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

Also: more from the GameDiscoverCo Show, and a whole bunch of notable news.

[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.]

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.]