers focus on crafting the most compelling games and deals for customers, and not spend time trying to convince someone at Valve to feature their products.”)

The end result for deals here? Sounds like Valve “will have new and updated tools to help developers better manage their discounts and sale events on Steam.” But the general idea seems to be: you’ll get ‘X Deal’ featuring in this section for interested players - in smaller #s - more times you are on sale, not just based on a one-time Daily Deal.

And during the test, we did see, for example, that fans of CRPGs were being shown smaller, but still highly-rated CRPGs, instead of ‘boomer shooter that is 80% off today!’ We think there might also be positive ‘platform satisfaction effects’* from this, as players buy more catalog games of relevance to them, vs. just ‘cheap, buy now!’.

(*Related: we’ve always thought the Switch eShop lost momentum in third-party games sales by featuring too many ‘90% off’ games of high hook but dubious quality, due to how its unit-based chart algorithm worked ‘til recently. That’s v. difficult to prove, though.)

Public reactions to the change have been guarded to positive. If you’re a larger entity who has managed to get an excess number of Daily or Weekend Deals in the past*, you might be more nervous. (*Increasingly difficult in recent years, as Valve shifted to a ticket-led system for platform interaction, and got more empirical with Deal awarding.)

But companies with a wide range of titles seem enthused by the possibilities: over at This Week In Videogames, Fellow Traveller’s Chris Wright says “The more a store is personalised and the less ‘blunt’ it is, the greater diversity of games it can support… that’s important because the amount of new games is only going up.” And Hooded Horse’s Bender thinks it’s “a wonderful trade and a big win for both players and developers.”

As for GDCo, we were surprised by the change - we’d just finished a project to track Deals Steam-wide back to 2020, shakes fist 😆. But we think it’s a positive shift that’ll lead to happier players. We expect (incremental) winners & losers on the $ side. But if you make great games, we’d be surprised if you ended up with less $ as a result.

One final note: Steam’s blog post says “more discounted games or sale events will have the chance to be visible on the homepage and elsewhere on Steam.” We’ve heard nothing so far about how publisher/third-party event features will now be prioritized in Discounts & Events. So it’ll be interesting to see what (even partial!) changes take place there…

This week on Steam: Ace Transport Idle Dungeons!

Read more

Hey folks: breaking news we’ll cover more on Friday, but Steam is moving away from ‘viewable by everyone’ Daily, Midweek and Weekend Deals, toward more personalized deals on Steam’s homepage. (We’ve been pointing out tests in the Discounts & Events section to you, so not 100% surprised - but this’ll be a notable change.)

Before we start, yes, “Counter-Strike co-creator Minh Le [claimed] that Valve boss Gabe Newell got so obsessed with Mongolian throat singing at Valve HQ that staff started closing their office doors to escape the noise.” But did you see somebody got Gabe to admit it? “I worked on sygyt, kargyraa and other styles and got to the point where I was really… annoying.”

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

Game discovery news: Family scam time, Aion?

Let’s get going on the game platform & discovery news for the week, shall we? It goes like this:

• Here's GameDiscoverCo Pro's estimates of 'trending' unreleased Steam games by 'new wishlists in the last 7 days', Sept 21st-28th, and 'take care of a giant family of wolves' sim Family Time made it all the way to #1 now. Elsewhere, MMO sequel Aion 2 hit #2 on the back of pre-orders opening for the Oct 5th release.

• Thanks to a viral demo, Find The Needle (it's one of multiple incremental / automation games based on this idea) hit #3, and Scam With Your Friends (job sim where you run a scam call center) quickly memed its way up to #4, with 'military tank as ARPG protagonist' (!) title Slam Tank also in the Top 10.

• Discord things: its September update includes this: “We’ve made some adjustments to the Trending Games page to allow you to filter it a bit. You can now peep trending games in entire genres!” Mm, discovery. Also Discord is working on a ‘Game Mode’ to reduce Discord CPU/GPU usage while gaming.

• Games as a platform news: ARC Raiders is testing a PvE mode and has some super interesting research on increasing co-op fans (37% and rising) in their player cohort; Activision is now letting players hide other player’s Call Of Duty skins if they take away too much from immersion (ahem, Beavis & Butthead.)

• An interesting new PlayStation ‘Wallet Credit’ experiment: “Sony’s unannounced-but-very-real cashback scheme is starting to pop up in more places… Reports of £10 [UKP] kickbacks for [digital PS5 purchases of] The Blood of Dawnwalker and Halloween have started to circulate… but it’s unclear who’s exactly eligible for the rewards and why.”

• Steam changelog news of the week: there is now “a 21-day waiting period between when you paid the app fee and when you can release that game” for your first release, down from 30 days previously. But if you’re transferring a game from elsewhere to this new company account, there’s no ‘new’ waiting period. (Hurrah?)

• Roblox has a lot of teens suddenly making a lot of money with UGC, and therefore a lot of lawsuits with much messiness, such as this Tower Defense Sim one profiled by Aftermath: payroll using Robux, and $35 million in damages demanded from a ‘high school computer science project’ now making megabucks.

• The platform split on GTA VI got spicy, with Xbox’s chief strategy officer Matthew Ball pushing back on The Verge’s Tom Warren over alleged poor pre-orders: “The title is breaking records for Xbox… our internal analysis shows our share of pre-orders to be matching our share of the console market..” (We don’t find out what that share is, though… Xbox at 25-30%, with PS5 at ~75%, do people think?)

• The folks at GIES have been looking at naming frequency for Steam games, spotting that in 2025, “Simulator is the most common title word on Steam, with 2,398 titles, or 1.9% of the total. VR follows with 2,308. No other word reaches 1%.” Also up-trending in actual game name: Survivors, Backrooms, Idle, Cozy.

• Bonus ‘game as platform’ news: Minecraft’s highlights from its Minecraft Live event play up “improving tools and systems to make it easier to create, manage, and share your game content.” (Minecraft’s official, paid UGC ecosystem has been a bit ‘exclusive’, it’s true, so “lower[ing] the barrier to entry” seems to be a priority.)

OUR SPONSOR: FirstLook.gg, The Player Relationship & Marketing Platform

You’re mid-newsletter, we know. We’ll be quick. We’re FirstLook.gg, and we build software for game studios who want to grow their game without losing their minds.

Find your next thousand playtesters, run creator campaigns without the agency markup, and turn every player interaction into your next best action. Ship better games, all from one place. 1,000+ studios already do.

Eden (our CEO) will demo it himself. GDCo subscribers: 30-day free Pro trial, worth $1,599.

What do s&box’s issues (so far) tell us about launching platforms in 2026?

We don’t generally lead newsletters by talking about something that isn’t (currently) working. But we think its creators are big and popular enough to deal with it - it’s Facepunch, the UK company led by Garry Newman who made Garry’s Mod and savage open-world hit Rust, which we estimate at ~$600m gross (!) on Steam alone.

This is S&box (sandbox!), which, per Wikipedia, us a “video game development engine and online game platform by Facepunch Studios built on [Valve’s] proprietary Source 2 engine. S&box was released on April 28, 2026, and is intended to be a spiritual successor to Garry's Mod, allowing users to create a variety of games and experiences.”

The project, which first unveiled an Unreal Engine 4 prototype in 2017, and switched to Valve’s Source 2 in 2021 (it’s the only non-Valve game to use Source 2, which powers Half-Life: Alyx, Deadlock, Dota 2 and Counter-Strike 2!) is being built incredibly transparently. So real-time revenue is just one of the data points:

The platform launched on Steam at $20 in April 2026 (after a pre-release ‘limited cosmetic items’ sale earlier in that month), and according to its finance page, has grossed ~$6 million so far. But its player-base is languishing - even after a $10 price-drop - with <500 CCU, down from a ~13,000 CCU peak at launch, five months ago.

YouTuber Eridium, whose video is above, is one of the only regular third-party chroniclers of S&box goings on (tho the technically super-impressive dev team has been posting frequent and super-detailed updates on their gargantuan task!) So, two ways to deconstruct this. First, let’s examine S&box-specific issues:

• The $20 price point concentrated the fanbase to the hardcore: the difficulty of starting S&box as free-to-play was obvious. But starting the tool at $20 - esp. since ‘how do you do discovery for a game-making tool?’ is a tricky question - has meant you’ve got committed, opinionated initial users. (Not older, though - GDCo Steam Fan Snapshot data sees overindexing in 18-24 year olds & students…)

• Initial fans of the game expected something more Garry’s Mod-like: GDCo estimates 86% of S&box makers/players also own Garry’s Mod. And that’s the main reference point. And so launching without Steam Workshop support and with a relatively unfinished sandbox mode didn’t fit their expectations.

• There’s a lot of ‘boil the ocean’ technical wizardry in S&Box: I continue to be super impressed with what the S&box team is doing. Yet as Eridium opines in his video: “Their focus is mostly on being a game engine, and then a platform second.” (There’s a lot going on, but not all perfectly aligned with player/maker happiness.)

There’s still a lot of interest here. We see hundreds of thousands of players/users and some impressive median (5 hours 14 mins) and average (29 hours and 42 minutes) usage times. But here’s the Steam review sentiment, and it ain’t so pretty:

So I think it’s worth zooming out a bit to the bigger, and probably more interesting issue. Facepunch was always going to have a spiky, opinionated worldview on game creation, given they make ‘most brutal/Darwinian multiplayer game of all time’ Rust, plus a boss who talks about pooping a lot on social media.

Thus, more universally, here are the issues with launching any kind of tool that helps people make & then play games in 2026 (also looking at you, Meta Horizon, etc):

• No ‘lead’ game means there’s no initial hook: one YouTube commenter said: “I hear some people blame how they didn't make it a gmod 2 or the sausage people for the launch's failure, but really it was the lack of easy-to-find good games.” And if you don’t have a signature reason to play/make only on that platform, why even commit?

• Player complaints about ‘AI/slop’ in the games are difficult to shift: as soon as you make an open platform, players are going to be drawn towards certain games - clickers, survivors, job sims - which are high-hook, a bit interchangeable, and lower complexity. And the old skool will say - ‘this is slop’. (Maybe it’s just… now?)

• Platform differentiation & discovery is the real problem: looking at the games available on s&box right now, from My Summer Cottage to Mow The Lawn & beyond, they look fun to try - but I’m just not sure why I would play it in S&box, even if it was free. (Why this and not Steam, or Itch, or Roblox, or Xbox…?)

There are definitely people working on more ambitious games for S&box. And opening it up to F2P may swell interest. Eridium also did a great YouTube Shorts showcase of available games. In the end, this feels like the overall game supply/demand issue we talk about all the time, writ large….

Specifically: when everyone can - and does - make games, the ‘maker to player’ ratio on smaller platforms like S&box becomes so lopsided as to be unworkable, even when there’s interesting games out there. (Particularly see: Media Molecule’s gorgeous 2020 PlayStation exclusive Dreams, which suffered from this problem in droves...)

The GameDiscoverCo Show: Xbox’s road to….

As we jam onwards, we also have The GameDiscover Show, ft. myself (Simon) and Post Games’ Chris Plante talking game discovery trends - sub to the podcast via Apple Podcasts, Spotify & elsewhere (audio), with a video version on YouTube (above).

The latest GDCo Show chats on the next part of the Xbox re-org, how a media smart guy says 'the relationship between time and value is breaking down' in media, the rise of Steam demos whose saves transfer to the full game, and Meta’s announcements of a revamped, AI-centric Horizon game creator and its latest VR plans. Enjoy!

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

End of week, almost time to clock off, so we move forward. And today’s lead story looks at Valve’s good ‘ol Steam Deck, as we take another look at the games that work best on it, a year after our first attempt…

Before we start, yes that’s comedian John Mulaney playing EA founder Trip Hawkins in the full trailer for the Nicolas Cage-starring John Madden biopic. (Trip says John’s “a wonderfully believable supernerd, and the script and cast nailed the heart of the story”, and it’s fun that the trailer references the technical limitations delaying the first Madden.)

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

Game discovery news: how many needles, again?

Let’s finish up the week by examining some notable discovery and platform news for games, as follows:

• Checking in on the top Steam demos for unreleased games by concurrent players, as of Sept. 23rd, 2026, according to GameDiscoverCo Pro data, and with Graveyard Keeper 2 (last week's #1) now launched, cute anime desktop companion Character House is #1 with a rocket, showing almost 30,000 CCU.

• From there, cyberpunk shop job sim Probably Stolen (#2) is still performing at ~10k CCU. There are two 'find the needle' first-person search games in the Top 10 (!), with Find The Needle (#3) followed by Needle In A Haystack at #7. Also new: sailing friendslopper Grr Grr Gnomes at #4 (2,700 CCU).

• Want to feel better about our recent ‘is the game biz sustainable?’ Steam analysis? Adriaan de Jongh pointed out: “Release your games multi-platform (desktop, mobile, console)… Steam makes up for “only” ~20% of Hidden Folks’ multi-million dollar revenue.” Also: maybe “finding a niche” & fans gets you away from the red ocean?

• Roblox things: social deduction game Murder Mystery 2 & viral hit Steal An Egg were the platform’s biggest titles by average CCU in August 2026; Offpath’s Tim Elliott made a great tool exposing ‘earning efficiency’ on Roblox, showing games like Gakuran & Grand Blue hitting the Top 50 by $, despite ~10k average CCU…

• China game consultant Wojtek Jaworski did a video walkthrough of big Chinese mobile Steam ‘mega-app’ Heybox, “using a few different titles, including Iron Nest: Heavy Turret Simulator and Kingmakers, to show what a single game page can tell you.” (Reminder: Heybox is a fairly big deal and we covered it in depth back in April.)

• Meta VR updates: Janko Roettgers sums up the new $1,300 VR Glasses as “the company’s biggest bet on TV-like entertainment to date”, as some games like ‘no controllers needed’ Beat Saber got showcased. But as M.G. Siegler notes: “Meta unveils the Vision Pro Apple should have shipped.” (It’s not really games-first..)

• We looked at most-watched games on Twitch, ‘released in the last month’ edition, using GDCo Pro data. And EA Sports FC 27 pipped Wardogs to #1 (but both are ~10m hours watched in the last week!) Also hot: Silent Hill: Townfall, Aniimo, NBA 2K27, Control Resonant, and further down, Active Matter & The Plant Shop.

• Trend-analyzing media smart guy Doug Shapiro posted something (semi-paywalled) about how “the relationship between time and value is breaking down” in media. A must-read & made us think of ‘incremental games’ on Steam which are a) inexpensive and b) compressed in a lot of ways, gameplay-wise. (It cites a BCG estimate that $0.70/hr was the average video game spend in 2025, inc. mobile.)

• Also in Meta’s presentations: fascinating that the pivot on the Horizon virtual world/UGC creator is multi-platform and AI-first, with tools to “turn any idea into a complete 2D or 3D mobile game.. with progression systems, balanced difficulty, art direction, multiplayer, and more.” (And easy publish to Facebook & Instagram?)

• Microlinks: Discord is launching its age estimation tech, noting “more than 90% of you won’t be asked to confirm your age”; People Playground is the latest game affected by Steam Workshop hacks; the top ‘trad media’-mentioned games of the week include GTA 6, Control Resonant, Physint & Silent Hill Townfall.

Our Sponsor: Indie.io: Making a game and handling your own marketing and development too?

We've published games for years, and we built tools out of that experience to help indie developers with exactly that.

From an ad manager to localization to a press kit builder and everything in between.
All self-serve, all free to use.

Whether you're prepping a launch or already shipping, get started at indie.io/start.

What’s Steam Deck’s biggest 2026 hits & genres?

We ran a piece about the games played the most on Steam Deck in Sept. 2025. A year later, we thought we’d check back in, with an overview of Valve’s SteamOS-powered PC gaming handheld. (We only have vague third-party sales LTD estimates, but we’re guessing 6-8 million are out there, up from 5-7 million last year. Could be more, tho!)

So it’s hardly the 23 million shipped of Switch 2. But it’s def. a platform that appeals to existing Steam fans who want to play on the go. And we do have some data to draw on to talk about both overall popularity and ‘most Steam Deck-ish games’.

Firstly, there’s a Steam Deck Top Played official chart made by Valve. Thus - here’s the most-played games overall on Deck in the last 12 months:

Notable: there are some new games shouldering their way in since 2025, with roguelike deckbuilder Slay The Spire 2 - only released in March - still making it to #1. We’re guessing the game’s 50 hour media playtime (!), per GDCo data, is a big reason…

Also notable in here: slick ARPG Hades II (#2), other roguelite-y entries like Megabonk (#4) and Ball X Pit (#9), and stalwarts like Stardew Valley & Balatro still in the Top 10. A lot of these ‘feel’ like handheld-ish games, but there are others that don’t 100%, like Baldur’s Gate 3 (#5), Palworld (#7), and Cyberpunk 2077 (#11).

So that’s interesting - but perhaps not unexpected. What we wanted to do next, though, is revisit the only external way to see interest in Deck across all Steam games, which is ‘see what % of the reviews were made after playing >50% on Deck’. So we looked across all games with >$1m grossed and >100 Deck reviews, and found this:

So, as last year, the very highest end is around 19% of Steam reviews from players who majority played it on Deck, and:

• The Top 3 games are the same as last year: since we’re looking lifetime, they’ve retained those review %s, and delightful ‘fake game platform’ compilation UFO 50 is still #1 at 19.2%. (Minishoot Adventures & Dungeons Of Hinterberg are next.)

• New entries in the Top 5? Mina The Hollower & Rogue Prince Of Persia: not surprising to see retro 2D love letter Mina up there with 13.7% ‘majority Deck’ reviews. And while we don’t think Rogue Prince Of Persia performed as wanted, 13.5% of players ‘majority Deck’-ed it - and even more partially, we presume?

The rest of the Top 10 had some other titles that feel really handheld friendly, including vampire life sim Moonlight Peaks (#10 with 12%, and one of the top-performing third party Switch games of the year), as well as narrative/social RPG Bloomtown.

Here’s a look at #11 to #30, inc. Discounty and Caravan SandWitch, and honestly, one of the main takeaways we’re having here is - if your game is reviewed in high percentages by Steam Deck-first players, you’re also going to do decently on Nintendo Switch. (And less so on Xbox/PlayStation.)

In fact, we found multiple examples of games above selling 50k units on Steam & another 50k on Switch. It differs a lot, and it’s not huge multi-million seller #s. But for smaller indies, being able to straddle Steam Deck & Switch interest for cozier & more pixel-art led games is a really good multi-platform strategy.

Finally, we did something we didn’t try last year, and looked at median ‘majority Steam Deck played’ review percentages across all of Steam’s genre tags. This gives you a great idea of the kind of genres people love to ‘snack on’ on the Deck:

The overall tag median is just 0.55% of reviews being Steam Deck majority-played - and here’s our full data set, But the higher % tags (above) include things like 2D Platformer (2.3%), Roguelike Deckbuilder and Metroidvania (2%), Boomer Shooter (1.7%), and JRPG and Farming Sim (both 1.5%).

And the kind of games people really don’t want to play majority (or at all) on Steam Deck? That’d be the above genres, with Grand Strategy (0.12%) and MMO (0.1%) at the very bottom, and going up from there, Colony Sim (0.2%), FPS (0.22%), Base Building (0.26%), Idler (0.34%), Looter Shooter (0.37%), and near-median, CRPG (0.52%).

Based on some data we’ve seen, we believe that Steam Deck playtime is 2-4% of many publisher catalogs, but can rise as high as 10-20% or more for some specific titles. That’s enough for you to keep an eye on and optimize compatibility for certain genres, but not enough for you to mount an entire Steam Deck-specific strategy?

This week on Steam: FC, graveyards, resonance..

Read more

We’re back, and before we start, yes, the next part of the Xbox re-org just hit, with more layoffs (250+) at Halo Studios & across Xbox, and Activision now running Rare & a new Halo title that’s more CoD tech-adjacent. Bethesda’s now in charge of Obsidian, and Ninja Theory’s spinoff is not going well (so possible layoffs.) It’s largely logical, it’s a lot, and we’ll probably unpack it in next week’s GameDiscoverCo Show…

But before we start, tho, what’s the correct way to pronounce the name of Nintendo’s mascot Mario? Obvious? Would you be surprised to hear there’s a long-form article about this from Drew Mackie on this subject? (There totally is, and it’s fun.)

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

Game discovery news: Wheels, families, factories..

Starting off with today’s news, we have some excellent game discovery and/or platform advances to poke at:

• The latest 'trending' unreleased Steam games by 'new wishlists in the last 7 days', Sept 14th-21st - per GDCo Pro - shows the ‘actually just released this sec’ retro 2D Flash game Happy Wheels at #1, with the furry-adjacent 'take care of a giant family of wolves' sim Family Time (#2) is still getting meme-d into a top spot.

• Elsewhere, an 'enhanced' update of strategy game Total War Shogun 2 hit #3, as roguelike factory builder defense game Beltfed pops up at #4, post-announce. The rest of the Top 10 is games we've discussed before - Control Resonant, Dear Passengers, Aion 2, Kingmakers, and Probably Stolen. (Dressmaker also did great!)

• The crew at Polden Publishing (Restaurats) sent us the first video/guide from their Polden Workshop project, a 54 minute overview on “how you make a game trailer” - they say: “Most [indie devs] know a trailer matters - they just don't know how to do it right, or whether there's a ‘right way’ at all..” (Some decent best practices in here?)

• GDCo also looked at Twitch 'top hours watched, last 7 days for games released in the last 6 months' late last week, and tactical team FPS Wardogs (#1) was the giant hit, with 19.5 million hours. (#2 across all games, behind only GTA V.) EA Sports FC 27 was #2 (5.7m hours) and F2P creature collector Aniimo did good at #3. (Also hot: Halloween, Blood Of Dawnwalker, NBA 2K27, and the new Onimusha!)

• Are Nintendo’s Joy-Cons on Switch 2 better than the drift-prone Switch versions? According to somebody who’s worked on over 1,000: “The stock Switch 2 analogue sticks have held up noticeably better than I expected… my rough estimate is that their durability has improved by about 50% on average.”

• An emerging trend? Demos where save data transfers to the full game! Firms like Square Enix (and just now Konami with Castlevania: Belmont’s Curse) have been pushing this, Graveyard Keeper 2’s exceptionally good Steam demo perf (~30k CCU) also: “Start playing the free demo now, then carry your progress into the full game.”

• Apple Arcade is getting expanded reach, given: “In more than 100 countries, Apple has launched a new initiative that bundles Apple TV and Apple Arcade subscriptions into [the 99c/month minimum] iCloud+, at no extra charge.” (But in the U.S. and most of Europe you still need an Apple One sub - this is mainly smaller countries.)

• ICYMI: the full version of Edge magazine’s ‘Crash 2.0’ cover story got posted on their website. Example: Tim Sweeney on full-time game dev’s budget and profitability issues: “It’s multi-causal.. those are the hardest problems to solve, because it means there’s not just one pivot you can make.”

• Hooded Horse’s Tim Bender added some data to our recent ‘Steam front page deals got more algorithmic’ scoop. For one game “7,341 visits [from the Discounts & Events front-page grid to the game details page] occurred in the last month [after this program started, vs.] 7,355 visits in the last 6 months.” So it’s all upside if featured, pleasantly..

• This survey of the Polish game biz in 2025 estimated the origin countries of the Top 200 most-wishlisted Steam games as of July 2025: the U.S. had 17%, Canada 9%, Japan and Sweden 7.5% each, Germany and the UK ~7%, and Poland was at 6% (~12 games.) Next up: Korea & France (~5%) and China (~4%). Interesting!

• Microlinks: data miners are suggesting the Xbox equivalent to ‘Platinum’ achievements on PS5 may be called ‘Mythic’; a great interview with Valve’s engineers on porting Half-Life Alyx to the Steam Frame; how incremental game My Fire Is Bigger Than Yours sold 24,000 copies in its first three weeks on Steam.

OUR SPONSOR: PWN Games — PC Paid Media Done Right

Advertise your PC game with PWN Games. With our CPA model, you only pay when a player wishlists, installs, engages, or pays.

250+ PC games promoted. 42M+ players acquired. 10 years in the PC UA business.

Trusted by top PC game publishers worldwide. Explore PWN Games today!

BeamNG.drive - the biggest driving game hit nobody analyzes?

A while ago we promised to look at games that are quietly ‘huge’ & evergreen on PC, but significantly underdiscussed. The first newsletter on this subject was about zombie survival-er Project Zomboid. But this time we’re turning our attention to “dynamic soft-body physics vehicle simulator” BeamNG.drive ($25).

This sandbox-heavy title, which has been in Early Access since May 2015 (!) hits ~25,000 CCU on Steam daily, where it’s been gradually adding concurrent players for its entire lifetime. (It even hit a 47k CCU high after its biggest update ever in July.) There’s also a PlayStation 5 version coming soon, fascinatingly….

How big is this game? Well, GameDiscoverCo estimates BeamNG.drive at ~$200 million lifetime gross Steam revenue, from >10 million copies sold. (It also only ever discounts at 20% off, due to its unique proposition, btw.) Here’s our estimates - with 1.3m copies sold in just the last 12 months:

After some digging, we managed to get a hold of biz/strategy head Sabrina Wee & team at the 85-person (!) BeamNG GmbH, the German company which owns and operates both BeamNG.drive and BeamNG.Tech, the enterprise version of the tool, used for autonomous driving simulators and other ‘real-life moving vehicle’ prototyping.

Here’s what we’ve spotted about the game/tool’s popularity, with additional (& rare) comments from the BeamNG crew themselves:

• Modeling ‘soft-body physics’ accurately in vehicles was always the goal: BNG.d isn’t quite a game, but a hairy tech solution - how do you get cars to drive & crash (esp, crash!) realistically? Sabrina & team: “Soft-body physics is a long, unglamorous investment and it took a lot of work and dedication to get where we are today.”

• There’s been a 20+ year quest to do this, starting with a predecessor: though not created by them, the freeware & latterly open-source Rig Of Rods launched in 2005 with similar goals. The BeamNG.Drive founders were from the Rig Of Rods community, and as this history explains, first launched a demo back in 2013.

• The game particularly took off after a) multiplayer UGC b) YouTubers arrived: BNG.d was doing just fine until the pandemic but took off further during that. Reddit comments indicate two things did it: multiplayer mods for the game & the rise of influencers like FailRace (crashes!) and like Jimmy Broadbent (sim racing.)

The other reason we suspect the game is doing better in recent years is a tech-led one: it’s very complex computationally to model lots of cars using soft-body physics. As PCs improve, you won’t get crawling frame-rates quite so much. (Though remember: when you add mods, the slowdowns are your problem, which is nice for the devs!)

We asked Sabrina why she thought the game only grows in CCU, and she singled out a) the organic growth of creator content “whether mods or social media” b) the fact “visibility also compounds” on Steam with such great (97% positive!) user reviews, and c) a really enthusiastic community with a whole bunch of different interests and niches.

One of the most fascinating things about the success of BeamNG.drive is that it’s not, in fact, for one target market. Do you like crashing cars and seeing how mangled they can get? Great! Enjoy rally, sim racing, or even rock crawling in Jeeps & Chevys? Or maybe you like mudding and offroading? Great, you can do that too.

You can see this in GameDiscoverCo Pro’s enhanced overlap player data, this time for highest player overlap for games that are at >8x as likely to be owned by BNG.d players than the average Steam player. It spans everything from (very moddable!) sim racers to truck sims, sandbox destruction games, and even survival driving sims:

As Sabrina told us: “Underneath it all, the subject matter does not date. Neither physics nor cars go out of fashion. Our growth has been gradual rather than driven by any single moment, which we think is also why it has held.”

Tho you might think this driving platform covers everything you’d need, it does not officially license car IP, and people really want to drive real-life vehicles. Digging around Steam’s screenshots, we noted a ton of BMW, Mercedes & other real-life car models, even tho the official modding website & in-game browser doesn’t have them.

Well, turns out third-party UGC sites like Modland have as many BMW models as you can think of, lovingly modeled by fans & ready to mod into the game. (We presume BMW doesn’t really mind, either, given this is fan expression of enthusiasm for the brand.) So again - UGC x platform = expanded markets you could barely dream of…

In the end, it’s the diversity of the streaming content being made with BeamNG.drive as a “vehicle platform” that must be key to its success: it’s massive on short-form video, and on YouTube alone, we see obvious ‘crash compilation’ videos, entire ‘you are the police’ game mods, and funny multiplayer ‘car hunt’ videos. What a cornucopia!

The GameDiscoverCo Show: Game Pass x ads, eh?

Returning once again, we have The GameDiscover Show, ft. myself (Simon) and Post Games’ Chris Plante talking game discovery trends - sub to the podcast via Apple Music, Spotify & elsewhere (audio), with a video version on YouTube (above).

Also, just a reminder: this podcast has a lot of analysis and discussion beyond what we cover in this newsletter. You’ll hear different things, generally us going way deeper on one-paragraph news stories that have interesting trend ramifications. FYI!

The latest GDCo Show covers a rumor around a dual-tier Game Pass system with and without ads (but without Day 1 games), the switch-up of the Triple-I Initiative streaming showcase to twice per year, Roblox allowing standalone apps for all its games on PC, console and mobile, and the latest 'AI in games' controversies (around a Steam festival and the Independent Games Festival AI disclosure.)

[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 hot to trot, and hitting the weekend by getting back to what we do best: firing PC/console video game data at ya in variegated shapes and sizes until you beg for mercy. Our lead story today (start begging now!) uses our Steam Fan Snapshot panel to look at discovery in a useful new way…

Before we start, our friends at the Video Game History Foundation have a great new YouTube video out profiling Takumi Kawagoe, a seldom-discussed Nintendo programmer who pioneered the 3D camera systems for games like Super Mario 64. (That’s back in the ‘90s when 3D free-roam games were a relative rarity!)

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

Game disco news: Blizzard, Wardogs media hype…

Let’s end the week by all kinds of handy game discovery & platform news, as follows:

• Our buddies at Footprints.gg/ICO have a new ‘trad media’ discovery chart (above), and it’s a busy one, with GTA VI (new soundtrack reveals) inevitably topping things, but Blizzcon buzz (Starcraft, Diablo, WoW) also charting hard & the released/trending Wardogs and Marvel’s Wolverine also high up in the charts…

• There’s a v. unsourced rumor about a 2027 Xbox Game Pass revamp, ft. two main tiers: “Ads tier will cost $12.99 a month… Game Pass without ads will cost $19.99 per month.” There would be no (first-party?) Day 1 games on the service from Feb. 2027, and cloud streaming is an add-on. (The tipper got tier changes right in 2025.)

• We used GDCo Pro data to look at trending unreleased Steam demos, and there’s two big new entries: pixel-y sim Graveyard Keeper 2 (#1) had a >25k CCU demo ahead of its debut next week (saves carry across!), and (also) Tinybuild’s cyberpunk shopkeeping simulator Probably Stolen (#2) did well with >10k CCU.

• A counter-point on GTA VI sending console hardware sales stratospheric now - according to Circana re: U.S. sales, the week of the GTA VI gameplay showcase, sales were up 14%, but per Mat Piscatella: “PS5 grew 17%, XBS 9%… the combined increase… amounted to less than 8k units.” (They may go gaga when it comes out, tho.)

• Steam’s top new release charts for August 2026 are out, and while GDCo already estimated top games, it’s nice to see them tiered officially. Also, top DLC in the mix includes this big STALKER 2 expansion, the Elden Ring Tarnished Pack, & various Darkest Dungeon, Jurassic World Evo 3 & Dead By Daylight DLCs.

• Microlinks, Pt.1: Xbox has new Game Pass titles inc. Gears Of War: E-Day & Minecraft Dungeons II and had a Tokyo Game Show streaming showcase; the ‘kid Kinect’-ish Nex Playground got $150m in funding & ‘nears 1m active subscribers’; here’s more about Valve’s Fex & Lepton ARM/Android compatibility layers.

• Re: the Steam feature to ‘name your publisher page as your franchise page’ to get a ‘more from this pub’ micro-banner on a game’s details page? Bad news: you can’t pick your publisher page any more. (Reminder: a franchise is specifically games that are ‘built in the same fictional universe, gameplay style, or intellectual property’.)

• Roblox things: one hot stat from the Roblox Dev Conf: “Top 10 creators now average $65.7M a year. Top 100: $10.8M. Top 1,000: $1.4M. All roughly quadrupled since 2020.” (Though a commenter notes avg makes things look way better than median!); the Roblox Innovation Awards were won by +1 Speed Keyboard Escape, TTK & more.

• Marketing consultant Arnaud De Sousa is not a fan of the Steam AI Gaming Festival. And who knows, you might not be too? (Clarifying notes: it’s a third party fest that Steam didn’t ask for, it hasn’t (?) had any front page visibility, and Arnaud spotted paid/ad elements that might make Valve re-examine it.)

• ‘Government x games’ things: the Australian authorities will talk to Steam about credit cards being the only age check for adult games (They want ‘fairness’, Steam doesn’t want to add more invasive checks?); the European Union is proposing social media bans for under-13s, with online games possibly part of restrictions.

• Microlinks, Pt.2: images of Meta’s ‘Project Phoenix’ MR headset leaked ahead of its unveiling next week; Apple Arcade’s October 2026 additions include a Pusheen-themed ‘cozy cat collector’ & a River City Ransom-themed ‘Survivors’ title (!); top August mobile grossers headed by Honor of Kings, Gossip Harbor, PUBG.

OUR SPONSOR: Xsolla: How 1,000+ PC game studios already sell direct with Xsolla Publishing Suite

You already sell your PC game on Steam. A direct channel adds a second place to sell it, and the two complement each other.

Xsolla Publishing Suite gives you your own PC game store, a launcher with your branding, and payments in every market you sell in. More than 1,000 PC game studios already run a direct channel, complementing Steam rather than replacing it.

Start now with your Publisher Account.

The one ‘game discovery by player age’ chart you need to see…

You may recall us launching the Steam Fan Snapshot data set earlier this year. It’s now up to >16,000 worldwide Steam players who responded to online giveaways and answered various questions for us, and we’ve tied responses in to their Steam catalogs.

But this time, we wanted to focus in more depth on a core question we asked: how these ‘Steam fans’ find out about video games. The options we chose are above, and here’s the percentages (you can pick multiple answers) across the whole survey:

With the understanding that these are probably less casual players, we still get a strong idea of the spread. Particularly notable?

• Word of mouth is the third-strongest method: at 44.9%, it’s behind only long-form videos (57%) and the Steam platform itself (55.8%).

• Shortform video and livestreaming are mounting a charge: given they’re somewhat (!) newer, 37.5% and 35.2% is a pretty decent chunk of players.

• Live text/chat platforms are still fairly low: for some of us who spend too much time(TM) on Discord, you might think it would be higher than 18%. But no…

So that’s interesting enough. But we also have the ability to filter by player age. And it’s doing that which outputs the chart that really made us sit up and take notice:

Please note that we’ve color-coded this by row compared to the ‘all ages’ ranking. So if you see something in a red cell, less people in that age group ended up using that method for game discovery. And there’s some big takeaways here:

• Short-form video has a massive >2x decrease as you get older: for under 18s, short-form is the #2 most important discovery method at 53.5%, even outpacing ‘Steam as a platform’. But for 45-54 year olds, at 20.2%, it’s second to last.

• Things like ‘word of mouth’ and ‘Steam as a platform’ are way more stable: ‘Word of mouth’ hardly varies at all at ~45%, except a dip in over 45 y/o-s, and ‘Steam as a platform’ is strong throughout* at ~55% (ever so marginally lower, in younger folks.)

• ‘Traditional games media’ also has a fairly big spread: unsurprisingly, trad websites are most popular in over 45s for game discovery (42.5% in 45-54 year olds) but dips all the way to 21.2% for under 18s.

• Twitch-style livestreaming has an interesting mid-age peak: averaging around 35%, it’s actually a tad lower for discovery (~31%) for under 18s, peaks at ~39% for 25-34 year olds, and goes back down to ~28% for 45-54 year olds.

• Discovery from text-based social media is concentrated in the 18-34 age space: your Twitter/X, Threads & BlueSky crew dips majorly to 21.4% for under 18s (from its 27.5% average) and peaks in the 18-24 range (31.8%).

In many ways, this is obvious: it’s a microcosm of how people consume content. But seeing it clearly across >15,000 Steam players reminds us all: discovery methods are changing. A lot. And so this data really hit home for us…

(*Yes, we know over 55s generally are less responsive to all discovery methods in this survey. We presume it’s because they’re set in their ways/know what they like, or something?)

We also wanted to give a practical example of how a game’s discovery methods can be quite different than the norm. Here’s the Steam Fan Snapshot data for friendslop megahit Peak, across almost 3,000 players (>30 min playtime):

One issue with ‘trendy’ newer games is that players of them tend to be paying more attention in general. Still, Peak skews somewhat younger (average age 27, vs 29 median), so you see an underperformance from ‘trad media’ websites and discussion forums, and an overperformance from shortform video and word of mouth, among others.

Finally, we also looked at how Steam tags/genres of games varied by average age (if you played a game with this tag in its Top 5 for >5 hours), but there’s just no room to include here. (Here’s the raw data for that, if you want to check it out for giggles…)

This week on Steam: Aniimo, Trails In The Sky top..

Read more

We’re back, and thinking carefully about a more existential question in today’s main newsletter story. (Do we want to do this? Not really. Should we do it so that everyone is on the same page, for better or worse? Probably!)

Before we start, you know YouTuber Any Austin from videos like ‘Where Do Hyrule’s Rivers Go?’ and ‘Do Grand Theft Auto V’s Power Lines Connect To Anything?’ Well, he’s continuing this line of in-game ecosystem research with his latest video featuring Cyberpunk 2077: ‘What Is Night City's Unemployment Rate?’ (Bravo.)

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

Game disco news: welcome back, Happy Wheels…

Let’s start out by checking out the latest game platform & discovery news from across the video game-verse:

• Looking at GDCo Pro's estimates of 'trending' unreleased Steam games by 'new wishlists in the last 7 days' (above), a surprise is Flash ragdoll physics 2D game Happy Wheels (#1), coming to Steam 15 years post-launch (!). At #2 when we ran this, but out now, Dimraeth is an isometric co-op fantasy RPG with much depth.

• Other newly trending titles? Furry wolf-children making sim (?!) Family Time (#6), which picked up ~70k wishlists after its announce. Gritty open-world survival-er The Dead We Knew (#7) is also adding interest. And cute/realistic zombie survival game Zeverland (interesting combo!) made it to #10.

• Valve’s Steam Frame is now officially unveiled, with a USD $1,059 (256 GB) and USD $1,200 (1TB) price point, and a YouTube video from Valve takes you through the standalone VR device (which also connects to a PC!) This BBC review approximates general reception: “The hardware is excellent - a light device which feels comfortable to wear and is packed with clever technology… but it comes at a high price.”

• Heavily rumored, the Triple-I Initiative streaming showcase is now happening twice per year, and October 8th is the next one, with “35+ announcements with back-to-back trailers of world premieres, gameplay reveals, launch dates [&] demos.” Teaser trailer here, and reveals from Dave the Diver, Risk of Rain 2 & more are promised.

• Roblox Developers Conference had a huge announce, with the keynote revealing: “Soon, creators will have the option to make their games available as standalone apps across mobile, PC, and consoles, with Roblox powering the technology and services underneath.” (This pivot seems early, with scant details besides web play in 2026 & offline modes by mid-2027 - we’ll see if/how it interacts with Steam…)

• Other ambitious Roblox things: RDC’s keynote also confirmed Roblox engine improvements to enable “2D and puzzle games” more easily, as well as Roblox Wallet, “a creator earnings account Roblox said lets creators earn directly in real currency, get paid automatically each business day”, and also a Roblox debit card.

• Steam (and other online platforms!) have “implemented age verification measures for Australian users, affecting titles that carry a local age rating of R18+”, and you’ll need to link select credit cards for it to work. (This came “in the wake of changes to Australia’s online safety code made earlier in 2026”, and appears mandatory.)

• In as much as Blizzcon is related to Xbox’s platform success, you can check out the big announces here, inc. a Starcraft shooter for 2030 and Diablo V in 2029. (Also: after adding CD Projekt games, Battle.net says they’ll be selective re: more games: “We're obviously not out there trying to do the Steam or Epic Game Store thing.”)

• The latest PlayStation Plus Game Catalog additions for September (for higher PS+ tiers) have a pretty nice diversity of titles, including RuneScape: Dragonwilds, WWE 2K26, Ball x Pit, and Date Everything! (There’s also cult-ier titles like Slitterhead, Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound & Dungeons of Hinterberg.)

• According to Circana's Future of Insights for Video Games Consumer Survey, “cost is becoming a stronger driver of US cancellations to Xbox Game Pass Essential, PS Plus Essential and Nintendo Switch Online”, with ‘couldn’t justify the cost’ reason for canceling up 4-10% from Q1, hitting at least 40% for all three.

• Microlinks: there’s speculation that you might need a trailer to appear in Steam Discovery Queue (whether or not, it’s good to have one!); August’s top grossing mobile games include Honor Of Kings, Gossip Harbor & PUBG Mobile; some data on Towerpunk’s reveal to >4k Steam wishlists, good thanks to a viral trailer.

OUR SPONSOR: Creators.gg, free creator programs in minutes

Finding creators is a grind. You email 200 YouTubers, hear back from six, and hand out keys with no idea what happens next. Creators.gg puts your game in front of 20,000+ creators looking for their next title.

Listing is free and takes under 10 minutes. Start with a key drop and auto-approval rules, then scale as far as you want: CPM campaigns, performance-based rewards, or a full Creator Battle Pass.

100+ programs are live, from first-time key drops to EWC’s $2M creator program. Start free today.

Is the game biz.. sustainable for the average indie?

When i went on Mike Rose & Rami Ismail’s ‘wide-ranging’ (lol!) games podcast Mike & Rami Are Still Here, I was reminded that there are many possible ways to view the game biz. GameDiscoverCo tends to hover over the PC/console ecosystem like The Watcher from the Fantastic Four, finding & analyzing the games that are doing well.

But you can also zoom down to the more human level: what should the average person do? And that’s exactly what Rami asked me at the end of the podcast: "If you’re an indie right now, the question I get most is like, is this worth it right now? Right? Like, should we?” And that’s a 100% valid question that we’ve, well, mainly skirted…

Answer #1: what the data says…

So we’re going to answer it two ways: a data-led answer (which is what you’d expect from us), and then quote from what we actually said during the podcast, which is a bit more ‘feels’-based. Let’s start with indie game-ish data - which goes a bit like this:

• Let’s say you spent USD $500k of your own money to make your game: no publisher, but you get all the upside. If you released that game on Steam in January 2026 (above), you’d need to be one of the 16 games of 1,230 (1.3%) that grossed >$1m LTD to have made $550k+ net back (after refunds, chargebacks, Valve’s 30%), and now be profitable, w/ongoing cashflow.

• Let’s say you spent USD $500k of a publisher’s money to make a game: it depends on your recoup, but we’d think that only ~7 of the games (0.6%) released in Jan would have recouped fully by now at ‘normal’ rates. These are not exciting headline numbers.

So that gets to the following questions: how many games do you need in your catalog to build up an acceptable ‘long tail’ for continued operations, if you’re self-pub? And how much cushion do you need in your bank account between publishing deals, if you can’t rely on royalties alone to fund your indie? (Given external $ got pinched.)

Maybe you can argue January is a slow month, and we shouldn’t be using it. (It’s true that some months in 2026 have more like 20-30 new games grossing >$1m.) You can also note that some (but not many non-cozy) indie games will also add revenue on console platforms at minimal extra cost. But it doesn’t shift the fundamental math(s).

What this says to us is: even at a game funding number ($500k) that some readers will say is radically too low, and some too high, there’s indications that you need to be hitting home runs to make the ‘new PC games’ market work for you at all. (Even at $100k budget, only 80 of the 1,230 (6.5%) would be breakeven net, if self-published.)

Answer #2: what the gut says…

Then there’s what I said on the podcast, referencing my ‘I’ve been in the biz for 30 years’ newsletter where I accidentally outed myself as a dinosaur (above). As I joked with Mike & Rami, there’s no 10km-wide asteroid heading for the game biz. But “there’s also no - in my view - return to the old days.” Really, what I see for indies - and what I said - is:

• There’s going to be a continuation of ‘so many people can make video games’. Many of those people are making games semi-professionally, or doing it just after they left school, or in a low-cost situation or locality. In many cases, this may not be a disadvantage for their popularity.

• So for better or worse, if you want a long full-time career in games: if you don’t have a game that’s done well, that you own and have continued revenue from, it’s going to be much trickier in the future. Not impossible, but way trickier.

• I think there are great, successful games out there. I’m kind of a glass half-full kind of guy. There are good things going on in the PC/console game space, and projects that impress and wow me every week.

• But I don’t deny on the individual level, especially if everyone needs a salary and you’re working with multiple people on your team, it’s rough, and it’s going to continue to be rough…

I concluded: “I think people have to find ways to make games less conventionally. I’m excited about the increasing number of games doing well overall. But it’s true that the vast majority (by %) of new games in 2026 aren’t going to perform commercially…”

So: the biz works, if you’re a) a publisher with a strong overall catalog, or b) a compact dev team who’s created something notable from a lower cost base. (I think of games like single-player, moddable lo-fi Battlefield riff Ravenfield, which my 10-year old loves, and GDCo estimates has grossed $15m since 2017…)

Yet overall, as a smaller indie, I think you need to understand the odds. And - I’m sorry, I think this is the second time I’ve quoted Kenny Rogers in this newsletter - “Know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em, know when to walk away, know when to run.”

GameDiscoverCo Show: why’s Xbox going Kojima?

Just in time for the newsletter, we have The GameDiscover Show, ft. myself (Simon) and Post Games’ Chris Plante talking game discovery trends - sub to the podcast via Apple Music, Spotify & elsewhere (audio), with a video version on YouTube (above).

This time, we talk about how Xbox is doubling down on Hideo Kojima after PlayStation dropped Physint, Ubisoft's move away from its Steam launcher, smaller Steam games getting better personalized visibility, and CliffyB talking about how AAA should 'faceplant for a while' in this new PC/console game creation paradigm.

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

As we weekend-max (?) by listening to Yousuke Yukimatsu’s all-The Prodigy mix on NTS Radio (cue much crunchy beats), we’re delighted to say the GameDiscoverCo newsletter has returned. (Disclaimer: we’re not voodoo people. Or magic people.)

Before we start, our buddy Chris at HowToMarketAGame (excellent blogs/newsletters here!) is doing a survey on Steam marketing & wishlists, grabbing (with your permission) aggregated wishlist, sales, and traffic data direct from your games’ Steamworks. Help him out, and we’ll all see the benchmarked, anonymized results…

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

Game disco news: Guildrun, FF top Steam demos…

Time to check the latest news and trends from game platform & discovery-land. And here’s what we’ve got:

• The top Steam demos for unreleased games, as of Sept 9th, 2026, by concurrent users, according to GameDiscoverCo Pro data (above)? Autobattler roguelite Guildrun (#1) is running and running as a chart-topper for ~2 months. But brand new at #2 is original - and anticipated - 'HD-2D' Final Fantasy RPG Resonance.

• We’ve looked at co-op scavenger-explorer Nomad Drive (#3) and 'keep quiet' co-op horror game BreathBound (#4), but newish chaotic co-optional rafting game Oar'Some Adventures (#5) and a brand-new demo for 2D cyberpunk sidescroller SlashZero (#15) are both worth peeking at.

• ICYMI: Xbox doubled down on Hideo Kojima’s games, signing the formerly PlayStation-published Physint - after Sony dropped it in June - to add to OD, while also “collaborating across film and television to bring new stories to broader audiences.” (PS dropping it makes sense if Death Stranding 1/2 underperformed expectations & the fact Physint would have been PS5 only, per Bloomberg.)

• As I reported on LinkedIn on Tuesday: “After its weekly maintenance window, Steam unfortunately rolled out a major bug around achievements. Automated data collectors of Steam achievement info [briefly got] data for every single Steam game that has one, even those unreleased... or even unannounced.” (Mainly smaller spoilers, and unfortunate.)

• Nintendo’s pair of streaming Direct showcases saw a) the Switch 2 remake of Zelda: Ocarina Of Time confirmed for a Nov. 5th launch, with tie-in Switch 2 hardware also available, and b) Metroid Ravenous revealed for Switch 2 debut in Jan. 2027, alongside a new 3D free-roaming Kirby game and a host of third-party titles (inc. a surprise console debut for Meccha Chameleon.)

• Microlinks: Nintendo has a ‘customer appreciation’ game sale that they say is “made possible in part by tariff-related refunds”, haha; Luna has added Remote Play on Amazon Prime, inviting up to 7 players to cloud-game even if they don’t have a Prime membership; Twitch released its ‘State Of Gaming Report’ with handy stats.

• Over on Roblox, there’s more egg-stealing breakthroughs: “Steal an Egg hit another all-time high this weekend… [at] 9.9M peak CCU… ~39% of everyone on Roblox at peak.” (These limited-time ‘Admin Abuse’ events where there’s exclusive items to collect attract massive FOMO - and likely bots. But a lot of the interest is real, folks.)

• Ubisoft is testing a workaround for its intrusive Ubisoft Connect PC launcher and Steam, announcing a new Ubisoft Connect Services Steam tool “that keeps Ubisoft game features such as cross-progression, cross-play, player safety, challenges and rewards, among others, without requiring the Ubisoft Connect PC launcher to be installed or launched.” (Another example of third-party launchers backing off of Steam…)

• Apple’s new $2,000 iPhone Duo isn’t going to be a major game platform immediately, yet Zenless Zone Zero and UnGodly are being demoed on Apple’s new foldable iOS device, and videos “designed to help developers adapt their games and apps to the new device’s form factor” are already out. So oogle ‘em if you want.

• A new Steam Client Beta has a couple of Big Picture Mode additions: a ‘Big Art Mode’ for a more attractive game-specific background, and a ‘Screensaver’ mode “that can be configured to show artwork from recently played games and your recent in-game screenshots.” (Also: Personal Calendar’s better integrated with Big Picture.)

• Microlinks, pt.2: GameStop sets a new Q2 profit record at $160m, and it’s thanks to trading cards, not video games; August’s official PlayStation top downloads are headed by Madden & Marvel Tokon for PS5 in North America; Footprints.gg’s top ‘trad media’ mentions of the week are topped by GTA 6, Zelda & Dawnwalker.

OUR SPONSOR: indie.io: Making a game and handling your own marketing and development too?

We’ve published games for years, and we built tools out of that experience to help indie developers with exactly that.

From an ad manager to localization to a press kit builder and everything in between.
All self-serve, all free to use.

Whether you’re prepping a launch or already shipping, get started at indie.io/start.

When 1.0 goes nice: Yet Another Zombie Survivors edition!

We don’t do enough ‘here’s what happened at Steam 1.0’ release postmortems here at GameDiscoverCo. So we were delighted when Diana Biszczanik from Awesome Games Studio pinged us re: Yet Another Zombie Survivors ($10-$15), which hit 1.0 on August 20th, after 3 years in Early Access.

(BTW, the slightly flippant name of the Polish indie studio’s latest game can be explained if you look at their rich heritage of ‘Yet Another Zombie..’ games, which started with Yet Another Zombie Defense all the way back in 2014, haha.)

To set context: this is a run-based ‘bullet heaven’ game, a la Vampire Survivors, but with an ability to recruit multiple other protagonists to run alongside you, and unlockable, permanent upgrades & skill trees. (Bonus: everyone loves zombies.)

Diana was kind enough to give us some of the Steam stats around 1.0. Directly from her:

- 5.5k peak players on day one. Our Early Access day-one peak was 2.5k.
- 9.9k peak players during the 1.0 launch weekend, vs. 10.2k during the EA launch weekend.
- 15k copies sold on launch day, roughly the same as during our EA launch.
- 88k copies sold in the first two weeks of 1.0, vs. 93k sold in the first two weeks of EA.
- On launch day, 53% of players were returning owners coming back to check out 1.0, while 47% were new players.
- 7-10% of players are on Steam Deck.

YAZS’ Steam 1.0 concurrents got within an inch of Early Access CCU - a great result. (Related: of the 10 most recent ‘notable’ Early Access graduates in our GDCo Pro, 30% of them had 1.0 CCU above Early Access. You can get a decent bump in CCUs from returning players without selling new copies. But to beat EA launch, you need more.)

We’ll get to analysis of how the 1.0 was ‘pleasant’ shortly. But wanted to show this GDCo Pro graph of total YAZS PC sales (we estimate ~750k, inc. Steam keys, and ~$5m gross) to point out one big takeaway: your Steam 1.0 is a nice shot in the arm, but most games that do good at 1.0 have been selling very nicely in Early Access, too:

Related: 1.0 is also a nice time for your console release, and YAZS is no exception. Survivors-likes aren’t incredibly strong on consoles, but inexpensive console ports can be handy: GDCo forecasts combined PlayStation & Xbox sales at <50k so far. (That includes sales in Game Preview on Xbox for ~12 months before release.)

The country breakdown of YAZS, btw? It’s this, direct from the devs: China 29.5%; United States 18.5%; Germany 6.4%; Korea, Republic of 3.8%; Russian Federation 3.6%; Japan 3.0%; United Kingdom 2.5%; Canada 2.2%; France 2.2%; Other 28.3%. (That’s strong Chinese interest, indeed..)

One final visualization with GDCo Pro data - this is ‘what do YAZS players also play >10x as much as the average Steam player?’, sorted by highest player overlap. The OG Vampire Survivors heads the list, and subgenre hits Brotato, Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor, and Soulstone Survivors also make the list with >30% overlap:

One thing many of these games have in common is a replayable, enjoyably divergent game loop. How enjoyable? We were piqued to hear that YAZS has a median time played on Steam of 11 hours and 12 minutes, and an average of a whopping 21 hours 18 minutes. For a game that’s cost $7-$15, that’s a lot of play per hour, $-wise…

So let’s talk about why 1.0 went well for the game. Chatting to Diana, here’s what we think made a difference:

• Tripling of influencer contact & shifted reach at 1.0: “[At EA], we reached out to around 500 influencers. [At 1.0], we expanded that to around 1,500 creators focused on bullet heaven games, roguelites, and zombie-themed games. Since YAZS is also great on Steam Deck, we reached out to Steam Deck-focused media as well.” (Also JP/CN media.)

• Clear explanation of the new elements since Early Access: this may be obvious. But if you’ve been ‘all polish, no new elements’ during EA, it’s difficult to get people to re-engage with your game at 1.0. Diana explains: “We basically added the equivalent of 3-4 major updates into one release, especially the hub with missions and some lore content, which isn't something you typically see in bullet heaven games.”

• Succinct and direct outreach in terms of pitch: how do you get people to look at your game again if it’s been out for 3+ years? Diana shared her exact pitch email to creators & media, which plays up the game’s differences from what are, frankly, a giant mass of Survivors-likes being pitched to streamers recently.

The result: high profile YouTube videos from folks like Gohjoe (128k views), from Dex (118k views), and from Aboboknows & more. There’s also a lot of discussion of ‘meta’ strategies in YouTube videos & comments - always good news for a game’s buzz levels.

With 72 games tagged ‘Bullet Heaven’ launching on Steam in August 2026 alone (GDCo data), here’s part of Diana’s media/creator pitch differentiating the game. And I think it works - the classic ‘you like this subgenre, but there’s a twist & also depth’:

“What makes YAZS different?

Control a 3-member squad - unlike most games in the genre, you can play up to three Survivors in a single run.

Create wild synergies - unlock Survivors, combine their abilities, and experiment with powerful team compositions across multiple game modes.

Build your playstyle - level up and choose perks, abilities, and nodes from 9 skill trees.

Fight new challenges - take on arena bosses, complete challenges, and unlock new achievements

Explore more than just combat - the 1.0 update introduces quests, story content, and a HUB area to return to between runs.”

Let’s sum up: YAZS is an already nicely executed game that added a lot of depth over 3 years. And 1.0 allowed an influx of both new and old players for a ‘marketing beat’ that’s a really pleasant boost. Long playtime, cheaper cost, what’s not to like?

Steam 1.0 launches are rarely transformative, with a handful of weird exceptions like Baldur’s Gate 3. But they don’t have to be, if your team is sized & scaled correctly. If you treat 1.0 as a potential mid-level win if you have momentum, not a ‘second launch’ Hail Mary opportunity, you’ll be in good shape…?

This week on Steam: it’s all about Wardogs, innit?

Read more

We’re right back at it, and we’re wondering how y’all doing out there. Reasonable? OK? Hunky dory? We’re… how do you say… rather excited to get on with our job, which is providing you much info on why video games are popular. So we’ll do that!

Before we start, the runaway ‘silly story’ intro slot winner this week: “Elden Ring Director Hidetaka Miyazaki Says He’s ‘Honestly Not Sure’ Where the Rumor About Him Having a Foot Fetish Came From.” Good job, IGN (and The Guardian for doing The Duskbloods interview.) So no, plz don’t call Miyazaki ‘Tarantino-esque’…

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

Game discovery news: summon the Wardogs…

Let’s take a look at some of the more notable game platform & discovery news since late last week, as follows:

• Here's GDCo Pro estimates of 'trending' unreleased Steam games by 'new wishlists in the last 7 days', Sept 1st-7th - and 'friendslop in the air' standout Dear Passengers (#1) and tactical shooter Wardogs (#3) shouldn’t be a surprise (We’ve talked less about F2P ARPG creature collector Aniimo (#2), which has good momentum.)

• At #4, The Missing Tail, from Estoty (creators of VR/mobile hit I Am Cat) does the 'two player co-op only' thing with cozy cat shenanigans, getting ~100k wishlists in no time. And PlayStation's State Of Play helped Final Fantasy VII Revelation (#5) and FF: Resonance (#9), as well as killer shark sequel Maneater 2 (#8) trend.

• According to data provided to The Game Business, “The GTA 6 Netflix reveal has caused a spike in sales of PlayStation and Xbox hardware. According to Nielsen IQ, UK PS5 sales jumped 33% [in the week following the reveal], while Xbox Series S and X sales leapt 34%.” The public, they love grand theft-ing in their autos…

• Over on Facebook (!) former Epic wunderkind Cliff Bleszinski has views on the ‘Crash 2.0 for games’ rhetoric: “So is the end near? Hardly. ‘Life finds a way”’ - keep looking towards the AA/’slop’ area to find the fun, and at a reasonable price, which allows you to sample a bunch of quirky, innovative titles with friends. Let AAA faceplant for a while, I say.”

• Spotting smaller Steam games getting more front page referrer traffic than they used to? That’s cos, some time recently, Valve changed the featured front-page games in ‘Discounts & Events’ (the non-Daily Deal ones) to be more personalized to logged-in player interests. (A good move to help the little guys, done quietly.)

• Here’s a fun site, PS Store DB, which is scraping all PlayStation Store game ratings and creating a ‘Highest Rated weighted by review count’ score. For games with >10k reviews, the top games are Dispatch (4.93/5), Persona 5 Royal (4.91/5), the OG Final Fantasy VII (4.9/5) and Persona 4 Golden (4.9/5), among others…

• We don’t talk about AI much, but Nvidia’s DLSS 5 ‘lighting diffusion model’, now shipping in NBA 2K27, is prob. the highest-profile incursion into games so far. There’s a ResetEra thread summarizing a longform Digital Foundry video we found v.helpful: “DLSS 5 best suited for games that are trying to look realistic.”

• As passed along by RoadToVR: “Valve has pushed an update to the Steam Link PC VR streaming app on Quest that finally includes the ability to play games via wired connection.” Why now? One commenter notes: “Meta only recently added support for video over USB, and Steam Link could not have implemented wired support without it.”

• Errata: on Friday’s August charts we noted that puzzle co-op hit Big Walk had 3m+ PlayStation players (and more downloaders) due to it launching as a PlayStation Plus ‘monthly game’. But looks like 99%+ of those (not 90%, as we put in the charts) are from PS+ players. (We’ll keep tweaking our PS+ download splits.)

• Microlinks: Xbox tells existing Game Pass members its new cloud gaming cap doesn’t apply to them, but only in certain countries; Apple may be working on first-party game controllers; if you dropped Xbox Game Pass, MS may try to tempt you back with a personal discount price (as low as $16/month for Ultimate.)

OUR SPONSOR: PWN Games - PC Paid Media Done Right

Advertise your PC game with PWN Games. With our CPA model, you only pay when a player wishlists, installs, engages, or pays.

250+ PC games promoted. 42M+ players acquired. 10 years in the PC UA business.

Trusted by top PC game publishers worldwide. Explore PWN Games today!

Does your Steam demo CCU ‘predict’ outcomes?

Headline: in this era when more Steam games are using pre-release demos to gauge interest & get feedback, we realized: we didn’t formally study the relationship between demo CCU and game CCU. But we can, thx to GameDiscoverCo Pro data (we have concurrents hourly from 2024 & just acquired daily peak CCU back to 2018.)

Firstly, some context: we checked the top 100 top-grossing games of 2026 so far on Steam, and found that 58 of them had a pre-release demo. That includes only 6 of the Top 20 (inc. Windrose, Pragmata) but three quarters (15) of those ranked #81-#100. So when you get below Forza & 007-sized games, it’s extremely common.

Let’s go for a high-level visualization to start. If your game’s demo got more than 50 concurrents on Steam, what was the peak-all time CCU of your game? Well, the median was 3.01x, and here’s the various ranges:

This, we think, is genuinely useful new info, calculated from the 2,569 Steam games we found that launched between Jan. 2024 and Aug. 2026 with a >50 CCU demo. (There were about 55,000 games launched in that time, so that’s only 4.7% of all games.)

So here’s how to think about this 3.01x multiplier - or at least, how we think about it:

• Let’s say your game’s demo got 200 CCU on Steam: this means, at median, you might see the full version launch to 600 CCU, which very roughly translates to (if not a pre-orderable game!) about ~12,000 units sold Week 1, and 35,000 units Year 1.

• But there’s a lot of moving parts here, both up and down: it’s hardly a fixed ratio! The top 20-30% of demos convert to peak game CCU at 6.24x, and the bottom 20-30% at 1.29x. That’s a 4-5 times difference, pretty quickly. The median isn’t gospel.

• Nonetheless, these ratios are important for understanding probability: let’s say your game had a 100 CCU demo, and you need to sell 100k copies in your first year on Steam. To do that, you may need a 16x ‘demo→game’ multiplier.

Is a 16x multiplier (from peak demo CCU to peak game CCU) doable? Absolutely! But you’d need to be in the top 10% of ‘demo to game’ CCU conversion for it to happen. And you need to have a compelling reason why your game would perform that well. (Was the demo underpromoted? Will the main game somehow go more viral?)

Anyhow, we picked out select games with particularly high, near-median, and below-median performance of peak demo to peak game CCU, and here they are:

The high-converters? Mainly games like Megabonk and Escape From Duckov with incredibly strong hook or game design loop that had good interest pre-release (demo CCUs in the hundreds or low thousands), but hit giant CCU highs post-release.

It’s notable there’s not much friendslop in here - partly because friendslop is so inexpensive that it often just launches without a demo? But there’s some co-optional titles that grew over time like Abiotic Factor & LORT, as well as just straight out great ‘sleeper/breakout’ hits like Absolum, Moonlight Peaks, and even Dispatch.

We also wanted to show a range of titles that were closer to ‘normal’ - including solo indie hits like Road To Vostok (3.3x) and AA-ier rhythm action title Dead As Disco (2.34x). If we were using this data to mentally model for your game, we’d probably use 2x-4x as a starting point…

Finally, here’s some games that had stronger demo performance in CCUs than full game performance. (Sorry if you’re featured!) It looks like some of these like Drive Together or Ghostbane are very strong hook for casual demo players, but ‘execution-light’ at commercial release.

Some of the other titles had PR/marketing firepower aimed at the demo rollout, or tried to charge above what the market thinks acceptable for certain styles of game. ($5-$15 is increasingly the norm?) That’s the rough shape of it - please ping us if you see any data discrepancies btw, because we can’t manually check >2,500 games easily.

Finally, we showed this early data to someone who wondered how the median differs, depending on the CCU cut-off. Good question, and the median ‘demo → game’ peak CCU multipliers are like this for demo concurrents: >10 CCU = 2.40x, >50 CCU = 3.01x, >100 CCU = 2.91x, >250 CCU = 2.59x, >500 CCU = 2.41x, >1000 CCU = 2.38x.

(So: as the demo CCUs get bigger, the multiplier and spread gets somewhat smaller, as outliers are removed. Makes total sense to us…)

GameDiscoverCo Show: backing off multiplatform

Finally and ultimately, we’re back with The GameDiscover Show, ft. myself (Simon) and Post Games’ Chris Plante with a bunch of extra insight - sub to the podcast via Apple Music, Spotify & elsewhere (audio), with a video version on YouTube (above).

On this episode, we talk about how PC game hardware increases might also stretch the game biz in similar ways to console & discuss how Xbox and PlayStation are in some ways getting 'less multiplatform' . We also look at some good points from Arrowhead's CEO and talk about why that Xbox cloud limitation (maybe!) happened.

[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 can see just via newsletter/podcast views that a bunch of you are back in action - it’s September, it’s post-Gamescom, you’re proactive & excitable individuals. So, uh, welcome, and try not to jump around too much as we continue gestures all this….

Before we start, for those who love Keita Takahashi’s inspired roll-’em-up Katamari Damacy might be interested to know that somebody made a web-based ‘object library’ for the original game - and sequel We Love Katamari. Viewing the primitive/adorable 3D models certainly gave us… a frisson of nostalgia for forbidden object accumulation?

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

Game discovery news: State of Play = more PS-y…

Let’s get going here - and we’ll start with a look at the latest game platform & discovery news du jour:

• PlayStation’s latest State Of Play streaming showcase (above) had a reveal or two, and lots of third-party multiplatform games. But it was mainly interesting re: showing first-party titles/DLC (Marvel’s Wolverine, Gran Turismo 7, Until Dawn 2, Saros, Ghost of Yotei) that we suspect won’t be on PC or Steam soon.

• Surprise news of the week was veteran data-crunching site SteamDB getting acquired by NexusMods - or more precisely a company called Chosen, which has big $ backing to roll up a bunch of game modding sites. Plan is to keep SteamDB running & handy while using its data to build a better mod manager. (Sure?)

• Xbox things: the Xbox Cloud Gaming service is restricting hours per month to Game Pass subscribers (Ultimate: 15 hours; Premium: 10 hours; Essential: 5 hours - tho only 4% of subscribers currently exceed these limits!) You can also buy more cloud hours - and there will be a non-GP ‘a la carte’ option for cloud; new GP titles include RuneScape: Dragonwilds, Speedrunners 2 & more…

• ICO’s Thomas Bidaux keeps a better track on weekly release counts on Steam than we do, spotting that we’re now above 700 games ‘released’ weekly. He also noted that 95 (13.1%) of those games* (*inc 1.0 releases) got >50 player reviews and 62 (8.6%) got >100 player reviews.

• There’s a pair of Nintendo Direct streaming showcases due next week (on the 8th and 9th), with “a special The Legend of Zelda 40th Anniversary Direct” on the 8th - presumably covering more on the Ocarina Of Time remake - and a ‘regular’ Direct with first/third party games on the 9th. Please expect them!

• We covered the pre-release discovery wins for How Many Dudes? back in January, and ICYMI, the Butterscotch Shenanigans crew has a giant, helpful recap for the roguelike dudebuilder: “[We] sold 173,000 units in its first week on Steam… our best-performing game ever… despite taking the least amount of time to make.”

• Roblox things: a new report from GameAnalytics has some neat insights - 44% of players use both mobile & PC, the median player opens the app 3 times a day; the first ‘less Roblox-y looking’ games from Roblox’s incubators are getting previewed; Roblox is now under the terms of the EU’s Digital Services Act (extra supervision.)

• Steam documentation change of the week: if you make a third-party sales/event page, Valve is clarifying that you might not get ‘basic’ featuring on the Special Events page (not the front page!) if “it’s a massive event… an event with no clear theme… or very similar to other events which have run this year.” (But they’ll tell you.)

• We just talked about why we think co-op only (non-friendslop) games are an under-served market, and right on cue, 2 player RC car co-op adventure Wheelmates launched with 194k demo downloads & 370k net wishlists, and is hovering at a creditable ~1,000 CCU on Steam right now.

• Some smart points in this interview with Arrowhead (Helldivers 2) CEO Shams Jorjani. #1: “The only thing that really, really mitigates risk… is brand and recognisability.” #2: for new games, even as a bigger studio, they’ll be “putting it in the hands of players right away - as soon as possible.”

• Microlinks: Sony & Microsoft say they’re not obligated to pass U.S. tariff refunds to consumers, echoing Nintendo; the latest Steam client update has officially added support for HDR streaming on Steam Deck OLED; the Apple App Store team showed up to Gamescom Dev to talk best practices for premium apps,

OUR SPONSOR: indie.io: Making a game and handling your own marketing and development too?

We’ve published games for years, and we built tools out of that experience to help indie developers with exactly that.

From an ad manager to localization to a press kit builder and everything in between.
All self-serve, all free to use.

Whether you’re prepping a launch or already shipping, get started at indie.io/start.

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

Where would we be w/out GameDiscoverCo’s top new Steam (& console) games of the month and more, powered by our Pro data? Here’s July, June, May, April, March, Feb and Jan’s, if you missed ‘em. And August’s top new Steam games by unit look like this:

• The 2x million sellers? Less expensive friendslop-adjacents: the absolute smash, albeit at USD $5-$7, was the Landfall-backed ‘fish & then shoot ‘em’ How To Fish, which we have at >6.3m units (!) And the $15-$20 linear co-op hit Big Walk, which we talked about, we’ve got at >1.6m on Steam alone in August. (Not bad.)

• Iron Nest & ReStory were the two ‘trad indie’ standouts in August: you’ll know ‘heavy turret sim’ Iron Nest - 650k units at $15-$20, since we covered it in-depth, but ICYMI, ReStory - almost 500k units at USD $18-$20 - is a really nicely done ‘chill electronics repair’ sim with retro consoles & cellphones/iPods to fix up.

• The rest of the Top 10 is an unsurprising mix of AA and indie: we’ll get to the bigger games, inc. Star Wars Zero Company, in the ‘top revenue’ chart. But the other indie titles include Rusty Lake’s $6-$8 puzzle adventure Servant Of The Lake (>250k units) and 2D physics factory automator Sandustry ($10-$15, >200k.)

One interesting title we’ve barely talked about - Grain Rot ($9-10), a horror co-op extraction ‘unbuilder’ with cute robots. It’s friendslop-adjacent with permanent progression baked in (maybe the ‘next step’?) looks snappy, and sold >200k at ~$9 USD just in its first three weeks…

Checking the Top 10 new Steam releases by $ for August (not inc. off-Steam key sales), you’ll see How To Fish ($26m, #2) and Big Walk ($21m, #3) in the mix, but late-month release XCOM-like Star Wars Zero Company ($50-$60) hit #1 at >$28m and ~650k units. And Mortal Shell II ($50-$60, >430k units, $17m) also did excellently.

Also: the AA titles have differing cross-platform outcomes. Star Wars Zero Company, being turn-based strategy, is doing ‘OK’ on console - <100k each on PS & Xbox, LTD. But Mortal Shell II, as a Souls-like, is doing better on PlayStation (almost 250k, with decent China & Middle East interest) and less well on Xbox, for regional reasons.

Checking on all-game Steam revenue for August, Valve’s Counter-Strike 2 and DOTA 2 are actually #1 ($131m) and #3 ($61m) this month, with a big Apex Legends season launch boosting the F2P hero shooter to #2, with $89m grossed on Steam alone.

Otherwise, it’s a little quiet, with debuts like Zero Company, How To Fish, Big Walk, and Mortal Shell II all ranking in the Top 10. The exceptions: pre-orders for Phantom Blade Zero ($22.5m, on nearly 400k units) are boding well for its Oct. Steam/PS5 release, and similarly for Oct’s Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 (325k pre-orders & $18m so far.)

We’ve also included the all-game #11 to #30 on Steam (above) again, since we find it fascinating. Notable in here: AA shooter Wardogs picking up more serious pre-order momentum (now at >500k on Steam alone), and a buncha F2P/catalog games doing well…

Finishing off by looking at PlayStation and Xbox’s top new games in August, it’s American football stalwart Madden NFL 27 nearing 2m across both consoles (with a ~40% share via the U.S.-centric Xbox player base.) The other standout is Marvel Tokon Fighting Souls, which sold >500k units on PS5 (plus another 200k on Steam, which suffered from PC tech issues at launch…)

There were also some good results for zombie survival-er No More Room In Hell 2 (which managed >400k across PS/Xbox, its launch timed to 1.0 on the Steam version), and the AA Hell Let Loose Vietnam, which rode its shooter chops to >800k across Steam, Xbox and PlayStation, with our PS and Xbox estimates at around 200k each.

Checking Switch Western eShop new releases for August, Big Walk was the top new performer with >100k copies sold. At sub-100k but scaling, we have LoTR: War in the North - Legacy Edition, Elden Ring Tarnished Edition (that one’s scaling quick!), with Madden NFL 27 and The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered also selling ‘alright’. (Switch 2 third-party is still fairly non-dynamic, tho...)

Last off, since GameDiscoverCo Pro analyzes Twitch monthly for the most popular games, here’s the top 20 games overall for the month. Ever wondered how some of these evergreen titles like LoL, Valorant, Minecraft stay evergreen? Look here!

And there’s a couple of ‘not always seen in the Top 20’ notables like Project Zomboid still staying high in the charts thanks to its Build42 Stable releasing in late July. We find the Top 20 ‘new release in August’ charts more interesting, though:

You’ve got Big Walk topping the charts, Tokon doing well (and How To Fish at #4), with sports games - inc. Madden & NBA 2K27, in Advance Access at the end of August - in the mix. And even games which just did ‘OK’ in sales thus far - such as Beast Of Reincarnation & Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy - feature in the Top 10.

Another notable trend is lo-fi horror games such as The Skin Stapler (ew!) and Gas Station Case doing well with Twitch viewers, although that interest doesn’t always convert to sales. (Both of these games topped out at around 200 concurrents on Steam.)

Steam this week: Onimusha, Dawnwalker nail it…

Read more

Welcome back from Gamescom, for those who gaily attended, and it’s all uphill (downhill?) until the end of the year from here. But we all have a few video games to launch and monitor in the meantime. Let’s get to it…

Before we start, we can’t be the only ones low-key obsessed with the McDonalds UK x Xbox special food menu? Specifically, there’s spicy chicken nuggets ‘inspired by’ the Moa bird in Halo, and, uhh, “Blamco Cheese Bites inspired by Fallout 76’s™ Blamco Mac & Cheese.” You can also “engage with content” and unlock in-game items. Synergy, folks!

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

Game disco news: PS5 gets... ad-supported TV?

Let’s kick things off for the week with a whole mess of game platform & discovery news, as follows:

• There’s a new Steam data leak from earlier in the platform’s history. The “so-called ‘teraleak’ contains over 12 terabytes of file depots served through Steam from 2003 to 2013”, including early builds of Valve games (Portal, Left 4 Dead, Dota 2), but also third-party titles with private Steam builds. (Misconfigured endpoint leak?)

• An unexpected launch on PlayStation would be ‘Live TV on PS5’, which offers “a free ad-supported experience from Sony Pictures Television” in the U.S., including movies (a 50 Cent-themed action channel!), TV shows (Community, The Walking Dead), anime (Naruto, Death Note, exclusive Crunchyroll channels) & more.

• After signaling it would, Xbox is cutting out other platforms from trailers on the Xbox YouTube channel, with no mentions of the non-Xbox SKUs for Minecraft Dungeons II. (The full platform list is on other versions, but the fans are sated…)

• Gamescom 2026 was, in general, a hit with attendees, with 368k (non-unique) visitors from 131 countries & 1,743 (!) exhibitors. (The organizers might have done a tad better responding to indie dev/publishers laptop thefts tho, since their literal ‘let’s tell you about the regulations’ response was seen as non-sympathetic.)

• We talk about console hardware price hikes, but how about PC? PC Gamer helps us understand: “Before the memory crisis, there was quite an abundance of RTX 5060 gaming PCs… [as low as] $749… these days you're looking at almost $1,000 for the same thing, and that's if you're lucky.” (PCs can be upgraded more modularly, but..)

• Valve was chatting to devs at Gamescom, and Yaroslav Shalashov passes along two tidbits: “Steam Networking will support crossplay, and you'll be able to build multiplayer for [console/other] platforms on a single system.” Also: “the Steam game analytics section [inc. the] median time metric will be reworked”, hopefully by EOY?

• PlayStation things: ahead of the GTA VI launch, “PS5 Pro is currently sold out across [U.S.] retailers online… it’s still available on PS Direct or at significant markups ($1,200+) from third party sellers”; State Of Play showcase is back on Thursday Sept. 3rd, inc. first & third-party games (and a warning about licensed music for co-streaming.)

• Not the cheeriest, but Kim Nordstrom’s post-Gamescom trend commentary is worth a peek: “Early Access looks pretty broken on PC… Ship a solid core loop immediately, or focus on quality with AA.” But here’s a plus: “Our global TAM is only 3.5B of 8.3B alive - 4B in a few years, maybe 5B in a decade-ish.” Number… go up?

• Former Gamefam founder/firebrand Joe Ferencz has opinions about Roblox’s algo changes to prioritize ‘highly retentive games’ vs. meme-y hits: “[Roblox] is a company looking at the greatest hit factory in the history of interactive entertainment and deciding the hits are the problem. The hits are not the problem. The hits are the product.”

• One thing that we missed in that BBC x Xbox Asha Sharma interview last week that The Verge picked up on: “We’ve been hard at work on a great next generation and a great family of devices for Helix, and we’ll share more soon.” Family of devices, huh? (Perhaps both first and third party-made ones, rather than multiple first-party?)

OUR SPONSOR: FirstLook Analytics + Engagement

You can see your wishlist count. You can’t see who’s behind it. FirstLook just launched Analytics + Engagement. Pins every session, retention cohort, playtime figure and custom event to the actual player who generated it, in-game and out.

Build a segment: five-plus sessions, back on day seven, five-star survey. It fills itself as players qualify. Then let it fire the beta key wave on its own, or ask the FirstLook agent to build the whole journey for you.

Free up to 100,000 player profiles, with free Unreal and Unity SDKs. Paid plans from $99/month: Request a demo.

What are the top new games of Gamescom 2026?

Like us, you’ve probably been tracking the many titles that got promoted in multiple ways (show floor, creator outreach, streaming showcases) at Gamescom 2026 in Germany last week. And thanks to GDCo Pro’s new Streaming Showcase Tracker (above, for ONL), we’re monitoring the Steam side of things in impeccable detail.

Here’s the streaming showcases we were monitoring last week, with an important caveat - some (with a *) haven’t reached the ‘7 day’ limit we compare wishlists against, so their numbers will still go up. Nonetheless, here’s the general direction of travel:

You may not be surprised to see Gamescom’s official Geoff Keighley-collab-ing Opening Night Live 2026 as the leading showcase. (It actually has >5x median wishlist increases than any other showcase.) So we’ll initially concentrate on that showcase’s charts, to see what made a big splash. Here’s the Top 15 games, by 7 day wishlist gain:

You can see a variety of titles crowding in here, including some very close to release, and also a bunch of new games. Some notes on them:

• New takes on existing IP were two of the top three games: Wizards Of The Coast’s new third-person ARPG using the D&D license, Warlock, came out at #1 (+375k wishlists), and a double-IP game - Lego x existing city-builder Cities Skylines, in LEGO Skylines - also got a ton of interest at #2 (+315k WLs).

• A strong showing for Asian devs is topped by Ananta: the anime open-world RPG published by NetEase hit #3 with +350k wishlists, and other strong AAA-looking titles from Asia include Arthurian ARPG Tides Of Annihilation (#11) and F2P creature-catcher Aniimo (#12). (There’s also two MiHoYo games, Nodusfall & Petit Planet, that aren’t going onto Steam soon, but have lots of interest.)

• The rest of the Top 10 has a fascinating mix of new & existing IP: there’s a rejigger of a hot old PC franchise (Heroes Of Might & Magic III Remake, +210k WLs), first-person cyberpunk-er No Law (+160k WLs), Paradox’s post-apoc grand strategy game Afterworld (+150k), and upcoming Metro & Rainbow Six titles.

If there’s a ‘feel’ across these titles, btw, there’s a lot of deeper, grittier titles in a variety of genres. To us: (non-cute) fantasy, post-apocalypse, cyberpunk, and distressed, ‘lived in’ worlds are in. (With some anime-ish & Lego exceptions, we’re not seeing bright, happy aesthetics in these charts. Every day is like Sunday, rite?)

BTW, it’s very notable that 65 of the 72 games mentioned in any way in Opening Night live had a Steam page at that point. (The only ones not: Worms, Nodusfall, 1001 Threads Of Mizan, Silver Palace, Monster Hunter Outlanders (mobile), Petit Planet, and Zoopunk, and >50% of these will get Steam pages in due course.)

Next, let’s look briefly at just the debuts we spotted in Opening Night Live. We see 17 of the top 50 announces in there that were (basically) brand new for the showcase:

We’ve already talked about a bunch of the Top 15-ranked, but there’s a ton of other interesting titles lower down: top-down ARPG Tarae: The Unbound, the Starship Troopers-y Exterminauts, fascinating-looking puzzle adventure Lofsong, roguelite PUBG expansion DED.NET, a new Rollercoaster Tycoon game, and more.

Since a lot of these games were blitzing Gamescom, they often appeared in multiple of the showcases - as well as talking to the press & sometimes on the show floor. And reminder: we don’t try to separate wishlist increases by showcase. (We’re just showing wishlists in the 7 days after the showcase, no matter how they turned up…)

Anyhow, a quick audit of the other showcases reveals a few uniques: the kinda adorable raccoon co-op-er Dumpster Gang and strategy/tower defense sequel Kingdom III: Rising Realms both added 50-70k wishlists while appearing in the longform 2-day Xbox showcase. (More like a magazine program, less of a trailerfest!)

But the Future Games Show @ Gamescom was more traditionally trailer-y, and in addition to overlap even with Xbox, showed unique games like hack & slasher Wolcen 2 and cozy tavern sim D&D: Long Rest Tavern, both of which started nicely with at least 50k more Steam wishlists. And that’s the shape of Gamescom - congrats, all…

GameDiscoverCo Show: Valve’s 30 years, checked

Last but not least, we’re back with The GameDiscover Show, ft. myself (Simon) and Post Games’ Chris Plante zipping through the stories of the week - sub to the podcast via Apple Music, Spotify & elsewhere (audio), with a video version on YouTube (above).

On this episode, we talk about Valve's 30 year anniversary and the inexorable (?) rise of Steam as a platform, ruminate on Battle.net getting third-party game additions with The Witcher 3, examine a change to more personalized midweek deals on Steam, and discuss how hit PC game genres have changed since 2021. Check it…

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

Welcome to ‘the tail end of Gamescom week’, and yep, it’s busy for new game reveals: GameFile rounded up the high-profile Opening Night Live handily, and you should also peep Future Games Show’s line-up, the Xbox Games Showcase Pt. 1 and Pt.2, and more. (We’ll have more on this next week, for those obsessed with who did the best.)

And before we finish up with Gamescom, a million points to whoever designed the ARC Raiders show-floor booth for Embark - apparently you’re running around it like you’re inside the game? Sounds like more fun than staring at monitors, to us…

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

Game discovery news: Onimusha’s demo goes big

So, let’s take a look at the latest game discovery & platform news, which appears to be the following:

• GDCo Pro’s top Steam demos for unreleased games (above) is headed by an expanded demo for Capcom's much-anticipated Onimusha: Way Of The Sword, then continued hits Guildrun (#2) & Nomad Drive (#3). (Two massive Betas, for CoD: Modern Warfare 4 (115k CCU) and for Wardogs (106k CCU) also happened...)

• Xbox things: the ‘physical disc to digital item’ program is here, testable by Xbox Insiders on Aug. 31st; Windows Central has some more details, inc. that most (tho not all) Xbox Series & Xbox One discs are compatible; Asha Sharma chatted to the BBC that Xbox needs to be "thinking about" affordability for its next console.

• About that ‘Battle.net getting more third-party games’ rumor? Blizzard just announced a collab with CD Projekt to bring The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt — Remastered to the PC platform, as well as “gain access to a Geralt-themed skin in Diablo IV” if you buy it on there. (It’s like the ‘Fortnite skins’ move on EGS…)

• Steam has an archive of their latest Next Fest video Q&A, with Ria Hu saying re: common dev mistakes: “People rush so much to get everything in order for Next Fest that they don’t have or… take the time to step back and say, ‘Okay, what am I really presenting to customers?’” (Getting a third party to poke at your store page is key.)

• We’re also publishing GDCo Twitch game chart analysis onto LinkedIn, and top games watched (released in last 6 months, 7 days to Aug 28th!) include Souls-like Mortal Shell II, fish&gun friendslopper How To Fish and basketball game NBA 2K27 as the only new games with >2m hours watched, last 7 days. (More within..)

• Microlinks: PlayStation Plus’ monthly games for September inc. Sniper Elite: Resistance, MLB The Show 26, and Wobbly Life; Google talks about its 15 years of AI research in games (inc. EVE Online newness); some rare data on micro-indies being ported to console ($15k console rev. for a racer, $3-4k for smaller games.)

• Discord’s doing more in-depth collabs, inc. Play Quest+ with Battlefield 6, where “players who accept the Quest and link their Discord and EA accounts can complete a gameplay objective to unlock rewards”, while “progress is automatically updated in Discord as users play.” (Also: Bloons TD6 and Rust items buyable direct in Discord.)

• Y’know how console manufacturers are getting U.S. tariff refunds but don’t intend to refund buyers? Well, buyers of Panic’s Playdate handheld are getting $ back, aided by all Playdates being bought D2C (easier refund tracking…) Refunding $12.36 “felt like the fair thing to do”, says Panic. (Much respect.)

• Two mini-updates on previous stories: looks like EA pulled its digital data from Circana (after going private) at the same time Xbox did; and ‘shovelware-adjacent’ PlayStation publisher Ternox (of STONKS-9800 fame) had its publisher access restored, after Sony evidently decided it was on the right side of the line.

• Aftermath has been speaking to some indies about Steam’s relatively opaque adult content eval pipeline: “For [Perfect Tides: Station To Station dev Meredeith] Gran, after she submitted her build full of the sex scenes, Steam took ‘probably about two weeks’ to get back to her, during which she was ‘sweating.’”

• Microlinks, Pt. 2: talking of tariffs, the Trump admin is looking at new U.S. semi-conductor tariffs that could include game consoles; mobile D2C (App Store cut-avoiding) $ got big, with 20-50% off-platform for some firms; Fields Of Mistria players really want polyamory in the game, per a fun Discord server analysis.

OUR SPONSOR: indie.io: Making a game and handling your own marketing and development too?

We’ve published games for years, and we built tools out of that experience to help indie developers with exactly that.

From an ad manager to localization to a press kit builder and everything in between.
All self-serve, all free to use.

Whether you’re prepping a launch or already shipping, get started at indie.io/start.

Hearth & Hamlet’s ~100k & the rise of the bite-sized clicker...

You may have noticed us covering more <$10 games, often by solo or tiny devs, on GDCo recently. Why? It’s mainly because were ‘following the players’, and a notably large percentage of these turn up in our top new games of the week on Steam by CCU.

One trend we’ve definitely noticed is the rise of the incremental genre which - to quote Wikipedia, is “a video game subgenre characterized by the incremental accumulation of in-game resources, and gradual, often exponential progression through repetitive actions or automation.” Two recent things made us look further at the space.

Firstly, HTMAG has some great mini-profiles on recent indie incremental hits in different genres, inc. on Sir, We Have An Orc Problem ($10, 4 month dev, 230k units est., incremental tower defense w/huge # of enemies) & on Bills Must Be Paid ($7, 7 month dev, 420k units est., incremental piggie bank-smashin’!)

And secondly, Polden’s Kirill Oreshkin singled out incremental games as a major new trend on Steam, saying: “I decided to research some incremental [PC] games I hadn’t played before…. Holy shit…You can’t stop playing. You’re hooked immediately.” (He calls them ‘hypercasual’, which is another possible name for this genre on PC…)

Anyhow, before we draw more conclusions, we have one particular game to analyze - Phorust Studios & Runic Forge’s Hearth & Hamlet ($8), “a medieval citybuilder clicker that blends resource management, in-depth upgrade trees and relaxing idle gameplay.” Aidan McGrath at Rune was kind enough to provide us current stats for the 9-day old game:

That’s pretty darn good for a title made by a solo dev from Australia, who works a dayjob as a teacher. We imagine it’ll gross >$2m in the medium term? Other key points around the game:

• Aidan tells us that “the game actually started as a fun incremental for [the dev’s] class at school to play”, and its biggest inspirations are Cast N Chill (for vibes), Ropuka’s Idle Island, Microcivilization and Tower Wizard.

• Median playtime of 7 hours 20 minutes is spectacular, given it’s so early in the game’s lifecycle & the game takes 8-12 hours to complete in total…

• Regionally, the U.S. is 23% of the units, followed by China (14.5%), Germany (13%), Japan (6%), Korea (5%), the UK, Canada, and Taiwan (4%), and down from there. (Having a regional sub-publisher, Gamersky, probably helped in Asia..)

And there’s a wider point, as Aidan from Rune explained to us: “We’ve seen a shift towards incrementals that are more ‘active’ - where, rather than idling, players are actually playing the game.” This has been the revelation to me - that a lot of incremental games are highly distilled, strong game-loop ‘number go up’ takes on specific genres.

Hearth & Hamlet is an interesting case. If you look at the above screenshot, you might think you design the paths and place the buildings by hand. But as the dev explains: “The city layout is completely predetermined. Think of it as assembling a pre-designed diorama. This is intentional as it is designed as a more relaxing incremental approach.”

Rune’s McGrath agrees that this “led to some weird expectations.... a substantial portion of our negative reviews are specifically non-idle players, who wanted a stronger city-builder experience.” But we think the game picked up a lot of attention due to its looks & playability, and it’s hanging at 79% Positive Steam user reviews, which ain’t shabby.

Oh, and a bonus, since everyone loves annotated wishlist graphs? The game hit >200k Steam wishlists by launch, aided by a popular demo, and here’s the rundown, per Rune

So, some conclusions: the rise of the LitRPG as a book genre proves that today’s ‘media consumers’ love progression as a key part of their experience. And we think the promise of these incremental games - sub-$10 price, strong hook, a blessedly finite experience - are a big win for players plagued with a backlog of 50-hour long games.

Another key point is low(er) barriers to entry. I liked Kirill Oreshkin’s take on this: “You sit down to play, a… tutorial begins, and your brain goes: ‘Aaaaargh! Effort! Don’t want effort! Want to play! Don’t want to learn!’ Sometimes you’re simply out of energy and looking for rest in a game.” Maybe games like this are… what many players actually want?

This week on Steam: Zero Company, MGS do gud!

Read more