How did narrative hit Dispatch hit 1m sales so fast?
Also: the most-streamed games for Oct, plus lots of platform & 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.]
The train, it just keeps on running down the tracks. And that means you’re getting another GDCo newsletter, shoveled on the pile like so much engine coal, whether you like it or not. (Most of you do, but are just backlogged - a bit like your Steam catalog?)
Anyhow, before we start, we dug this chat with a video game cookbook author (re: her Pokémon cookbook quandary: “I know one [recipe] I pitched was ‘Oh, we could do Sandshrew, but like a concha, like it’s rolled-up.’ And they’re like ‘No, [readers] might think they’re eating Sandshrew’.” (The final fix? The cookbook is almost all vegetarian dishes.)
[WANT LOTS MORE DATA? Companies, get much more ‘Steam deep dive’ & console data SaaS access org-wide via GameDiscoverCo Pro, as 80+ have. And signing up to GDCo Plus gets (like Pro!) the rest of this newsletter and Discord access, plus ‘just’ basic data & more. ]
Game discovery news: Where winds meet Tarkov?
Time to crank out the interesting platform & discovery links for a brand new week, and here’s what we’ve got:
Checking GDCo’s ‘7-day trending’ unreleased Steam game follower chart (Nov 3rd to 10th): ahead of their release this week, Wuxia ARPG Where Winds Meet (#1), and the ‘long available off-Steam’ extraction shooter Escape From Tarkov (#3) both got significantly boosted in trending, each making it over 500k wishlists.
New? Warhammer Survivors (#4) is hot, using the actual Vampire Survivors engine. And chibi zombie survival game Zeverland (#5) has a pre-alpha test. Also happening: ‘Cozy miniature world’ title Animula Nook (#6), flooded-world survival citybuilder Drownlight (#7), and grim post-nuclear survival shooter Pioner (#8).
PlayStation’s latest quarterly results are out, and a $204m write-off from Destiny 2 (& some other adjustments) dipped profit for the Game division, but sales were up 4% YoY to $7.2b, with its full-year rev. forecast up 3%. The PS5 has now sold 84.2m units, up 3.9m, and Ghost of Yōtei sold a decent 3.3m copies in Month 1.
Hot take of the week: veteran indie dev Cliffski and ‘Is indie game dev even viable as a business in 2025?’ He looks at the tavern sim glut & asks: “We might be relegating indie game dev to the same zone as ‘fiction writer’, as a career which absolutely everyone knows is financial suicide.” Related: there are now two kaiju cleanup games?
ICYMI: the ‘wider Steam pages as default’ change is now out of Beta and officially live, so check out your own Steam pages to make sure they look good. (Also in that update: an overhauled trailer/screenshot carousel, more robust game description features, and refined background imagery - mmm, improvements!)
If you’re on Xbox Game Pass & then release DLC, is it a gold mine? Revenge Of The Savage Planet’s Alex Hutchinson says not so much: “The attach rate for [DLC on Game Pass] has just been appalling…. What it says is, if you give stuff for free, then what you’ve done is told people not to pay for it.” (Also lots of casual players, tbf.)
Microlinks, Pt.1: Nintendo launched a website to check the compatibility of Switch software on Switch 2; the GDC State Of The Industry survey is open for y’all to fill out; PlayStation Store reveals that the top PS5 games in October were Battlefield 6 and Ghost Of Yotei, with Red Dead Redemption 2 winning PS4.
Some folks - like Stash’s Archie Stonehill - aren’t happy about Google & Epic’s proposed Android App Store settlement, which he says has Fortnite-friendly %s for cosmetics, shifts Google’s cut “from a fee for payment processing to one for distribution” (bad for webshops!) & “advantages alt stores over direct sideloading.” The judge doesn’t seem to be a fan either…
Indie co-op STALKER-like Misery got DMCA-ed off Steam by STALKER devs GSC Game World. And while it’s true they “don’t own the copyright on depressive Soviet-era buildings, playing guitar, vodka, radiation, or abandoned locations”, there’s inspiration here, and the Misery devs being edgy pro-Russian teens isn’t helping.
Don Parsons took a look at how generative AI was used by Next Fest demos - at least according to official Steam page statements: “65 of the games made use of generative AI to make background art… making general character or monster art was done in at least 38 cases.” (The total was 507 games out of the 2,900 we covered.)
Joe Henson (Hypercharge: Unboxed) has posted a very helpful guide to Steam store page optimization. We liked this list of common mistakes: “Reintroducing your logo like we’ve never met… Cool media hidden below “Read more.” If it sells the game, it belongs up top…. Asking me to wishlist before you’ve earned it. Show, don’t beg.”
Microlinks, Pt.2: The Verge is arguing Nintendo has too many platform-specific mobile apps - five and counting, many released recently; the Golden Joysticks’ game of the year shortlist includes 12 games we’re going to see in GOTY a lot; the state of Texas is suing Roblox over alleged child safety concerns.
How did Dispatch hit 1m copies sold so fast?
You’re probably aware of the - semi-expected, but not this big - success of $30 ‘superhero workplace comedy where choices matter’ Dispatch. It launched on October 22nd with two ‘episodes’, and rolls out the final two episodes of its eight-episode season tomorrow, Nov. 12th.
The game, which made ‘trending unreleased’ GameDiscoverCo Steam charts multiple times leading up to launch, sold 1 million copies on Steam/PlayStation in 10 days. And GDCo believes it’s approaching 2 million units (70-80% of them on Steam) as the finale hits. It’s been a sensation. And this is a linear, narrative-led ‘TV w/choices’ title!
Of course, that leads to typically counter-cyclical commentary from the Internets: “It’s cool how we keep proving over and over and over again that there’s a significant market for narrative-heavy, character-driven, single-player experiences in video games and publishers just categorically refuse to believe us.”
Well, possibly, but we do think Dispatch is an exception. The shutdown of V1 of Telltale Games in 2018 showed that the (perhaps overscaled!) studio was having issues delivering profitable games in this ‘generally not cheap’ genre. Dispatch’s dev, AdHoc, is made up of some key Telltale devs, and is laser focused on interactive narrative.
And if we look at the Steam performance of some other narrative-first games launched in the ‘post-Telltale v1’ era, look - the sales numbers speak for themselves:
(There’s several big caveats on the above estimates. We’re skipping console, and a couple of the titles PC-launched first on Epic Games Store, though we don’t think they fared incredibly well there. Still others had Game Pass on Day 1. But we think it’s directionally right.).
So… why is Dispatch such a huge outlier? We have thoughts, but we also got the chance to ask AdHoc’s CEO and exec producer Michael Choung, a Telltale veteran himself. Here’s what we’ve identified:
Superheroes - esp. badly behaving ones - are catnip to players: the TV shows Invincible & The Boys - big hits. And good quality superhero games are few and far between, partly because extreme superpowers & intelligible gameplay don’t match well*. (Gritty brawlers featuring the largely human Batman still work…) So we think adult superhero shenanigans are perfect for virality. (*Ask me how I know.)
Higher graphical production values sucked a lot of players in: Dispatch was not a cheap game. The AdHoc crew tell me they have 30 internal employees, plus a “big animation team in Thailand and Canada” and many more worldwide, with 3 years of live production put into the game. But the art direction & animation results are gorgeous, especially compared to the average post-’Telltale V1’ title.
The ‘weekly episode unlock’ works way better than a longer cadence: Michael told us: “We’re really just borrowing a rhythm that’s worked for decades on television… that weekly cadence hits a sweet spot where anticipation builds, but not long enough to fade.” (The oldskool Telltale episode gaps were waay more spread out for production reasons, with monthly generally being the quickest.)
Smart use of relevant - and interesting - voice acting talent: by mixing traditional acting standouts like Aaron Paul & Jeffrey Wright with much-loved VA stalwarts (Laura Bailey) and - notably - influencers (MoistCr1TiKaL and Jacksepticeye, who did a 4m-viewed video on it), you add a lot of buzz.
And on higher production values - there’s identifiable interactivity in Dispatch, from dialog choices to mini-games to dispatching picks. But you really don’t affect the big ‘beats’ of the story that much at all - because those ‘beats’ are big, impressive animated fights you want everyone to see & not branch away from.
Michael added, re: interactivity: “If players don’t care about what’s happening and who it’s happening to, no amount of branching will fix that…. we focus on relationships. Whatever emotional impact a big budget game might get from - let’s say - destroying a planet, we’re looking to get the same thing from deciding who to go out on a date with.”
In some ways, that’s counter-intuitive, since GDCo continually preaches player choice to get players to pick up games, after seeing them played. But guess what? Dispatch ended up being huge, eye-catching & interactive enough that players are happy to buy & play the game and not watch it on YouTube, esp. with new weekly episodes.
And maybe the success of this game is a ‘nobody knows anything’ lesson for us. You also have to be copacetic with certain media being unexpectedly huge - it’s the KPop Demon Hunters conundrum writ large. Would we have suggested people invest heavily in this genre? Nope. But is it working out for them? Heck, yes.
To end, let’s ask Michael why he reckons they’re a hit? “Here’s what we think is true. There are two main reasons Dispatch has found the success it has... and it’s the same reason we’ve seen similar success at other studios. 1. We know how to build great stories. 2. We know how to identify people that know how to build great stories. As far as we can tell, those are the real needle movers.
There are more GameDiscoverCo-friendly answers too: the deliberate and early decision to not compromise on visual fidelity in an era dominated by images, Steam page optimization, an organic, non-GMO creator program run by our friends at Guillotine. All of that mattered. But we’re pretty sure the main reason we stand out is because the game is good and that’s a testament to the work of the people that made it.”
Hard agree. The game’s success shows there’s space for the $30 ‘interactive TV series game’ if you understand the market & nail execution. Next? An AdHoc teamup with D&D megastars Critical Role for an Exandria-set game was already confirmed. In the longer-term - is this level of interactivity what Netflix might move towards, in concert with the rise of the microdrama? All kinds of interesting trends are converging…
Most-streamed games in Oct: League of.. wowzers
To end - yes, livestream analytics platform Stream Hatchet is again helping us look at the Top 100 most-streamed games from October 2025, analyzing the big (non-China) game video streaming platforms like Twitch & friends.
Here’s the full list of the Top 100 (Google Drive link) with GDCo annotations. And here’s the top trends in September, analyzed once more (woo!) by Stream Hatchet’s Mark Rowland and us in, a weird melange:
League of Legends blasted it further ahead, thanks to World Champs: it was #1 in Sept too, but Riot’s foundational MOBA was up 30% to a spectacular 213 million hours watched (!) in October, thanks to the in progress LoL World Championships. Grand Theft Auto V is once again #2 with 164m hours, of course.
Battlefield 6 managed to break into the Top 10, despite a mid-month start: EA’s shooter reboot is the top new entry, and hitting #10 with 43.9m hours watched is quite a feat, given an Oct. 10th release date (and a separately counted 10.6m hours watched for Battlefield REDSEC, its F2P ‘battle royale’ spinoff.)
The Top 20 had another new entry, plus a swift riser: ARC Raiders formally released on the 30th of October, but still made it to #17 with 20.7, hours watched. And mid-September release Megabonk hit #16 with 23.3m hours watched (+132%), as it continues to crest 30,000 Steam CCU daily, almost 2 months after debuting.
Other new entries? They include Switch exclusive Pokemon Legends Z-A (#27, 14.3m hours, more info), extraction hit Escape from Duckov (#20, 12m), and PlayStation exclusive (for now!) Ghost of Yotei (#32, 11.1m). Also new: Little Nightmares III (#41), RV There Yet? (#43), Digimon Story: Time Stranger (#46), Fellowship (#64), Ball x Pit (#70), and The Outer Worlds 2 (#88). 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.]