Everything you want to know about shortform video & games...
...but were afraid to ask? Also: lots of news & this week's Steam debut charts...
[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.]
As the week ends, we’re back to our shenanigans, with GDCo looking at short-form video trends for games with the help of a handy partner - as well as this week’s Windrose-led Steam debuts for GDCo Pro/Plus subscribers. (Why is Windrose such a hit? We heard it was the dodo demographic, excited about their empowerment.)
Before we start, we enjoyed this vintage 1994 survey of U.S. Sega Genesis owners, revealing that that 52% of non-Sega Channel households owned Sonic The Hedgehog, followed by Sonic 2 & Sonic 3 (31% each), Mortal Kombat (16%), Madden Football (15%), and further down the spiral, classic brawler Streets Of Rage (5%).
[FREE DEMO OF GDCo PRO? You too can get a gratis demo of our GameDiscoverCo Pro company-wide ‘Steam deep dive’ & console data by contacting us 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: 007, Metro 2039 pop up…
Let’s start things out with a whole bunch of game platform & discovery news, as follows:
ICO’s Footprints.gg has its latest ‘trad media’ mentions (April 8-14) headed by Crimson Desert again (it just hit 5m sold), but notable new interest in upcoming Bond game 007: First Light (#6) and the newly announced post-apocalyptic shooter sequel Metro 2039 (#7). (Mm, Eastern Europe x dystopia.)
Wondering why Grand Theft Auto 6 is coming to PC a bit later? In part, as these leaked GTA Online revenue splits indicate, “PS5 generates more than half the weekly GTA Online bookings, with $4.5m earned per week.” PlayStation is 64% of the total, Xbox 33%, and PC just 3% - presumably alternate PC mods is largely the reason.
Landfall’s Hanna F made an interesting LinkedIn post discussing a Twitter/X post she made that went viral that “any update is a bonus not a right” for Peak, saying: “I think devs/studios/publishers need to get better at setting player expectations, not only for our own communities but for the industry at large.”
Meta has confirmed a cost increase for its Quest VR devices, “increasing the price of Quest 3 by $100 and Quest 3S by $50, starting on Sunday”, to $600 (Quest 3) and $350 or $450 (Quest S). Meta says the price hikes are coming because of the “global surge in the price of critical components - specifically memory chips.”
Research outfit Hushcrasher has tried to track game budgets increasing over time, arguing: “The [cumulative] budget of every game released on Steam in 2025 sum up to an all-time record of $27 billion.” (We think a chunk of this $ is difficult to track ‘sweat equity’, esp. on the low end, but we like the attempts to quantify.)
PlayStation fans queuing to buy PS5 before the price upgrade? Circana’s Mat Piscatella says so, for the U.S., “reach[ing] 2026 highs during the week ending April 4th, as price increases loomed. U.S. spending on video game hardware for the week nearly doubled when compared to the same week a year ago.”
Nobody is manning the ‘common sense to not approve’ button on the Switch eShop again, where ‘sandbox RPG’ Hytale is available and in the charts, and has absolutely nothing to do with the actual PC Minecraft-y RPG Hytale, which recently released. (This is bad for trust on the platform!)
Roblox is getting more specific about age-based accounts “for younger users on Roblox: Roblox Kids for users ages 5 to 8 and Roblox Select for users ages 9 to 15.” (Access & chat is suitably gated.) There’s also new requirements to publicly publish games “to help make sure games are suitable for our youngest users.”
Sony’s PlayStation Plus Game Catalog for April 2026 is adding The Crew Motorfest, Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered, Football Manager 26 Console, Warriors: Abyss and more, as classic PS2 JRPG Wild Arms 4 joins the highest PlayStation Plus Premium tier in emulated form.
Esoteric data: Owl & Co’s Hernan Lopez is talking about the Attention 20, “the 20 most valuable global attention economy companies ranked by enterprise value”, inc. multiple game companies (EA, Nintendo, Roblox, Take Two.) But it’s Apple, Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon and Meta dwarfing the others atop the charts.
All to know about shortform video x games in 2026
Yes, folks, shortform video optimized for mobile phones is, increasingly, a big deal for PC/console game discovery. For example, our Steam Fan Snapshot data has it as a key discovery method for 36% of our respondents, ahead of ‘trad media websites’ (28%) and Reddit-y discussion forums (29%).
And since these platforms have all ‘come up’ in the last few years, we’re not sure all of you understand the nuances. That’s why we asked somebody immersed in the space to explain - Mahdeen Abrar of Jestr, whose company incents small/medium creators on TikTok, Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts to post about games in exchange for $.
Jestr creators posted 100 million payout-compatible views in March 2026 - 44m Instagram, 34m YouTube Shorts, 32m TikTok, though historically the network has been 50% Instagram, 30% YT Shorts and 20% TikTok. So there’s plenty of volume to infer results from. Let’s start with key platform differences, per Mahdeen:
Instagram Reels: “Skews slightly older and is a very visual app. Cozy and/or horror does great here - hugely underrated for gaming.” He also notes that the platform “optimizes for shares much more heavily than TikTok does”, and it’s the only platform you’ll often see more ‘shares’ than ‘likes’. (But both are good, obviously!)
TikTok: This standalone app has “the most mainstream & youngest audience, and friendslop thrives here.” Why? You see a lot of Roblox & Minecraft on the platform, inherently social and co-op titles. And: “As these gamers grow up and look for more sophisticated titles, the next obvious step up is friendslop.”
YouTube Shorts: this shortform part of YouTube “has a lot of overlap with Reddit users - more hardcore/niche games have a chance to pop here.” Mahdeen suggests the “algorithm is less curated”, so you’ll get less ‘hyperfocused’ content recs. Overall: “the audience tends to skew older and… commenters are much more critical/hardcore gamers.”
For YT Shorts, Mahdeen gives an example from his own editorial Shorts channel for a game called Service With A Shotgun that got ~40k views:
Mahdeen notes: “What you’ll notice is that a lot of the comments actually reference other games or common gaming terminology.” This is a key difference between YouTube and TikTok: “you can safely assume that on TikTok, nobody knows as much about what you’re talking about.”
A great example of that? Jestr’s ‘what is Silksong?’ TikTok that picked up 51,000 likes around the release of the Hollow Knight sequel, including a whole bunch of ‘I’ve never heard of this game’ comments. As Mahdeen says: “It’s easy to get in our own gaming bubble and assume even the biggest indie games are known by the masses.” Spoiler: they aren’t!
We also wanted to ask Mahdeen about different types of shortform creators - clearly, there’s various flavors. (Most of these folks are not necessarily similarly popular on longform video platforms like Twitch and YouTube, btw.) And here’s 3 key ones:
Gameplay Creators: “These are your typical creators who upload short clips of them playing games. Usually these guys are streamers who multipurpose content from their VODs, but edit them in a fast-paced way to appeal to short form. The obvious winning genres in this creator archetype include friendslop and horror.”
Here’s an example featuring key gameplay from co-op fighter x builder Overthrown:
Mahdeen adds: “One very surprising genre that gameplay creators find high viral success with is puzzle games. These types of videos are very effective, due to the viewers being able to ‘figure out’ the puzzle alongside the creator.”
He provided me some examples, but I thought I’d go back a bit and highlight Daniel Benmergui’s clever story-puzzle game Storyteller, which went hella viral in this way after the mobile version got added to Netflix:
Showcase Creators: “This is an archetype of creator that can ONLY exist on short form, because they don’t actually NEED to play the game to talk about it. It’s very common to use existing B-roll or trailer footage, then add a voiceover discussing or reacting to the game.”
Here’s an example showing that, in the best scenarios, it’s actually creators recutting entire trailers & presentations of your game to play up the ‘hook’:
Mahdeen adds: “These types of creators can usually cover any genre, but I find strategy/less visually appealing games struggle a bit more with showcase content. This is because those games feel infinitely better to play than they do to watch clips of.”
There’s also an opportunity to take “more of a storytelling approach”, highlighting the devs behind the game and their unique challenges or background. (‘Ex-AAA devs’ and ‘solo indie’ are the most vanilla versions of those, but still provide hook scaffolding!)
Real-World Aesthetics Crossover: “This style is much more niche and uncommon, but can still be highly effective! It relies on visually appealing games paired with eye candy desk setups.” Again, this is an interesting type of content where creators don’t even need to play the game if they don’t want to.”
Funnily enough, one of the Hozy videos we featured in Tuesday’s newsletter had the more typical ‘cozy background’ - here’s another. But there are other framing looks too, like this more ‘core’ one for Echoes Of Mystralia:
So what we are noticing here? That shortform videos creators - both paid & organic - are intriguing to work with - if nothing else, to work out how they encapsulate your game’s ‘hook’ for you. Here’s an example for The Last Gas Station, a cozy/creepy pixel art title that got almost 60k likes on TikTok alone, due to a hook-reinforcing video.
We don’t think all game genres work incredibly well with shortform. But a chunk of the more dynamic ones do. So however you try to scale your shortform interest (first-party posts, third-paid organic, third-party paid, all of the above), we hope you learned something from this piece. (Thx, Mahdeen!)
Debuts on Steam: go, Windrose, Pragmata, Mouse!
For GDCo Pro & Plus subscribers, we’re finishing out with a trio of titles (above) that all did pretty darn well in a busy Steam week for debuts. Full chart & analysis below…