How Dead as Disco surged wishlists with a demo twist
Also in here: our first Roblox monthly charts & lots of discovery 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.]
That was quite a weekend here in Los Angeles, huh - Lots of ‘not-E3’ news to digest? We’re going to feature a round-up of the trending-est SGF-adjacent games this Friday, after we’ve had a chance to let the wishlists cook. In the meantime, let’s document..
Before we do, we refer you to the Steam Next Fest demo showcase. Steam’s PC demo showcase started yesterday, and its 2500+ demos are featured until Mon. 16th. We have a big analysis of that next Tuesday. And in the meantime, Valve’s official June Next Fest trailer features a few of the more interesting titles - go browse around!
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Game discovery news: Not-E3’s game cavalcade
OK, so let’s get going with analysis of things that are happening - largely ‘new games to discover’, as opposed to platform-based, by the way:
Three general vibes around ‘Los Angeles at ‘not-E3’ time’, ignoring the Federal troops piling in (ahem)? We’d say: ‘some hopeful vibes amidst a diffused, slightly subdued set of physical events’, ‘there’s just a LOT of games’, and ‘anyone could have a hit game - so people still see market opportunity’. There’s also plenty of good tacos.
The big announce platform-wise - at the Xbox showcase - was “two Xbox Ally handhelds with new Xbox full-screen experiences” - the ROG Xbox Ally and ROG Xbox Ally X, shipping in 2025 - that are “designed to be more handheld-friendly and hide away the complexity of Windows to focus on gaming instead.”
More info? Phawx (video) has a great explainer, saying “when you start up the system it actually jumps straight into this Xbox experience”, without Windows touchscreen or keyboard needed. There’s also a Xbox-specific ‘Steam Deck Verified’-like system coming. Stephen Totilo (text) also went hands-on with one, noting it’s also intended to run Steam and GoG games, rather than solely Xbox PC store titles or cloud-streamed games. (Tho we haven’t seen the Steam interface for this yet.)
It’s true, Friday’s Summer Game Fest showcase had a shout-out to GDCo in the intro - we provided ‘Top 10 Steam best-sellers YTD 2025’ data (above). Geoff Keighley discussed the team size diversity for top-sellers & discovery challenges: “Hopefully if you're watching this show you'll discover your next favorite game.”
The top announcements from Friday’s SGF included 2026’s Resident Evil Requiem, a Lies Of P prequel DLC that surprise-dropped, extremely gory survival horror game ILL, large-scale battle sim Chronicles: Medieval, and more on IO’s Bond game. (A LOT of games - much adult, gritty & AAA-y, but some whimsy too.)
After that, Day Of The Devs showcased some excellent titles, including sequel reveal Escape Academy 2 & new looks at titles from beloved indies (Sword Of The Sea, Big Walk). Meanwhile, Devolver Digital’s sightly unhinged Direct was about just one game, brick-breakin’ survival roguelike BALL x PIT - demo out now!
Other showcases? The Wholesome Direct had some cozy goodness, including a leaf-blowing game and a just-launched Japanese vending machine management sim - nice concept! And the Future Games Show was notable for the announce of The Expanse: Osiris Reborn, a v.good-looking ARPG from CRPG experts Owlcat.
Game-wise, here’s the full Xbox Games Showcase line-up: Call Of Duty Black Ops 7 is unsurprising, but Grounded 2 hitting Early Access next month is def. unexpected. Double Fine’s Keeper looks nicely artisanal, and The Outer Worlds 2 looks good, but an $80-$100 price point, even if previously trailed, is aggressive.
Let’s finish up with the PC Gaming Show - although check the Games Recap 2025 site for more showcases we missed! 70+ trailers in this one, and reveals included “Blumhouse's horror mystery game Eyes of Hellfire, Failbetter Games' narrative farming sim Mandrake, and Soft Rains' tantalizing sci-fi adventure game Ambrosia Sky.”
Apple officially announced its iOS/Mac Games app at WWDC, which “combines Apple Arcade, App Store game recommendations, your App Store game library, and your friends list into a single location. Apple calls it an ‘all-in-one destination for games and playing with friends.’” It’s due “this fall” - here’s a 21-minute long Apple overview.
There’s a usability tidbit we missed from the Switch 2 launch: “Nintendo has now added an ‘on sale’ filter to the eShop's [more prominent] Wishlist menu… handy if you're currently tracking a long line-up of titles to buy when they're next on offer.”
GOG is adding one-click free mod packs for various games - here’s a video introducing it and here’s the GOG Mods page itself, which includes total conversions for Skyrim like Enderal: Forgotten Stories & much more besides. (GOG is pitching this as part of their ‘game preservation’ remit.)
Two good opinions: the ex-Escapist crowd at Second Wind did a video on the game discoverability problem, emphasizing positivity & word-of-mouth; Paul Kilduff-Taylor talks about the ‘working musician’ vs. ‘artist’ concept in games, saying: “the ‘next Balatro’ will not come from a Working Musician - it can't be produced under lab conditions.”
Dead as Disco: surging wishlists with a demo twist
It’s also performing well at Steam Next Fest, but we wanted to talk about Brain Jar Games’ “martial arts meets music video” title Dead As Disco today, because it appeared on our ‘trending unreleased Steam games’ chart multiple times recently - due to a deeply viral PC demo version, with 1,600 Overwhelmingly Positive reviews & counting.
So we reached out to Brain Jar’s Will Cook & Adam Gershowitz to work out what happened. And we can boil it down to three short bullets - they:
have the tech to let you load any song of your choice to beat people up with.
put it in the public demo!
got people doing just that went genuinely viral on TikTok. (Barbie Girl!)
How viral? The game surged from <50k Steam wishlists to >250k wishlists in less than a month, and is still going higher. So, we’re splitting this analysis into two parts. First, we asked Will (Brain Jar’s CEO) about putting this more freestyle ‘load any song’ mode into their demo.
He said: “Even though the [song upload] idea has been with us from the beginning, I think we bought into it as a team this past January, when we first teased our gameplay on TikTok and were overwhelmed by the number of song requests that flooded in.”
So yes, the game itself features its own songs - check out the official Next Fest trailer for a better idea of the overall vibe. And it’s very playable with them. But all of those 35 million+ TikTok impressions wouldn’t have happened without the song upload feature! (Look, Hatsune Miku songs! Look, Eminem tracks!)
There’s also a gameplay element to this. While the game may remind you of rhythm brawler hit Hi-Fi Rush, it plays notably differently, and this makes it easier to have UGC. We asked Will: “I think you've essentially timed animations and player movement to beats, without making the player forced to press buttons in time - is that actually correct?”
Will explained: “On the player-input side, we reward on-beat pressing but don't require it. No matter when you press, our beat-warping ensures your attacks instantly respond to your press, but don't hit the enemy until the proper moment(s) in the music. So you feel cool no matter what, but perfect timing feels best and is most powerful.”
Folk, this is great, ‘cos it takes a lot of the harsh ‘right/wrong’ timing around rhythm games away, and makes it way more accessible. There’s also depth - we presumed that BPM (beats per minute) would be the main way people would tune uploaded UGC.
But Will explained: “Think of BPM as ‘tier 1’ syncing, whereas instruments & vocals are ‘tier 2’ syncing. At the moment, only the included story-level songs have tier 2 syncs, but soon enough we'll put the tools we use to do that (songmaps) in the players' hands (as well as unveil ‘tier 3’ syncing).”
Part one: sorted. Part two: Brain Jar’s Adam Gershowitz put together a document for us on what the devs think went well to viral-ize this title. Here’s some highlights, written by him (and lightly edited by us):
“In January of 2025, we teased our gameplay on TikTok and on YouTube. Those exploratory posts of unedited gameplay blew up, netting over 3 million+ views in the first month.
Behind the scenes, we invited 200 fans from the Discord to test the song import feature behind an NDA. The feedback was so good, and the demand for invites so strong, that we decided to lean in, removing the NDA and inviting 3,000 additional players starting the very next weekend.
We expected this test of our UGC flywheel to give us a bump before Steam Next Fest. What happened was on a different scale altogether:
TikTok quickly filled with content, and in 48 hours the first of many clips went viral, amassing 2M+ plays from a user with less than 1k followers at the time. (In fact, except for a couple of notable exceptions, most of our viral success came from relatively unknown users on TikTok.)
We followed up, launching the official Steam demo a few days later in conjunction with the Next Fest press preview period. Almost immediately ,we surged to the top of several demo categories.
This momentum carried us 250K+ wishlists heading into Next Fest, and overwhelmingly validated the thesis we had fundraised on. So what did we learn?
Importing music was our ‘Secret Sauce’: Our proprietary ‘Songcrafter’ tech stack gave us the ability to transform every player into a content creator, and they loved it. 87% of players imported their own music.
TikTok can be as good (or better) than streaming for wishlists: It’s more approachable, easier to create for, and doesn’t rely on creators with large audiences to drive success. TikTok drove over 50% of our wishlist traffic, if not way more: YouTube was next, but it wasn’t even close.
Our creators averaged 89k plays per TikTok post: that’s not including the 10 that went viral, racking up over 17 million plays total. It sounds too good to be true, but if you’re a creator averaging 300 views per video, playing Dead as Disco right now… [can] 10x-10,000x your views. You just need to find the right song.
Have a good feedback survey & check it regularly: We consistently polled our players with a simple survey, and used it to decide when to lean in. Our first playtest had an [extremely good!] +93.5 Net Promoter Score… currently, the game has an +86.5 NPS with over 8,000 respondents.”
Thanks, Adam! Concluding, a couple of follow-ups. First, there might be an argument that if ‘loading your own songs’ ends up being the actual hook, the demo is very generous. One Steam demo reviewer: “Imagine walking into a Pizzeria that gives out a free sample on entry but said sample is a whole Pizza. That's how i feel about this demo.”
But we’re pretty sure the final game has a LOT more to it. And getting pure enthusiasm so early helps ‘Hype’ sooo much. So this another example of how ‘unleashing your key hook early in a demo, relatively unrestricted’ seems to be paying off. Will people pay for another pizza after this? We think they might…
Finally: we’re aware there are rights & access issues with uploading songs that the devs don’t own the rights to. But TikTok takes care of song rights for videos, and in the long-term, there’s no reason there can’t be a) a set of official DLC releases and b) a bunch of UGC song data/leaderboards where players provide their own MP3s (on PC).
And: if anyone remembers the Audiosurf series back in the day, there were music games that used to thrive on the ‘you can upload any song you like’ approach. So it’s surprising that not many have pursued this approach in many years. We’ll see if i works out for Dead As Disco - but it’s certainly looking promising!
Roblox’s top-earning for May 2025: Grow a Rival
In similar vibes to ‘we sure picked a bad week to quit smoking’, we sure picked a bad (busy!) week to grok all of the top Roblox games. But luckily, we have help from David Taylor of Creator Games, who’s providing us an exclusive monthly chart [Google link] of the Top 20 top-grossing games, using data from his CreatorExchange metrics site.
Not many other Roblox analysis sites try to estimate top games by Robux/$ revenue, so it’s great to see this view. David also made a LinkedIn post with select data on the Top 10 titles, so let’s look at both and make some pronouncements on May 2025’s leaders:
Grow A Garden is - obviously - #1 in both earnings ($12M) and minutes played: we had a whole newsletter on this, but David notes the plant-growing & pet-raising game “set a new all-time record for monthly playtime… 1.2 billion hours in May - nearly doubling the previous record of 650 million hours set by Blox Fruits in January.”
The Top 10 is quite stable & notably genre-diverse: you can see everything in here from well-done cartoon-y FPS (Rivals) to survival-y ‘moving base’ zombie train game (Dead Rails) through anime-inspired fantasy soccer game (Blue Lock: Rivals). We’ll be hearing about these titles repeatedly, but consider this an intro.
One big ‘mover and shaker’ is asymmetrical horror game Forsaken: again, you may know this genre on Steam (hi, Dead By Daylight!) But as a player explains to David: it’s “a 1 vs all survival game like Murder Mystery 2 but with more horror elements.” It had 106 million hours played (#7) but ‘only’ $1m in revenue for May.
It’s interesting to see Dress To Impress still at #6, as the fashion-themed game gets write-ups in Vogue: “About 63% of users are over 13 (43% are over 18) compared to 51% in the larger Roblox community.” So it’s a good example of a title over-indexing on older users - something Roblox is keen to note for those who think the platform’s ‘for kids’.
We’re expecting, much like the SteamHatchet most-watched streaming charts we run, to see a lot of the same games pop up every month in the Top 10. But - as with those charts - the fact that these games deliver, month after month is notable! Toodles…
[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.]