The rise of the first-person sim: how Roadside Research hit 250k wishlists, fast

Also: we've got news, news, news for you, you, you.

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

Hope you all had a nice weekend, folks. Perhaps it was sunny, or ‘not rainy’, or ‘cozy inside’ in your part of the world? Luckily, on the Internet, the virtual sun shines all the time, if you feed it the right RGB values. So we’ll use that for a bright outlook on life?

Before we start, I think we need a computer term-based ‘feel good story’ this Tuesday. Thus, PC Gamer points out that “the British public has voted to name the savior of their railways: Ctrl Alt Deleaf, the leaf cleaning train.” It beat out names including ‘Leaf-Fall Weapon’, and follows the classic British crowdnaming of Boaty McBoatface. *sigh*.

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Game discovery news: Tarkov pounces on Steam

Looking at the top game platform & discovery news since Friday, we’ve got a caboodle of noodle-y news to squeeze into your brainpan. So let’s plan on it:

• Looking at GDCo's '7-day trending' unreleased Steam game follower chart (Sept. 15th to 22nd, above), the top new game is Escape From Tarkov (#1), the off-Steam extraction shooter hit finally coming in November. (Controversially, all existing players will have to re-buy on Steam.) Below that? Usual suspects: EA Sports FC 26, Silent Hill F (both out this week), plus Battlefield 6.

• The highest new entry is The Lift (#3), a demo-toting 'supernatural handyman sim' which has you house-flipping in Soviet SCP surroundings. Also new: Arkheron (#9), the fantasy PvP ARPG from key former Blizzard devs, and modern 'grand strategy game' Systemic War (#13), digital board game Twilight Imperium Digital (#14), and Bomb Rush Cyberfunk sequel Hyperfunk (#15).

• Ah, there’s been another Xbox hardware price hike in the U.S., its second in 2025, with the Xbox Series X now at $650 (previously $600, up $50), and Xbox Series X Digital at $600 (previously $550, up $50). Reason cited? “Changes in the macroeconomic environment.” (We presume tariffs are the unstated impetus.)

• Here’s a great HowToMarketAGame column on 10 reasons why you shouldn’t hold back on contacting content creators, from “Indie game visibility is SLOW” to “Content creators cascade” and “You don’t get to pick when and who covers you.” 100% agree - hit influencers up early, and often - but not obnoxiously!

• The latest ‘are consoles doomed?’ chatter? Circana (via TheGameBusiness) has some data on modest aging: “The average age of console players in 2024 was 27.9 years old. That’s up from 24.2 years old in 2018.” And The Verge editorializes on the multiplatform change: “The console wars are long over.”

• One thing we didn’t cover in the big Fortnite ‘in-game items’ shift: “Fortnite is now planning to include a Sponsored row in UEFN, allowing creators to purchase slots to advertise their game.” And interestingly: 100% (now) and 50% (later) of that sponsorship money goes back into the “engagement payout pool” for the game.

• Here’s a fun one - per VGC, “Lenovo says it’s had to cancel some pre-orders of its [$1,100- -$1,480] Legion Go Gen 2 [PC gaming] handheld, claiming it got more than it expected.” Perhaps conservative - “we don’t believe in holding onto customer payments for products we can’t ship in a timely manner” - but an interesting indicator?

• When you base your game on online memes, as Roblox/Fortnite smash Steal A Brainrot does, you may hear from the meme originators. (The creator of Tung Tung Tung Sahur “contacted Sammy, one of Steal a Brainrot's creators.. [and] Sammy… proactively pulled Tung Tung Tung Sahur from the game earlier in September.”)

• Automaton Media asked over 10,000 of their Japanese readers on X to name the gaming platform they used most, and “60.7% chose PC as their first pick, followed by 19.3% for PlayStation and Xbox. The third and fourth place were taken by Switch users (11.1%) and mobile (9%) respectively.” (It’s self-selecting, but the rise of PC is real.)

• Microlinks: Roblox added ex-Airbnb exec/VC Vlad Loktev as chief creator ecosystem officer within its creator division (devrel?); Valve will be ending Steam client support for 32-bit versions of Windows on January 1, 2026; PlayStation trophies will unlock the ability to purchase real-life merch for some franchises.

Roadside Research: a sim twist hits 250k wishlists

We wonder if some of you think GDCo is covering the ‘first-person simulator’ genre too much. But it’s one of the few surging new subgenres in today’s PC market - like co-op Lethal Company-y ‘crewlikes’ (which has overlap with this, since Roadside Research is also co-op), and single-player Vampire Survivors-y roguelites.

Reminder from our Schedule I write-up: “Since Supermarket Simulator unlocked a perfect combo of first-person resource management and small business grind in Feb. 2024, there’s been a series of ‘simulator’ games that are easy to control & have the gameplay loop dialed-in.”

So, following pieces on automation/sim Parcel Simulator and fun twist Cash Cleaner Simulator, today’s story looks at another two hit (or prospective hit!) simulators, starting with Cybernetic Walrus & Oro’s Roadside Research (above), which recently hit 250k Steam wishlists on the back of a demo, after a June announce (fast.)

Even before the demo hit, the initial reveal trailer - in which “players will embody aliens in disguise to run a gas station and research humanity” - swiftly scaled the game to 100k wishlists. (BTW, we love the twist, and the amateurish alien disguises, haha.)

If you look at the Steam daily wishlist additions for the game (above), you can see the idea was strong enough that it spawned giant TikToks from influencers mashing up the trailer to re-explain it. (Here’s one from JustRae we found that has 621,000 likes.)

How, and why did this work? We chatted to Cybernetic Walrus’ Mike Coeck about how it came together, working closely with GDCo-profiled upstart publisher Oro:

• The game is built on existing assets, with a twist: the team found a good Unity Asset Store pack of a gas station as a sim starting point, but: “running a gas station was something that had been done well before, so we needed something unique.” They considered vampires & zombies, before picking “aliens preparing an alien invasion.” (We think Roswell Greys are under-represented in games, for being so iconic.)

• The trailer is ‘target gameplay’, but with some playable code to back it up: in our previous discussions of sim OGs PlayWay, we noted that their CG launch trailers often created excess expectations the dev team couldn’t deliver on. But Mike notes: “we actually develop the gameplay parts that we want to show in the trailer.” And the trailer itself is cinematic-adjacent and pre-rendered. It’s a good combo.

• This allows for ‘hype’ before the game is fully developed: an example, per Mike: “In the trailer of Roadside Research, you see an alien stacking shelves. This is a part we actually developed and polished.” But buying products to stack those shelves with wasn’t yet done by the small 5-person team at the point the debut trailer launched.

The devs at Cybernetic Walrus are trying to get as lean and efficient as possible, using what they call a ‘momentum framework’, for games like this and their previous ‘cat packaging horror’ mini-hit with Oro, Order 13. They expect to spend only 7 months on dev until Steam Early Access launch, and then be in EA for a year or so.

In today’s market, this “fail fast and fail forward” approach can make a lot of sense. And it’s not all asset store re-use. Mike notes the alien models/art are all custom-created by them, but: “Why would we spend a month writing a keybind/control panel feature if we can buy one from the Unity asset store and modify it to our taste in a couple of days?” Ding ding.

So, turning to the Roadside Research demo, released on September 15th - you can see how influencers like Camodo Gaming (3.9m subs) are responding well to the gameplay the team has put out so far:

The current state of the demo: “110,000+ humans tricked into opening an alien gas station… peak of 2,384 concurrent players.. 81% Positive with 233 reviews after 3 patches… average playtime: 1h33m… 55% playeed >1 hour, 25% >2 hours, and 2% >5 hours… +31K wishlists, bringing us to 258,457 total… Our Discord passed 7k members.”

And it’s still early. The game right now is vast majority ‘gas station sim’, and some demo reviews were disappointed there wasn’t more alien shenanigans in there, besides ‘get research points by grabbing customer DNA’ type gameplay mechanisms & goofy character anims.

Still, the base game is highly ‘sticky’, and Mike told us: “I have not seen any ideas that we are not able to put in the game. Probing and kidnapping are two things we have planned.” Which they clearly have time to add, either before or after Early Access launch…

So the devs got the shop sim working, and now they’re going to lace in even more alien weirdness. (Cybernetic Walrus co-founder Szabolcs Csizmadia also “had the idea of the paper masks and giving the ability to let players draw their own”, great for content creators.) Anyhow - this lean and mean approach seems to be working so far, right?

Bonus: look at Waterpark Simulator’s CCU go…

In addition, we’re seeing other games going viral in this subgenre recently. It’s very rare to see CCU actually increase significantly after launch, but that’s exactly what we spotted for CayPlay’s Waterpark Simulator since its August 22nd Steam release.

So yep, this is another sandbox-y first-person sim game, with some ‘theme park sim’ vibes (keeping players happy, etc) and some ragdoll physics for the poor ol’ waterpark guests you can fling around, as well as freeform & silly waterpark designs.

Look at the concurrents (CCU) for this game - impressive.

GameDiscoverCo is estimating Waterpark Sim at ~200,000 units sold already, nearly 50% of them in the U.S. [UPDATE: the creators just announced 250k sold, congrats!] And while its peak of 9,000 CCU isn’t hot compared to Roblox games, this is a $13 paid game with a good long tail. (We have it at $2.3m gross revenue, and an 11x median Week 1 wishlist-to-sales conversion number.)

A non-normal sales curve - normally sales would be <10% of launch day by now.

So at current numbers, it could approach $7-10m gross on Steam over time. (Though long tail is maybe an issue for this genre, since there’s a lot of alternatives & ‘jumping around’ between games. For example: we have Supermarket Simulator itself making $27m on Steam from Feb 2024 to Dec. 2024, but ‘only’ another $5m so far this year.)

We didn’t have a chance to chat to the devs of Waterpark Simulator, but we did discover the CayPlay is the game studio of big YouTuber Caylus (19.3m subs!), who made videos about it repeatedly. And according to the studio co-founder, the team also intends to work on GTA 6 UGC (!), as well as Roblox/Fortnite UGC.

And guess what - when you have mega-popular charismatic Twitch/YouTubers like CaseOh doing a 19-episode series (and counting!) about Waterpark Simulator - getting raucously grumpy at disgruntled guests and flubbing his park setup winningly - you can see where ‘YouTuber entertainment + fan enthusiasm = more sales’ for this niche.

We’re not saying that it’s easy to have a hit in this subgenre. Our data says there were 38 games with Simulator in the title (!) launched in Aug. 2025 on Steam. And none have made >$70k gross so far besides Waterpark Sim. (For the record, Returns Outlet Simulator (#2, $69k) and Parisian Brasserie Simulator (#3, $62k) round out the Top 3.)

But if you can do it right, the combination of catchy concept, easy to grok gameplay and supreme streamer-compatibility (everyone wants to entertainingly fail at jobs for their fans?) still makes the first-person simulator a compelling area to consider.

[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.]