Are a new breed of publishers 'solving' discovery?
Also: the next three months of key Steam releases & lots of platform 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.]
A little something for the pre-weekend, Sir? GameDiscoverCo is happy to oblige, in the form of this textual melange of bullet points, opinions, and data about PC & console video games. And we’re going to keep doing it, too, so there…
Before we start: GDCo sponsored the Oakland Ballers - our local baseball team - in 2025, and even did a game jam featuring their mascot. Well: we’re a ‘proud partner’ of the Ballers again for 2026 - and we want to get more game firms supporting their local communities. (It’s wholesome, and good.) So if you do, ping us and we’ll feature you!
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Game discovery news: Dec’s new Steam hits, huh?
Starting out, let’s take a look at the game discovery & platform news since we last checked in:
We did a quick graphical round-up of ‘top new Steam games of Dec.’ (above) cos it was quiet, but: viral co-op horror game Don’t Scream Together (#1) hit ~300k sales, and My Summer Car sequel My Winter Car (#2) was the big late-Dec hit (It’s now at almost 400k units - people love fixing up their busted, trashed car!)
Otherwise: we have a couple of old-school MMOs at ~200k players (Guild Wars Reforged & Ashes Of Creation), and an interesting selection of other indies (inc. clicker A Game About Feeding A Black Hole and clever fantasy automation game Alchemy Factory, which is also still scaling well in January.) Interesting, huh?
Could Switch 2 sales be slowing, due to a) hardcore fans having bought b) affordability issues? The Game Business has data saying maybe: U.S. sales in Nov/Dec were 35% off 2017’s Switch 1 pace & the same stat was 16% off in the UK and ~30% down in France. (But Japan’s still hot, and we have a looong way to go.)
Tom Francis (Tactical Breach Wizards) has written an excellent ‘bits of advice for indies’ piece, the main points being: “1. Stay as small as you can… 2. Pick something prototypable… 3. Testing is the magic bullet… 4. Price is a solved problem.”
Roblox things: there’s plenty of note in the official 2025 Roblox Replay round-up: “Roblox is part of over 151 million users’ daily lives, and in Q3 of 2025, the average user spent 2.8 hours a day playing games and sharing experiences.” Also: Roblox now requires facial age checks to access chat, no matter how old you claim you are.
Microlinks: Steam Workshop mods are getting new/easier version control to stop ‘em breaking; Epic now has text chat sync-ing across Fortnite, the Epic Games Store, and Epic Games iOS apps; almost 20% of the top new sellers on Steam in 2025 used generative AI.
The 29th annual DICE Awards have nominees, and: “Topping the list with 8 nominations each are Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 and Ghost of Yōtei, followed by Arc Raiders and Dispatch with 6… Blue Prince earned 5 total nominations with Death Stranding 2: On the Beach close behind with 4.”
Xbox things: Game Pass picked up some biggish new titles in Jan, inc. Star Wars Outlaws and Resident Evil Village; there’s an upcoming Xbox Developer Direct showing off Fable, Forza Horizon 6, and Game Freak’s Beast of Reincarnation.
‘Try before you buy’ indie games on iOS/Android are making decent (if not giant!) $ recently, as shown by Adriaan De Jongh’s Rift Riff, of which he says: “Rift Riff‘s daily avg net revenue: ±$100 on Steam; ±$400 on mobile (90% App Store, 10% Google Play).” (We’ve also noted titles like Yes, Your Grace doing pretty well that way.)
Mobile stuff: Anton Slashcev’s mobile games heatmap for 2025 shows how 4x strategy was giant ($7.5b, up 19%!), but action RPGs were down 38% to $835m; Dec’s top-grossing mobile games (non-webshop revenue!) are headed by LastWar: Survival, Roblox, Monopoly Go!, Whiteout Survival & Royal Match.
Microlinks, pt. 2: SteamSpy’s Sergiy Galyonkin has announced Kobo, “a toolkit that lets players create, remix, and break things inside existing games”; GameStop is closing hundreds of stores while incenting its CEO to maxi-meme its stock; YouTube’s AI-powered Playables Builder is in Beta for YouTube creators.
Are a new breed of publishers ‘solving’ discovery?
At GameDiscoverCo, we don’t tend to profile specific publishers. When we do, they tend to be new, agile ones, like our piece on Oro Interactive. And we found another ‘test subject’ to probe - Polden Publishing, which has put out 6 games on Steam since June 2025, and has >10 upcoming, inc. ‘battle royale typing game’ Final Sentence.
None of these have been giant hits - yet. But in our view, Polden is ‘mining in the right places’, with a host of catchy-looking titles (from devs we haven’t heard of!) which are selling tens of thousands of copies & getting pretty decent feedback.
So we caught up with Polden co-founder, Kirill Akimkin, who set up the company with another Kirill (Oreshkin!) and Yaroslav Shalashov last year. He was willing to be 100% transparent, which we (obviously) love. Here’s the company’s LTD Steam rev:
And here’s the units sold of all of the company’s titles so far - interesting for multiple reasons, including the attach rate of Supporter Packs for Polden’s games:
Just talking briefly re: some of Polden’s best-sellers: Restaurats is a medieval ‘rats serving orcs/vampires’ (!) restaurant sim with co-op, Lessaria is a Majesty-inspired strategy RTS, Static Dread is a Cthulhu-y Papers Please-a-like, and My Wife Threw Out My Card Collection (So I Bought a Dump to Find Them All) is a garbage-sorting card collector inspired (we presume) by the guy with $750m of Bitcoin in a dump.
So where are all these games coming from, and how does the biz model work? Here’s what we gleaned from chatting to Polden’s Kirill Akimkin:
Russian-language* game dev Telegrams run by the founders are key: both Oreshkin and Shalashov (ex-Wargaming) operate transparent ‘here’s how we are building the company’ Telegram channels that are very honest & raise company profile (*BTW: Polden tells us none of their founders or dev companies are HQ-ed in Russia any more, and they’re also working with Ukrainian devs.)
Even at low budget, there’s specific method to their strategy: at $50k-$150k total budgets, these games are all micro-indies. (Some are in LCOL countries like Georgia, which helps.) And sure, Polden’s release rate seems aggressive, but the team does surveys and is strict about positive KPIs on demos before releasing.
Polden’s transparency helped the ‘right’ kind of game acquisition: by creating a growth narrative for the Russian diaspora making games (and subsequent English language data dumps on LinkedIn!), they drew devs to them - Kirill A tells us: “To be honest, they ALL came to us organically - we never reached out to anyone.”
You can argue Polden’s doing nothing different to a regular publisher. And they - and we - know that the market is still massively hit-driven. Kirill says: “The idea is to get 20 releases and see if there is a hit.” But what’s the discovery ‘solve’? They’re speedrunning the process, and have unlocked a unique set of devs who seem commercially minded.
And in a market where tiny games can be hits, launching more inexpensive titles - within targeted genres and with quality control - is a differentiator to the trad ‘we won’t get out of bed for <$1m dev budget’ approach. We’ve seen micropublishers break out, too - Future Friends with CloverPit, and Forklift with Cash Cleaner Simulator.
Existing publishers often have a big back catalog to rely on. But in the post-COVID world, you need to either start tiny or hit it big early for this to work. For some, you might see this as a ‘race to the bottom’ - Polden’s titles are small-game messy, with bugs and AI controversies included.
But we also see how they’re doing it, and think - ‘hm, promising!’ And that doesn’t happen much nowadays (hence the dearth of new hit indie publishers in the last 5 years, with a handful of exceptions like the strategy Pac-Man ‘nomming up all the good core indie strategy titles’ wizards at Hooded Horse.)