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

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

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

Game discovery news: Squadron 42 pops up high..

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Steam games with CCU ‘staying power’ - how?

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

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

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

Survival Log: resource re-arranging x zombie survival?

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

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

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

ReStory: chill electronics repair = smart angle

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

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

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

Sandustry: megacomplex pixel automation bliss

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

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

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

Combolands: why not a roguelike citybuilder?

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

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

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

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

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

GameDiscoverCo Show: how many Next Fest demos?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read more

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

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

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

Game discovery news: friend scamming is… hot?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

GameDisco Show: a bad name hurts a good game?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Game disco news: Witcher remaster, Resonant hit..

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This week on Steam: Ace Transport Idle Dungeons!

Read more

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

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

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

Game discovery news: Family scam time, Aion?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The GameDiscoverCo Show: Xbox’s road to….

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

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

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

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

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

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

Game discovery news: how many needles, again?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read more

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

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

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

Game discovery news: Wheels, families, factories..

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The GameDiscoverCo Show: Game Pass x ads, eh?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Game disco news: Blizzard, Wardogs media hype…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read more

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

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

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

Game disco news: welcome back, Happy Wheels…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Answer #1: what the data says…

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

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

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

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

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

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

Answer #2: what the gut says…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

GameDiscoverCo Show: why’s Xbox going Kojima?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Game disco news: Guildrun, FF top Steam demos…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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When 1.0 goes nice: Yet Another Zombie Survivors edition!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What makes YAZS different?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Game discovery news: summon the Wardogs…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Does your Steam demo CCU ‘predict’ outcomes?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

GameDiscoverCo Show: backing off multiplatform

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Steam this week: Onimusha, Dawnwalker nail it…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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What are the top new games of Gamescom 2026?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

GameDiscoverCo Show: Valve’s 30 years, checked

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

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

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

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

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

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

Game discovery news: Onimusha’s demo goes big

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read more

A new week, and a busy one for those at Gamescom, but we’ll just keep on keeping on. And our lead story is a look at some ‘crunchy’ Steam tag data to work out how trends around PC game genres have changed in the past half-decade or so…

And before we start, I (Simon) just made an appearance on Mike & Rami Are Still Here, the newish pod/vodcast from No More Robots founder Mike Rose and industry stalwart Rami Ismail. (Expect silly questions and recounting of joint histories, but a bit of prognostication, especially towards the end…)

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

Game discovery news: hey, Wardogs, Sally Face 2..

Let’s start out by having a hack at the newest notable game platform & discovery news. And we’ve spotted the following:

• Looking at GDCo Pro's estimates of 'trending' unreleased Steam games, Aug 17th-24th (above), AA 100-player FPS Wardogs (#1) is looking rather hot, given its playtest hit 105k CCU on Steam recently. And at #2, it's the newly announced Sally Face 2, which follows up the very creepy cult hit 2D adventure.

• Friendslopper Dear Passengers is at #3, the recently re-hyped Phantom Blade Zero hits #4, and there's a brand new entry at #5 for Northern wilderness co-op survival-er Rerouted. And there’s 2 other new announces: visual novel Tulpa The Unseen Lover (#7) and '00s Need For Speed-y indie street racer Heatwarped (#10).

• Steam is testing personalization on normally curated Midweek Deals, which “are featured on the Steam homepage… from Monday at 10am Pacific until Thursday at 10am Pacific. There are up to six Midweek slots per week.” (If you’re logged in, you’ll see a wide selection of discounted games this week, largely different per account.)

• Remember timed console exclusivity? It’s always been lurking, and Silent Hill: Townfall’s latest trailer shows a prime new example: “Alongside reiterating that Townfall is a PS5 console exclusive, a caption confirmed: ‘Also available on PC. Not available on other consoles until at least 6 months after release date’.”

• As Geoff Keighley reminds us, “Valve was founded 30 years ago today [on August 24th, 1996] by Gabe Newell and Mike Harrington.” Tom’s Hardware has more on the history, spanning Half-Life and sequels, the Source Engine, and - of course - a little PC gaming platform called Steam. (Congrats!)

• This ResetEra thread on the state of ‘big box store’ physical retail for games documents the decline of Xbox footprint, w/just “a small case for [Xbox] consoles with some controllers…. Honestly even the PlayStation section has shrunk a bit… The Nintendo one is still large… and I think is the only one that still has a demo unit.”

• We don’t generally see indie devs announcing an immediate 50,000 pre-orders on Epic Games Store, but that’s what ‘magical girl’ co-op action RPG Kernel Hearts managed, thanks in large part to an exclusive Fortnite skin for those who pre-ordered. (That cross-promo is, at least initially, looking quite effective…)

• For those devs who have Steam pre-orders for their game, there’s a change to SteamWorks documentation explaining that (encrypted!) preload should ideally be activated for “Games with large file sizes [and] extremely anticipated games”, and warning that multiple big pre-load patches can clutter a Steam player’s hard drive.

• Roblox things: some bots got blocked in Roblox, leading to CCU decreases; Offpath’s Tim Elliott spotted that “Steal an Egg on Roblox set a record for fastest time to 500k CCU in just 497 hours of organic traffic”; doomscrolling and short-form video features “are no longer allowed in games targeted towards children on Roblox.”

• More ‘web browser gaming’ - not cloud-streamed, locally run? Exhibit #1: Entity just raised $5.8m “to bring console-quality games to what it calls the ‘new web.’” Exhibit #2: Moon Studios’ Thomas Mahler has a browser-first version of new game Luma (also w/downloadable PC/Mac versions.)

• Finally: ‘keyword squatting’ is still an issue on consoles, i.e. picking a game name that includes words from another popular game’s title. The latest unfortunate example would be Lethal Corporation on Switch eShop, which clones the Lethal Company logo but isn’t even co-op. (Can’t we do more about this, platforms?)

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How have hit PC genres changed since 2021?

Look, the PC game market has changed significantly over the last 5 years. But how can we quantify that? At GameDiscoverCo, we have a lot of underlying data on this, so we thought we’d use ‘purified’ versions of Steam tag clouds to compare the market in 2021 to that of 2025.

Rather than just cloud-ifying all tags on all games released in that year, we’re a) keeping this to ‘genre’ tags, b) excluding the ‘mega-genres’ like strategy, action, and RPG c) using tags only from new games with >50k copies sold in that year, and d) only using tags that are ranked in the Top 5 for a game - i.e. the most important.

The results (above) for 2021 are interesting, and def. feel like a ‘five years ago’ market snapshot: survival is huge, as is city builder and action RPG, with JRPG, turn-based strategy & base building also big contenders. Now, let’s look at 2025, same view:

Well, that’s a difference. At first, I presumed that maybe Roguelite (#1, up 39 spots!) and Roguelike (#2, up 37 spots) might have been introduced as tags since 2021. But nope, SteamDB’s ‘tag additions by date’ say they’ve been around since ~2017, just under-used. (So yep - the ‘run-based randomness’ trend is kinda on fire.) Other things of note:

• Action RPG continues to be a super-solid genre: it covers a multitude of sins, from Souls-likes to action/strategy hybrids, but it’s up one spot to #4 vs. 2021.

• JRPG, RTS, and Turn-Based Strategy are on the way down: they’re down 24, 17, and 19 spots overall. Why? We suspect more hybrid-genre, roguelite-y games.

• Life Sim is on the way up, City Builder slipping down: life sim, which a large # of cozy games brush up against, is up 31 spots (!) to #6. And City Builder is still in the Top 10, but is down 5 spots to #7.

Other big gainers, subgenre-wise: Idler - up 46 spots to #15, and Racing - up 22 spots to #9, mainly due to more indie/niche racers? And on the other side, Survival Horror is down 17 spots to #26, whereas Psychological Horror is down 6 to #13. (We still think horror is hot, mind you - just a particular uneasy/creepypasta flavor, maybe?)

But, I hear you yelling, is ‘units sold’ really a good comparison? There are lots of cheaper games (some of them shorter, some of them very replayable!) in 2025 vs. 2021. Well, fair, cos:

• The Top 10 games by units we pulled for 2021 included only one game under $20 (Devour, an early Phasmophobia-like), and five at $60 (inc. Forza 4, Halo Infinite.) Even co-op breakout It Takes Two was a ‘mid-price’ hit at $40.

• The Top 10 games by units for 2025 has three big hits under $10 (R.E.P.O., Peak and RV There Yet?) and only two games at $60+ (Battlefield 6, Monster Hunter Wilds.)

That’s a bit more anecdotal, of course. (Though we’ve surveyed for decreasing price before.) But across all the games we surveyed, 2021’s 261 games had a median current USD price of $19.99, and 2025’s 469 games were 15% less at a $16.99 median.

So if you think we’re over-concentrating on cheap $5 games that sell 50k copies way more easily, let’s switch things up to be revenue-first. Here’s the same tag clouds, but with output by >$1m gross Steam revenue in that year, starting with 2021’s releases:

This tag cloud, from 196 games, looks fairly similar to the ‘units’ one for 2021, but with Survival downgraded quite a bit, and FPS and JRPG downshifted not much at all. (It’s good to know it doesn’t make a titanic difference.)

The good news: it’s our new baseline to compare to the top Steam tags for 2025 by revenue, as inexpensive games that sold 50-100k units are now excluded from this tag soup, while $50 games that sold 30k copies during that year make it in here:

Well, some of this is kinda the same - Roguelite is again #1 in 2025 (up 37 spots from 2021), and Roguelike is #2 (up 28 spots from 2021!) But here’s differences we spotted:

• Some key genres like FPS and JRPG drop less in this view: FPS is only down 2 spots to #3 here, and JRPG down 8 spots to #10 (vs. #28 in the ‘copies sold’ view!)

• Hack And Slash is an intriguing over-performer: we think this tag gets added to a lot of more $ ARPG & Souls-likes, and even some roguelikes, and it’s up 11 to #5, vs. #12 in the ‘units’ view.

• Immersive Sim makes a bit more of a bid for interest: this subgenre is making a bit of a stealth comeback, and there’s indies in the space like Shadows Of Doubt - so it’s up 13 spots to #15, higher than the ‘units-only’ version.

We find all this pretty interesting because, minus all those other less genre focused Steam tags (no disrespect, Dwarves and Capybaras), it feels like a true ‘flavor test’ of the zeitgeist right now. (Whether we like the direction of flow or not.)

And that’s it! To write this up, I’ve been consulting a ‘cheat sheet’ documenting the exact tag ranking changes from 2021 to 2025 (thx Alejandro!) And heck, we’re going to leave it in the newsletter in its raw form below, because it’s pretty interesting. Hurray!

[A final reminder: we’re not saying you have to make games in these subgenres, or that Steam tagging is a perfect way of documenting them. We are, however, saying that this is real data on new game popularity via Steam tags, regardless of dev team size and dev time.]

GameDiscoverCo Show: Advance Access = 98% play early?

Finishing things up, it’s The GameDiscover Show, with myself (Simon) and Post Games’ Chris Plante zipping through the stories of the week - sub to the podcast via Apple Music, Spotify & elsewhere (audio), with a video version on YouTube (above).

On this episode, we talk about changes for GDC 2027, why pre-orders and Advance Access for many games seem to be 'pay to get access early', why some PlayStation 'shovelware'-adjacent publishers are being kicked off (then re-instated!) on the platform, and discuss Big Walk's success and the future of the 'co-op only' game genre.

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

Welcome to the end of week, a good time to look into House House & Panic’s Big Walk. We ask a perhaps obvious (perhaps not?) question - why aren’t more PC/console games launching as ‘online co-op only’ in this very co-op friendly post-COVID world?

Before we start, our buddies at the Video Game History Foundation just acquired a relatively forgotten ‘90s book - ‘Computer Gaming World: Why Won’t This *&☠️#1 Game Work?’ So yep, beyond Steam review complaints, PC compatibility issues have existed for EVER. (It features a cartoon about a chilling “configuration nightmare jungle”.)

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

Game discovery news: click on that dirt, click it….

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

• Our look at GDCo’ latest top Steam demos for unreleased games reveals staying power for roguelike autobattler Guildrun (#1) and co-op bomb defusal game Bombanana! (#2), but rising stars including incremental automation game Dirt Clicker (#3) & nice-looking loot-driven isometric bullet heaven-er Hellforged (#7).

• Some new Bain & Co surveying of 5,000+ players, as interpreted by GI.biz, reveals: “two-thirds of players prefer familiar games or sequels, and only one in five seek new titles.” Also notable: 32% of 13-17 year olds “prefer open standbox/UGC” style content, vs. 19% for 40-49 year olds.

• An unfortunate leak in the ARM Steam client revealed the official Steam Frame VR/AR headset unboxing & setup videos a little ahead of time. The main takeaway so far? Valve’s how-to videos are witty, the hardware’s design looks slick, and we’re expecting pricing & availability news VERY soon. (Next week?)

• PlayStation kicking off ‘shovelware’ publishers got controversial in targeting Ternox Games & STONKS-9800, since the stock market sim has sold decently on Steam: “Sony unilaterally terminated my PlayStation developer and publisher agreement without giving me any reason.” (Ternox previously put out ‘easy Platinum’-ish games, tho, but Stonks is legit/decent. But.. it’s Sony’s platform to clean up!)

• HowToMarketAGame has been looking at the rise of third-party Steam sales/festivals, revealing a top chart for ‘games that got in the most Festivals’ - headed by The Wandering Village (59!), Tavern Talk (55), and Dorfromantik (47). (Chris also spotted that “Cozy and Narrative… are over represented in festivals.”)

• Circana has released July 2026’s U.S. game hardware (& select software*) charts, with spend down 10% YoY to $4.5b, with all sectors (software & hardware) down, and CoD: Black Ops II #1 in PC/console games. One interesting side stat: 63% of new physical games in 2026 were Nintendo, 32% PlayStation, & 4% Xbox. (*Minor intrigue: did Xbox pull its first-party digital data from Circana & GSD? Apparently.)

• The U.S. game console hardware situ in July, per Circana, is not pretty: hardware units -39% year on year, and spending -29% to $282m, “the lowest total for a July month since 2020 ($163 million).” Overall: “PlayStation 5 unit sales fell 6% versus July 2025… Xbox Series dropped 18%.” And Switch 2 units are -51%, but vs. Month 2 of Switch 2, so maybe less bad. (Yet with a price rise upcoming, should it be better?)

• Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier is reporting on another shift away from PlayStation live service games, for Horizon Hunters Gathering, but his YouTube video on the history of ‘PS x live service’ is most essential. (We understand why companies wanted to put ‘5 x successful live service games’ into their future P&L, but…)

• The latest Steamworks doc ‘diff’ showing Valve’s problem of the week? “Artwork Overrides are intended to call attention to new content & updates… [but] you should not use Artwork Overrides to copy the graphical assets from another product on Steam, including DLC.” (Who’s been putting their DLC art in their main capsule image?!)

• The ‘couldn’t be more on LinkedIn’ folks at Polden have put out a 35-page ‘here’s how to make your Steam game’ slideshow, and we liked its section on ‘strategy development’, i.e. what needs the mechanics fulfil, looking at game positioning & promo concepts. (A lot of people finalize the game concept & then do this.)

• Microlinks: the latest Footprints ‘trad media’ charts show GTA 6 (footage leaks) & Phantom Blade Zero as most-mentioned; new on Xbox Game Pass are titles including Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy; Apple’s EU App Store rates are now set (and marginally lower) but Epic ain’t impressed, since DTC $ is disadvantaged.

Will Big Walk’s 1m usher in a co-op only game era?

It may not have escaped your notice that “cooperative multiplayer adventure about teamwork and talking” Big Walk ($20, $15 on launch discount), which launched on August 4th, has done rather well. It peaked at 46,000 Steam CCU and Panic confirmed 1 million copies sold multi-platform in ~6 days*.

(*GDCo currently estimates ~3.5m players LTD across Steam, PlayStation and Switch, and rising, with ~2m of those being PS+ subscribers thanks to a relatively rare PlayStation Plus ‘Monthly’ sub inclusion at launch.)

Anyhow, there’s a number of interesting things about Big Walk. Specifically:

• It’s a more sophisticated, ‘linear journey’ take on much of the ‘friendslop’ genre, but started dev in ~2020, way before friendslop was even a thing.

• It’s from the devs of megahit Untitled Goose Game (>12m players, per GDCo) but there’s only 6% overlap in Steam players between UGG and Big Walk (!)

• It had basically zero pre-release demos or betas, yet still managed to get to almost 1 million Steam wishlists at launch.

So what’s going on here, besides it being a great game? Well, we have some ideas on what Big Walk represents, trend-wise. But before we get there, let’s check some data, starting with GDCo Pro’s (auto-annotated!) estimates of the game’s wishlist journey:

So yes, the original reveal trailer at The Game Awards in December 2023 did a lot of heavy lifting, boosting the game over 100k wishlists quickly. If you look at that trailer, you’ll see the game’s premise encapsulated - a realistic-ish environment, stylized lead characters, and a promise of landscapes, mystery & puzzles to explore together.

From there, the longer gameplay trailer at Day Of The Devs during SGF 2025 sparked a lot more regular interest, and the ‘home stretch’ til release even more so. We actually think that the Myst (or more recently, The Witness)-ish vibes on the game really helped the unconventional hook of ‘there’s secrets here, but you have to play to find ‘em’.

Having said that, there’s no doubt that a lot of people playing Big Walk are coming across from traditional co-op ‘friendslop’ titles. Here’s GDCo data on games with high player overlap, who are also >8x as likely to have played than the average Steam player:

So, seeing obvious titles like PEAK (75% player overlap), Lethal Company (67%), and Meccha Chameleon (48%), you get the idea. But there’s also Tabletop Simulator at 49%, and Golf With Your Friends at 39%, an indication of a softer set of comps, distinct from the more action-y Risk Of Rain 2 (53%) and Helldivers 2 (51%).

The general view here is clear - these are games that you generally play with people that you know, likely with voice chat, as part of your regular social life. And I feel like this comes through even clearer in GDCo’s review sentiment overview:

The amount of time that ‘friends’ comes up in the positive review sentiment word cloud is unreal. And House House themselves, in this Reddit AmA, make it clear it was COVID-era virtual friend hangs that partly inspired the game:

“RE inspiration - when we started work on Big Walk we were in COVID lockdowns, and playing games together regularly with some friends who lived overseas. Big ones were things like Raft, or the 'We Were Here series', as well as a bunch of Roblox games: Somewhere Wales, or Everest Pipkin's Dream Diary.”

Finding this quote delighted me, because I’d already intended to link at least one of these games to our conclusion. Which is: I don’t understand why more dev teams haven’t been exploring ‘co-op only’ experiences. The precedent is there:

• Hazelight Studios has made a career over exclusively co-op titles and has sold tens of millions of units: A Way Out, It Takes Two, and Split Fiction.

• The curiously under-the-radar We Were Here series, which we’ve profiled before for GDCo, is also a multi-million seller, blending co-op only puzzle & exploration.

• Even the micro-indie horror series Fears To Fathom made a co-op only iteration, Fears To Fathom: Scratch Creek which has been doing great on Twitch and has sold ~300k copies, according to GDCo estimates.

I’m not just cherrypicking these titles - there aren’t many of them. I think devs just haven’t seen it a genre, or have fallen back to ‘co-optional’ titles with more aggressive gameplay loops. (The space may be ‘underdesigned’ for some oldskool purists?)

But it 1000% works. So the salient points are: these type of more co-op games are often super streamable (because of the voice interactions between the participants!), and if they require lower amounts of manual dexterity, they’re very accessible. And most of all, this space - ‘next game to play w/your friends’ - is a very active buyer market.

Big Walk is a special work of art - watch the Jacksepticeye YouTube video (beyond the first 5 minutes!) for the sense of wonder, open spaces and discovery it engenders. And what it says to me is: beyond more hasty (but still often v.fun) friendslop, there’s a deeper ‘co-op only’ subgenre here to explore. Players are waiting for it?

This week on Steam: Mortal Shell II, How to Fish…

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We’re back, and after our previous survey of 3,800 Steam fans on what they thought of AI usage in making games, we got one question from multiple devs: was that view on AI different for certain genres or types of game? And thanks to how we gathered the data, we can actually answer that question today….

Before we start, a shout-out to the ‘clever hook’ of Slayblade, which is out on Steam this week and, rather than being a roguelite mashup with poker (Balatro) or pachinko (Peglin), ‘unofficially’ mashes up with Beyblade instead. A spinning top roguelite? Sure!

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

Game discovery news: Phantom Blade scythes in..

Let’s start the week out with a whole bunch of game platform & discovery news, going a little something like this:

• Looking at GDCo Pro's estimates of 'trending' unreleased Steam games, Aug 10th-17th (above), brand new at #1? PS/PS5 Wuxia ARPG standout Phantom Blade Zero, due to a pre-order trailer/reveal. Next up, one slot down from last week: planeslop Dear Passengers (#2) and Bayonetta-like action-er Swords & Slippers (#3).

• The next 3 titles are intriguing too: Disney's D23 showcase brought interest to strategy title Star Wars Zero Company (#4) and the freshly revealed (& multi-platform!) sequel Kingdom Hearts IV (#6). And 100-player shooter Wardogs opened pre-orders and is getting good buzz (#5).

• Talking of Wardogs, we’ve seen multiple people call out (in a good way!) this ‘10 reasons NOT to buy Wardogs’ video by the dev team, since it’s trying to aggressively expectation manage for the Early Access release around content, pricing & more. (It’s $40 for an EA pre-order, so we see why - interesting counter-spin approach.)

• As spotted by The Verge: “Sony apparently hasn’t decided exactly when the PlayStation 6 will be released. From a Wall Street Journal profile of Sony CEO Hiroki Totoki: ‘Totoki said the company still hasn’t fixed a date for PS6’s launch.’” Totoki “not given to sentimentality”, says the WSJ profile - he does indeed seem no-nonsense, though he’s also “an Oasis superfan.” (We’re not sure what to do with that info.)

• GDC has announced its format updates for the March 1st-5th 2027 show, and this r/gamedev post sums up the changes: “Festival hall is moving from Wed-Fri to Tues-Thur… Summits are more community driven… [The return of the] Friday career day… ” (There’s also “a new Business Hall at Moscone West” for focused biz meetings.)

• ICYMI: Netflix’s video game pivot continues, as it “is closing Los Angeles-based Night School studio, which it acquired in 2021 and plans to close Helsinki-based Moonloot, which was founded in 2022.” Night School was doing PR for its interactive horror game Unhinged as recently as 6 weeks ago - v. unfortunate.

• PlayStation’s official top downloads of July 2026 confirm GDCo’s reporting that Call Of Duty Black Ops II (#1) and Black Ops I (#2) were the big PlayStation 5 hits of the month. Black Flag Resynced also performed well, and in PlayStation F2P land, it’s Roblox and Fortnite perpetually holding down the top spots.

• Steam 1.0 watch: co-op zombie shooter No More Room In Hell 2 hit 1.0 and an all-time peak of 15k Steam CCU, as it also shipped PlayStation & Xbox SKUs which GDCo estimates are doing well - 100k+ each & scaling up. (It’s a partial redemption for a sequel that’s slower & more foreboding than many expected.)

• In ‘platform backlash’ news, “Twitch has confirmed that it is using livestreams, chats, and clips to help train generative AI models at parent company Amazon. Addressing the issue in a livestream, Twitch’s Chief Product Officer Mike Minton said it was an opt-out setting because ‘if it was opt-in, nobody would opt in’.” (Woops, etc.)

• This week’s big release Mortal Shell II hit Advance Access and, thanks to a donated key to SteamDB, we can already see its CCU (23k!) But we also wanted to claim that ‘+$10 to play early and support the dev’ is the real reason people fork out $60 for the ‘Devout Edition.’ (The ‘Obsidian skin set’ ain’t worth $10 - but there’s also nothing wrong with monetizing this kind of early FOMO, is there?)

• Steam’s official ‘top new releases’ of July 2026 tiers are posted, and we always like looking at the new DLC in there (since we don’t put those in our charts.) This time: this $30 Granblue Fantasy: Relink DLC hit Gold tier, and pricey DLC for Dragon Ball: Sparking! Zero (and less pricey for Grim Dawn) also charted Silver.

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Steam players & AI: does genre, age, game matter?

As noted above, our previous AI-related survey of 3,800 Steam ‘fans’ got a lot of interested comments from devs. And we did get a lot of ‘I’m working on this type of game - do players of those games have more or less of an issue with AI?’ questions. And normally, we can’t easily ask in that much detail…

But because the players we surveyed are already opted in to our Steam Fan Snapshot cohort, they’re OK with us (in aggregate!) checking out their public Steam accounts to see what games they’ve been playing. So this enabled us to cross-reference behavior…

Just to re-establish context - the Q we asked is: “What’s your view on buying Steam games that have any kind of ‘we used AI’ disclosure?” (This isn’t about AI code help, but focused on things that trip a ‘Steam AI’ disclosure like minor audiovisual use.)

And the possible answers are: ‘I have absolutely no problem with it’ or ‘I am fine with it’ (we’re labeling those ‘accepting’; ‘I am neutral’ (we’re labeling as, uh, ‘neutral’), and ‘I’m not super keen on it’ or ‘I won’t do it under any circumstances’ (labeled as ‘Non-accepting’.)

So I asked our coders to pull AI ‘acceptance’ levels based on accounts that had played either Stardew Valley or ARC Raiders for >5 hours. They then tried a couple of other contrasting titles: Battlefield 6 & Hollow Knight: Silksong, and finally found the two bigger games with the highest contrast: Frostpunk and Balatro. Here’s what we found:

• Grittier, more realistic AAA/strategy game players seem less concerned by AI: for Frostpunk, 53.9% of >5 hour players were ‘accepting’ of AI, compared to 21.4% ‘non-accepting’. And for Battlefield 6, it’s 41.8% ‘accepting’ vs. 36.4% ‘non-accepting’.

• Pixel art, cozier & roguelite title players skew more concerned by AI: you can see Balatro has just 26.9% ‘accepting’ of any AI use, and 51.8% ‘non-accepting’. (The rest are neutral.) And Silksong also has a low ‘accepting’ rate - 31.3% and a somewhat higher non-accepting one: 47.5%.

This is a great starting point, right? It feels to us like there’s a skew towards players of obviously handcrafted games being more strident against any AI elements in their games. But can we go further? We can, and here’s what we found in genre:

When looking at players who’d tried at least one game with these Steam tags for >5 hours, we again see some divergence of views:

• At the high end of ‘accepting’ are hardcore strategy genre players like Naval games, 4X, and Grand Strategy, as well as crossover genres like Base Building.

• At the lower end of ‘accepting’ are genres like Idler, Boomer Shooter and Auto Battler, as well as Roguelike Deckbuilder.

Just as a reminder, the original question had 43% of players saying they were potentially OK with buying games that had any kind of AI disclosure, even if super-minor, 31% were potentially not OK with it, and 26% were neutral (not shown here.)

Finally, we were wondering if age had anything to do with this, given we might stereotype some of the ‘accepting’ genres as those enjoyed by older players. So we filtered the 3,800 responses by the age of the player, and got the following:

So the answer appears to be - yes, age matters somewhat, though it’s subtler than we thought it was going to be. Under 25s we surveyed are 41% ‘accepting’ of any level of AI disclosure in games they buy, whereas 45% of 35-44 year olds are. So up to a point, older folks are incrementally more AI-accepting, and ever so slightly less negative.

But the 45+ year olds - only 7.2% of the respondents, smaller sample size - who are the wild cards, since they convert about 5% of the ‘Accepting’ to Neutral responses. They don’t care one way or the other, folks! And that’s the way they like it…

To conclude: we’re testing for sentiment on low levels of AI inclusion, and this survey should NOT be taken as reading ‘Battlefield 6 players want lots of AI in their games!’ It’s difficult to convey nuance around this subject, and various headlines after the last survey ended up going overly broad.

Also: we’re not printing these results to endorse anyone who wants to put AI elements in their games, esp. if it straight-out replaces human labor. That’s not, uh, our favorite thing at all. We’re just curious on which of Steam’s genre/age ‘microscenes’ are less or more OK with this trend - which is def. a trend - than others….

GameDiscoverCo Show: PlayStation Plus timing?

And to round things off, it’s The GameDiscover Show - inc. one ‘weight falling on foot’ incident - with myself (Simon) and Post Games’ Chris Plante talking about game discovery goodness - sub to the podcast via Apple Music, Spotify & elsewhere (audio), with a video version on YouTube (above).

On this episode, we talk about Helldivers 2 finally making it onto Sony's console subscription service (and the ideal PS+ timing for first-party games!), the state of paid mods/UGC in 2026, how AI interfaces may (or may not) change how people pick out their media, and discuss which game showcase might be right for devs.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Game discovery news: Switch 2 keeps on jammin’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Epoch 1: The Triassic ‘forming’

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

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

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

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

Epoch 2: The Jurassic ‘norming’

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

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

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

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

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

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

Epoch 3: The Cretaceous ‘performing’

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

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

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

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

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

—

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

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

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

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