April 2026's top new PC & console games, revealed..
Also: a great example of transparency from Road To Vostok & lots of other 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.]
Well, new week, new email newsletter, that’s what we always say. And we’re back to take a look at the top new game releases of April 2026 across PC and console, as well as the other titles tearing up the charts, even weeks after their release. It’s… fun?
Before we start, the article ‘What you can’t say in a [Sega] Saturn game’ brings max nostalgia, since we forgot arcade game high-scores’ ‘censorship’ to stop delinquents putting SEX or FUK as their name. (The piece documents what Virtua Fighter, Decathlete & more replace them with - there’s even an Aum Shinrikyo-related entry.)
[THE DEEPEST PC/CONSOLE DATA? You can get a free demo of our GameDiscoverCo Pro company-wide ‘Steam deep dive’ & console data by reaching out today - >90 orgs have it. Or, signing up to GDCo Plus gets the rest of this newsletter and Discord access, plus more.]
Game discovery news: hi, Black Flag, Zero Sievert 2
Let’s start out by examining the game platform & discovery news that erupted since late last week:
Checking GDCo Pro's 'trending' unreleased Steam games by 'new wishlists in the last 7 days’, the Assassin's Creed Black Flag remake is #1 again, close to 800k wishlists swiftly, and underwater survival sequel Subnautica 2's confirmed release date (May 14th!) has vaulted it up to #2, as it tops 4 million wishlists.
Elsewhere, Witcher-y vampire ARPG The Blood Of Dawnwalker hits #4 thanks to confirmed Sept release date & preorders. New entries: Polish influencer-led survival game Painland (#5) and top-down extraction shooter sequel Zero Sievert 2 (#7), (It’s following up a cleverly pitched game with >600k copies sold on Steam.)
The Steam Controller debuted yesterday for $99 and quickly sold out, but as GameSpot notes: “It became extremely difficult to snag one before it went out of stock due to payment processing errors.” (Valve says stock “ran out sooner than expected”). Also: Valve has been showcasing the Steam Input Configurator for easy mapping.
A recent Circana survey of U.S. gamers about why they play consoles had ‘for exclusives’ at the top of the response heap, at 41% (down 8% year on year, tho!) Also hot and happening: ‘friends & family also play console’ (38%), ‘easier to play with friends/family’ (37%), and ‘prefer to play in living room’ (down 4% to 36%).
Roblox has been playing up Roblox Reality tech “to combine hyperscale multiplayer gaming with photorealism”, using AI to build much better-looking environments on top of existing levels. (The CEO did note that “This will not be free. This will use cloud compute. We will have some kind of way of subscribing or paying for this.”)
There’s a notably strong set of upcoming May games for Xbox Game Pass, including the much anticipated first-party racing game Forza Horizon 6, plus Subnautica 2 (on Day 1 in Game Preview) - plus Day 1 arrivals for Mixtape and Call Of The Elder Gods.
ICYMI: GameStop’s latest ‘cosplaying a real company for meme stock purposes’ move is announcing a bid to buy eBay, though it’s extremely unclear they have access to enough capital to do a deal. (But hey, if it happens, it’s the only way they will be able to make money on the new Steam controller.)
One notable platform-y stat pointed out in Paradox’s latest financials: 97.4% of the company’s PC game revenue in the Crusader Kings makers’ latest quarter was ‘Steam platform’. We presume they’re counting third-party key sales in there. (80% of Paradox’s total revenue is from PC, 16% from console and the rest from mobile.)
Have trouble keeping up with game media, esp. YouTube channels, podcasts, etc, but also websites? Us too! So thanks to Chris Plante (who interviewed me for his podcast Post Game a while back) for making ‘An Incomplete Catalogue of Games Media in 2026’. (Lots of gooood links in there…)
Steam has a new video Q&A recording up about June’s Next Fest, confirming that they are sticking with the ‘random games served at players until Thurs 10am and then machine learning-based recommendations’ algorithmic approach. (They also say the recommendation algo uses wishlisting trends, and doesn’t use demo playtime.)
Microlinks: Disney’s new CEO is exploring a ‘super app’ that might include games; Bethesda has just released Switch 2 ‘code in a box’ physicals of Fallout 4 & Skyrim (not even game key-card?); Xbox is bringing automatic ‘super resolution’ upscaling to the ROG Xbox Ally X handheld.
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April’s top new PC & console games, revealed…
We do these every month, and learn things every time, so we bet you do too! It’s GameDiscoverCo’s top new Steam (& console) games of the month, powered by our Pro data - here’s March, Feb and Jan’s, if you missed ‘em. Here’s the top-line #s:
Windrose was the standout new Steam game of the month: not surprising if you followed its strong wishlist (>1.3m at launch!) & demo (>22,000 CCU) performance, but the PvE pirate survival adventure hit ~1.65m sold from April 14th to month end. It’s hanging at 100k concurrents too, implying it’ll sell many more millions…
Pragmata and Vampire Crawlers also circled the ‘1m units’ milestone: Capcom’s long-in-dev action title Pragmata hit 1m on PC and another 600k+ on console (majority PlayStation!) And unique Vampire Survivors first-person deckbuilder follow-up Vampire Crawlers rode a 6x lower price point to ~900k in just 10 days.
Two late-month releases surged after the end of April: just calling out co-op robot cowboy romp Far Far West (released April 28th), already at >750k copies sold LTD (but 275k in April). And similarly, Heroes Of Might & Magic: Olden Era (out April 30th!) is at ~650k copies sold (and ~180k in the few hours after launch.)
There’s some other notable small-team titles further down the charts too, including survival game Road To Vostok (~250k, discussed later) and hybrid tower-defense/miner The Spotter (>100k).
One notable thing about this month’s top new Steam games? Of the ten titles that sold >100k, only one of them - Heroes Of Might & Magic - was based directly on an existing IP. (Although Vampire Survivors/Crawlers was an indirect sequel.) In today’s market, that’s relatively rare: March had 5+, Feb had at least 3…
Looking at the Top 10 new games on Steam by gross revenue, it’s Windrose and Pragmata which dominate the Top 2 spots with nearly $40m in gross Steam revenue within a few days, thanks to price point ($30 and $60, respectively).
But jazz age cartoon FPS (nice angle!) Mouse: P.I. For Hire rode its $30 price point to ~350k units and $10m in gross revenue on Steam alone, and we think it picked up decent accretive sales numbers across PlayStation (>125k), Switch (>75k), and Xbox (>50k) also, thanks to its Cuphead-styled whimsy.
Next, let’s go check out top-selling Steam games of all kinds (by units, paid only) in April, since there’s some interlopers from previous months:
Slay The Spire 2 piles on another 1.35m more units: we now have the iconic PC-only $25 roguelike deckbuilder sequel - which released on March 4th - at around 6.7 million copies sold in total, about 62% of whose players also own the OG game.
Crimson Desert’s another March release with strong April sales: the giant $70 ARPG added 800k+ units on Steam alone, and is now over 5 million units worldwide (~3m+ on/off Steam, ~500k Xbox, 1.5m+ PlayStation, we estimate.)
Multiple other smaller indies made it onto the units chart: specifically, $12 coin-pusher roguelike Raccoin, which launched March 31st, we see at >500k units, and $7 scratchcard-themed incremental game Scritchy Scratchy, originally out March 18th, added >350k units and has nearly 900k at this point.
BTW, we’re not talking about BidKing much ‘cos it’s a $3 China-first multiplayer auction game with mostly Negative reviews, and all its recent updates are about exploiters/cheaters, and there’s money-laundering claims too. But it’s in the charts!
And here’s the top-grossing games for the month, including F2P titles, with Counter-Strike 2 inevitably at #1 with >$150m, followed by F2P titles like PUBG ($62m) and Apex Legends ($44m) in the Top 5.
Crimson Desert, Windrose, and Pragmata are also in the mix with $40-$50m gross, and you’ll also see Warframe and Marvel Rivals in the Top 10, grossing close to $20m - as is Forza Horizon 6, thanks to pre-orders! (We have the Japan-set racing sequel’s total Steam pre-orders alone at nearly 700k units and almost $50m in revenue.)
Finishing off with console, does the fact that we only have one graphical chart for you indicate it was a bit of a slow month, overall? We decided to just print the PlayStation paid Top 5 by units:
For new PlayStation games, Pragmata led things with >400k units, including quite a bit of interest via consoles linked to Hong Kong/China (>20% of players) and Japan (almost 10%). (Often nowadays, games that scale on PlayStation - like Resident Evil titles - have good international reach outside of Europe and the U.S.)
Bethesda franchise Starfield saw ~175k PlayStation players after its April 6th PS5 release - a fraction of total players, but an extra $9m in handy incremental revenue. Mouse, Hades II and Saros were ~100k players - tho Saros launched Apr. 29th and is now at >150k. New PlayStation Plus titles were headed by Lords Of The Fallen (1.2m!)
Otherwise, moving on to Xbox, Pragmata was the biggest selling new paid title at ~70k units, followed by Mouse P.I. with ~50k. And on Game Pass, most new titles had 100-200k downloads: we see the new GP April Top 5 as Replaced, Vampire Crawlers, Kiln, Tiny Bookshop and Aphelion.
For Nintendo Switch and Switch 2 eShop, first-party Nintendo social sim Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream is way out ahead, with >300k Western eShop units & lots more physical. Next up: Mouse: P.I. For Hire hit >70k eShop copies, Vampire Crawler made almost 50k and scaling & Pragmata and Content Warning were a tad lower on eShop.
Transparency wins for Road To Vostok’s solo dev?
If you’re a GDCo Pro or Plus subscriber, we already talked briefly about ‘solo-adjacent dev’ first-person survival game Road to Vostok ($20), which launched in Steam Early Access on April 7th and has thrived, as seen by its appearance above with >250k sales.
To remind you what we said: “Players still really like the openly dystopian European vibes of games like S.T.A.L.K.E.R., which this game extends - it’s set in a no man’s land between Finland and Russia… quite ‘of the moment’. (One Finnish reviewer: “Hiding in a Vostok apartment with an armored Russian vehicle driving past is one of the scariest experiences I’ve had in a game in a long time.”)”
The permadeath & gritty gameplay means Road To Vostok isn’t for the fainthearted. But what we’ve been most impressed with is the levelheaded way the dev - former army lieutenant Antti Leinonen - has dealt with his community so far. Specifically:
Post-release transparency about his team size (1!): Leinonen lays it out there in his first post-release Steam news post: “Being a solo-developer has many perks and benefits, but also a lot of limitations… For example, I currently have ~11k unread emails.” Players are responding really well to this level of honesty.
Being careful about hotfixes while in a post-launch haze: this applies to all, but we love it that Antti spells is out: “If you start making tweaks and especially code-changes under [a heavy crunch situation around launch], you can easily fix one thing, but you accidentally create two new problems or some unexpected issues.” You need method.
Clear roadmap around creating more content & depth: as per usual with ‘unexpected’ - or semi-expected - hits, players are burning through content and want more. In his second update, the dev notes that game content will take up 85% of a ‘financial bucket’ he has access to, now the game sold >250k units.
Also, in a world where players are always asking for more, it’s impressive that Leinonen can say clearly in the second update: “Once this second patch is live and if there are no major issues, I will be also taking that much needed development break.” So he’s signposting a few days he will not be working on the game, in a fairly personal way.
Partly because people are so impressed that a solo dev can make such a complex game, but partly because the game is expansive in pretty good shape already - and already has a strong modding scene - the dev has cultivated a situation where the community appreciates him, and contrasts him with ‘companies that put out half-finished games’.
We like thinking about how Road To Vostok got into that position - presumably with clear, repeated, personal communication. In a world where parasocial relationships matter and corporations can be much-maligned, there’s a lot of takeaway here for how you talk to your players? (But yep, having a great game also helps, heh.)
[We’re GameDiscoverCo, an analysis firm based around one simple issue: how do players find, buy and enjoy your PC or console game? We run the newsletter you’re reading, and provide real-time data services for publishers, funds, and other smart game industry folks.]