How do PC player demographics change at 50 hours vs. 30 minutes?
Some new research! Also: this week's Steam newbies & 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.]
Welcome to the end of the week. And as the weekend happily looms, we’re back to announce an awesome milestone - 45,000 subscribers to the GameDiscoverCo newsletter. (Yes, we know 50k would be hotter - don’t fret, we’ll be there shortly…)
Before we start, shout-out to the Video Game History Foundation for the launch of its amazing ‘history of E3’ collection, inc. a detailed kick-off video, a bunch of vintage E3 show-floor footage, and even a podcast w/E3 OGs Doug Lowenstein & Carolyn Rauch.
[THE DEEPEST PC/CONSOLE DATA? You can get a free demo of our GameDiscoverCo Pro company-wide ‘Steam deep dive’ & console data by reaching out today - >110 orgs have it. Or, signing up to GDCo Plus gets the rest of this newsletter and Discord access, plus more.]
Game discovery news: Xbox’s megatrends graph
Let’s go, we’ve got graphs and text and links on game platforms & discovery, and we’re jamming it all out for you now:
Microsoft’s quarterly results are out, and as fanalyst John Welfare graphs (above), long-term Xbox trends aren’t stellar. He estimates: “Content & Services: ~$4.75b (-10% YoY); Hardware: ~$234m (-13% YoY).” Xbox rev. has been in decline for 4 straight quarters & annual revenue is back down to FY 2024 levels.
Asha Sharma did have public comments, noting “‘over 200 million new players came to Xbox and our games’ in FY2026, but that the ‘business did not grow with our audience’ as a result”, promising a return to growth in FY2027. The immediate future, per CFO Amy Hood, is for Q1 non-hardware $ to decline “in the mid-single digits” YoY. (Ah, and an internal message from Sharma to Xbox has longer-term growth plans.)
For our ‘trending Steam demos’ analysis using GDCo Pro this week, we thought we'd sort only by demos released in the last two weeks. Top demos: Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls (#1, 16k CCU) & Guildrun (#2, 14k CCU). Also hot: Low-Budget Repairs (#3, 2,500 CCU) & RTS Sanctuary: Shattered Sun (#4, 1,200 CCU).
PlayStation’s results also arrived: PS5 sales edged up to 95.3m, up 1.6m for the quarter (flat QoQ, but down 36% YoY), with 125m active PSN users, up 2m YoY. Revenue was flat YoY, and profit was up 37% due to a weaker yen & U.S. tariff refunds. Also: Sony CFO Lin Tao also said that they are “cautiously” moving forward on physical game phase-out, & haven’t seen $ impact.
Notable Steam documentation edit of the week? Changing the language from “First discounts, no matter how old the title, are not eligible for Daily Deal” to “First discounts tend not to be eligible for Daily Deals due to lack of performance data.” (But the next line is still ‘don’t submit until after your first discount’.)
Microlinks: a new Steam client beta has Remote Play additions: HDR streaming to Steam Deck OLED and better-quality AV1 codec for Deck in general; GOG confirm they’re working towards shipping GOG Galaxy on Linux; PS+ Monthly games for August are Dying Light 2 Stay Human, Big Walk & Signalis.
VR things: Meta’s push for VR games is fading, and Reality Labs lost $4.6b in Q2 on $431m in revenue ($ up 16% YoY - likely AR glasses-led!) And the Steam Frame just got FCC-approved. We’re seeing speculation the launch could be as soon as Monday, given ‘Frame-only on Steam’ games like Pavlov Shack are now popping up.
Some say hit PC game ‘compulsion loops’ are getting a bit much, like Mathew Kumar, who wrote about Vampire Survivors: “It’s getting disturbingly transparent to see the slot machine and scratch card[-ish gameplay].. ‘come join us in the machine zone. [it] doesn’t even need you to spend all your money. Your time is good enough for us, here.’”
Here’s Jason Della Rocca (filtered through Chirag Vadhia) on the partial pivot to project funding from $ sources in games: “A studio that has done its own validation already has its players, and what it is missing is the money to finish the game, which is all the funds provide, along with none of what it no longer needs.”
Cheekiest ‘advertise to Steam devs’ hack we’d forgotten about? Linking to each Steam game every 2-3 days with a relevant URL to show your company’s name/info in their game’s UTM referrer screen in Steam’s back end? (Very clever, Adzap and Newzoo - but pleease nobody else do it.)
Roguelike auto-battler defense game Slotbound, which has hit 50k wishlists & 2,900 peak demo CCU, is one of the first popular solo ‘overtly AI-assembled’ Steam games we’ve seen with the dev explicitly talking about it. (AI code use, obv. but also using Nano Banana for low-res pixel art - tho some is asset-store bought.)
Microlinks, Pt.2: Footprints’ latest ‘trad media’ mentions are headed by Halo: Campaign Evolved & EA Sports FC 27; how Backrooms-ish ‘online fandom’ is rewriting the IP playbook; Xbox has added Ubisoft titles like Assassin’s Creed Valhalla to the ‘Xbox on PC’ store (tho you also need Ubisoft Connect.)
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How do player demographics change at 50 hours?
Since GameDiscoverCo launched its Steam Fan Snapshot data in April, we’ve been mining it and related surveys for ‘real’ Steam player data. And in chatting to a friend of GDCo (hi Eric!) about the 16,000+ player data points (tied to their Steam public profile, with their permission), he pointed out multiple additional analyses we could do.
Firstly, let’s remind you all of the baseline. Here’s a question we asked about how people think they find out about games - with an all-respondents answer (interesting in itself), followed by per-game answers for extraction hit ARC Raiders (above), RPG breakout Clair Obscur, and (for a counter-example) friendslop smash R.E.P.O.:
We have data on high hundreds to low thousands of players for each, and you can see interesting things, for example:
The average age of player is somewhat higher for Clair Obscur (31), and significantly lower for R.E.P.O. (25). (Our averages generally span 25 to 35.)
Who finds games via short-form video? 37.5% of the survey, but only 34.2% of Clair Obscur players, 39.4% for ARC Raiders, and. a whopping 50.9% for R.E.P.O.
Conversely: 27.9% of people use trad media websites like PC Gamer to find new games, but a bigger 33.3% of ARC Raiders players, vs. a below-average 27.5% of R.E.P.O players.
Something we’ve found is that it’s worth comparing multiple games. Why? For recent hit releases, those title’s players will be paying more attention than our average respondent anyhow. So you want more comparison points. (If you see what we mean?)
Anyhow, that’s the base data. And to that, we’ve added two things - first, a ‘relative’ chart compared to the ‘all respondents’ view. This lets you quickly see, for example, that gender-wise, ARC Raiders skews male vs. our default sample:
But the neatest new view (yes, available to GameDiscoverCo Pro subs now) is one that allows you to see changes in survey response for longer playtimes on specific games. As a baseline, here’s the other devices that ARC Raiders players on Steam - in blue - say they use to play games for at least one hour per month:
What we’d glean from this: ARC Raiders players are def fans of Steam Deck (that’s a ~50% over-index on our default result for this cohort!), and are above-average players in general on console. (Although less committed to playing mobile games.)
Now let’s look at how the chart for ‘devices used for games’ for ARC Raiders changes by playtime, specifically for the three current-gen consoles:
Interesting. As you can see, high playtimes for ARC Raiders on Steam are correlated with reduced monthly playtime on consoles - particularly Switch (26.9% for all owners, 16.7% for >50 hour players!) but also PlayStation (23.8% for all owners, 16.7% for >50 hour players.)
We presume that’s related to the hardest-core player ‘maining’ the game, and spending less time sampling games across multiple devices. There are some other, subtler changes we spotted in discovery methods:
Looks like as playtime goes up, more players are likely to find games via livestreaming (40.6% at >30 minutes played, 44.5% at >50 hours), while text-based social media like Twitter/Bluesky comes down from 38.2% (>1 hour played) to 33% (>50 hours played.)
Now, let’s continue by taking a look at some of this data from Clair Obscur, starting with how player age changes with longer playtimes:
It’s relatively subtle, but looks like there’s an increase in 25-34 year olds playing the game for long periods (40.3% at >1 hour, 45.8% at >50 hours), and corresponding decreases for 35-44 year olds (25.5% for owners, 22.4% at >50 hours.) 18-24 year olds also increase with more playtime (from 25.5% for owners to 30.7% at >15 hours.)
You really have to jam on the game to play it for >50 hours, since the main story is more like 25-30 hours long. But you get the general idea: younger folks with less family obligations are likely those really playing these games for tens of hours…
Since Clair Obscur is a narrative game itself, we thought it’d be neat to see players’ other activities besides, you know, playing video games. Here’s the relative view:
Again, we can see an underperformance from this slightly older audience on watching short-form videos (-10.1%), but some hefty overperformances on reading books and manga (+21%) and listening to podcasts (+44%).
But look what happens with longer playtime: the percentage of weekly movie-watchers goes down (from 48.4% to 40.1%), and book-readers similarly (from 26.1% to 21.2%). (This may be tied to younger age groups, who do these things less, playing for longer, right?)
So: what this GDCo data is telling us - we think - is that info consumption shifts significantly with age and their generational peers. And understanding the potential age & media habits of your players may significantly change where you target them.
Steam debuts this week: Mistfall Hunter, Halo hit…
OK, let’s finish up by looking at the top debuts of the week (above), according to data from GameDiscoverCo’s voluminous Pro/Plus tool, available to our paid individual or company subs. Let’s examine… while trying not to clip over Gmail limits, yiikes!