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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Steam Summer Sale winners, next week’s notables

Read more

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

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

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

Game discovery news: cat mail is the best mail…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Look, we have to talk about Meccha Chameleon…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

GameDiscoverCo Show: hardware, Next Fest, more

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Game discovery news: Steam Machine dream…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This week on Steam: SAND & Empulse both land…

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

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

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

Game discovery news: EGS gets feature aggro…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ANNOUNCE: the GameDiscoverCo Show is here..

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Game discovery news: GTA VI pre-order panic…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How Steam’s personal calendar is blowing up…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This week on Steam: Zenless, Elliot, Application…

Read more

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

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

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

Game discovery news: the Final Fantasy rises…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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What Twitch data adds to the game discovery pic…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Game discovery news: Backrooms x backrooms..

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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What top games, showcases hit during SGF 2026?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This week on Steam: Meccha, Solarpunk, Gnomes!

Read more

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

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

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

Game disco news: some games got announced…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

OUR SPONSOR: Player.gg x Summer Game Fest

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

How Project Zomboid hit ‘evergreen’ stealthily…

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

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

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

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

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

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

Seven key reasons for Project Zomboid’s success?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Fixed towels not getting wet in the rain

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Game discovery news: 007 Calls the Witcher back

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This week on Steam: Gothic’s remake arrives large

Read more

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

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

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

GDCo news: mecha mecha Meccha Chameleon…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Why ‘hobbyists’ are a bigger disruptor than AI…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Game discovery news: 007, Forza top the hype…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The state of Quest VR game discovery in 2026…

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

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

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

• core VR enthusiasts

• teens and young adults drawn to social gameplay loops

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Steam this week: 007’s new Romestead Paralives…

Read more

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

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

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

Game discovery news: Warhammer skulls it up…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Player age, and game discovery ramifications…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Game discovery news: Forza, Subnautica 2 hit it…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Finding the ‘secret new Steam winners’ of April…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oaken Tower: async autobattler brings the game loop…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read more

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

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

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

Game discovery news: shortform hits are trending

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Early Access graduates in 2026: what happened?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Steam’s tag changes: what should you know?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Game discovery news: Forza Horizon 6 looms large

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Steam this week: Subnautica 2 dredges up gold!

Read more

Well, it’s time to explore PC/console game discovery again, whether you like it or not - and today, we’re poking around somewhere angels fear to tread: is ‘get lots of wishlists and hope’ actually the best method of creating a successful game launch in 2026?

Before we start, we hadn’t spotted that the NYU Game Center has been putting a bunch of its guest lectures online, and we really enjoyed Getting Over It & Baby Steps’ Bennett Foddy talking about his provocative, masocore game design style: “I particularly love it feeling like life or death when you’re trying to do something normal.”

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

Game discovery news: Stranger than Subnautica?

Let’s kick things off by vigorously probing the game platform & discovery news of the week so far, like so:

• According to GDCo Pro's 'trending' unreleased Steam games by 'new wishlists in the last 7 days', May 4th to 11th, underwater survival sequel Subnautica 2 (out this week!) is safely at #1, and Forza Horizon 6 - out next week - is also booming again at #3 (and getting a lot of pre-orders - we have it at 950k on Steam alone.)

• New entry-wise, we see Stranger Than Heaven (#2), the latest epic ARPG title from the devs of Yakuza, WWI trench warfare simulator Dig In (#6), and awaited shooter sequel Aliens: Fireteam Elite 2 (#8). Also: there’s a surge for Soviet kiosk sim with open playtest, I Have No Change (#5) - quite a diverse set of genres.

• Xbox and Discord officially announced their Game Pass collab, including “a starter edition of Xbox Game Pass” with 50+ games & 10 hours of cloud play, part of the new Nitro Rewards bonuses for paid Discord subs. (Game Pass subscribers also get extra Discord orbs monthly and when completing quests - it’s symbiotic.)

• Much confusion on Forza Horizon 6 getting leaked & pirated on PC early. Not the facts (it has!), but claims of Playground Games making pre-load files playable early were denied by the dev. It’s the third recent AAA game to get a pre-release hack, with Death Stranding 2 and Pragmata also getting pirated before release.

• Our 2c on the leak: we think a Steam reviewer key (or token/file manifest?) got to pirates for FH6. (So does SteamDB, which rather awkwardly got donated a token for the full game around the time this blew up.) Outside chance of a Steam or encryption hack, but human-level failure (influencer/reviewer hack?) seems likely.

• Roblox’s top titles on the platform for April 2026 included anime-ish ARPG Sailor Piece - which hangs out around 400,000 CCU - making it all the way to #1 for the on minutes played (and #5 on monetization.) Related: PC Gamer interviewed the Roblox-native dev of current Top 10 survival title 99 Nights In The Forest.

• Nintendo results aftermath: the company is forecasting Switch 2 hardware sales down from 19.9 million (this year) to 16.5 million units (next year), and the new hardware price “does not fully account for all cost increases”. (Unrelated: we dug it that their Switch price increase PR also included $ changes for hanafuda cards.)

• After we talked about the Popular Upcoming section of the new Steam Beta UI, it appears that it’s been further shifted to show “a select set of the top games coming out in the next few days”, vs. the Popular Upcoming-style view. (If it ships, some devs will miss a pre-launch wishlist bump, tho we’re not sure they were HQ ones.)

• PlayStation results aftermath: the game division saw profits up 11% to $2.9b for the fiscal year, even with a $760m writedown on the Bungie acquisition. But it’s forecasting revenue down in FY2026, since “we plan to base our PS5 hardware sales in FY26 on the volume of memory we can procure at reasonable prices.” (More squeeze.)

• The Verge has gone in-depth on Netflix’s new ‘TV games first’ strategy, suggesting the “tab at the top of the app alongside movies and television” without quitting out makes them feel way more seamless, and concluding: “Games are no longer a separate service Netflix operates, they’re just part of Netflix.”

• Microlinks: Twitch is punishing streamers who use viewbots by capping their concurrent viewership; Steam recently added more detailed docs on the Roadmap image feature on Steam; “It took Apple 98 days to remove an infringing game after receiving my DMCA notice”, vs. 1-7 days for Roblox.

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Launch success on Steam: correlating metrics?

Look, it’s simple: more people are interested in your PC game, then you get more Steam wishlists, and then when you launch, the game’s a big hit. Just go get more wishlists and you’ll be fiiiine. It’s all about ‘number go up’. Riiight?

Except: as we’ve proven with analysis: “The idea of wishlist ‘conversions’ on Steam as some kind of reliable metric is near-fatally flawed. Why? Because the performance range of ‘wishlists at launch’ compared to ‘sales at the end of Week 1*’ varies by 10-20x, not 10-20%.”

How do we project slightly more certainty into that outcome? At GameDiscoverCo, we do delve into why individual games were a hit. But we don’t as a rule, try to predict outcomes. However, in chatting to Lumo Publishing’s Steve Stopps recently, we realized there are absolutely things you can metricize that might correlate - in part.

And the first one of these we wanted to highlight was Steam follower to wishlist multiplier. Chris Z has a brief explainer of the metrics, but the follower button on Steam allows players to see more info about a game in their activity feed & news hub.

You can see public follower counts, and extrapolate wishlist numbers (or see them directly, if you’re the dev of a title.) So you can get to a multiplier, which we’ve documented before and was a median of 1 follower for every 9.6 wishlists in 2021, and 1 follower for every 12 wishlists in 2023.

The claim Steve made - which we’ve nodded along to in the past, but hadn’t explored, was that the higher your ‘follower to wishlist’ multiplier, the lower the conversion for your game. Why? Because wishlists without a follow are likely to be more ‘casual’ in nature. (Also perhaps: most inorganic calls-to-action are wishlist-first, nowadays.)

So we grabbed games released in the last 12 months with >50k wishlists, and - removing the biggest outliers - mapped that multiplier (X axis) with success in terms of outperformance of expected conversion metrics (Y axis). And indeed, you can see a downward tilt to the ‘line of best fit’ as the ‘follower to wishlist’ multiplier goes up:

To give a couple of recent examples, Subnautica 2 is out tomorrow, and is at 5 million wishlists and 352,000 followers, a 14.2x multiplier - and below the 16.1x median. It’s also a meaty, in-depth title. So - no reason to hint at underperformance from that.

On the other hand, RV crafter Outbound came out yesterday and debuted with 1.22 million wishlists and 64k followers, a 19x multiplier. Based on current CCU metrics (max 6k), it may struggle to get to a median conversion of 200k units in Month 1 - though still do decently.

Steve Stopps also analyzed GameDiscoverCo Pro data on around 5,000 games released in 2025 - a much broader range. And here’s a subset of his data on ‘follower to wishlist multiplier’ vs. lifetime sales, showing that games with higher multiplier do worse:

Needless to say, there’s all kind of issues with generalizing on these stats. For example, according to our data, RV There Yet? had a sky-high 42x follower to wishlist multiplier and still sold 3.7m copies in Month 1, haha. But here’s how we think about it:

• Does your game have a very casual audience? If you’re friendslop-adjacent, or Escape Simulator 2, it’s expected to have an above-median ‘follower to wishlist’ multiplier. These games also have sky-high ‘reviews to sales’ multipliers - players are parachuting in to play the game, not mess with Steam features.

• If not casual, but a high multiplier, beware & examine forecasts: Not picking on them, but less casual games we can see with high follower-to-wishlist multipliers like Death By Scrolling, Keeper or Skate Story failed to outperform median expectations. (They still did fiiine, but not as well as the devs might have hoped.)

• Low multipliers are good, because people are strapped in for the ride: you don’t get 10% of wishlisters signing up for news unless legit interested! The 100 highest-multiplier games in GDCo’s 600+ game sample with >50k launch wishlists have median ‘launch wishlist balance to month 1 sales’ conversion of 0.22x. But the lowest 100 have a median of 0.37x - that’s 68% better.

Of course, the problem here is there’s WAY too many variables. Outbound, for example, had crazy-good shortform video reach. But maybe many of those people were maybe a) wishlisting the general idea of ‘RV chill times’, not the exact game b) more onboard with paying RV There Yet?-ish prices of $8, than the $23 it launched at.

Or it could be a price/execution combo. Though many Outbound players turned up to try the demo, with a max CCU of over 3,500, the game just slipped to Mixed reviews, another thing that will dampen sales. Steve Stopps also provided us with select data on this idea, showing that poor reviews drop sales by 2-5x over time:

Anyhow, the general point here is: maybe it’s not OK to just say ‘we’re going for max wishlists, and let’s plug in median conversion numbers!’ Some of the things you might want to take into account, besides ‘follower to wishlist’ multiplier and review estimates, are:

• Active/repeated demo players: in addition to CCU, are people engaging and re-engaging with a demo version? What’s the NPS score for players?

• Discord & community activity & sentiment: we often look at Steam forum traffic pre-release, particularly volume. And Discord server data is very helpful.

• Organic influencer activity: are people excited - when not incented - to talk about your game in visual formats? This is a biggie & should have high weighting.

• What’s wishlist momentum coming into launch? Are we seeing the game in the Top 20 for new wishlist adds for multiple weeks, or is it stumbling into launch? You might also consider ‘wishlists added per month’ instead of ‘total wishlists’.

Not sure if anyone is doing this yet, but we could see a matrix of all of these factors changing first week/month conversion estimates across a portfolio. We haven’t been keen to do it en masse, because there are so many outliers that we will regularly look stupid. (And you may end up maths-ing yourself to death.) But there’s hints here…

Top streamed, April: Overwatch not underwatched

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

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

• Overwatch continues to move forward, as others step back: five of the top seven games had marginal decreases, but Blizzard’s Overwatch continues good results after its Feb. rebrand, with 15.1% growth to 46 million hours watched at #6, sneaking past DOTA 2 and Fortnite. (Did the Underwatch April Fools gag help?)

• Rust blasted into the Top 10 for the first time in >18 months: the brutal survival game had 39 million hours watched, a 265% increase from April. That’s partly due to one particular creator: TheBurntPeanut, who set up a new server, so was watched playing Rust on Twitch for 8.4 million hours (!) during the month.

• Nintendo-related games - and Windrose - topped debuts: specifically, quirky life sim Tomodachi Life hit 21.6 million hours watched (#19), followed by a Twitch Rivals-enhanced mobile/Switch F2P debut Pokémon Champions (#24, 16.9m). Also big? Steam piratical hit Windrose (#26, 14.7m) and Pragmata (#33, 11.7m.)

Further down the charts, a couple of games that hit 1.0 on Steam did make it in - PvE tactical FPS Gray Zone Warfare (#56) and survival game Soulmask (#88), showing that Early Access graduates can still summon up new mojo under positive circumstances!

[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 Friday! As we finished this missive, news of Nintendo putting Switch 2 prices up by $50 to $500 (and by a higher % in Japan) just hit, alongside PlayStation’s results that saw PS5 “ship 1.5m units this quarter, down from 2.8m last year.” (We’ll have more on Tuesday, but console crunches continue…)

And before we start, it’s back: “This year’s My Famicase Exhibition [in Tokyo] features 250 art pieces of fictional games, displayed on physical Nintendo Famicom game cartridges”, and Super Punch rounds up successful designs (more on Instagram), including one, Mecha Mech by GameDiscoverCo logo/website designer VictoryOverAll (congrats!)

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

Game discovery news: overexcited about GTA, eh?

Let’s finish things out for this week by looking at mucho game platform and discovery news, like this:

• According to ICO’s Footprints.gg and its ‘trad media’ coverage, GTA 6 hit the top spot again thanks to Take Two’s Strauss Zelnick saying not-much in multiple interviews. (But it’s still on schedule!) Also hot: PlayStation exclusive Saros, Xbox’s multiplatform hit-in-the-making Forza 6, Subnautica 2, and more…

• Xbox’s new boss Asha Sharma is making major exec changes,“bringing over execs from the CoreAI engineering group where she worked before, along with a director at her previous company, Instacart.” But there’ll be less AI in the product, as Xbox will “begin winding down Copilot on mobile and will stop development of Copilot on console.”

• Fresh via the Curran Games Agency, we have a new pricing tool for Steam games to try out, with Cassia Curran noting of the underlying data: “If few reviewers mention a game's price (neither complaining nor gushing over great value), it's likely to have higher revenues and is probably priced correctly.”

• Some new stats from an IGN & friends report polling ‘highly committed’ fans: “38% of Millennials (people aged 30 – 44) and 42% of Gen Z (those aged 14 – 29) said they still buy full-price games, but only 20% Gen X (people aged 46 – 61) said they would.” There’s a lot of discounted games & not a lot of time, folks…

• After rampant site errors during the Steam Controller’s debut, Valve is instituting a reservation queue for upcoming Controller purchases, like Steam Deck, a ‘good idea’: “Once you reserve, your place in line will be saved. When we go back in stock, order emails will be sent in the same order that reservations were made.”

• In ‘surprising platforms investing in games’ news, Google Deepmind is partly behind EVE Online parent CCP spinning off Pearl Abyss, with Deepmind’s Demis Hassabis excited to: “advance AI research safely inside a player-driven universe as amazingly complex as EVE Online.” (Via those famously normal EVE Online players.)

• Discovery trend news: an analysis on why ‘tavern games’ are hot - “12 [out of] 22 of the released games made over $100k”; a look at how IndieGameJoe has been making game promo Tweets go viral - yes, in 2026; good analysis of announcing real-time roguelite strategy game Everfront - spoiler, it was r/godot which did best for ‘em!

• Steam oddities: did you know the More Like This game page recommendations, like New & Trending, seems to be subtly region-specific? (It’ll be 80-90% similar worldwide, but with slight changes in the UK vs. the U.S., for example?) We had to change our recent write-up and Pro data labeling to indicate as much….

• Windows vs. SteamOS news: while an Ars Technica editorial suggests: “the RAMpocalypse has bought Microsoft valuable time in the fight against SteamOS”, Windows Central has a piece on ‘Windows K2’, noting Microsoft “is working to optimize the platform so.. steamOS and Windows gaming performance are comparable.”

• Here’s some interesting analysis of Discord server sentiment behind recent hits such as Far Far West, Road To Vostok & Crimson Desert, with the main takeaway that Crimson Desert apparently forgot to hire strong moderators: “Users reported frequent arguments over religion, racism, and [players] asking for free game codes.”

• Microlinks: Xbox just put out a dev update showcasing video from its GDC 2026 Project Helix session; analysis on how Roblox is trying to “rebalance away from kids”; Microsoft’s Xbox Mode hits Windows 11 PCs for “a controller-focused full screen experience.”

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How Far, Far West sold >500k units in <2 weeks...

We’ve mentioned it a couple of times recently, but wanted to dive deeper into robo-Western co-op roguelite horde shooter Far Far West ($20), which has officially announced 500,000 copies sold on Steam since its April 28th release, but we suspect is over 750k and heading towards a million units. (A huge deal in today’s market.)

This wasn’t a ‘surprise hit’ - in the sense that GDCo estimates the game launched with close to 650k Steam wishlists. And a lot of them were strong, organic ones based on two Steam playtests - which hit 2,400 and 9,400 CCU - and a Feb. 2026 Next Fest appearance that saw it rank #5 on Valve’s ‘unique players’ chart from 3,500 games.

But there’s plenty to talk about, and we caught up with the devs (Evil Raptor’s CEO/lead dev Nico Meyssonnier) and publisher (Fireshine’s Rob Feather) to do just that. First, courtesy of Rob, here’s an annotated pre-release wishlists chart:

There’s definitely a takeaway here - the playtests & Next Fest demo were hot stuff for boosting interest. But there’s also plenty of showcase appearances and streamer / shortform reachouts & activations in there - it’s not just ‘demo & done’.

But before we get deeper into the marketing analysis, let’s talk about the game. Why is it popular? We have some ideas:

• ‘Fun with friends’ masks a well-honed lite extraction PvE shooter: this Steam review is particularly helpful. There’s clear Deep Rock Galactic & Helldivers 2 eachoes - co-op on an RNG map with objectives, boss, extract - but “lack of a hard time limit as long as you don't defeat the boss” means you can doof around more.

• The dev has been ‘set free’ by a move to a less linear structure: talking to Nico, whose 8-person team also made linear 3D platformers Akimbot & Pumpkin Jack, this iteration of Far Far West “is actually the third”, with the first being tower defense and #2 being a Left 4 Dead-y “linear, mission-based game.” Going RNG sandbox-y is unlocking player ‘possibility space’ and big growth for them…

• The ‘haunted magic Wild West robot’ theme really helps: Nico says the team took a speck of inspiration from Overwatch on the cowboy/robot crossover, but the “history, legends, landscapes [and] special mood” of going Wild West with a twist is a big part of the draw, and the team’s take on the worldbuilding is on point.

Beyond that, there’s an alchemy you can see in the 4-minute Far Far West microreview I link above: there’s interesting upgrades for combo-able weapons, a ton of fun micro-objectives to go after on randomly generated maps (lots of variety!), and a soul collecting system for meta-progression. Despite a small dev team, it feels expansive.

And there’s a lot of player praise for the animations, visuals and ‘game feel’, which is interesting, because the environments themselves - outside of the hub towns - are fairly minimal. But concentrate on what players actually do & that’s what matters?

Just getting some of Far Far West’s underlying data points out of the way: GDCo sees the game as U.S.-led (28% of players), with China at 8% and the UK, Canada, Germany, the Russian Federation & Brazil all in the 3-5% range - it’s an international hit.

Also notable - here’s GDCo Pro’s overlap/affinity data sorted specifically by highest game overlap with >8x Affinity Multiplier. In this list, Far Far West players are more than 8x as likely to have played that game than the average Steam player:

Finally, we wanted to talk about how well the pre-release playtests went for Far Far West. We talked to both Rob (Fireshine) and Nico (Evil Raptor) about this, and it was clear it fueled the game’s success majorly. We found Rob’s explanation of how they rolled out playtests particular helpful:

“A week before each ‘playable beat’, a few hundred VIP community members jumped in so we could gather feedback and tighten the build. Four days before, our newsletter list got a code. Two days before, the whole Far Far West Discord community could claim keys. Each layer gave us real data, more polish time, and a growing pool of people excited to share the game.

The playtest then went fully open alongside a feature in an online showcase, with ‘play now’ as the CTA across all our updated assets. Around the same time, we brought a few creators on board and supported the moment with some paid ads and short‑form videos.

This tiered access and community management built hype for the game/playtest while also allowing us to test and polish the build before it went fully public. It also greatly engaged the community, incentivizing them to stick around to get early access to future playable beats.”

Lead dev Nico added of the ‘playtest, listen to players, iterate’ approach: “This is the first time we’ve made a game with an ‘open dev’ approach…. to be honest, this was the best idea we’ve ever had for the game.. I must say it’s very enjoyable as a developer to have a constructive & straightforward relationship with the players!”

And Fireshine’s Rob explained the virtuous cycle from playtest success, noting the “huge positive response” led to a lot of organic streamer & shortform video support, and big wins via the Steam algorithm in platform support for Discovery Queue, ‘because you played’ recommendations, and even ‘More Like This’ (rare for pre-release games.)

Concluding: it sure looks to us like Far Far West hit an under-served part of the market (for well-executed games!), bringing some really nice, slightly goofier/lighter flavor to co-op looter/extraction games. And all done with a compact team, too. Small teams making games that ‘feel’ big and expansive: it’s the theme of the year?

New on Steam: Everything’s Farever Dead as Crab?

Read more

Well, new week, new email newsletter, that’s what we always say. And we’re back to take a look at the top new game releases of April 2026 across PC and console, as well as the other titles tearing up the charts, even weeks after their release. It’s… fun?

Before we start, the article ‘What you can’t say in a [Sega] Saturn game’ brings max nostalgia, since we forgot arcade game high-scores’ ‘censorship’ to stop delinquents putting SEX or FUK as their name. (The piece documents what Virtua Fighter, Decathlete & more replace them with - there’s even an Aum Shinrikyo-related entry.)

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

Game discovery news: hi, Black Flag, Zero Sievert 2

Let’s start out by examining the game platform & discovery news that erupted since late last week:

• Checking GDCo Pro's 'trending' unreleased Steam games by 'new wishlists in the last 7 days’, the Assassin's Creed Black Flag remake is #1 again, close to 800k wishlists swiftly, and underwater survival sequel Subnautica 2's confirmed release date (May 14th!) has vaulted it up to #2, as it tops 4 million wishlists.

• Elsewhere, Witcher-y vampire ARPG The Blood Of Dawnwalker hits #4 thanks to confirmed Sept release date & preorders. New entries: Polish influencer-led survival game Painland (#5) and top-down extraction shooter sequel Zero Sievert 2 (#7), (It’s following up a cleverly pitched game with >600k copies sold on Steam.)

• The Steam Controller debuted yesterday for $99 and quickly sold out, but as GameSpot notes: “It became extremely difficult to snag one before it went out of stock due to payment processing errors.” (Valve says stock “ran out sooner than expected”). Also: Valve has been showcasing the Steam Input Configurator for easy mapping.

• A recent Circana survey of U.S. gamers about why they play consoles had ‘for exclusives’ at the top of the response heap, at 41% (down 8% year on year, tho!) Also hot and happening: ‘friends & family also play console’ (38%), ‘easier to play with friends/family’ (37%), and ‘prefer to play in living room’ (down 4% to 36%).

• Roblox has been playing up Roblox Reality tech “to combine hyperscale multiplayer gaming with photorealism”, using AI to build much better-looking environments on top of existing levels. (The CEO did note that “This will not be free. This will use cloud compute. We will have some kind of way of subscribing or paying for this.”)

• There’s a notably strong set of upcoming May games for Xbox Game Pass, including the much anticipated first-party racing game Forza Horizon 6, plus Subnautica 2 (on Day 1 in Game Preview) - plus Day 1 arrivals for Mixtape and Call Of The Elder Gods.

• ICYMI: GameStop’s latest ‘cosplaying a real company for meme stock purposes’ move is announcing a bid to buy eBay, though it’s extremely unclear they have access to enough capital to do a deal. (But hey, if it happens, it’s the only way they will be able to make money on the new Steam controller.)

• One notable platform-y stat pointed out in Paradox’s latest financials: 97.4% of the company’s PC game revenue in the Crusader Kings makers’ latest quarter was ‘Steam platform’. We presume they’re counting third-party key sales in there. (80% of Paradox’s total revenue is from PC, 16% from console and the rest from mobile.)

• Have trouble keeping up with game media, esp. YouTube channels, podcasts, etc, but also websites? Us too! So thanks to Chris Plante (who interviewed me for his podcast Post Game a while back) for making ‘An Incomplete Catalogue of Games Media in 2026’. (Lots of gooood links in there…)

• Steam has a new video Q&A recording up about June’s Next Fest, confirming that they are sticking with the ‘random games served at players until Thurs 10am and then machine learning-based recommendations’ algorithmic approach. (They also say the recommendation algo uses wishlisting trends, and doesn’t use demo playtime.)

• Microlinks: Disney’s new CEO is exploring a ‘super app’ that might include games; Bethesda has just released Switch 2 ‘code in a box’ physicals of Fallout 4 & Skyrim (not even game key-card?); Xbox is bringing automatic ‘super resolution’ upscaling to the ROG Xbox Ally X handheld.

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April’s top new PC & console games, revealed…

We do these every month, and learn things every time, so we bet you do too! It’s GameDiscoverCo’s top new Steam (& console) games of the month, powered by our Pro data - here’s March, Feb and Jan’s, if you missed ‘em. Here’s the top-line #s:

• Windrose was the standout new Steam game of the month: not surprising if you followed its strong wishlist (>1.3m at launch!) & demo (>22,000 CCU) performance, but the PvE pirate survival adventure hit ~1.65m sold from April 14th to month end. It’s hanging at 100k concurrents too, implying it’ll sell many more millions…

• Pragmata and Vampire Crawlers also circled the ‘1m units’ milestone: Capcom’s long-in-dev action title Pragmata hit 1m on PC and another 600k+ on console (majority PlayStation!) And unique Vampire Survivors first-person deckbuilder follow-up Vampire Crawlers rode a 6x lower price point to ~900k in just 10 days.

• Two late-month releases surged after the end of April: just calling out co-op robot cowboy romp Far Far West (released April 28th), already at >750k copies sold LTD (but 275k in April). And similarly, Heroes Of Might & Magic: Olden Era (out April 30th!) is at ~650k copies sold (and ~180k in the few hours after launch.)

There’s some other notable small-team titles further down the charts too, including survival game Road To Vostok (~250k, discussed later) and hybrid tower-defense/miner The Spotter (>100k).

One notable thing about this month’s top new Steam games? Of the ten titles that sold >100k, only one of them - Heroes Of Might & Magic - was based directly on an existing IP. (Although Vampire Survivors/Crawlers was an indirect sequel.) In today’s market, that’s relatively rare: March had 5+, Feb had at least 3…

Looking at the Top 10 new games on Steam by gross revenue, it’s Windrose and Pragmata which dominate the Top 2 spots with nearly $40m in gross Steam revenue within a few days, thanks to price point ($30 and $60, respectively).

But jazz age cartoon FPS (nice angle!) Mouse: P.I. For Hire rode its $30 price point to ~350k units and $10m in gross revenue on Steam alone, and we think it picked up decent accretive sales numbers across PlayStation (>125k), Switch (>75k), and Xbox (>50k) also, thanks to its Cuphead-styled whimsy.

Next, let’s go check out top-selling Steam games of all kinds (by units, paid only) in April, since there’s some interlopers from previous months:

• Slay The Spire 2 piles on another 1.35m more units: we now have the iconic PC-only $25 roguelike deckbuilder sequel - which released on March 4th - at around 6.7 million copies sold in total, about 62% of whose players also own the OG game.

• Crimson Desert’s another March release with strong April sales: the giant $70 ARPG added 800k+ units on Steam alone, and is now over 5 million units worldwide (~3m+ on/off Steam, ~500k Xbox, 1.5m+ PlayStation, we estimate.)

• Multiple other smaller indies made it onto the units chart: specifically, $12 coin-pusher roguelike Raccoin, which launched March 31st, we see at >500k units, and $7 scratchcard-themed incremental game Scritchy Scratchy, originally out March 18th, added >350k units and has nearly 900k at this point.

BTW, we’re not talking about BidKing much ‘cos it’s a $3 China-first multiplayer auction game with mostly Negative reviews, and all its recent updates are about exploiters/cheaters, and there’s money-laundering claims too. But it’s in the charts!

And here’s the top-grossing games for the month, including F2P titles, with Counter-Strike 2 inevitably at #1 with >$150m, followed by F2P titles like PUBG ($62m) and Apex Legends ($44m) in the Top 5.

Crimson Desert, Windrose, and Pragmata are also in the mix with $40-$50m gross, and you’ll also see Warframe and Marvel Rivals in the Top 10, grossing close to $20m - as is Forza Horizon 6, thanks to pre-orders! (We have the Japan-set racing sequel’s total Steam pre-orders alone at nearly 700k units and almost $50m in revenue.)

Finishing off with console, does the fact that we only have one graphical chart for you indicate it was a bit of a slow month, overall? We decided to just print the PlayStation paid Top 5 by units:

For new PlayStation games, Pragmata led things with >400k units, including quite a bit of interest via consoles linked to Hong Kong/China (>20% of players) and Japan (almost 10%). (Often nowadays, games that scale on PlayStation - like Resident Evil titles - have good international reach outside of Europe and the U.S.)

Bethesda franchise Starfield saw ~175k PlayStation players after its April 6th PS5 release - a fraction of total players, but an extra $9m in handy incremental revenue. Mouse, Hades II and Saros were ~100k players - tho Saros launched Apr. 29th and is now at >150k. New PlayStation Plus titles were headed by Lords Of The Fallen (1.2m!)

Otherwise, moving on to Xbox, Pragmata was the biggest selling new paid title at ~70k units, followed by Mouse P.I. with ~50k. And on Game Pass, most new titles had 100-200k downloads: we see the new GP April Top 5 as Replaced, Vampire Crawlers, Kiln, Tiny Bookshop and Aphelion.

For Nintendo Switch and Switch 2 eShop, first-party Nintendo social sim Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream is way out ahead, with >300k Western eShop units & lots more physical. Next up: Mouse: P.I. For Hire hit >70k eShop copies, Vampire Crawler made almost 50k and scaling & Pragmata and Content Warning were a tad lower on eShop.

Transparency wins for Road To Vostok’s solo dev?

If you’re a GDCo Pro or Plus subscriber, we already talked briefly about ‘solo-adjacent dev’ first-person survival game Road to Vostok ($20), which launched in Steam Early Access on April 7th and has thrived, as seen by its appearance above with >250k sales.

To remind you what we said: “Players still really like the openly dystopian European vibes of games like S.T.A.L.K.E.R., which this game extends - it’s set in a no man’s land between Finland and Russia… quite ‘of the moment’. (One Finnish reviewer: “Hiding in a Vostok apartment with an armored Russian vehicle driving past is one of the scariest experiences I’ve had in a game in a long time.”)”

The permadeath & gritty gameplay means Road To Vostok isn’t for the fainthearted. But what we’ve been most impressed with is the levelheaded way the dev - former army lieutenant Antti Leinonen - has dealt with his community so far. Specifically:

• Post-release transparency about his team size (1!): Leinonen lays it out there in his first post-release Steam news post: “Being a solo-developer has many perks and benefits, but also a lot of limitations… For example, I currently have ~11k unread emails.” Players are responding really well to this level of honesty.

• Being careful about hotfixes while in a post-launch haze: this applies to all, but we love it that Antti spells is out: “If you start making tweaks and especially code-changes under [a heavy crunch situation around launch], you can easily fix one thing, but you accidentally create two new problems or some unexpected issues.” You need method.

• Clear roadmap around creating more content & depth: as per usual with ‘unexpected’ - or semi-expected - hits, players are burning through content and want more. In his second update, the dev notes that game content will take up 85% of a ‘financial bucket’ he has access to, now the game sold >250k units.

Also, in a world where players are always asking for more, it’s impressive that Leinonen can say clearly in the second update: “Once this second patch is live and if there are no major issues, I will be also taking that much needed development break.” So he’s signposting a few days he will not be working on the game, in a fairly personal way.

Partly because people are so impressed that a solo dev can make such a complex game, but partly because the game is expansive & in pretty good shape already - and already has a strong modding scene - the dev has cultivated a situation where the community appreciates him, and contrasts him with ‘companies that put out half-finished games’.

We like thinking about how Road To Vostok got into that position - presumably with clear, repeated, personal communication. In a world where parasocial relationships matter and corporations can be much-maligned, there’s a lot of takeaway here for how you talk to your players? (But yep, having a great game also helps, heh.)

[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.]

Time to segue into the ‘end of week’ GameDiscoverCo newsletter. And a warning: my colleague Alejandro and I were originally planning to do another Steam deep-data dive, but just didn’t have the stomach for it. So we regressed to a) a trends piece with b) Beatles semaphore pics and c) alligator jokes instead. It’s fiiine.

Before we start, influencer Blurbs decided to make some incredibly silly Skyrim mods suggested by his chat, including weapons that slip out of your hands and chicken vomiting spells. But our fave is the mod where you debate dragons on geopolitics to beat them: “What’s your stance on rumors that ibuprofen is causing vampirism in Tamriel?”

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

News: Saros, Dawnwalker loom on the horizon….

Let’s get started with the rest of the discovery & platform news for the week, starting with the following:

• The latest top ‘trad media’ mentions from ICO’s Footprints.gg are filled with the obvious (Crimson Desert, Black Flag remaster, Pragmata), but also Housemarque & PlayStation’s roguelite action-er Saros (#3, out yesterday) and Witcher-y vampire adventure Blood Of Dawnwalker (#6, pre-orders & Sept release date confirmed.)

• Xbox’s quarterly results were non-optimum: “Gaming rev down 7% [YoY]… Xbox content + services rev down 5%… Xbox hardware rev down 33%”, with guidance for the next quarter to be down “in the low-teens, reflecting… strong first-party content [a year ago], as well as the recent price changes for Xbox Game Pass.”

• We found John Welfare’s giant multi-year graph to be helpful in contextualizing: “Total Revenue [for quarter]: $5.341 billion… Content & Services: ~$5.120b… Hardware: ~$221 million.” (So at this point, hardware is a bit of a rounding error.) Xbox’s Asha Sharma noted: “Player and revenue growth has not yet met our ambition. We know we have work to do.” (Though Xbox MAUs were a record, per Satya Nadella.)

• Steam ad ‘takeover’ watch: as you can see, both co-op robo-Western shooter Far Far West and turn-based strategy reboot Heroes Of Might & Magic: Olden Era got store-wide frontpage takeovers at various points this week! (Diablo IV got a more focused wishlister/player takeover, thanks to its Lord Of Hatred expansion.)

• A Sony statement on the ‘online checks’ farrago for PlayStation games: “The new system will require only a single online check before it functions as a perpetual license for the digitally purchased game.” (People think it’s related to an exploit in “the 14-day window that PlayStation users have to request a refund for digitally purchased games.”)

• To encourage games for older players, Roblox is “increasing the DevEx [royalty] rate by 42% for spend from age-checked 18 and older U.S. players”, if your game uses the (less blocky!) R15 avatar. Also, Roblox says “its creators have earned over $1.6 billion through its DevEx program in the last year… up over 63% YoY” - lots more detail here.

• Despite Q1 bookings of $1.7b and free cash flow of $596m, Roblox’s share price is down ~20%, after it decreased forecasts, “citing headwinds from its age-verification rollout that restricted user communication and slowed new user acquisition”, and its Russia ban. Full-year $ guidance of $7.47b “falls well below the analyst consensus of $8.38b.” (Big +35% YoY growth to 132m DAU, but down from 152m in Q3 2025.)

• Mythmatch dev Moo Yu has been transparent about his budget, which we always appreciate, with code handled by him gratis, and otherwise: “Project Duration: 4 Years… Total Budget: £99,812.50 ($135k)”, w/contractors split 47% art, 19% writing, 17% design, 14% audio and 2% other, with a £250 ($340) day rate for all contractors.

• Mobile game news: Stillfront’s CEO was talking about their latest results, and we spotted that “44% of [the company’s mobile game revenue] is now going through a DTC platform”, up from 36% the previous year. That’s almost half the revenue outside of iOS/Android stores, “driven by players actively being incentivized” to go off-platform.

• Much discussion of PlayStation/Xbox console exclusives recently. Circana’s Mat Piscatella: “[Xbox] and Sony began dabbling outside of console exclusivity because the console [hardware] market wasn’t growing. And now both are considering moving back more towards console exclusivity, because the console HW isn’t growing.” As Chris Dring adds, looks like it’s going to get more ‘case-by-case’, going forward.

• Microlinks: PlayStation Plus’ monthly games for May 2026 are EA Sports FC 26, Wuchang: Fallen Feathers, Nine Sols; the top console games in India in 2025 were Ghost of Yotei, Assassin’s Creed Shadows, and EA FC 26; the latest Steam client update allows you manage downloads on remote Steam installs - handy.

14 trends for the next 5 years: PC/console games

At GameDiscoverCo, we tend to thrive on the granular and specific. So you won’t see many higher-level articles from us. But in this case, we were piqued by Horace Dediu’s excellent analysis firm Asymco, which focuses purely on Apple, but has been posting some fascinating graphs on ‘worldwide active devices’ as part of that.

This is his work extracting those numbers for 2007 to 2030, including mobile devices, PC, and console:

Dediu’s conclusion from this: “Google and Apple will be the primary distributors for all software and services into the foreseeable future. Try as they might, challengers face over 9 billion in installed base. Note well how entrenched Windows has been on the desktop even as (free) Linux and (better) macOS alternatives have harvested usage. This rigidity has held over the 1.5 billion addressable market for 30 years now. For additional evidence consider the dynamics, or lack thereof, of the game console business.”

In a separate post imagining John Ternus stepping down as Apple CEO in 2040 (!), he adds this (below) view of the same graph, by percentage of the total in any given year.

What’s notable here? Well, game consoles were close to 10% of the addressable device market for games back in 2010, and might be at 3% in 2030. And PC was over 70% in 2010, and might be 12% (Windows & Linux) in 2030. In some ways, this is a weird, skewed view. The market’s not down. But look, it’s an interesting perspective:

Then, we read ‘The video game industry’s very dark night’, a longform piece focused partly on PC/console games by by ex-game biz (BioWare, Ubisoft) contrarian Georg Zoeller. And we got, well, a little maudlin: “There is no compelling answer to the question of "Why should I invest my money in games instead of other opportunities?" and many answers to ‘Why shouldn't I?’, some of which are provided below.” Time to sob?

7 PC game biz trends for now (& the next 5 years!)

Luckily, while searching for a Kleenex, we ran into our bullet-points for a ‘state/future of the PC/console biz’ client off-site .PPT a couple of weeks ago. (There were alligators. But since the client didn’t pay for the alligators - or the hot dogs fed to them - there’s no conflict of interest. Just don’t tell the alligators about the content repurposing?)

So that’s the point of this newsletter - cuing off the graphs & article, some helpful trend prognostication which should apply both for a) now b) the next 5 years, even more so. Let’s start with ‘what we think of the PC game biz’:

• Without catalog revenue, it’s risky AF: if we had a dollar for every publisher earnings that includes the phrase ‘record catalog revenue’, we’d have… a lot of dollars. You need older games with good Steam wishlist balances, but that strength is the ultimate hedge. (If a slowly decreasing one - you still need hits!)

• Lots of interest in high-hook, lower polish games: ‘graphical sophistication’ - by whatever weird stick you measure that by - is not a primary revenue driver. It’s about the idea, the gameplay loop, and often the depth and immersiveness of experience. Worrying about surface-level polish’ll kill ya.

• Discount-driven sales disadvantage new titles: we’re seeing constant catalog sales of older $20 games for $5, and $60 games (with DLC providing yield wins) for $20. So when your new game is coming out at $20 with a 10% discount? It does need to be pretty special to stand out from the reduced-price comps.

• Most veteran devs have their cost-base too high: this one’s rough. But unless you have big older games that are holding down the fort for you, revenue-wise, only the truly compact will survive. Why? Because it’s the compact that are having hits.

• Small amounts of AAA(A) games still break out: here’s the flipside of that. Make something truly standout using a lot of money, and people will take notice. Crimson Desert managed it, for example, with that circus scene and some epic scope. But it’s so easy to slip into that mid-area of ‘lots of $, can’t tell/don’t care’.

• ‘Random’ indies continue to thrive (low % chance): we feature a lot of those folks in the newsletter. We think there’s some skill involved in both a) picking the right subgenre b) executing. There’s also a lottery element. But those making games in 2026 may best thrive with a core team of <5 people. (We know that’s small.)

• All others wallow in the ‘too many games’ morass: we also grok this marshy area, since most are in it. Games that would have debuted to 500 CCU on Steam eight years ago are now debuting to 100 CCU or less. They’re not worse, there’s just so much good material out there. ‘Here comes everybody’, indeed.

We’d actually give the PC game biz a B- right now - in the sense that it’s a mess, but it’s absolutely a mess it’s possible to do well in, if you play your cards right. (Or get lucky - that’s allowed, too.)

7 console game biz trends for now (& the next 5 years!)

And let’s finish off with ‘what we think of the console game biz’. Again, these are ‘now’ trends that we see continuing into the future. And repeating - there’s no reset, or change coming up we see that will change this:

• PlayStation/Xbox works great as ‘new Resident Evil’ machine: looking at games doing well on console in 2026 so far - well, Res Evil Requiem, which we have at 4m+ console units, is one of a handful. Core console players who haven’t migrated to PC (or also buy games on PC!) are looking for marquee games, and… that’s it?

• Momentum on PS for shooters, sports, epic ARPGs: games like ARC Raiders and Battlefield 6 have made a splash on console. Sports games (soccer, basketball, football) also do great. There’s a few other exceptions - Split Fiction, Silksong, ARPGs like Monster Hunter Wilds & Ghost Of Yotei. Otherwise, hits are limited.

• Switch 2 = disappointing for third-parties: there’s a few exceptions for Nintendo-y games or clever standouts (especially on the cozy side), but our data says that you’re struggling to sell >100k for most third-party games.

• Why? Early adopters have big existing Switch catalogs: It’s just not a dynamic market, with upgrading Switch 1 fans - the majority of Switch 2 players - already swimming in games. And then there’s the classic ‘Nintendo has loads of exclusive titles which fans may buy first’ issue.

• Xbox fading out, but still has core US/UK fans: some games like Ready Or Not or Marathon have had much close to 1:1 ratio across Xbox and PlayStation than you would expect, given the >2:1 difference in installed base in favor of PlayStation. That’d be those key markets kicking in.

• Overall, ‘average game’ total console # = <50% PC: yes, you should expect your combined PlayStation, Switch and Xbox totals to be less than 50% of your Steam sales unless you have a particularly console friendly title (see above.)

• Size of catalog/availability of discounts = huge issue: if you look at the amount of AAA console games that are discounted to $15-$20 from $60-$70 at any time, and the sheer amount of games now available on (less new game-first) console storefronts, well…. players are eating well, but breaking through the noise, oof.

And then we haven’t even got into the existing & larger upcoming issues around console hardware affordability. New consoles could change things - and GTA VI could accelerate interest. But consoles will still be a) expensive and b) require a TV, just not crazily mass-market. So we’re going to have to give consoles a C- right now.

Why? They’re great as another Resident Evil delivery mechanism (or for Fortnite), but seem largely closed to newness in most genres. (Except via the console sub services like PS+ and Game Pass, which are ‘just fine’ and can have decent reach, but are not a profitability fix for devs…)

Debuts on Steam: Might, Magic, Far, Far, West…

Let’s cut across to analysis of this week’s Steam debuts (for GameDiscoverCo Pro & Plus subscribers) to finish off, And three games hit >10k CCU (a good result!) after release, as pictured above. Can you name all three? We’re about to…

Read more

Another week? Really? You’re having us on. Anyhow, we had to be actively persuaded from not making today’s headline about ‘piss (wands) and vinegar’, but sanity has prevailed. So you’ll simply get analysis of YapYap’s sales triumph, not an ‘obscure regional saying’ pun-based take - phew.

Before we start, our buddies at the Video Game History Foundation just helped digitize & put Vidiot magazine into their game media archive, “a video game spinoff of the rock music magazine Creem” that ran for 5 issues in 1982-1983. If you want to see Dan Aykroyd playing Space Duel or John ‘Q*Bert’ Mellencamp - you’re in luck?

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

Game discovery news: we’re not bored of pirates…

Let’s start out with a check into game platform & discovery news, shall we? Here’s what we’ve got:

• Looking at GDCo's 'trending' unreleased Steam games by 'new wishlists in the last 7 days', April 20th to 27th, long-rumored remake Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced (#1) shoots to the top of the charts (mm, pirates!), and MiHoYo’s F2P ARPG Zenless Zone Zero (#2), long on other platforms, gets mucho Steam interest.

• But wait, there's four new entries in the Top 6, with 3D fighting game sequel Dragon Ball Xenoverse 3 (#3) and giant MMO sequel Aion 2 (#6) also seeing plenty of new wishlisters. (Metro 2039 and Cartel Pilots Wanted, both hot from last week, round out the Top 6.)

• Valve confirmed the Steam Controller for a May 4th ‘add to cart’ release on Steam, and here’s the sales page for the $99 controller, with magnetic (non-drift) thumbsticks, rumble & grip-enabled gyro. (There’s a good GameDeveloper.com overview, Valve’s video overview & the LinusTechTips rundown.)

• As spotted by TOS.gg’s Zach Bussey, “Amazon is experimenting with the ability to play games through Twitch. Game Lift is being tested with a 20-minute ReAnimal demo in the USA and Canada on Desktop Web... I'm told explicitly that this was ‘developed by Amazon’ and is primarily intended as an ad product.”

• A Steam Deck 2 WIP update? Sure, we’ll take it, as IGN asked Valve’s Pierre-Loup Griffais, and he confirmed: “We're hard at work on it… we expect… lot of what we're doing here [with the new Steam Controller, Steam Machine & Steam Frame] will be learnings that build up to it.” So not now, but soonish(tm).

• Microlinks: Enshrouded is the latest ‘game as mod/platform’, adding Adventure Sharing for castles, obstacle courses & dungeons; the Australian government demands to know what Roblox, Minecraft, Fortnite, and Steam are doing to prevent grooming, radicalization; id@Xbox’s Spring Showcase recap is here.

• Here’s more from Xbox boss Asha Sharma and chief content officer Matt Booty, with definite signs from Sharma that lower Game Pass tiers are part of the equation: “I think, historically, our pricing hasn’t been as flexible.. And I think that’s the big thing we want to go work on. You saw that with Game Pass.”

• As spotted by TWIV, Garry’s Mod developer Facepunch Studios recently “‘open sourced’ their entire finances” for its next creation tool/game, s&box (out today!) “including salaries, server costs, taxes, and more.” It also lists the $480k paid out to the community so far by mod - DXRP is #1 all-time with $100k.

• Turkey has passed a new bill around game platforms & social media worth looking at: “Any gaming platform that has more than 100,000 daily users in Turkiye must now appoint a local representative” - and warnings, fines, and eventual traffic throttling will happen if age ratings & other rules aren’t followed.

• Microlinks, Pt. 2: South Korea and Southeast Asia are the latest regions to get a PS5 price increase (up to 43%!); Xbox “unveils stylish new logo”, with a return to its classic green color; we think this new PlayStation ‘online license check’ 30-day feature isn’t intentional or permanent, but I guess we’ll find out soon?

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How YapYap jammed its way to 1m copies sold…

We recently came across Kingfisher’s YouTube video essay (above) about ‘friendslop’ and magic-themed co-op horror game YapYap, a $10 title which launched on Feb. 3rd on Steam and confirmed 1 million players by March 18th. (We have it at >1.15m copies sold now, #7 in new games released in 2026 purely by Steam units sold.)

Obviously, at a relatively cheaper price, the game has ‘only’ grossed a bit less than $10m so far. But it’s one of the breakout hits of the year, and the dev team just announced plans for new wands, monsters, hub progression & more, addressing a key adoption objection to the delightful title - there’s just not enough to do.

Anyhow, we caught up with dev team Maison Bap’s Ray G, who is based in Vancouver - though his compact ~10 person team is worldwide & remote working. And here’s some key findings from our chat about how YapYap did so well:

• The dev studio shifted to friendslop after its initial title didn’t perform: Maison Bap has been around for 6 years, and most of that time was working on BapBap, which, after “pivoting, like, 5 times” became a roguelike PvP F2P party game. Ray says “we spent way too long” on it, and so a fresh, lower-lift idea was required.

• YapYap was devised ‘earlier’ in friendslop’s rise, & voice-first: in early 2025, before Peak had even shipped, the team looked around at short-dev (3-6 month) possibilities, and decided on “voice as a mechanic”. (You cast spells using your voice - an idea that Mage Arena coincidentally also used in 2025.)

• As TikToks for the game blew up, the team had to invent the mechanics: back in July 2025, an early TikTok for the game got 288k likes (!), but it was so early in dev that what you do in the game was unclear. One novel physics-friendly invention: vandalism as a key game mechanic. (You destroy items as an objective.)

So it’s super interesting that YapYap was vibe-first and gameplay-later - Ray told us that the vandalism mechanic “wasn’t part of the plan in the first month.” And in general, the game has been buzz-first - everyone wanted to play it, “we had so much momentum”, Ray said, but the game was shallower because it was still so early in dev.

However, there’s so many amazing design decisions in the final game - from turning everything into fish for mayhem reasons, to clever wands that control monsters, to funny word-repeating mini-games to stop you being turned into a monster.

If you look at influencers such as MoistCr1TiKaL playing the game (above), it looks, to be honest, pretty slick. This is why it had ~900k Steam wishlists at launch, and was #3 in Valve’s Top 10 uniques chart - from 2,900+ games - for October 2025’s Next Fest.

And how did people find out about this game overall? If you look at GameDiscoverCo Pro’s Steam Fan Snapshot data, we see a big over-index on word of mouth and short-form videos (duh!), and underindexing on trad media & discussion forums:

Unsurprisingly, given this, we think players skew young: only 12% of YapYap’s Fan Snapshot players were >=35 years old, compared to 27% for all Fan Snapshot participants. Oh, and ‘Boxleiter method’ fans, it has a 180x ‘review to sales’ multiplier on Steam, sky-high (60x can be more common?) due to its more casual player base.

Anyhow, we think the art direction for YapYap is its killer feature. It just looks so appealing, with real-time shadows & cloth & lo-fi texture weirdness. In his YouTube essay, Kingfisher says: “I am a huge fan of that nostalgic dark fantasy vibe”, and nothing hits that “dreamy, hauntingly whimsical energy the way YapYap does.”

This is - in significant part - down to YapYap’s art director Louis, whose X account has a bunch of interesting early tests. It’s ‘new but retro’-feeling aesthetic which still uses interesting tech, and Ray G commends the juxtaposition of the “very dark, uh, horror-esque kind of vibe with PSX graphics… but also super relatable and cute characters.”

Oddly, the vibe I got from Maison Bap’s Ray G. was, as times, a little conflicted. Sure, the game has >1m copies sold and a Very Positive (84%) review count. But when you have viral interest in a game that early, it can feel like the Wallace & Gromit train chase scene where you’re laying tracks in front of you.

In addition, some of the things people want to do in the game - or that show well for social media - don’t necessarily make for balanced game mechanics. For example, the Maison Bap crew realized: “Oh, it’d be so funny if you can piss from your wand.” (Reader, it totally is.)

But as Ray noted to me: “A lot of our spells are kind of like that, where… we kind of design it so that it’s funny, and you laugh about it with your friends, but… it’s hard to make it deep.” And with just keeping up with maintenance & patches on a super popular game, it’s incredibly difficult for a small team to do lots of live service-y new feature updates too.

So you end up with a duality of feelings, as shown by the positive (left) and negative (right) word clouds from GameDiscoverCo Pro’s sampling of the most helpful Steam reviews for YapYap:

On the one hand - ‘super fun’, ‘good game’, ‘can’t wait to see’, and on the other - ‘needs more content’, ‘over and over again’, ‘not enough’. Video games, huh? Either the public isn’t interested, or they want more and more right now, and they’re going away if you can’t provide it. (It’s ‘cos they love you - but the Veruca Salt vibes are there, anyhow.)

Anyhow, good luck to the Maison Bap crew on the new features they are planning, and it’ll be interesting to see how players re-engage at that point. And others taking lessons from this, this is yet another example of ‘early dev showcase validates the vibes and idea’. (Yes, we’re becoming tiresome on this point.)

3x GDC 2026 discovery talks you shouldn’t miss?

In case you missed it, a whole chunk of free talk videos and slides from GDC 2026 went up on the GDC Vault website. (At the same time, all talk videos from GDC 2024 were made free, by the look of it. Wow, there’s a lot of good content in there to peruse.)

Anyhow, unfortunately GDC’s YouTube channel doesn’t get updated with these new talks any more, but I thought we should point out three notable discovery-related talks & takeaways from GDC 2026 lectures, here:

• Marketing/trailer veterans Dana Trebella & Derek Lieu did a talk on ‘translating your invisible marketing foundation into visibility’, and we particularly liked it because it concentrates on rationalizing & defining your audience for your game. (There’s even a SWOT analysis section in here, something we use at GDCo.)

• Talking of friendslop, Nick Kaman of Aggro Crab did a talk on the making of PEAK which is full of charming detail, including the claim that the winner CEO of the sales battle between Another Crab’s Treasure & Content Warning had to pay for therapy for the other CEO. (Nick got 3 free sessions as a result of that?)

• None other than Chris Zukowski of HowToMarketAGame has a ‘what to do if you had a hit game’ talk that talks about all sorts of useful things for ‘games that actually sell on Steam’ - from supporter packs & soundtracks for extra $ to bundles & discount strategies. (Less ‘GabeN as fairy princess’ Photoshops tho, plz?)

And while we’re at it, here’s three more GDC 2026 talks that are discovery-adjacent and worth checking out: Finji’s Rebekah Saltsman on her company’s perspectives on indie publishing, a marketing postmortem of solo dev hit The Operator, and the latest Experimental Games Showcase, back for its 24th year (!) after previously showcasing Katamari Damacy, Baba Is You & more. (Now that’s some heritage.)

[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.]