February 2026's top-selling new Steam games are... what?
Also: Slay The Spire 2 & Marathon go huge on Steam, and lots of 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.]
We have returned - and before we get going, a mea culpa on the ‘wishlists added during Next Fest’ specifics in Tuesday’s newsletter. We’ve removed ‘em cos they undershot some wishlist increments, partly due to the big follower-to-wishlist multiples of Next Fest. (All the other data/analysis - uniques, CCU, followers - was just fine, tho.)
Oh, and if you’re actually in town for GDC in San Francisco next week, microtips from a local: the Nintendo Store in Union Square is open, Gott’s Roadside at the Ferry Building does a good burger, and the Kaws exhibit at SFMOMA is good-ass pop art. (There’s also playable games at SFMOMA on Thu/Fri via The MIX.)
[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: Resident Evil’s takeover..
We’re already rolling on to the next big launches (see our Steam section later), but let’s start our discovery & platform news section with last week’s biggie:
The latest Footprints.gg estimates on weekly ‘trad media’ mentions show Resident Evil Requiem - which already hit 5 million copies sold, per Capcom, #1 by far. Also hot: transmedia franchises God Of War & Fallout, as well as Pokemon life sim Pokopia (Switch 2 exclusive, Dragon Quest Builders 2 co-devs, a lotta hype.)
Xbox’s new CEO Asha Sharma re-engaged the fanbase via X/Twitter, revealing “Project Helix, the code name for our next generation console. Project Helix will lead in performance and play your Xbox and PC games.” More partner discussion at GDC next week, according to Sharma. (Expensive consoles for core gamers are back!)
Just announced: new tools for developer and publisher homepages on Steam, including specialized versions for special occasions, new templates, new configurations and more. (This is a really nice upgrade, and comes with a 20 minute video tutorial on it - great stuff, Valve.)
We got a full Jason Schreier piece for Bloomberg on Sony’s PC pullback: “Sony Group Corp. no longer plans to release its big PlayStation 5 games on PC… Online games such as Marathon and Marvel Tokon will still be released across multiple platforms, but single-player titles such as… Ghost of Yotei and… Saros will remain exclusive to PS5.”
Next Fest follow-ups? There were 750 total AI-disclosed Next Fest entrants (21% vs 17% from the last edition), we forgot to mention on Tuesday. And some say the first coupla “unpaid labor” days of Next Fest game-tuning is like being “thrown into a pool of endless white noise” for players. (Could there be a pre-Fest to tune algo?)
Big news in mobile royalty-town, as Google reduces most Play Store fees to 20-25%, to deal with Epic lawsuit ramifications and try to win back ‘we’re taking payments to our web store’ companies. M.G. Siegler wonders what this means for Apple ($), in particular, who are still holding out. (How about PC/console, too?)
We got a nice note re: a Steam discovery tool: “steampoacher(), the free tool for viewing and downloading Steam capsule images just added support for screenshots and trailers, including download support for both. I guess you could call it version 3?” Great!
Some interesting meta-thoughts (ha ha!) from Meta’s CTO Andrew Bosworth on ‘failing VR game fans’: “Many of the people who might say I failed them would say so because they loved things that I gave them, and are mad that the gravy train has come to a stop. But I still respect that.. the people that argue that I’ve failed are not yet VR gaming fans, who I think could be.” (So yes, it’s about market size.)
FirstLook’s new whitepaper (free reg. req.) interviewed 250 devs about discovery success signals for PC/console games, with 78% of studios saying YouTube was a key platform for them discovery-wise, vs. 53% TikTok, 48% Twitch, and 41% Discord. (The answer, as always, is ‘all of the above’.)
The Financial Times ($) says that: “The White House is debating whether to allow Tencent, the Chinese tech and gaming company, to maintain stakes in popular video game groups.” (The discussion is if a ‘security risk’ is created by the part or whole ownerships in Epic, Riot, Supercell & others - fun, huh?)
Microlinks: The Sims 4 will open an official marketplace to let content creators sell mods for a share of ‘Moola’; Capcom says PC game sales account for approximately 50% of total units and they expect this % to increase; the UK Insomnia Gaming Festival is canned due to “reduced investment in live events from major tech and hardware brands.”
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Feb. 2026’s top-selling new Steam games = these!
It’s a whole new month - and following our look at Jan. 2026’s top new Steam games, headed by Quarantine Zone, StarRupture and LORT, it’s time to check out February. It’s a shorter month, but had three titles selling better than the #1 in Jan:
Mewgenics made the top spot in our charts with 1.7m units: it’s a close call between it and Res Evil Requiem, but in our charts, “bizarre cat-breeding simulator” Mewgenics ($30) - which we did a full newsletter on already - is the top new Steam game of Feb. 2026. (Median time played is already ~13 hours, average >23!)
Resident Evil Requiem launched late in the month & is a giant hit: it came out late on Feb. 27th, and we have it at 1.5m units sold on Steam in those ~36 hours. But Capcom’s horror sequel Resident Evil Requiem ($70-80) is over 2m LTD Steam units - and more than 5 million across PC/console. (It’s so well-executed, too.)
Super Battle Golf & Yapyap show how strong co-op goofiness is: co-operative wizard-based ‘friendslop’-type thing YAPYAP ($10) is down off its 14k CCU heights. But its goofy likeability took it to >700k units, as anarchic golf cart/weapon mangler Super Battle Golf ($8) hit 500k in 9 days. (Streamers love ‘em.)
The above two ‘sloppers’ weren’t the only co-op playgrounds to chart - Roadside Research ($12) also made it into the Top 10. (We’ll have more on the trend next week - there’s a low technical/asset barrier to entry, but you have to really nail execution.)
When it comes to actual Steam revenue, the ‘new game’ charts look different, since we’re comparing $8 games to $70 games. (Of course, the dev costs varied a lot, too!) Resident Evil Requiem takes the lead with ~$75m on Steam, and has amassed a lot more $ since end of month.
But we also see ‘dark samurai action RPG’ Nioh 3 ($70) pop up into third place with >$25m, and some other titles like Diablo II Resurrected ($40) also jump up the chart somewhat. (We’re not sure what a good result for that remake is, but people liked it!)
As for overall top Feb. premium Steam game performers (in units!), you can see the new games we mentioned, but also big pushes from bug-infested shooter Helldivers 2 (+700k to 13.7m on Steam), thanks to a new cyborg invasion & discount, and Arc Raiders (+700k to 8.6m on Steam.)
Aggressive discounting (75% off, alongside a new desert biome) helped Ark: Survival Ascended (+500k to 3m Steam units) make the charts and hit $100m in gross Steam revenue, according to our estimates - though it’s been in Early Access since 2023.
Our revenue estimates across all Steam games in Feb. 2026 (including F2P titles) shows Counter-Strike 2 predictably hanging out at #1, with good months from PUBG (#3, thanks to Spring Fest), Apex Legends (#5, thanks to a new Breach update), and more.
Finally, as a bonus, we’ll check in on PlayStation, where we have Resident Evil Requiem at >1.6m units in Feb. (and >2m to date!) with Saudi Arabia (i.e. the Middle East), Hong Kong (i.e. China) and Japan the #2-4 biggest countries playing it, behind the U.S. (It’s such a global phenom vs. many other franchises.)
Also in this chart: Nioh 3 approaching 500k sold, and co-op horror game Reanimal (which also sold decently on Steam!) at nearly 300k, with Dragon Quest VII remake and the God Of War 2D pixel art ‘surprise drop’ between 150k and 200k units so far. Over-the-top sequel High On Life 2 managed 100k between PlayStation and Steam.
On other consoles: High On Life also added >1m Xbox Game Pass players, by far the highest for last month for a new GP game. (You may remember the original was the biggest ever third-party Game Pass launch, likely 5x that, in merrier days.) And we have Resident Evil Requiem at a respectable 300k til month-end on Xbox: people care.
Nintendo Switch Western eShop-wise, classic Pokemon games FireRed and LeafGreen are selling close to 1m, and Mario Tennis Fever hit 250k - and more on physical. For third-parties, Resident Evil Requiem was top, perhaps >100k digital, with Fallout 4: Anniversary Edition and Dragon Quest VII Reimagined also charting.
Steam debuts this week: hi, Slay The Spire 2 (& Marathon!)
