<![CDATA[The GameDiscoverCo newsletter]]>https://newsletter.gamediscover.cohttps://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!SdeS!,w_256,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fc4ecd3b8-0264-4896-8b6e-4cfeffc01276_840x840.pngThe GameDiscoverCo newsletterhttps://newsletter.gamediscover.coSubstackTue, 16 Jun 2026 04:38:49 GMT<![CDATA[What were the top games & showcases during Summer Game Fest?]]>https://newsletter.gamediscover.co/p/what-were-the-top-games-and-showcaseshttps://newsletter.gamediscover.co/p/what-were-the-top-games-and-showcasesFri, 12 Jun 2026 19:28:45 GMT[The GameDiscoverCo game discovery newsletter is written by ‘how people find your game’ expert & company founder Simon Carless, and is a regular look at how people discover and buy video games in the 2020s.]

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:

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?

Background via Unsplash’s Pawel Czerwinski, thx!

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…

[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

]]><![CDATA[How Project Zomboid just... kept selling?]]>https://newsletter.gamediscover.co/p/how-project-zomboid-just-kept-sellinghttps://newsletter.gamediscover.co/p/how-project-zomboid-just-kept-sellingTue, 09 Jun 2026 18:55:49 GMT[The GameDiscoverCo game discovery newsletter is written by ‘how people find your game’ expert & company founder Simon Carless, and is a regular look at how people discover and buy video games in the 2020s.]

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:

OUR SPONSOR: Player.gg x Summer Game Fest

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

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

How Project Zomboid hit ‘evergreen’ stealthily…

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

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

(Plz ignore that March 2026 spike, it’s an anomalous data event we’re ironing out…)

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:

A lot of these peaks are related to game patches, like the ‘unstable’ launch of Build42 at the end of 2024.

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!)

Got to be prepared, huh?

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.]

]]><![CDATA[May 2026's top new PC & console games, revealed..]]>https://newsletter.gamediscover.co/p/may-2026s-top-new-pc-and-consolehttps://newsletter.gamediscover.co/p/may-2026s-top-new-pc-and-consoleFri, 05 Jun 2026 19:26:22 GMT[The GameDiscoverCo game discovery newsletter is written by ‘how people find your game’ expert & company founder Simon Carless, and is a regular look at how people discover and buy video games in the 2020s.]

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:

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

]]><![CDATA[Why 'hobbyists' are a bigger discovery disruptor for games then AI...]]>https://newsletter.gamediscover.co/p/why-hobbyists-are-a-bigger-discoveryhttps://newsletter.gamediscover.co/p/why-hobbyists-are-a-bigger-discoveryTue, 02 Jun 2026 17:59:56 GMT[The GameDiscoverCo game discovery newsletter is written by ‘how people find your game’ expert & company founder Simon Carless, and is a regular look at how people discover and buy video games in the 2020s.]

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:

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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.]

]]><![CDATA[Scary baboons, sim hits: the state of Quest discovery in 2026]]>https://newsletter.gamediscover.co/p/scary-baboons-sim-hits-the-statehttps://newsletter.gamediscover.co/p/scary-baboons-sim-hits-the-stateFri, 29 May 2026 19:19:46 GMT[The GameDiscoverCo game discovery newsletter is written by ‘how people find your game’ expert & company founder Simon Carless, and is a regular look at how people discover and buy video games in the 2020s.]

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…

Scary Baboon, Nightclub Simulator VR, I Am Cat (L-R)

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:

NOTE: this excludes Gym Class, which had reviews deleted earlier in 2026.

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.)

NOTE: exc. Golf+, which also had a buncha reviews deleted (for some reason!) Thx to Curran Games Agency (good VR reports!) for confirming this!

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

]]><![CDATA[How old are your players, and does it matter for discovery?]]>https://newsletter.gamediscover.co/p/how-old-are-your-players-and-doeshttps://newsletter.gamediscover.co/p/how-old-are-your-players-and-doesTue, 26 May 2026 19:11:28 GMT[The GameDiscoverCo game discovery newsletter is written by ‘how people find your game’ expert & company founder Simon Carless, and is a regular look at how people discover and buy video games in the 2020s.]

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:

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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.]

]]><![CDATA[Finding the 'secret new winners' of April on Steam...]]>https://newsletter.gamediscover.co/p/finding-the-secret-new-winners-ofhttps://newsletter.gamediscover.co/p/finding-the-secret-new-winners-ofFri, 22 May 2026 18:52:13 GMT[The GameDiscoverCo game discovery newsletter is written by ‘how people find your game’ expert & company founder Simon Carless, and is a regular look at how people discover and buy video games in the 2020s.]

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:

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

]]><![CDATA[What happened to Early Access graduates in 2026 so far?]]>https://newsletter.gamediscover.co/p/what-happened-to-early-access-graduateshttps://newsletter.gamediscover.co/p/what-happened-to-early-access-graduatesTue, 19 May 2026 19:20:42 GMT[The GameDiscoverCo game discovery newsletter is written by ‘how people find your game’ expert & company founder Simon Carless, and is a regular look at how people discover and buy video games in the 2020s.]

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.]

]]><![CDATA[How Poppy Playtime made 'free game, paid DLC' work on PC]]>https://newsletter.gamediscover.co/p/how-poppy-playtime-made-free-gamehttps://newsletter.gamediscover.co/p/how-poppy-playtime-made-free-gameFri, 15 May 2026 16:37:58 GMT[The GameDiscoverCo game discovery newsletter is written by ‘how people find your game’ expert & company founder Simon Carless, and is a regular look at how people discover and buy video games in the 2020s.]

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.”

A T-shirt design showcasing Huggy Wuggy, Mommy Long Legs & Boxy Boo.

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:

Each revenue spike is a new Chapter - with Chapter 5 being the latest.

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

]]><![CDATA[Launch success on Steam: are there correlating metrics?]]>https://newsletter.gamediscover.co/p/launch-success-on-steam-are-therehttps://newsletter.gamediscover.co/p/launch-success-on-steam-are-thereTue, 12 May 2026 19:03:14 GMT[The GameDiscoverCo game discovery newsletter is written by ‘how people find your game’ expert & company founder Simon Carless, and is a regular look at how people discover and buy video games in the 2020s.]

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?

We’re a little low on Subnautica 2 WLs but working on improvements :)

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

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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:

BTW, the median ‘follower to wishlist’ multiplier for these games was 16.1x.

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.]

]]><![CDATA[How Far, Far West sold >500k in less than 2 weeks...]]>https://newsletter.gamediscover.co/p/how-far-far-west-sold-500k-in-lesshttps://newsletter.gamediscover.co/p/how-far-far-west-sold-500k-in-lessFri, 08 May 2026 19:49:46 GMT[The GameDiscoverCo game discovery newsletter is written by ‘how people find your game’ expert & company founder Simon Carless, and is a regular look at how people discover and buy video games in the 2020s.]

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:

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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?

GDCo’s Steam review sentiment analysis is SUPER positive. (We may have LOL-ed at ‘by decree of gabe newbot’ in the word cloud.)

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:

Deep Rock Galactic, Risk Of Rain 2 & Helldivers 2 are indeed the big games that interest is coming across from

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.”

Feel the vibes! Pic via a Steam player.

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?

Guess the games? Guess the games!

Read more

]]><![CDATA[April 2026's top new PC & console games, revealed..]]>https://newsletter.gamediscover.co/p/april-2026s-top-new-pc-and-consolehttps://newsletter.gamediscover.co/p/april-2026s-top-new-pc-and-consoleTue, 05 May 2026 19:17:01 GMT[The GameDiscoverCo game discovery newsletter is written by ‘how people find your game’ expert & company founder Simon Carless, and is a regular look at how people discover and buy video games in the 2020s.]

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:

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

Note: we’re now including off-Steam key purchase estimates. in these numbers.

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.]

]]><![CDATA[14 trends for the next 5 years of PC/console games]]>https://newsletter.gamediscover.co/p/14-trends-for-the-next-5-years-ofhttps://newsletter.gamediscover.co/p/14-trends-for-the-next-5-years-ofFri, 01 May 2026 19:34:24 GMT[The GameDiscoverCo game discovery newsletter is written by ‘how people find your game’ expert & company founder Simon Carless, and is a regular look at how people discover and buy video games in the 2020s.]

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

We’re just trying to Mystic Meg this whole newsletter, now? Jeez.

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:

(Yes, people can have multiple active devices!)

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!)

All analysis is essentially signaling. (Paul is dead.)

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

]]><![CDATA[How YapYap jammed its way to 1 million copies sold in just 6 weeks]]>https://newsletter.gamediscover.co/p/how-yapyap-jammed-its-way-to-1-millionhttps://newsletter.gamediscover.co/p/how-yapyap-jammed-its-way-to-1-millionTue, 28 Apr 2026 19:11:20 GMT[The GameDiscoverCo game discovery newsletter is written by ‘how people find your game’ expert & company founder Simon Carless, and is a regular look at how people discover and buy video games in the 2020s.]

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:

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  • Thousands of players flowing into your game (not just drive-by signups)

  • One view of who’s wishlisting, playing, lurking, and engaging (our dash is stunning btw)

  • Feedback and sentiment from players who care about the future of games

Games like Defect, Dead as Disco, and Wardogs are already building real player relationships with FirstLook across their entire lifecycle.

If you want players to show up and stick, reach out to our CEO eden.chen@firstlook.gg or set up your free account today.

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:

OG (late 2023) friendslopper Lethal Company comes up a lot in the comments.

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:

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.]

]]><![CDATA[Is 'marketing before you build' a good discovery idea in 2026?]]>https://newsletter.gamediscover.co/p/is-marketing-before-you-build-a-goodhttps://newsletter.gamediscover.co/p/is-marketing-before-you-build-a-goodFri, 24 Apr 2026 19:10:01 GMT[The GameDiscoverCo game discovery newsletter is written by ‘how people find your game’ expert & company founder Simon Carless, and is a regular look at how people discover and buy video games in the 2020s.]

Plenty of things happening in Discoveryland - as there always is - so let’s take a look around, on this fine Friday. Is our lead story about games that aren’t (complete) games, but might be soon if the Internet likes them enough? It certainly is…

Before we start, we loved this Game File story about Panic’s ‘mail-in patches’ program for completing games like Despelote, inspired by Activision’s similar early ‘80s program for titles such as Pitfall: “Players often wrote in saying… they’d completed the game in question with a friend or family member, that it helped them strengthen a bond.”

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

News: Vampire Crawlers ‘wines’ up a takeover…

Let’s start out with the latest game discovery & platform news, fashioned in this style:

  • We know Steam editorially picked ‘takeover’ banners are hot for discovery - here’s some recent ones, inc. Windrose & Crimson Desert. But did you know they can be ‘conditional’? This (above) front-page takeover for Vampire Crawlers is visible if you own or wishlist its kinda prequel Vampire Survivors, we spotted. (Conditional ‘pop-up’ IMs are far more common, tho - takeovers are a relative rarity…)

  • Xbox is at the ‘releasing mission statement internal emails’ stage of its reorientation, and notable in there: “Our new north star will be daily active players… we will reevaluate our approach to exclusivity, windowing, and AI… ‘Microsoft Gaming’ describes our structure but it does not describe our ambition.” (Back to Xbox as a brand.)

  • March 2026’s U.S. game hardware & select software spend was up 12% to $5.3b, per Circana. Mat Piscatella notes console $ was up 69% to $500m, driven by Switch 2 (PS5 $ was only up 3%), and Crimson Desert, MLB The Show 26 and Pokémon Pokopia helped console content spending be up 22%. (Not too shabby.)

  • An interesting new feature from Valve: “If your game has received a Steam Deck verification report and is marked as Verified”, you can now see average framerate for players (trailing 30 days, daily!), and specific categories (like Stability, Performance) for anyone who doesn’t agree with Verified status - tho >95% do.

  • A couple of folks pinged us, re: Tuesday’s newsletter, that perhaps the ‘Wild West’ mention for Steam key sellers was a bit harsh. So for the record: we do think third party key sellers can provide additional $, ‘discovery surfaces’ and local knowledge & reach. (There’s just a lot of companies in that space to navigate & understand.)

  • Max Power Gaming comes through with a profile of new Roblox hit Sailor Piece, another anime-influenced ARPG which ‘borrows’ some hype: “its player base jumped by roughly 66% (from ~33K to ~55K CCUs) on March 10, the same day One Piece Season 2 launched on Netflix.” (It’s #3, averaging 420k CCU in last 30 days.)

  • The latest Footprints.gg ‘trad media’ mentions charts has Capcom’s Pragmata at #1, thanks to its hyped multi-platform launch & 1 million sales already. Also notable in the Top 5: oft-discussed games Crimson Desert, Metro 2039, Windrose, and Clair Obscur (thanks to its BAFTA Awards win.)

  • And we’re getting a sense of some of Xbox’s ‘broadening’ moves, given this leak around a teased Discord partnership: “Xbox is planning to bundle a new Game Pass tier with Discord Nitro… Game Pass Starter Edition will offer access to ‘50+ games like Stardew Valley, Fallout 4, and Grounded’, plus 10 hours of cloud gaming every month.”

  • More regional age ratings are coming for consoles: “Sony has started telling PlayStation players in the UK and Ireland that age verification will be required [starting in June 2026]… they’ll have to verify… in order to keep using certain features like messages and voice chat.”

  • Microlinks: Roblox also settled with U.S. states Alabama and West Virginia over child safety allegations; Microsoft offering voluntary retirement to those “whose combined years of service added to their age totals 70 or more”; looks like Mihoyo’s Zenless Zone Zero F2P ARPG hit has a Steam page now - is Genshin Impact next?

OUR SPONSOR: Build A Successful Games Business

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Is ‘marketing before you build’ a good discovery idea in 2026?

For those paying attention to our ‘trending unreleased Steam games’ list, you might have spotted a game called Cartel Pilots Wanted high up this week. We estimate the game, from OldYacht & Polden Publishing, at 218,000 Steam wishlists in just one week. That’s some serious velocity.

This is all based on the launch trailer (above) and then some extremely viral short-form videos based on it, such as this one on TikTok (162,000 likes!) playing up the co-op drugrunning across tropical islands.

Anyhow, Polden’s Kirill Akimkin has been quite public about their strategy here: “Over the past year we started benchmarking every project before [fully] signing it. Instead of committing early, we run a mini-announcement through short-form content and measure traction first. If a game reaches ~25-30k wishlists quickly, we move forward with funding and production. If it doesn’t, the project goes back to the developer with no obligations. Cartel Pilots Wanted passed that threshold faster than anything we’ve tested so far.”

Chatting to Polden, we confirmed that the trailer, which is GTA Vice City-ish in its sunny visuals, is using a real-time game engine (Unreal, with MetaHuman), though it’s clearly cinematics-heavy, and a lot of the prototyped gameplay hasn’t been 100% worked out. But we have a lot of questions and thoughts over this approach, such as:

  • Is understanding the memetics of ideas more important than anything? Beyond Polden, we know of other publishers - including PlayWay, whom we covered doing it back in 2021 - who will launch Steam pages & trailers early, and see what the public thinks about them. So why not a minimum meme threshold?

  • Has ‘cost to test games’ come down in price sufficiently to make this work? Given access to high quality game engines & ease of prototyping, plus ways to quickly scale & gauge audience access to ideas (organically or paid!), is the opportunity cost insignificant enough to scale this?

  • Is there a danger we’ll grow a ‘hypercasual’-style dev underclass? Funnily enough, a chunk of today’s successful first-person simulator devs (like the Turkish devs of Supermarket Simulator) came from the ‘test loads of ideas, only get paid if people care’ world of free hypercasual mobile games, now largely defunct/morphed. This type of conditional funding could be a negative for the PC/console biz, right?

What’s clear is that certain genres (particularly co-op first-person sims & friendslop) have dynamite reach via these ‘condensed short-form trailers’, whether paid or free. Here’s another example of the kind of shortform trailer re-cut getting great reach:

As for why the virality, we can speculate: sunny, high-quality visuals, rebellious but not repellent theme (you’re a fun-lovin’ criminal!), big ‘play with your friends’ vibes and some clear gameplay pillars (do deals, load up your airplane, then fly) that seem like they could be fun.

But with these type of most-viral hits come big ‘expectation management’ issues. For example: what is the minute to minute gameplay really like? Is it actually fun sitting in a plane with your buddy? Are plane-flying games actually entertaining? Will the cinematic island-hopping vibes translate to an actual fun, long-lived experience?

We don’t know - and likely, the devs are still working it out. But they stress-tested the underlying concept early, and people liked it. So now they have to nail the landing for what we presume will be a $10-$15 game. And we can look at some of Playway’s history of doing this to see that indeed, sometimes it works. (But other times, nope!)

Here’s a successful example - Contraband Police, whose original trailer (released 8 years ago) didn’t have any of the Papers, Please-ish gameplay that made the game a hit (1.5m units on Steam after its 2023 release), but was focused solely on vehicles:

So we presume what happened (this trailer was probably CG-based, btw) was that people wishlisted the game, and the devs gradually worked out what the fun was in the concept, all while sitting on player interest. (The final game still does have driving and shooting in it, but no ‘driving while shooting’, we don’t think?)

On the other hand, Jungle House - which we were disappointed didn’t have more jungle canyon rope bridges in it - was announced 5 years ago with a ‘target gameplay’ trailer that looks, frankly, kinda fun:

Unfortunately the actual game crafted based on the trailer seems to have trailed off into nothingness, partly due to an inability to recreate the vision and poor demo momentum, and is now delisted on Steam, despite 36k wishlists. There’s a handful of disappointed comments in the forums, but that’s about it….

Anyhow, we’re not suggesting everyone make ‘fake trailers’ - and we don’t think that is what Cartel Pilots Wanted did, tho it’s a very early/vibe-y trailer. (For certain genres, it may be impossible to do this ‘early trailer’ idea without getting sketchy.) And this approach can lead to some big pitfalls when the expectation doesn’t match reality.

Heck, we know of at least one game with huge shortform video wishlists that flopped on launch because casual wishlisters wanted ‘a type of game’ but wouldn’t pay $ for the precise game delivered. (If you’re marketing on vibes, you have to work out what the purchase threshold is for the ‘vibes-based wishlister’.)

But there’s an underlying point somewhere in here that’s difficult to ignore: why go all the way through making an expensive game, only to discover that players were never that interested? Aren’t there ways to try more ideas, earlier? (Besides early playtests, demos, and feedback, which are 1000% key nowadays.)

The super-early trailer is one way: doing lots of game jams is another. Having a larger, more diverse portfolio as a publisher and hedging is another. In a crowded market where interest is unpredictable, they are all relevant, and speak to a larger point: if you don’t know if people care about your game, try to find out now. Not later.

This week on Steam: Vampire Crawlers goes huge

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]]><![CDATA[The surprising % of Steam games not actually bought on the platform?]]>https://newsletter.gamediscover.co/p/the-surprising-of-steam-games-nothttps://newsletter.gamediscover.co/p/the-surprising-of-steam-games-notTue, 21 Apr 2026 18:21:37 GMT[The GameDiscoverCo game discovery newsletter is written by ‘how people find your game’ expert & company founder Simon Carless, and is a regular look at how people discover and buy video games in the 2020s.]

Welcome, all! This week, we have mainly been watching the Razor 1911 real-time PC demo honoring 40 years (!) of demo and intro making for the demoscene collective. (It’s quite culturally specific, esp. for aging European computer users, and a tad piracy-adjacent - but we’re here for the art/feels, not the cracks.)

Oh, and thanks to Pixel Maniacs’ organic influencer marketing tool for sponsoring today’s newsletter. (If you want to reach our audience of >43k video game professionals, just ping us and we’ll fit you in the sponsor schedule, hurray…)

Before we kick off, you likely saw the breaking news, but Xbox is decreasing Game Pass Ultimate pricing to $22.99 per month (from $30) and PC Game Pass to $14 (from $16.49), and shifting Call Of Duty from ‘at launch’ to ‘12 months after launch’ for it. We think this makes sense, but not sure it will re-establish significant momentum?

[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: Metro, Cartel Pilots do gud!

Anyhow, let’s start things out by taking a close look at the latest game platform & discovery news, going a bit like this:

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The surprising % of Steam games not bought on platform?

We’ve been on a journey, folks. And it started because we were looking into why some newer AAA releases on PC looked a tad underforecast in our GameDiscoverCo ‘copies sold’ algorithms. The end result? Some notable stats on the off-Steam sales boom for certain types of big-publisher titles - and some guesses as to why.

Let’s start with the facts on Steam review counts, using the example above for Death Stranding 2, because it got complicated recently:

  • For bigger games, the default you’ll see is English language on-Steam reviews - 4,034 in this case. Valve’s change last August separated reviews out by language. (We’re still getting devs telling us that ‘recent reviews’ should also be language-specific to avoid regional review bombs, btw - they’re not right now.)

  • If you scroll down to the reviews section you’ll see a separate ‘total reviews in all languages’ number - for Death Stranding 2, 10,706 since its March 19th debut. But wait, is that really all the reviews? No, it’s not…

  • If you mouse over the ‘purchase type’ option in reviews you’ll see there’s actually been 19,000 total Steam reviews - 10,700 classed as ‘Steam purchasers’, and another 8,400 classed as ‘other’. That’s a… lot.

What are these other reviews? Here’s Steam’s official blurb for them: “These are reviews written by customers that received the game from a source outside of Steam. (This may include legitimate sources such as other digital stores, retail stores, testing purposes, or press review purposes. Or, from inappropriate sources such as copies given in exchange for reviews.)”

We were certainly aware these reviews existed - and track ‘em in GameDiscoverCo Pro. But we tended to associate them with ‘lots of Steam keys as Kickstarter rewards go here’ or ‘game was in a Humble Choice, so reviews ensue’. We pulled data on recent Steam hits (last 12 months, >$1m gross) and found some key ‘high-other’ outliers:

Overall, the median number of off-Steam reviews is around 12% for the entire cohort. You’d probably expect that if people were selling Steam keys via third-party stores and giving out keys to influencers who might end up reviewing, etc.

But a number of recently released $60-$70 titles are showing 30-45% ‘other’ reviews. What gives? Well, for expensive games that people know they want to pre-order, the ‘10-20% off’ options provided by (even more reputable) third-party Steam key stores are very tempting. For example, the upcoming James Bond game is $8-$10 off right now.

And of course, Steam - as default - only gives devs 5,000 Steam keys at launch. But for giant games like Silent Hill F or Elden Ring Nightreign, put out by some of the biggest publishers, they’ll be giving out lots more. It’s leading to a curious situation where up to 40% of these sales are unmonetized by Steam. (Their 30% platform cut is, instead, revenue - minus any discounts - collected by the third-party Steam key store.)

To give you an idea of where the keys might be going, here’s GDCo’s split of ‘on Steam’ vs. ‘other’ reviews for Resident Evil Requiem, still 18% cheaper off-Steam. There’s lots of Chinese and Portugese-Brazilian language keys helping the 42% off-Steam review total:

Of course it’s possible that off-Steam purchases are sold to demographics that over-review, or there’s a lot of promo/review keys sprinkled in. So we can’t take these numbers as gospel. But they’re indicative, at least.

On the other end of the spectrum, here’s key titles that have done well with a low percentage of ‘other’ reviews. These are mainly indie breakouts with a lower price point who aren’t pre-orderable big IP, unsurprisingly. Many, like Mewgenics, don’t seem to deal with third party Steam key stores much at all:

Finally, we also decided to check out the percentage of ‘purchased/acquired off Steam’ reviews by price across this cohort (>$1m revenue, released in last 12 months). We confirmed that, yes, the more your game costs, the more likely you are to have lots of off-Steam reviews. This is related to IP visibility, $ upside of a discount, etc, we think:

Anyhow, here’s GDCO’s full Google Drive document tracking review ratios for all new paid Steam titles with >$1m gross in the last year. Feel free to look around at your leisure. And there’s not necessarily a clean conclusion to this data, but:

  • We presume big publishers will continue using third-party key stores when given enough keys, because it bulks up their sales without affecting their margin. (Even if it’s affecting Valve’s revenue, and the off-platform price difference is odd. Valve can’t ‘price fix’ keys, though, so it’s a super complex situation.)

  • For smaller breakout indie hits, there’s likely a genuine 5-10% uplift to be had in intelligently using Steam keys on third-party stores after you’re a hit. (But you’re not going to get lots of keys from Steam ahead of release. And dealing with the Wild West of third party stores can be a ‘heavy lift’ for tiny teams.)

Oh, and we’ll be adding a ‘player’ estimate to GameDiscoverCo’s Steam data which partly takes into account the ‘copies sold off platform’ issue, and may reference it. It’s not going to change our copies sold/revenue estimates - we don’t know what people paid off-platform, it could be a Humble Choice, etc - but will nod at off-platform sales.

Getting a front-page game on Itch - a case study

The folks at Luden.io sent along a new blog post about how they kept their game on the front page of Itch.io for weeks. This intrigued us, because we haven’t seen much about strategy on Itch, which is generally an ultra-indie platform.

The game in question, SuperWEIRD: Automation Roguelite, ended up getting in the New & Trending section on Itch, was later editorially featured by Itch admins, but then hit the key ‘Latest Featured’ section on the site.

The full piece is useful, and includes algorithmic optimization of top tags for Itch (!) in it. But here’s the TL:DR for the article, directly from Oleg Chumakov & Yaroslav “Pangolin” Kadyshev:

  • Tags on Itch.io are not optional, they are key distribution channels.

  • Internal itch.io traffic matters more than external.

  • Your banner and page clarity are critical.

  • You can influence visibility, but you don’t fully control it.

  • There are no easy standard ways to apply for featuring on Itch.

  • Itch.io is great if you’re looking for: indie-friendly players, early feedback and initial community-building.

  • Itch is not great for massive Steam wishlist conversion, but it is great in a different way.

From its Itch.io launch, SuperWEIRD “got around 2,500 wishlists and a similar number of closed Steam playtest applications.” So not a giant win, but also not nothing. (And there’s been Itch-first megahits in the past, including Buckshot Roulette, of course!) So it’s always good to see a little platform analysis…

[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.]

]]><![CDATA[Everything you want to know about shortform video & games...]]>https://newsletter.gamediscover.co/p/everything-you-want-to-know-abouthttps://newsletter.gamediscover.co/p/everything-you-want-to-know-aboutFri, 17 Apr 2026 18:50:22 GMT[The GameDiscoverCo game discovery newsletter is written by ‘how people find your game’ expert & company founder Simon Carless, and is a regular look at how people discover and buy video games in the 2020s.]

As the week ends, we’re back to our shenanigans, with GDCo looking at short-form video trends for games with the help of a handy partner - as well as this week’s Windrose-led Steam debuts for GDCo Pro/Plus subscribers. (Why is Windrose such a hit? We heard it was the dodo demographic, excited about their empowerment.)

Before we start, we enjoyed this vintage 1994 survey of U.S. Sega Genesis owners, revealing that that 52% of non-Sega Channel households owned Sonic The Hedgehog, followed by Sonic 2 & Sonic 3 (31% each), Mortal Kombat (16%), Madden Football (15%), and further down the spiral, classic brawler Streets Of Rage (5%).

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

Game discovery news: 007, Metro 2039 pop up…

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

  • ICO’s Footprints.gg has its latest ‘trad media’ mentions (April 8-14) headed by Crimson Desert again (it just hit 5m sold), but notable new interest in upcoming Bond game 007: First Light (#6) and the newly announced post-apocalyptic shooter sequel Metro 2039 (#7). (Mm, Eastern Europe x dystopia.)

  • Wondering why Grand Theft Auto 6 is coming to PC a bit later? In part, as these leaked GTA Online revenue splits indicate, “PS5 generates more than half the weekly GTA Online bookings, with $4.5m earned per week.” PlayStation is 64% of the total, Xbox 33%, and PC just 3% - presumably alternate PC mods is largely the reason.

  • Landfall’s Hanna F made an interesting LinkedIn post discussing a Twitter/X post she made that went viral that “any update is a bonus not a right” for Peak, saying: “I think devs/studios/publishers need to get better at setting player expectations, not only for our own communities but for the industry at large.”

  • Meta has confirmed a cost increase for its Quest VR devices, “increasing the price of Quest 3 by $100 and Quest 3S by $50, starting on Sunday”, to $600 (Quest 3) and $350 or $450 (Quest S). Meta says the price hikes are coming because of the “global surge in the price of critical components - specifically memory chips.”

  • Research outfit Hushcrasher has tried to track game budgets increasing over time, arguing: “The [cumulative] budget of every game released on Steam in 2025 sum up to an all-time record of $27 billion.” (We think a chunk of this $ is difficult to track ‘sweat equity’, esp. on the low end, but we like the attempts to quantify.)

  • PlayStation fans queuing to buy PS5 before the price upgrade? Circana’s Mat Piscatella says so, for the U.S., “reach[ing] 2026 highs during the week ending April 4th, as price increases loomed. U.S. spending on video game hardware for the week nearly doubled when compared to the same week a year ago.”

  • Nobody is manning the ‘common sense to not approve’ button on the Switch eShop again, where ‘sandbox RPG’ Hytale is available and in the charts, and has absolutely nothing to do with the actual PC Minecraft-y RPG Hytale, which recently released. (This is bad for trust on the platform!)

  • Roblox is getting more specific about age-based accounts “for younger users on Roblox: Roblox Kids for users ages 5 to 8 and Roblox Select for users ages 9 to 15.” (Access & chat is suitably gated.) There’s also new requirements to publicly publish games “to help make sure games are suitable for our youngest users.”

  • Sony’s PlayStation Plus Game Catalog for April 2026 is adding The Crew Motorfest, Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered, Football Manager 26 Console, Warriors: Abyss and more, as classic PS2 JRPG Wild Arms 4 joins the highest PlayStation Plus Premium tier in emulated form.

  • Esoteric data: Owl & Co’s Hernan Lopez is talking about the Attention 20, “the 20 most valuable global attention economy companies ranked by enterprise value”, inc. multiple game companies (EA, Nintendo, Roblox, Take Two.) But it’s Apple, Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon and Meta dwarfing the others atop the charts.

All to know about shortform video x games in 2026

BTW, we’re using YouTube Shorts for all the videos in this piece just ‘cos it embeds better on email. Hopefully!

Yes, folks, shortform video optimized for mobile phones is, increasingly, a big deal for PC/console game discovery. For example, our Steam Fan Snapshot data has it as a key discovery method for 36% of our respondents, ahead of ‘trad media websites’ (28%) and Reddit-y discussion forums (29%).

And since these platforms have all ‘come up’ in the last few years, we’re not sure all of you understand the nuances. That’s why we asked somebody immersed in the space to explain - Mahdeen Abrar of Jestr, whose company incents small/medium creators on TikTok, Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts to post about games in exchange for $.

Jestr creators posted 100 million payout-compatible views in March 2026 - 44m Instagram, 34m YouTube Shorts, 32m TikTok, though historically the network has been 50% Instagram, 30% YT Shorts and 20% TikTok. So there’s plenty of volume to infer results from. Let’s start with key platform differences, per Mahdeen:

  • Instagram Reels: “Skews slightly older and is a very visual app. Cozy and/or horror does great here - hugely underrated for gaming.” He also notes that the platform “optimizes for shares much more heavily than TikTok does”, and it’s the only platform you’ll often see more ‘shares’ than ‘likes’. (But both are good, obviously!)

  • TikTok: This standalone app has “the most mainstream & youngest audience, and friendslop thrives here.” Why? You see a lot of Roblox & Minecraft on the platform, inherently social and co-op titles. And: “As these gamers grow up and look for more sophisticated titles, the next obvious step up is friendslop.”

  • YouTube Shorts: this shortform part of YouTube “has a lot of overlap with Reddit users - more hardcore/niche games have a chance to pop here.” Mahdeen suggests the “algorithm is less curated”, so you’ll get less ‘hyperfocused’ content recs. Overall: “the audience tends to skew older and… commenters are much more critical/hardcore gamers.”

For YT Shorts, Mahdeen gives an example from his own editorial Shorts channel for a game called Service With A Shotgun that got ~40k views:

Mahdeen notes: “What you’ll notice is that a lot of the comments actually reference other games or common gaming terminology.” This is a key difference between YouTube and TikTok: “you can safely assume that on TikTok, nobody knows as much about what you’re talking about.”

A great example of that? Jestr’s ‘what is Silksong?’ TikTok that picked up 51,000 likes around the release of the Hollow Knight sequel, including a whole bunch of ‘I’ve never heard of this game’ comments. As Mahdeen says: “It’s easy to get in our own gaming bubble and assume even the biggest indie games are known by the masses.” Spoiler: they aren’t!

We also wanted to ask Mahdeen about different types of shortform creators - clearly, there’s various flavors. (Most of these folks are not necessarily similarly popular on longform video platforms like Twitch and YouTube, btw.) And here’s 3 key ones:

  • Gameplay Creators: “These are your typical creators who upload short clips of them playing games. Usually these guys are streamers who multipurpose content from their VODs, but edit them in a fast-paced way to appeal to short form. The obvious winning genres in this creator archetype include friendslop and horror.”

Here’s an example featuring key gameplay from co-op fighter x builder Overthrown:

Mahdeen adds: “One very surprising genre that gameplay creators find high viral success with is puzzle games. These types of videos are very effective, due to the viewers being able to ‘figure out’ the puzzle alongside the creator.”

He provided me some examples, but I thought I’d go back a bit and highlight Daniel Benmergui’s clever story-puzzle game Storyteller, which went hella viral in this way after the mobile version got added to Netflix:

  • Showcase Creators: “This is an archetype of creator that can ONLY exist on short form, because they don’t actually NEED to play the game to talk about it. It’s very common to use existing B-roll or trailer footage, then add a voiceover discussing or reacting to the game.”

Here’s an example showing that, in the best scenarios, it’s actually creators recutting entire trailers & presentations of your game to play up the ‘hook’:

Mahdeen adds: “These types of creators can usually cover any genre, but I find strategy/less visually appealing games struggle a bit more with showcase content. This is because those games feel infinitely better to play than they do to watch clips of.”

There’s also an opportunity to take “more of a storytelling approach”, highlighting the devs behind the game and their unique challenges or background. (‘Ex-AAA devs’ and ‘solo indie’ are the most vanilla versions of those, but still provide hook scaffolding!)

  • Real-World Aesthetics Crossover: “This style is much more niche and uncommon, but can still be highly effective! It relies on visually appealing games paired with eye candy desk setups.” Again, this is an interesting type of content where creators don’t even need to play the game if they don’t want to.”

Funnily enough, one of the Hozy videos we featured in Tuesday’s newsletter had the more typical ‘cozy background’ - here’s another. But there are other framing looks too, like this more ‘core’ one for Echoes Of Mystralia:

So what we are noticing here? That shortform videos creators - both paid & organic - are intriguing to work with - if nothing else, to work out how they encapsulate your game’s ‘hook’ for you. Here’s an example for The Last Gas Station, a cozy/creepy pixel art title that got almost 60k likes on TikTok alone, due to a hook-reinforcing video.

We don’t think all game genres work incredibly well with shortform. But a chunk of the more dynamic ones do. So however you try to scale your shortform interest (first-party posts, third-paid organic, third-party paid, all of the above), we hope you learned something from this piece. (Thx, Mahdeen!)

Debuts on Steam: go, Windrose, Pragmata, Mouse!

For GDCo Pro & Plus subscribers, we’re finishing out with a trio of titles (above) that all did pretty darn well in a busy Steam week for debuts. Full chart & analysis below…

Read more

]]><![CDATA[How Hozy went cozy to sell 100k on Steam in 4 days...]]>https://newsletter.gamediscover.co/p/how-hozy-went-cozy-to-sell-100k-onhttps://newsletter.gamediscover.co/p/how-hozy-went-cozy-to-sell-100k-onTue, 14 Apr 2026 13:38:47 GMT[The GameDiscoverCo game discovery newsletter is written by ‘how people find your game’ expert & company founder Simon Carless, and is a regular look at how people discover and buy video games in the 2020s.]

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

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

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

Game discovery news: Triple I floods the charts..

These estimates are a tiiiny bit high - but that’s good for morale, right?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why the ‘production point’ matters for all devs…

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

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

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

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

Effort ≠ Progress

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

Effort = Progress

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

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

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

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

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

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

]]><![CDATA[Inside the Chinese Steam/console 'companion app' you may not know]]>https://newsletter.gamediscover.co/p/inside-the-chinese-steamconsole-companionhttps://newsletter.gamediscover.co/p/inside-the-chinese-steamconsole-companionFri, 10 Apr 2026 18:53:52 GMT[The GameDiscoverCo game discovery newsletter is written by ‘how people find your game’ expert & company founder Simon Carless, and is a regular look at how people discover and buy video games in the 2020s.]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Steam this week: Road To Vostok hits solo glory…

Read more

]]><![CDATA[What the Steam Fan Snapshot tells us about PC game players]]>https://newsletter.gamediscover.co/p/what-the-steam-fan-snapshot-tellshttps://newsletter.gamediscover.co/p/what-the-steam-fan-snapshot-tellsTue, 07 Apr 2026 19:04:09 GMT[The GameDiscoverCo game discovery newsletter is written by ‘how people find your game’ expert & company founder Simon Carless, and is a regular look at how people discover and buy video games in the 2020s.]

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

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

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

Game discovery news: Car Mechanic Sim tunes up

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

What Steam Fan Snapshot tells us about players…

Here’s some Steam Fan Snapshots demographics for social fishing hit Webfishing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(The sample sizes for these titles vary from 30-50 on the low end to 2-3,000 on the high end. We’ll get more responses over time.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Top streamed March games: Requiem still goin’!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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