[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 right back at it, and we’re wondering how y’all doing out there. Reasonable? OK? Hunky dory? We’re… how do you say… rather excited to get on with our job, which is providing you much info on why video games are popular. So we’ll do that!
Before we start, the runaway ‘silly story’ intro slot winner this week: “Elden Ring Director Hidetaka Miyazaki Says He’s ‘Honestly Not Sure’ Where the Rumor About Him Having a Foot Fetish Came From.” Good job, IGN (and The Guardian for doing The Duskbloods interview.) So no, plz don’t call Miyazaki ‘Tarantino-esque’…
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Game discovery news: summon the Wardogs…
Let’s take a look at some of the more notable game platform & discovery news since late last week, as follows:
Here's GDCo Pro estimates of 'trending' unreleased Steam games by 'new wishlists in the last 7 days', Sept 1st-7th - and 'friendslop in the air' standout Dear Passengers (#1) and tactical shooter Wardogs (#3) shouldn’t be a surprise (We’ve talked less about F2P ARPG creature collector Aniimo (#2), which has good momentum.)
At #4, The Missing Tail, from Estoty (creators of VR/mobile hit I Am Cat) does the 'two player co-op only' thing with cozy cat shenanigans, getting ~100k wishlists in no time. And PlayStation's State Of Play helped Final Fantasy VII Revelation (#5) and FF: Resonance (#9), as well as killer shark sequel Maneater 2 (#8) trend.
According to data provided to The Game Business, “The GTA 6 Netflix reveal has caused a spike in sales of PlayStation and Xbox hardware. According to Nielsen IQ, UK PS5 sales jumped 33% [in the week following the reveal], while Xbox Series S and X sales leapt 34%.” The public, they love grand theft-ing in their autos…
Over on Facebook (!) former Epic wunderkind Cliff Bleszinski has views on the ‘Crash 2.0 for games’ rhetoric: “So is the end near? Hardly. ‘Life finds a way”’ - keep looking towards the AA/’slop’ area to find the fun, and at a reasonable price, which allows you to sample a bunch of quirky, innovative titles with friends. Let AAA faceplant for a while, I say.”
Spotting smaller Steam games getting more front page referrer traffic than they used to? That’s cos, some time recently, Valve changed the featured front-page games in ‘Discounts & Events’ (the non-Daily Deal ones) to be more personalized to logged-in player interests. (A good move to help the little guys, done quietly.)
Here’s a fun site, PS Store DB, which is scraping all PlayStation Store game ratings and creating a ‘Highest Rated weighted by review count’ score. For games with >10k reviews, the top games are Dispatch (4.93/5), Persona 5 Royal (4.91/5), the OG Final Fantasy VII (4.9/5) and Persona 4 Golden (4.9/5), among others…
We don’t talk about AI much, but Nvidia’s DLSS 5 ‘lighting diffusion model’, now shipping in NBA 2K27, is prob. the highest-profile incursion into games so far. There’s a ResetEra thread summarizing a longform Digital Foundry video we found v.helpful: “DLSS 5 best suited for games that are trying to look realistic.”
As passed along by RoadToVR: “Valve has pushed an update to the Steam Link PC VR streaming app on Quest that finally includes the ability to play games via wired connection.” Why now? One commenter notes: “Meta only recently added support for video over USB, and Steam Link could not have implemented wired support without it.”
Errata: on Friday’s August charts we noted that puzzle co-op hit Big Walk had 3m+ PlayStation players (and more downloaders) due to it launching as a PlayStation Plus ‘monthly game’. But looks like 99%+ of those (not 90%, as we put in the charts) are from PS+ players. (We’ll keep tweaking our PS+ download splits.)
Microlinks: Xbox tells existing Game Pass members its new cloud gaming cap doesn’t apply to them, but only in certain countries; Apple may be working on first-party game controllers; if you dropped Xbox Game Pass, MS may try to tempt you back with a personal discount price (as low as $16/month for Ultimate.)
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Does your Steam demo CCU ‘predict’ outcomes?
Headline: in this era when more Steam games are using pre-release demos to gauge interest & get feedback, we realized: we didn’t formally study the relationship between demo CCU and game CCU. But we can, thx to GameDiscoverCo Pro data (we have concurrents hourly from 2024 & just acquired daily peak CCU back to 2018.)
Firstly, some context: we checked the top 100 top-grossing games of 2026 so far on Steam, and found that 58 of them had a pre-release demo. That includes only 6 of the Top 20 (inc. Windrose, Pragmata) but three quarters (15) of those ranked #81-#100. So when you get below Forza & 007-sized games, it’s extremely common.
Let’s go for a high-level visualization to start. If your game’s demo got more than 50 concurrents on Steam, what was the peak-all time CCU of your game? Well, the median was 3.01x, and here’s the various ranges:
This, we think, is genuinely useful new info, calculated from the 2,569 Steam games we found that launched between Jan. 2024 and Aug. 2026 with a >50 CCU demo. (There were about 55,000 games launched in that time, so that’s only 4.7% of all games.)
So here’s how to think about this 3.01x multiplier - or at least, how we think about it:
Let’s say your game’s demo got 200 CCU on Steam: this means, at median, you might see the full version launch to 600 CCU, which very roughly translates to (if not a pre-orderable game!) about ~12,000 units sold Week 1, and 35,000 units Year 1.
But there’s a lot of moving parts here, both up and down: it’s hardly a fixed ratio! The top 20-30% of demos convert to peak game CCU at 6.24x, and the bottom 20-30% at 1.29x. That’s a 4-5 times difference, pretty quickly. The median isn’t gospel.
Nonetheless, these ratios are important for understanding probability: let’s say your game had a 100 CCU demo, and you need to sell 100k copies in your first year on Steam. To do that, you may need a 16x ‘demo→game’ multiplier.
Is a 16x multiplier (from peak demo CCU to peak game CCU) doable? Absolutely! But you’d need to be in the top 10% of ‘demo to game’ CCU conversion for it to happen. And you need to have a compelling reason why your game would perform that well. (Was the demo underpromoted? Will the main game somehow go more viral?)
Anyhow, we picked out select games with particularly high, near-median, and below-median performance of peak demo to peak game CCU, and here they are:
The high-converters? Mainly games like Megabonk and Escape From Duckov with incredibly strong hook or game design loop that had good interest pre-release (demo CCUs in the hundreds or low thousands), but hit giant CCU highs post-release.
It’s notable there’s not much friendslop in here - partly because friendslop is so inexpensive that it often just launches without a demo? But there’s some co-optional titles that grew over time like Abiotic Factor & LORT, as well as just straight out great ‘sleeper/breakout’ hits like Absolum, Moonlight Peaks, and even Dispatch.
We also wanted to show a range of titles that were closer to ‘normal’ - including solo indie hits like Road To Vostok (3.3x) and AA-ier rhythm action title Dead As Disco (2.34x). If we were using this data to mentally model for your game, we’d probably use 2x-4x as a starting point…
Finally, here’s some games that had stronger demo performance in CCUs than full game performance. (Sorry if you’re featured!) It looks like some of these like Drive Together or Ghostbane are very strong hook for casual demo players, but ‘execution-light’ at commercial release.
Some of the other titles had PR/marketing firepower aimed at the demo rollout, or tried to charge above what the market thinks acceptable for certain styles of game. ($5-$15 is increasingly the norm?) That’s the rough shape of it - please ping us if you see any data discrepancies btw, because we can’t manually check >2,500 games easily.
Finally, we showed this early data to someone who wondered how the median differs, depending on the CCU cut-off. Good question, and the median ‘demo → game’ peak CCU multipliers are like this for demo concurrents: >10 CCU = 2.40x, >50 CCU = 3.01x, >100 CCU = 2.91x, >250 CCU = 2.59x, >500 CCU = 2.41x, >1000 CCU = 2.38x.
(So: as the demo CCUs get bigger, the multiplier and spread gets somewhat smaller, as outliers are removed. Makes total sense to us…)
GameDiscoverCo Show: backing off multiplatform
Finally and ultimately, we’re back with The GameDiscover Show, ft. myself (Simon) and Post Games’ Chris Plante with a bunch of extra insight - sub to the podcast via Apple Music, Spotify & elsewhere (audio), with a video version on YouTube (above).
On this episode, we talk about how PC game hardware increases might also stretch the game biz in similar ways to console & discuss how Xbox and PlayStation are in some ways getting 'less multiplatform' . We also look at some good points from Arrowhead's CEO and talk about why that Xbox cloud limitation (maybe!) happened.
[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.]