[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.]
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.]