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

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

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

Game discovery news: Wheels, families, factories..

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The GameDiscoverCo Show: Game Pass x ads, eh?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Game disco news: Blizzard, Wardogs media hype…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read more

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

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

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

Game disco news: welcome back, Happy Wheels…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Answer #1: what the data says…

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

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

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

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

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

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

Answer #2: what the gut says…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

GameDiscoverCo Show: why’s Xbox going Kojima?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Game disco news: Guildrun, FF top Steam demos…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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When 1.0 goes nice: Yet Another Zombie Survivors edition!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What makes YAZS different?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Game discovery news: summon the Wardogs…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Does your Steam demo CCU ‘predict’ outcomes?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

GameDiscoverCo Show: backing off multiplatform

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Steam this week: Onimusha, Dawnwalker nail it…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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What are the top new games of Gamescom 2026?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

GameDiscoverCo Show: Valve’s 30 years, checked

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

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

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

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

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

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

Game discovery news: Onimusha’s demo goes big

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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How have hit PC genres changed since 2021?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

GameDiscoverCo Show: Advance Access = 98% play early?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Game discovery news: Phantom Blade scythes in..

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

GameDiscoverCo Show: PlayStation Plus timing?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Game discovery news: Switch 2 keeps on jammin’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Epoch 1: The Triassic ‘forming’

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

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

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

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

Epoch 2: The Jurassic ‘norming’

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

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

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

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

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

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

Epoch 3: The Cretaceous ‘performing’

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

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

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

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

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

—

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

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

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

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This is a rare ‘non-Tuesday or Friday’ newsletter from GameDiscoverCo, with one simple goal. We sometimes hear from people who say: “I ain’t reading all that. I’m happy for u tho. Or sorry that happened” re: our newsletters. (Yes, we know they’re long - but there’s a lot going on…)

Anyhow, it occurred to us that some of those people - GDCo subscribers who don’t have full bandwidth for our newsletter - might not know that we have a new weekly pod/vodcast, The GameDiscoverCo Show. And we’re 5 episodes in now, so it’s a great time to get on board:

Briefly: every ~40 minute long episode has myself (Simon) and Polygon co-founder & Post Games’ Chris Plante talking about game discovery goodness. We keep things snappy and structured: discussing three platform/discovery news stories, one ‘main’ story, this week/next week’s big releases, and a special surprise question.

We actually delve further into news story analysis than the newsletter does. So there’s new analysis here for regular GDCo readers. But it’s also a good way to get a pulse of what’s going on from GDCo if, say, you have ‘commute to work’ or ‘work out’ audio/video time, but no more reading time. (Curse you, time-consuming words…)

So yep, you can sub to the podcast via Apple Podcasts, Spotify & elsewhere (audio, RSS), with a video version weekly on YouTube (below):

We’ll keep running weekly links to the latest GDCo Show episode at the bottom of our regular Tuesday newsletter, also. But this is your one-time reminder that The GameDiscoverCo Show does, and will exist.. please use it as you see fit.

[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 August kicks off, we’ll be the first to ask: who stole seven twelfths of 2026 so far - the time bandits? Well, since time has certainly elapsed, whether or not Sean Connery disguised as a firefighter was in the mix, we shall hasten on with today’s newsletter…

Before we start, remember when Sony was lavishly courting PC gamers? No, not 2025, this was back in 1996, when it took out a 16 page ad supplement in PC Gamer magazine to hype up its "PlayStation mega-hits" with "CD-quality audio." (Also, how crazy is it that surreal cult classic Eastern Mind was mentioned in here?)

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

Game discovery news: the Reincarnation of Walk?

Let’s kick off the week with the lightning of discovery news, followed seconds later by the thunder of some game platform updates:

• Looking at GDCo Pro's estimates of 'trending' unreleased Steam games, July 27th-Aug 3rd (above), planeslop standout Dear Passengers (#1) is now over 2 million wishlists, and multiple hot games releasing this week also make the Top 10, inc. Beast Of Reincarnation (#2), Big Walk (#6), Iron Nest (#9), and Marvel Tokon (#10).

• Also trending: much-discussed autobattler roguelike Guildrun (#5), and 'WWII from the Chinese perspective' FPS (!) The Defiant (#6). Brand new? Slick (& AI?) looking Gunfire Reborn-a-like co-op roguelite shooter Guns & Dragons (#9), with last week's horde survivor FPS Guns 'N Goblins (#7) also hanging in there.

• Info on emulated Xbox 360 games coming to PC has surfaced via a dev document - The Verge explains: “With [Xbox] 360 games developers… will have control over things like a game’s price and if it’s available on Game Pass.” It’s due 2027-2028 for Project Helix & PC, but more OG Xbox games on PC may hit by October 2026, after “the initial program announced in July included just four games.”

• Roblox’s results late last week weren’t stellar for the platform, as “daily active users (DAUs) fell 7% sequentially to 123 million in the second quarter”, and SeekingAlpha notes “decelerating monetization [growth and]… a decision to pull FY26 guidance, unleashing a flurry of [analyst] downgrades.” (Kid safety-related barriers are part of it, as well as viral game hangover from 2025 - here’s the full .PDF with more deets.)

• When we covered co-op sandbox hit Project Zomboid again in June, we ‘warned’ that the full launch of the much-delayed Build42 upgrade would prob. send interest through the roof. And indeed it has, with Steam CCU quadrupling after its July 29th debut, and an all-time high of 121k CCU set last weekend. Score!

• Steamworks text change alert of the week - when you prep graphical assets for your Steam publisher/franchise sale pop-up message, Valve doesn’t want you to put discounts directly on the image: “Please DO NOT include messaging like “Up to XX% off”. Steam will automatically show that message on the store.”

• A leak via a soccer game YouTuber suggests that EA Sports FC 26 had 9.8 million daily active users across PC/console recently. (GDCo Pro estimates agree on ~10m DAU, btw - the game’s #3 behind only Fortnite & Roblox across Steam, PS & Xbox, with >75% of the DAU on PS4/PS5 & only ~5% on Steam. Impressive!)

• More Xbox things: some of the regional Xbox hardware price increases are hefty, it turns out, with the UK’s Series X digital going for £620 (previously £450, +38%, vs. +25% in the U.S.); post-earnings, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella says they are “making the necessary decisions… to reset the [Xbox] business for long-term growth.”

• A new interview with Nintendo’s Shigeru Miyamoto has him saying: “I was happy that the Switch lasted for 8 to 9 years. I think that customers are no longer just looking for specs. I think the ideal is that ‘if you buy the software, you can play it on the device you have at home.’” (In other words: more horsepower ain’t the main thing, chief.)

• Here’s another micro-indie success on Reddit: “2 person [short incremental game], launched with 61k+ WL, game made in 7 months, 7 years of making games, Bills Must Be Paid is our first successful game, 100k+ copies sold in less than 72h.” Notably, the devs are ex-hypercasual mobile and web casual (CrazyGames, etc) - so they ‘get’ hook…

• PlayStation things: Sony says it’s been talking to retailers about its disc-free future, suggests U.S. retailers may still sell codes in a box; it also reiterated it has secured enough PS5 memory chip supply ​for the current financial year: “There is no change to our plan for ​hardware profitability for FY26 to remain similar to FY25.”

• This Naavik analysis of SensorTower H1 2026 mobile game trends is v.useful for context, noting - absent intel on off-platform (DTC) $ - “Downloads: -13% YoY, Android-driven… Revenue: -2% YoY, but not a healthy market”, and: “The market has become increasingly dependent on an aging base of long-standing incumbents.”

Creators.gg: free creator programs for studios

FirstLook just launched Creators.gg, the first free creator program tool for studios. List your program with no subscription, no per-seat fees and no request caps. Onboard creators and distribute keys at $0, paying only when you fund a paid campaign or add additional creator functionality.

You can setup a campaign in under 10 minutes, reaching 10,000+ creators. Get keys in their hands the same day. We already power the Esports World Cup’s $2M creator program,

Creator relationships are one of the most underrated growth channels in games. List your program free at creators.gg.

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

It’s back! It’s GameDiscoverCo’s top new Steam (& console) games of the month and more, powered by our Pro data - here’s June, May, April, March, Feb and Jan’s, if you missed ‘em in 2026 so far. This time out, July’s been ‘fine’ for new releases:

• The Assassin’s Creed Black Flag remaster proved we all love pirates: those scallywags, we’re not fed up with them! With >1 million units on the platform inc. off-Steam keys, plus at >1.4m on PlayStation & >650k on Xbox, this competent $60/$70 remaster of a fun 2013 original has been a palpable (>$200m gross) hit.

• Shift At Midnight was the inexpensive viral hit of the month: topping out at 37k CCU on Steam, and with great staying power, this $10 co-optional mashup of first-person job sim with creepy ‘bad customer’-identifier (a la Papers Please & Quarantine Zone) is also close to 1m sold during July on Steam.

• A vast diversity of games sold 200-300k for the month: games spanning extraction Souls-like Mistfall Hunter ($25) - which has serious CCU staying power - to sim game eSports Manager 2026 ($20), first-person tornado survival sim Funnel Runners ($15) & adorable shipping sim Cat Mail Co. ($15) topped 200k.

One trend we definitely seem to be seeing here is clustering of cheaper or mid-price games around breakout microgenres. (First-person sim is the obvious example this month, but roguelike twin-stick shooter Pathogenic ($10) also hit it out the park.)

If we look at the Top 10 new Steam releases by revenue for July (not including off-Steam key sales), you’ll see Assassin’s Creed way in front, and the more expensive hits crowding to the front: Halo: Campaign Evolved is #2 in this list with >$10m gross, tho with Mixed Steam reviews, with Master Chief Collection preferred by some.

Also popping up with a ‘just fine’ reception is Bandai Namco’s $70 action JRPG Echoes Of Aincrad (which has grossed >$20m, almost half of it on Steam.) And $30 ‘gacha RPG without the gacha’ DragonSword: Awakening is doing nicely & nearly at $10m PC gross, with strong continued CCU for a clever ‘alt Genshin’ angle.

Next, moving past new games on Steam and checking on all-game revenue, Valve has the top two, with its long-running MOBA Dota 2 (>$70m) joining Counter-Strike 2 atop the charts. (With the Assassin’s Creed remaster making it to #3.)

Immediately after them, Palworld’s 1.0 release catapulted it up the charts, with >$55m revenue and >3m units in July alone - we now have it at >20m units sold on Steam alone, and way over 30m players, cross-platform. Also notable: F2P-ers Apex Legends, PUBG, and Marvel Rivals all had good months. And Meccha Chameleon added $23m and ~5m copies, mainly early in July, to hit 14.5m units and $65m gross.

Since you liked it last month, we’ll briefly feature ‘all Steam games, #11-#30 by revenue’ again. It mainly shows chunky F2P games like Warframe and Wuthering Waves can make >$10m monthly, as well as now-discounted evergreens like Baldur’s Gate 3.

Finishing off this section by looking at PlayStation and Xbox top-sellers around new releases, there’s a bit of an eye-opener on the PlayStation side of things:

There wasn’t a ton of noise in our ‘filter bubbles’ about the Call Of Duty Black Ops 1 & 2 remasters for PS4 and PS5. But for core CoD fans, it was a huge deal. (Both were originally PS3 games, and got v.competent updates from Iron Galaxy at a $40 price point - with the price point dropping to only $20 if you have PlayStation Plus.)

We see online rumors that the two ports already sold >7m units combined as of July 28th, and we have them up at 11m (Black Ops II) and 3.8m (Black Ops) for the month. Too high? Possibly, but unlocking PS4 (& PS5) shooter OGs to replay BlOps games for $20 has been a huge win for both Activision and PlayStation.

Anyhow, EA Sports College Football 27 (at 1.4m on PlayStation and 1.3m on Xbox) was the other hefty new console seller of July, alongside the Black Flag remaster. And we have Halo: Campaign Evolved at a reasonable ~250k on PlayStation, with ~2m Xbox players in total, and ~250k of those paying $ outside of GP. Makes sense…

Oh, and scanning Switch Western eShop new releases for July briefly, first party Nintendo games dominate as per usual: Splatoon Raiders hit >350k eShop players & Rhythm Heaven Groove >300k. But there’s a biggish third-party hit: vampire farming sim (!) Moonlight Peaks neared 200k, and sold similarly well on Steam, a great result. (Not much else topped 50k in its debut month, a predictably ‘meh’ result…)

Finally, you may recall GameDiscoverCo Pro now analyzes Twitch monthly for the most popular games. And we’re contractually obliged* to show you the Top 20 across all titles (above), which shows how many of the OGs are still hot - tho Palworld surged due to 1.0, and Black Flag Resynced acrually made it into the Top 20. (*Not really!)

But the Top 20 most-watched new games on Twitch in July is way more interesting, and always a view that shows us some unexpected games:

The surprise for us in here is ‘darkweb’ hacking game Welcome To The Game III (#2), which had 4.3m hours watched from folks like MOONMOON and xQC, and sold ~30k units to date. Otherwise, we’d expect great numbers from Black Flag Resynced (#1) and Shift At Midnight (#3), and ineed we got them….

There’s a few other titles in here that are underdiscussed, though: always interesting to see Switch 2 exclusives do well (that’s Rhythm Heaven Groove & Splatoon Raiders, at #8 and #10.) And Photomaly (#11, 1.15m hours, 25k units sold) is “a PSX-style horror game where you manage a photo studio” - yep, looks horrifically streamer-appropriate!

GameDiscoverCo Show: compulsion loops… good?

Finally for this week, The GameDiscover Show is returns with myself (Simon) and Post Games’ Chris Plante talking about game discovery goodness - sub to the podcast via Apple Music, Spotify & elsewhere (audio), with a video version on YouTube (above).

This time out, we talk about whether your target PC/console device for dev should always be the PC, chat about vertical video taking over the Internet, the rise of 'compulsion loops' in games, and analyze new Steam demo hit Guildrun. 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.]

Welcome to the end of the week. And as the weekend happily looms, we’re back to announce an awesome milestone - 45,000 subscribers to the GameDiscoverCo newsletter. (Yes, we know 50k would be hotter - don’t fret, we’ll be there shortly…)

Before we start, shout-out to the Video Game History Foundation for the launch of its amazing ‘history of E3’ collection, inc. a detailed kick-off video, a bunch of vintage E3 show-floor footage, and even a podcast w/E3 OGs Doug Lowenstein & Carolyn Rauch.

[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 - >110 orgs have it. Or, signing up to GDCo Plus gets the rest of this newsletter and Discord access, plus more.]

Game discovery news: Xbox’s megatrends graph

Let’s go, we’ve got graphs and text and links on game platforms & discovery, and we’re jamming it all out for you now:

• Microsoft’s quarterly results are out, and as fanalyst John Welfare graphs (above), long-term Xbox trends aren’t stellar. He estimates: “Content & Services: ~$4.75b (-10% YoY); Hardware: ~$234m (-13% YoY).” Xbox rev. has been in decline for 4 straight quarters & annual revenue is back down to FY 2024 levels.

• Asha Sharma did have public comments, noting “‘over 200 million new players came to Xbox and our games’ in FY2026, but that the ‘business did not grow with our audience’ as a result”, promising a return to growth in FY2027. The immediate future, per CFO Amy Hood, is for Q1 non-hardware $ to decline “in the mid-single digits” YoY. (Ah, and an internal message from Sharma to Xbox has longer-term growth plans.)

• For our ‘trending Steam demos’ analysis using GDCo Pro this week, we thought we'd sort only by demos released in the last two weeks. Top demos: Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls (#1, 16k CCU) & Guildrun (#2, 14k CCU). Also hot: Low-Budget Repairs (#3, 2,500 CCU) & RTS Sanctuary: Shattered Sun (#4, 1,200 CCU).

• PlayStation’s results also arrived: PS5 sales edged up to 95.3m, up 1.6m for the quarter (flat QoQ, but down 36% YoY), with 125m active PSN users, up 2m YoY. Revenue was flat YoY, and profit was up 37% due to a weaker yen & U.S. tariff refunds. Also: Sony CFO Lin Tao also said that they are “cautiously” moving forward on physical game phase-out, & haven’t seen $ impact.

• Notable Steam documentation edit of the week? Changing the language from “First discounts, no matter how old the title, are not eligible for Daily Deal” to “First discounts tend not to be eligible for Daily Deals due to lack of performance data.” (But the next line is still ‘don’t submit until after your first discount’.)

• Microlinks: a new Steam client beta has Remote Play additions: HDR streaming to Steam Deck OLED and better-quality AV1 codec for Deck in general; GOG confirm they’re working towards shipping GOG Galaxy on Linux; PS+ Monthly games for August are Dying Light 2 Stay Human, Big Walk & Signalis.

• VR things: Meta’s push for VR games is fading, and Reality Labs lost $4.6b in Q2 on $431m in revenue ($ up 16% YoY - likely AR glasses-led!) And the Steam Frame just got FCC-approved. We’re seeing speculation the launch could be as soon as Monday, given ‘Frame-only on Steam’ games like Pavlov Shack are now popping up.

• Some say hit PC game ‘compulsion loops’ are getting a bit much, like Mathew Kumar, who wrote about Vampire Survivors: “It’s getting disturbingly transparent to see the slot machine and scratch card[-ish gameplay].. ‘come join us in the machine zone. [it] doesn’t even need you to spend all your money. Your time is good enough for us, here.’”

• Here’s Jason Della Rocca (filtered through Chirag Vadhia) on the partial pivot to project funding from $ sources in games: “A studio that has done its own validation already has its players, and what it is missing is the money to finish the game, which is all the funds provide, along with none of what it no longer needs.”

• Cheekiest ‘advertise to Steam devs’ hack we’d forgotten about? Linking to each Steam game every 2-3 days with a relevant URL to show your company’s name/info in their game’s UTM referrer screen in Steam’s back end? (Very clever, Adzap and Newzoo - but pleease nobody else do it.)

• Roguelike auto-battler defense game Slotbound, which has hit 50k wishlists & 2,900 peak demo CCU, is one of the first popular solo ‘overtly AI-assembled’ Steam games we’ve seen with the dev explicitly talking about it. (AI code use, obv. but also using Nano Banana for low-res pixel art - tho some is asset-store bought.)

• Microlinks, Pt.2: Footprints’ latest ‘trad media’ mentions are headed by Halo: Campaign Evolved & EA Sports FC 27; how Backrooms-ish ‘online fandom’ is rewriting the IP playbook; Xbox has added Ubisoft titles like Assassin’s Creed Valhalla to the ‘Xbox on PC’ store (tho you also need Ubisoft Connect.)

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How do player demographics change at 50 hours?

Since GameDiscoverCo launched its Steam Fan Snapshot data in April, we’ve been mining it and related surveys for ‘real’ Steam player data. And in chatting to a friend of GDCo (hi Eric!) about the 16,000+ player data points (tied to their Steam public profile, with their permission), he pointed out multiple additional analyses we could do.

Firstly, let’s remind you all of the baseline. Here’s a question we asked about how people think they find out about games - with an all-respondents answer (interesting in itself), followed by per-game answers for extraction hit ARC Raiders (above), RPG breakout Clair Obscur, and (for a counter-example) friendslop smash R.E.P.O.:

We have data on high hundreds to low thousands of players for each, and you can see interesting things, for example:

• The average age of player is somewhat higher for Clair Obscur (31), and significantly lower for R.E.P.O. (25). (Our averages generally span 25 to 35.)

• Who finds games via short-form video? 37.5% of the survey, but only 34.2% of Clair Obscur players, 39.4% for ARC Raiders, and. a whopping 50.9% for R.E.P.O.

• Conversely: 27.9% of people use trad media websites like PC Gamer to find new games, but a bigger 33.3% of ARC Raiders players, vs. a below-average 27.5% of R.E.P.O players.

Something we’ve found is that it’s worth comparing multiple games. Why? For recent hit releases, those title’s players will be paying more attention than our average respondent anyhow. So you want more comparison points. (If you see what we mean?)

Anyhow, that’s the base data. And to that, we’ve added two things - first, a ‘relative’ chart compared to the ‘all respondents’ view. This lets you quickly see, for example, that gender-wise, ARC Raiders skews male vs. our default sample:

But the neatest new view (yes, available to GameDiscoverCo Pro subs now) is one that allows you to see changes in survey response for longer playtimes on specific games. As a baseline, here’s the other devices that ARC Raiders players on Steam - in blue - say they use to play games for at least one hour per month:

What we’d glean from this: ARC Raiders players are def fans of Steam Deck (that’s a ~50% over-index on our default result for this cohort!), and are above-average players in general on console. (Although less committed to playing mobile games.)

Now let’s look at how the chart for ‘devices used for games’ for ARC Raiders changes by playtime, specifically for the three current-gen consoles:

Interesting. As you can see, high playtimes for ARC Raiders on Steam are correlated with reduced monthly playtime on consoles - particularly Switch (26.9% for all owners, 16.7% for >50 hour players!) but also PlayStation (23.8% for all owners, 16.7% for >50 hour players.)

We presume that’s related to the hardest-core player ‘maining’ the game, and spending less time sampling games across multiple devices. There are some other, subtler changes we spotted in discovery methods:

Looks like as playtime goes up, more players are likely to find games via livestreaming (40.6% at >30 minutes played, 44.5% at >50 hours), while text-based social media like Twitter/Bluesky comes down from 38.2% (>1 hour played) to 33% (>50 hours played.)

Now, let’s continue by taking a look at some of this data from Clair Obscur, starting with how player age changes with longer playtimes:

It’s relatively subtle, but looks like there’s an increase in 25-34 year olds playing the game for long periods (40.3% at >1 hour, 45.8% at >50 hours), and corresponding decreases for 35-44 year olds (25.5% for owners, 22.4% at >50 hours.) 18-24 year olds also increase with more playtime (from 25.5% for owners to 30.7% at >15 hours.)

You really have to jam on the game to play it for >50 hours, since the main story is more like 25-30 hours long. But you get the general idea: younger folks with less family obligations are likely those really playing these games for tens of hours…

Since Clair Obscur is a narrative game itself, we thought it’d be neat to see players’ other activities besides, you know, playing video games. Here’s the relative view:

Again, we can see an underperformance from this slightly older audience on watching short-form videos (-10.1%), but some hefty overperformances on reading books and manga (+21%) and listening to podcasts (+44%).

But look what happens with longer playtime: the percentage of weekly movie-watchers goes down (from 48.4% to 40.1%), and book-readers similarly (from 26.1% to 21.2%). (This may be tied to younger age groups, who do these things less, playing for longer, right?)

So: what this GDCo data is telling us - we think - is that info consumption shifts significantly with age and their generational peers. And understanding the potential age & media habits of your players may significantly change where you target them.

Steam debuts this week: Mistfall Hunter, Halo hit…

OK, let’s finish up by looking at the top debuts of the week (above), according to data from GameDiscoverCo’s voluminous Pro/Plus tool, available to our paid individual or company subs. Let’s examine… while trying not to clip over Gmail limits, yiikes!

Read more

Deepest, darkest summer is upon us, as we move away from data-heavy newsletters (lots and lots of graphs in the last couple) on to a game profile - of new Steam demo breakout Guildrun. Why? How? We talk to the devs, who are handily transparent…

Before we start, very important news: this wholesome Automaton Media story about the developer of Japanese butt-controlled fighting game Ketsu Battler collab-ing with the popular Granblue franchise mainly grabbed our attention because.. there’s a butt-controlled fighting game? (Yes there is, you tuck a Switch controller into your pants.)

[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 - >110 orgs have it. Or, signing up to GDCo Plus gets the rest of this newsletter and Discord access, plus more.]

Game discovery news: have you got Ringwyrm?

Let’s start out this week with a soupcon of discovery & platform news, which goes as follows:

• GDCO Pro's estimates of 'trending' unreleased Steam games by 'new wishlists in the last 7 days' sees ‘friendslop on a plane’ standout Dear Passengers at #1 again, followed by the shortly to be featured Guildrun, with the just exiting Advance Access today Halo: Campaign Evolved at #3.

• Surprise buzz subject Ringwyrm (#4) is a solo indie doing the 'lo-fi immersive 3D action horror' thing, rather well. The rest of the Top 10 is either shortly-to-release games with hype (Beast Of Reincarnation, Mistfall Hunter, Forsaken Realms and Machine Party) or just-announced franchise updates (hi, EA Sports FC 27!)

• We haven’t seen many Steam Workshop security issues, but Meccha Chameleon had multiple maps that try to launch command prompts and therefore malware, “installing a Remote Access Trojan (RAT) on affected systems.” The Meccha Chameleon devs have patched it, but not before the exploit took over one of their own computers and led to their Discord server getting wiped. (Ugh, bad actors.)

• Over at LinkedIn, I discussed Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls, which is getting a lot of complaints over performance for its PC open beta: “There's actually an argument to be made that all development should be PC-first at this stage, given the amount of issues that crop up with the crazy diversity of hardware out there for PC game players.”

• Ah, a success story: “We recently started posting about our upcoming game, Sandcastle, on Instagram Reels and TikTok and got 50,000 wishlists in the first week (165,000 total now!).” Turns out a relaxing ‘beach sandcastle’-making game with realistic water effects is complete catnip for short-form video, with 236k likes (!) on Instagram.

• In ‘vestigial limb’ stylee, we spotted some publishers like Capcom and Konami doing their ‘regular’ sales on their publisher page directly. (Reminder: “Starting July 9, 2026 at 10am Pacific, Steam will no longer be allowing “adhoc” Developer, Franchise, or Publisher sale pages.”) But without banners on game pages, they’re a bit useless?

• Effect on PC shipments of component shortages? Per PC Gamer: “New research from Counterpoint corroborates that the PC market has finally been impacted by the memory crisis.... In the second quarter this year there were 4% fewer global PC shipments than the same time last year. This backs up what the IDC reported earlier this month.”

• Are you paying enough attention to video/vertical video? Kirill Oreshkin reminds us: “The main source of [Steam game] traffic is influencers… for strategy games, tactics & roguelikes - long-form influencers first. For co-op & viral games - short-form influencers first.” Related: plz read The Verge on how vertical video has won the Internet.

• Xbox things: there was an intermittent Xbox Live outage from late Sunday into Monday which prevented some players from booting games; ex-Xbox staffers, inc. Mike Brown (former creative director for Forza Horizon 5) have been ???-ing about Game Pass: “I think the reality is not enough people have subscribed to it at the prices they needed to pay in order to make that business viable.”

• Really enjoyed this piece by Qi Lu on why ‘Steam players want..’ is no longer a good way to look at the market: “The shift from chart-based, editorially-curated discovery toward a tag- and behavior-driven Discovery Queue, combined with Steam Deck's session-based usage pattern and Next Fest's now-continuous demo pipeline, means the platform increasingly routes different audiences to different corners of itself.”

• The super-popular Game Maker’s Toolkit Jam has engine news on its 2026 iteration: “Well, it finally happened! After 9 years of Unity dominance, Godot was the most used game engine for submissions: 🤖 Godot - 47%; 🎮 Unity - 34%; 🛠️GameMaker - 5%; 🚀 Unreal Engine - 3%; ✨ Other - 11%.” (Here’s the last 4 years.)

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How Guildrun genre-mashed its way to ~300k demo players in 10 days

When talking to the devs of PvE autobattler roguelike Guildrun, which revealed with a Steam demo on July 15th, we figured: ah, it’s a bit early to feature. But then we looked again: it’s #1 in our ‘Steam unreleased demos’ chart with 14,000 CCU, and #59 (!) on GDCo’s all-game Twitch charts, with 560k hours watched in the last week.

So, we reconsidered, and have been chatting to Leyline’s Jonathan Hager, who has 6 people working full-time on the game (partly funded from German regional & national game funds) alongside the two founders, freelancers & key PR/outreach folks. And he provided this look at Steam demo stats, as of July 27th:

For a demo, Guildrun getting over 275,000 players so swiftly (hitting 300k shortly) is impressive, as is 3 hours 55 minutes median playtime in just ~10 days, with 25% of players already over 10 hours.

And this demo success - alongside big longform influencer interest - has led to some major wishlist wins for the game, which (as we accurately predicted above) already hit ~230k Steam wishlists as of yesterday. Here’s the breakdown:

The U.S. being #1 is unsurprising, but a couple of notes about this country split from Jonathan: “We expected Germany to do well… we know roguelike autobattlers do well here. Japan was very unexpected, especially because the game is not localized into Japanese yet. But… the art style resonated very well there, and articles [and social media] did great.”

OK, so people really, really like this game. But why do they? Let’s list the reasons:

• Guildrun is an expert roguelike spin on PvE autobattlers: We’d recommend looking at Northernlion’s first (sponsored) video on the game to grok the gameplay. At its base, it’s a PvE take on a game we don’t discuss much (partly because it’s not on Steam!) - Riot’s PC/mobile PvP-er Team Fight Tactics.

• The UI, characters, and design compete with Riot & Blizzard levels: this game has great-looking (complex, but readable) UI & really nice character art. And the lead designer is an actual ex-Blizzard & Riot analyst/designer with a lot of Hearthstone/’meta’ knowledge - if he wrote for Icy Veins, he knows wassup.

• The clever bit is the grafting of roguelike hook into autobattler ease: there’s a low initial skill level to play this game - you pick characters, upgrades, player positions, and hit ‘fight’. But the meta is crazy deep. Jonathan told us: “Combining autochess gameplay with roguelikes is something not that many games have explored.”

So the end result, per Jonathan: “The roguelike formula and the TFT-autochess loop felt like a natural fit, and like something we’d want to play ourselves: run-based structure, randomized rewards, finding synergies and adapting to each run.” And we all know how the human brain works - we all just love randomized build meta. (Ahem, Balatro.)

So it’s interesting - I didn’t see this type of game coming. But in hindsight, why wouldn’t skilled indies pull Riot & Blizzard-ish levels of complexity & polish into the roguelike autobattler space? And by removing PvP, you’re nulling out all kinds of a) technical complexity b) CCU scaling issues c) annoying opposing player behavior…

I’ll also note that this type of ‘classic’ fantasy art presentation is relatively rare (for whatever reason) in the roguelike or autobattler space. (Maybe because it requires something just beyond ‘micro-indie’ to create, resource-wise?) So - at least for me - the vibes for Guildrun feel fairly novel…

But let’s also talk about practical execution. What did the team do right on the rollout that made people fall in love with Guildrun? Here’s some notable wins:

• Early iteration of the core design loops for the demo, months ago: Jonathan noted “we started building a small community of friends, family and colleagues in December”, and targeted players, “speaking to players on Reddit… looking for TFT threads of people looking for a PvE experience and posted in roguelike subreddits.”

• Super-fast iteration of builds and proper ‘meta’ analysis: starting with 250 people in the Discord, and expanding with Reddit & ads, “from January, we started updating the [playable beta] at least once every week”, even analyzing winrates and pickrates weekly & tuning them. So: polish for months, with 3k community at demo launch…

• Good organic influencer outreach to strong niches: one big advantage with going for a ‘deep genre’ pick? Jonathan & team could reach out to roguelike and autobattler specialist influencers for organic pickup, which was very strong. (They also paid for some streamers, but note “organic traffic and creator coverage completely outpaced that floor”, and some paid influencers did organic follow-ups.)

One interesting thing about this game - in general, shortform video like Instagram Reels & TikTok was a not a big driver of interest for Guildrun. (We’re not surprised, because shortform wins are generally around more casual, high-concept games. So see: shortform isn’t always a panacea…)

One final thing of note: the ‘reveal the game and launch the demo same day’ is still relatively rare for PC games. Jonathan tells us they did so “because we wanted to market the game around the demo and concentrate traffic as much as possible.” And heck, it’s working for Guildrun. So maybe this is an under-used tactic?

But obviously, this requires you to have a super-polished demo ready at the point you announce the game, and that can’t be two months away from release. (Why? Because you won’t have time to scale wishlists and organic visibility.) Luckily, Guildrun is due out “in the first half of 2027”, so there’s still plenty of time to grow interest…

GameDiscoverCo Show: review meta, Gamescom…

We’re back again - The GameDiscover Show has returned, with myself (Simon) and Post Games’ Chris Plante jamming on trends: tell your friends & sub to the podcast via Apple Music, Spotify & elsewhere (audio), with a video version on YouTube (above).

This time out, we’re covering the deprofessionalization (?) of gaming, Gamescom 2026 (and why Gamescom and TGS’ attendee numbers have a ‘secret’), Steam’s changes to wishlist sorting & gifting, and GDCo’s research into what Steam fans think of reviews.

Also in there: our game recommendations for the week, a ‘surprise’ question, and more - come and check it out. 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.]

What the hey? Is it time for another GDCo newsletter already? It is, and this time, we’re going back to our our latest survey of ‘Steam fans’ (last tapped for questions about games and AI), to ask them about another key subject - Steam player reviews.

Before we start, we dig (haha!) The Data Drop newsletter making a visual (scrollable) guide to every block ever added to Minecraft. (The game started with 26 classic blocks in 2009 - and yes, obsidian was there from the start - and finishes up in 2024 with block types like, uh, ‘waxed exposed copper trap door’.)

[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 - >110 orgs have it. Or, signing up to GDCo Plus gets the rest of this newsletter and Discord access, plus more.]

Game discovery news: GTA, Modern Warfare 4 go!

Let’s end out the week by taking a look at some of the top discovery & platform news since last time out:

• Our friends at ICO’s Footprints.gg again put out their latest ‘trad media’ coverage report (above), and GTA 6 will just be #1 until the game comes out, apparently. But next? Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 announced its Beta schedule, and Palworld’s 1.0 is going swimmingly, with peak Steam CCU now close to 1 million.

• Some notable Valve changes to Steam wishlist org for players, which we teased a few days back: players can now sort their wishlists by specific named categories (like ‘Next Fest’, ‘Wait For Reviews’, etc.) And categories can have customized wishlist notifications - or none at all. Most players won’t use this - but some will.(And games with demos are called out in wishlist view, with mouseover for trailer!)

• The above wishlist changes were done, in part, to support better Steam game gifting, including guest checkout “which lets a family member or friend make a gift purchase without needing to create a Steam account”, gift cards/games sent by email, and optional public ‘wishlist category’ lists for birthday/Xmas gifting. (All smart.)

• Amazon’s Luna cloud gaming service is “now available on Prime Video on Fire TVs in the US and UK… [you can] start playing in seconds right on your TV, using a controller or your phone.” Since it’s included with Prime, we imagine this could boost pickup - games include: “Hogwarts Legacy, EA Sports FC 26, and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle to GameNight party games like Clue, Ticket to Ride, and Taboo.”

• The Circana U.S. game hardware/software charts for June 2026 show total $ down 21% to $4.5b, mainly down to poor comps with Switch 2 launch in June 2025 (spending down 79%!) But software was down 12% to $3.9 billion, too, thx to console & mobile drops. (Xbox hardware units were up 86% vs. last June, tho..)

• As we’ll do every week, we looked at the top unreleased Steam demos by CCU using GDCo Pro data: PvE autobattler roguelike Guildrun is now #1 - more about it next week. (Co-op bomb defusal game Bombanana! slipped to #2, and slot machine-based autobattler Slotbound went up to #4.)

• Netflix has said it’s early days for its game biz a few times: well, it’s still “early signals” from a “small base” mode, with the Netflix Playground app getting 3x daily player growth, and Netflix co-CEO Gregory Peters saying “monthly active players for cloud games have increased 11x.” (No, we don’t know from where to where.)

• Xbox things: it’s launching Xbox Backward Compatibility on PC, with emulated OG Xbox games inc. BliNX & Conker: Live and Reloaded; it’s testing ad-supported cloud streaming on existing games for Xbox Insiders; the Meta Horizon+ sub service is getting a ‘starter edition’ of Game Pass with ~50 games.

• Gamescom 2026? It’s full of exhibitors for the allotted space (tho not all available Messe space, perhaps?), a bit like a hovercraft is full of eels. In addition: “Several [new] exhibitors have also joined the lineup, including Konami, Tencent Games, Embark Studios, and Level Infinite.” (It’s doing a good job of smooshing biz/consumer.)

• PlayStation things: this editorial from The Verge on no more physical PS discs notes that “Capcom… reported that an astounding 93 percent of its game sales were for digital copies in its last fiscal year.” And Mat Piscatella reveals that “7 [PlayStation games] have sold more than 100k physical units year-to-date.” But still people mourn…

• Microlinks: Bloomberg’s look at the creation of the new Steam Machine has a Valve engineer re: hardware component pricing: “Honestly, it’s still getting worse.”; new UK survey on kids’ online experiences [.PDF] Roblox/Minecraft stats & more; by Day 3, active creator accounts predicted FPS tier success “with 72% accuracy.”

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Will fewer people buy Steam games due to reviews?

As we showed with our recent AI survey, we’ve been having fun surveying ~3,800 ‘Steam fans’ - more committed players who respond to giveaways online, etc - about multiple subjects from June 25th to July 2nd, 2026. Why? There’s a lack of this type of ‘large respondent pool’ with granular data on how people interact with Steam!

And the second subject we asked these players was something that many of us pay a lot of attention to: Steam player reviews. But what do players say about reviews? Firstly, we checked their interest:

So yes, player reviews are a big deal on Steam. 40.5% of all respondents say they always check reviews before buying, and 32% say they do it most of the time. (From there, 19.4% say they check it sometimes, 5.6% occasionally, and just 2.5% never.)

Not really that surprising, perhaps - but good to see it confirmed. The really interesting question is the next one - which Steam player ratings make people think twice. Before we get there, let’s remind us of how Steam’s review categories work:

There’s been plenty of end-result data in the past showing that lower-rated games perform worse - particularly those with Mixed ratings and below (some of which will be just due to game quality, but there’s a knock-on effect!):

Given these graphs, we weren’t sure when people would definitely say ‘I’m less likely to buy this game with X rating’, which is important because it may significantly affect long tail. And here’s what they said:

Just listing it out: 20.3% of respondents said an all-time rating of less than Very Positive reviews (Mostly Positive or below) would make them “less likely to buy”. And 30.8% said ratings of Mixed or below would make them less likely. (So if your overall review is Mixed, that’s half of your audience looking at your game skeptically…)

From there, 34.9% of those replying said it would be Mostly Negative ratings or below that really put you off, and only 9.7% said that “no rating would make a significant different for me.” So: reviews - they really matter. But a Mostly Positive rating? Less of a death sentence for player interest than you might think…

Finally, we asked about ‘recent’ ratings, on people’s mind because other-language review bombs will still hit ‘recent’, even if the main rating is only showing English language reviews.

As you can see, 32.9% of respondents said that yes, if a game has ‘worse’ recent reviews than all-time, they’ll '“look very carefully” at recent reviews. 47.4% said they would maybe check it, but “understand there are sometimes short-term review complaints.” And only 14.5% said they wouldn’t pay attention.

We also asked open-ended text questions on ‘What do you find most/least helpful about the Steam player review system?’, and we got >2,500 usable responses (!!) for each question. So, with some Claude help, here’s the top ‘helpful’ things about reviews, alongside example actual player responses:

• Finding out about bugs, performance & technical issues (14% of respondents): “I only check to see if people report bugs… [and to] see info on performance, more than for the content quality of a game.”

• Overall score / aggregate player consensus for games (8% of respondents): “The overall rating percentage cuts through noise instantly. 'Overwhelmingly Positive' from 40,000 reviews tells me something no trailer ever could.”

• The ability to filtering, sort & drill down on data (7% of respondents): “The split overview with most helpful and most recent reviews. The ability to respond. The highlighting of developer replies. The graph with the distribution of positive and negative reviews.”

• Playtime display positively affecting reviewer credibility (6% of respondents): “The most helpful part for me is seeing the reviewer's playtime right next to their opinion. It really helps filter out knee-jerk reactions from people who barely played.”

Also mentioned prominently: honesty & authenticity from actual players, the ability of select reviews to go in-depth with both pluses and minuses, and the recent/overall split.

Unlike the positives, there’s a lot more consensus on ‘What do you find least helpful about the Steam player review system?’ around one particular subject:

• Joke/meme/troll & low-effort reviews (20% of respondents): "The joke reviews that copypaste the same review on every game - but there are less of them now since Steam made awards less useful, so there's no incentive to bait for awards in reviews.”

• Review bombing / brigading / off-topic drama (11% of respondents): “When reviews are coordinated attacks by groups of people over some trivial matter that they blow out of proportion, wasting your time reading about why the game now has bad reviews.”

• Fake, paid, bot & AI-generated reviews (6% of respondents): "Fake positive reviews from friend groups or purchased accounts still slip through. When a new game launches with 200 glowing reviews in the first 24 hours and each reviewer has 1 game in their library, something's off.” (We’re not sure re: ‘1 game in library’, but we still see it…)

Also mentioned: Bias, emotion & unfair negativity, inappropriate helpfulness votes & award farming, the binary thumbs up/down choice with no ‘neutral’ option, and reviews with lack of detail. But overall: player reviews are a big net positive for Steam…

This week’s Steam debuts: Shift At Midnight hits…

Read more

Happy, uh, Tuesday, is it? And almost August already? This year is flying by, and ‘too much news’ certainly seems to be part of it. (Look, we’re trying to catch it all for you, like Tobey Maguire/Peter Parker caught that tray. Hopefully not with 156 takes.)

Before we start, congrats to the winners of GameDiscoverCo’s ‘Scrappy Saves The Animals’ game jam with the Oakland Ballers on Itch.io! Check out video of the entrants, and you can play the top games - including the winner, Scrappy’s Rescue Run. Games will be showcased at the video game-themed Ballers game this Friday.

[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 - >110 orgs have it. Or, signing up to GDCo Plus gets the rest of this newsletter and Discord access, plus more.]

Game discovery news: Paper Shredder, Guildrun?

Let’s start things out with a look at the various game platform & discovery news - stacking up like this:

• GDCO Pro's estimates of 'trending' unreleased Steam games by 'new wishlists in the last 7 days', July 13th to 20th, is, duh, headed by Dear Passengers. But all of the Top 3 are new, with first-person cleaning game Paper Shredder (#2) also getting a ton of short-form video love, and adding ~140k wishlists quick.

• The final new entry is super-slick, great looking autobattler roguelike Guildrun (#3), whose wishlists are arguably more 'solid' than the other top games, in that it has a playable demo which already hit 11k CCU on Steam. We've talked about other top titles before, inc. Soulframe (#4) and Dinoblade (#5, out this week!)

• Mainframe’s Sulka Haro did a big data dive on publicly accessible ‘Steam x AI’ data, revealing: “An AI-flagged game reaches a real modest-success tier (≥100 reviews ≈ ~3,000 sales) at only about 55% of the non-AI rate - and that ratio hasn’t improved in two years.” A second part adds: “AI games rate lower - but not catastrophically.”

• Steven Lake’s interview with Edmund McMillen reveals that after “Steam recommended we do this extreme 90% off sale” for The Binding Of Isaac Complete Bundle in the Steam Summer Sale, it had “close to 4 million” extra units sold, many at ~$5. (Catalog titles - you really want to be in that ‘90% off’ feature spot!)

• Academic and game maker Paolo Pedercini - ever provocative - has article-ized a talk on ‘A History Of Games Through Mass Extinctions’, and he notes: “Industry commentators* have been talking about a deprofessionalization of the Western game industry” (*me), adding: “Science Fiction author and futurologist Bruce Sterling has this maxim: ‘Whatever happens to musicians happens to everybody’. He sees musicians as the patient zero for the precarization of all cultural industries.” Spicy stuff.

• One of the folks hacking devs to inject malware into their Steam games & grab player crypto got caught. Here’s the full legal filing against him - he “infected the devices of some 8,000 people, the FBI said, gaining access to about 80 crypto wallets and stealing at least $220,000.” A 1 in 100 wallet success rate still pays off, eventually…

• Roblox things: they’ve announced the UGC-centric Build - “a new mobile-first creation tab within the Roblox app, and a new suite of AI-powered tools within Studio for creators of every level”; one investor claims successful Roblox creators get “terrible, predatory offers from deeply unethical hypercapitalistic companies on the platform who intentionally take advantage of stark deal asymmetries with 15-20+ year old devs.”

• The latest Xbox Game Pass titles to debut on the subscription platform include big titles (the awaited Halo: Campaign Evolved, Game Freak’s intriguing Beast of Reincarnation) and some trendier breakouts (Mistfall Hunter, Corsair Cove, Shift At Midnight.)

• Valve just dropped a decent-sized update to SteamVR ahead of the (presumed) Steam Frame VR hardware release. The updates “brings a good slate of standard Steam features to SteamVR [and] a more VR-native user experience, in part thanks to its new UI for SteamVR’s Dashboard”, according to RoadToVR.

• A mobile platform ICYMI: “Epic Games and Google… jointly withdrew their attempt to retroactively settle the lawsuit that’s changing how Android app stores work in the United States - and that means Google will be forced to carry rival app stores inside of its own.” (As soon as Wednesday, apparently?)

Before we move on, we wanted to show off a new feature in GameDiscoverCo Pro. We added automagic graph annotations for Steam demo launches, Next Fest and 190+ (!) streaming showcase events. Here’s a particularly good example, tracking the rise of co-op Scottish weapon brawler Tears Of Metal - out this week:

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What’s the ‘long tail’ for your PC game in 2026?

So your game launched on Steam. Your first week (or month’s) sales are in. That’s a good starting point. But how much money can you expect at the end of the first 6 months, or 1 year, or 2 years? We’ve covered this before, notably back in 2021 with a reader survey, but a GDCo subscriber pointed out we didn’t benchmark it recently.

Luckily, we have data estimates for every single Steam game. So we looked at a host of recent titles - all games launched from July 2023 to July 2025 (so they can accumulate at least a year of sales) with Month 1 sales of >1,000 units.

And here’s the headline numbers. Voila: the copies sold/revenue multiplier across all 5,000 games in that cohort, with Month 1 being 1.0x revenue and copies sold:

That’s a lot of numbers! But to simplify things: if you had 10,000 copies sold at the end of Month 1, the median result says you’d have 14,600 cumulative sold by Month 6, 17,900 by Month 12, and 22,700 by Month 24. (LTD median gross revenue multiple is about 7% lower after Month 12, and 12% lower after Month 24, due to discounting.)

We also know people like to use other multipliers in their calculations, specifically ‘Week 1 sales’ as a base, so we can easily show multipliers for common milestones:

As you can see, if you sold X copies in Week 1, you will - at median - have sold 1.39x those copies by Month 1, 2.59x the copies by Year 1, and 3.32x copies by Year 2. (And the revenue is slightly different - 1.42x the revenue by Month 1 (more, due to launch discounts expiring!), 2.46x by Year 1, and 2.99x by the end of Year 2.

Was this more than you expected? Less? The only thing we’ll note is that a median hides big swings. For example, Lethal Company has a 4.14x Week 1 to Month 1 sales ratio, Mouthwashing has a 2.54x ratio, but Fuga: Melodies Of Steel 3 had a frontloaded 1.04x, and Wargroove 2 had 1.08x. (Still, it’s a great starting point…)

And the important point is this: if you see ‘hey, X game grossed $1 million in Week 1’, it’s quite likely to gross $3 million in the next couple of years - and eventually stretch out to $4-5 million or more. (Unless horribly frontloaded.) So there’s some significant residual revenue to arrive there, that you should plan for…

Since we know people love using Week 1 as their benchmark, here’s the same graph as above, but with Week 1 as 1.00x instead of Month 1. And perhaps unsurprisingly, long tail is down from the 2021 survey, when we had Year 1 as 3.05x Week 1 revenue. It’s now (well, as of 2023-2025) showing Year 1 as 2.46x Week 1 revenue, about 20% down.

(We’d expect that, because there’s been strong Steam revenue growth since 2021 - as much as +100% in aggregate - but the # of launched games is outpacing that. And that’s likely to affect decisions on increased choice made during the first year or two of release. We hear 2017/2018 was even more halcyon for fatter ‘long tail’. But that’s practically the Jurassic…)

Finally, we decided to look at the data through a few lenses. First, with the rise of cheaper games, we thought we’d separate out <$10 games from >=$10 ones, discovering that more expensive titles have slightly better long tail (2.7x Week 1 copies sold in Year 1, up 4% compared to the 2.59x median.)

Since most <$10 titles are more semi-professional and have less likelihood of appearing very cheap on discount, cos they’re already cheap, they fare worse. (Their Year 1 units sold long tail is 10% less than median, at 2.32x.)

Then there’s multipliers by total Week 1 sales, which show - perhaps unsurprisingly - that games that sell better on Week 1 have a better long tail. In the 1k-10k space, presumably affected by some hyped games that were received poorly, you only get 1.96x Week 1 sales in Year 1.

But if you sold 10k-100k copies in Week 1, you’re hoping for 3.16x as many copies in Year 1 (22% above the median), and if you sold 100k+ copies in Week 1, we show a huge median of 4.64x. (But again, viral outliers are going to be affecting this…)

Finally, we hear co-op games are hot, and therefore may have a more pleasant long tail, due to friends recommending to friends, better streamability, etc? Well, the data bears this out, with 3.53x Year 1 sales compared to Week 1 for all games that had co-op, online co-op, etc in their Steam tags.

That’s a super-impressive 35% up on the median Year 1 to Week 1 multiplier of 2.59x. We would consider designing co-op into your next game - if appropriate. (Seriously, it’s the #1 thing we ask people to be added, after seeing a promising idea.)

GameDiscoverCo Show: AI, refunds, Apple Arcade!

After a brief holiday/sickness hiatus, The GameDiscover Show has returned, featuring both myself (Simon) and Post Games’ Chris Plante. Reminder: you can get it on Apple Music, Spotify & elsewhere (audio), with a video version on YouTube (above).

This time out, we talk about GDCo’s recent AI survey, whether Steam refunds for short games are bad news & how the Apple Arcade catalog has settled in, over time. Plus we discuss where Meccha Chameleon fits in the Steam ecosystem. (And I find out I’ve been pronouncing ‘Meccha’ wrong…) Fun times…

[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.]