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

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

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

Game discovery news: Warhammer skulls it up…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Player age, and game discovery ramifications…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Game discovery news: Forza, Subnautica 2 hit it…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Finding the ‘secret new Steam winners’ of April…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oaken Tower: async autobattler brings the game loop…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read more

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

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

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

Game discovery news: shortform hits are trending

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Early Access graduates in 2026: what happened?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Steam’s tag changes: what should you know?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Game discovery news: Forza Horizon 6 looms large

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Our sponsor: The Game Business Live returns

Popular industry podcast The Game Business is Live in Los Angeles on Monday, June 8. Hosted by Christopher Dring and Geoff Keighley, the event will feature interviews with EA president Laura Miele, industry veteran Jason Rubin and analyst Matthew Ball.

The event is part of the Summer Game Fest series of events. Tickets are available now, and GameDiscoverCo readers can receive 20% off, simply by following this link.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Steam this week: Subnautica 2 dredges up gold!

Read more

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

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

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

Game discovery news: Stranger than Subnautica?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Launch success on Steam: correlating metrics?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Top streamed, April: Overwatch not underwatched

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Game discovery news: overexcited about GTA, eh?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Our Sponsor: The Game Business Live returns

Popular industry podcast The Game Business is Live in Los Angeles on Monday, June 8. Hosted by Christopher Dring and Geoff Keighley, the event will feature interviews with EA president Laura Miele, industry veteran Jason Rubin and analyst Matthew Ball.

The event is part of the Summer Game Fest series of events. Tickets are available now, and GameDiscoverCo readers can receive 20% off, simply by following this link.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Transparency wins for Road To Vostok’s solo dev?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

News: Saros, Dawnwalker loom on the horizon….

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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How YapYap jammed its way to 1m copies sold…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

News: Vampire Crawlers ‘wines’ up a takeover…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This week on Steam: Vampire Crawlers goes huge

Read more

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

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

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

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

Game discovery news: Metro, Cartel Pilots do gud!

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

• GameDiscoverCo's 'trending' unreleased Steam games - by 'new wishlists in the last 7 days', April 13th to 20th - has quite a few new entries & is led by post-apocalyptic shooter sequel Metro 2039 (#1), and shortform viral sensation Cartel Pilots Wanted (#2) - everyone wants to be lawless drugrunners nowadays, pshaw.

• Besides repeat customers like Graveyard Keeper 2 (#3), Forza Horizon 6 (#4) and Fable (#5), new entries include lo-fi 'trolling Todd Howard in the trailer' first person Scrolls-like The Lantern of The Laughless Saint (#8), and pirate city-builder Corsair Cove (#9), both w/strong hooks. (In the latter case, Captain Hook-s?)

• The BAFTA Games Awards saw Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 take Best Game, as it has at most other awards, and Dispatch and Ghost Of Yotei grab multiple gongs, with No Man’s Sky winning Evolving Game and Blue Prince coming out on top for Game Design. (Full awards stream is here.)

• Big box U.S. store Costco seems to be clearing out some of its Switch 2 physical games, with Metroid Prime 4, Kirby Air Riders & Pokemon Legends A-Z all at $29.99. (We wouldn’t normally cover discounts, but we do wonder if it’s indicative of there being less casual Switch 2 cart buyers at retail…)

• Xbox Game Pass is still pushing out bangers while it muses on its future - with Vampire Crawlers joining on Day 1, Kiln and Aphelion also debuting at launch, and even the friendsloppy Sledding Game making it into Game Preview, timed with its Steam debut on April 30th. (Smaller, hotter games might be the thing?)

• Roblox stuff: The Verge spotted that “After swapping the word ‘game’ for ‘experience’… while the Epic Games v. Apple trial was taking place, Roblox is getting more comfortable with using the term ‘games’ once again.” Also: it settled with the state of Nevada for $10m around child safety concerns timed around its new kid accounts.

• Steam released its ‘top new releases of March 2026’ sale page late last week, and while we already covered the top games, we like looking at the DLC Valve puts into the mix: this time including Ready Or Not’s Boiling Point missions (Gold tier) and Icarus’ Dangerous Horizons expansion (Silver tier.)

• ESRB president and IARC founder/chairperson Patricia Vance has announced she’s retiring later in 2026, big news in the game ratings world. (She’s been ESRB president since 2002!) And there’s a search open for her successor, should you want to muse about content ratings full-time.

• Talking of Xbox’s future, there’s one more Asha Sharma internal memo quote (via The Verge) we spotted: “On the product side, our front end is a set of experiences built at different times, where discovery, relevance, and social are not first-class, and players have to work to find what to do next or who to play with.” (The solution? Investment in engineering and data.)

• Microlinks: ICYMI, Tim Cook is handing over the helm (pips?) at Apple to John Ternus; Pew Research looks at why U.S. teens use TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat; there’s a new self-publishing toolkit commissioned by Games London (but also available to those outside of earshot of the Bow Bells.)

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The surprising % of Steam games not bought on platform?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Internal itch.io traffic matters more than external.

• Your banner and page clarity are critical.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Game discovery news: 007, Metro 2039 pop up…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

All to know about shortform video x games in 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read more

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

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

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

Game discovery news: Triple I floods the charts..

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why the ‘production point’ matters for all devs…

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

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

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

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

Effort ≠ Progress

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

Effort = Progress

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Steam this week: Road To Vostok hits solo glory…

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

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

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

Game discovery news: Car Mechanic Sim tunes up

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What Steam Fan Snapshot tells us about players…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Top streamed March games: Requiem still goin’!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Game discovery news: PlayStation price context..

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Steam wishlist emails: a notable notification shift?

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

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

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

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

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

• The account has been disabled.

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

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

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

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

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

This week on Steam: Raccoin pushes out a hit…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Steam’s new regional price tips - how different?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Game disco news: Crimson Desert gets chatter…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How a banned PS dev ‘hacked’ console discovery

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

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

1. Using ‘open-source’ adjacent IP prominently

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

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

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

2. ‘Squatting’ on keywords for popular games

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

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

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

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

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

3. Use ‘easy Platinums’ to further incent players

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

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

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

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

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

Debuts on Steam: Life Is Strange tops slow week…

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

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

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

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

Game discovery news: Cat Parents gets buzzy…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Game discovery news: SteamOS is going places…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Steam debuts: Crimson Desert, Death Stranding 2!

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