[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 weekend looms, we have to ask: have you ever danced with the devil in the pale moonlight? We just like the sound of it. If not, no worries, but feel free to shimmy with this very newsletter, as we sashay around mucho PC/console discovery goodness.
And before we start, the fun subgenre of ‘you can look at classic 3D game assets on this webpage’ - of which noclip.website was a classic - now adds the Pardall Games viewer, which is cataloging PS1-era bangers, from Toyota Supra-s from the original Gran Turismo to almost everything in Final Fantasy VII (hi, Aerith.)
[NEED THE BEST DATA? You can get a free demo of our GameDiscoverCo Pro company-wide ‘Steam deep dive’ & console data, inc. MCP server, by reaching out today - >110 orgs have it. Or, signing up to GDCo Basic gets extra newsletter and Discord access, plus more.]
Game discovery news: GTA, E-Day, Witcher 3 hype
Let’s finish out the week with a close look at the latest game discovery & platform news, as follows:
Our buddies at ICO’s Footprints.gg looked at the top ‘trad media’-covered games, and Grand Theft Auto VI is #1 yet again, but with different runners-up: Xbox’s Gears Of War: E-Day on its debut, and The Witcher 3 Remastered thanks to its Sept 29th free update. (With Star Wars: Galactic Racer placing next.)
Veteran trailer maker Derek Lieu asks a key Q on YouTube: “Are game trailers ‘old news’ when one viral short [video] can make a game blow up?” (He looks at aspects of shorts (captions, voiceover) that differ from “a 60-90 second video crafted to sum up the game's experience/vibe”, and notes that most short-makers recut… the trailer!)
PlayStation/Sony things: ahead of Grand Theft Auto VI’s launch, “GameStop and third-party resellers raise the used PS5 Pro price to $1,400 - a $500 markup on Sony’s RRP”; Sony “sells off dozens of XR patents to Meta in apparent pullback from AR/VR hardware [interests].”
As demos appear ahead of Steam Next Fest, we thought GDCo Pro would capture the top Steam demos released in the last week by CCU (as of Thu!) And 2D IP update Castlevania: Belmont’s Curse is #1 (1,700 CCU), as slick autobattler Northgard Battlegrounds hits #2 and turn-based JRPG Epic Seven makes #3.
We received a note from Mr. G. Keighley re: SGF 2027, as follows: “We’re happy to confirm that Summer Game Fest will stream live from the iconic Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles on Friday, June 4, 2027… once again be followed by SGF Play Days, produced by iam8bit, from Saturday, June 5 through Monday, June 7.” FYI!
The packed Triple-I Initiative showcase was, indeed, full of stuff - here’s a breakdown of everything announced, which included a big new Risk Of Rain 2 DLC, surprise puzzle sequel Machinarium 2, a sequel to survival ARPG hit Outward, new co-op deities smasher Aftergods, with lots of playtest/demo CTA.
Over at Fortnite/UEFN, per Brendan Stock, “games will now have much richer thumbnails and video previews”, inc. separate art & logo, gameplay video on your island details page, and more. Also new: benchmarked data to compare your game to, inc. on click-through rate, bounce rate, session length, and Day 1/7 retention.
Everyone’s got an ‘it’s easy to make games using AI’ solution, and Google’s new one is Playground, an “experimental gaming platform that lets you create, play, and share custom games.” It also has an advanced-level hook-up with an upcoming Unity product: “For dedicated creators ready to expand their concepts, Playground will soon offer an integration with Unity Spark.”
On X, Pierre485 pointed out some physical game-only platform splits for key UK charting games last week: “EA Sports FC 27 - PS5 (67%) / XB (14%) / NSW (8%) / PS4 (6%) / NS2 (5%); Minecraft Dungeons II - NS2 (70% ) / PS5 (22%) / XB (8%); Ace Combat 8 - PS5 (86%) / XB (14%).” (Physical’s dying, but the retail splits are still fascinating.)
Xbox things: the head of Mojang is moving to run Xbox’s XP, “a new… division focused on how people experience our franchises beyond the games themselves”, inc. movies, theme parks, etc, as an ex-Reddit CPO takes over Minecraft; the latest Asha Sharma town hall said “we've started to return to growth” in first party; new additions to Game Pass include Battlefield 6, Valor Mortis, and more.
Microlinks: an interesting streaming analysis of the popularity of GTA V RP (roleplay) content; Amazon’s Luna update for October includes Star Wars: Galactic Racer as a Day 1 stream; a YouTube video on Dread Admiral’s dev reveals ~$40k in out-of-pocket spend and $18k in gross Steam revenue so far.
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How Dressmaker is ‘ready to wear’ for a big Steam crowd…
Veteran South African game studio Free Lives put out a funny LinkedIn post last week: “Free Lives has been making video games for 15 years. Usually, those games are irreverent, violent and usually designed to poke fun at people who deserve it. More recently, however, we made a game about very frilly dresses.”
And yes, that’s the starting point to discuss Dressmaker, the self-published $15 job sim from a new ‘Cozy Lives’ subsidiary of the Stick It To The Stickman, Anger Foot, Terra Nil and Gorn dev that - it’s safe to say - is a semi-unexpected megahit - though not 100% out of the blue, since it picked up >150k Steam wishlists by launch.
Why? Though the co-developed deckbuilder Shroom And Gloom with Team Lazerbeam & Free Lives’ trad publisher Devolver also debuted in Sept & is doing decently at ~100k units, we’re estimating Dressmaker at >500k sold on Steam in 2 weeks, scaling fast, and up to #5 by units in LTD sales of Sept. 2026 Steam debuts. (It converted 8.6x as well as ‘expected’ in Week 1, and is outpacing other titles right now.)
So what’s going on here? We caught up with the game’s co-creator Jonathan Hau-Yoon (Terra Nil), who originated the title with his partner and co-dev Sabrina Becker, who, per this excellent Engadget interview, “turned to games after a chronic illness, Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, forced her to pivot away from professional costume design.”
Here’s some key takeaways from our discussions with Jonathan:
Though a cozy game at heart, Dressmaker has transcended niche: Jonathan told us: “I’ve had a number of colleagues describe the game as ‘niche’ pre-launch, where I’ve disagreed. I think that many gamers have long enjoyed playing dress-up, but just wouldn’t necessarily use that term. They buy their favourite skins in League, Overwatch or CS2, turn Monster Hunter into fashion statements, or look forward to seasonal events like Halloween.” (Even Northernlion has been into Dressmaker recently.)
The game makes dress making into a sandbox creative experience: he noted: “Dressmaker is thematically more feminine, and uses ‘seamstress sim’ as a way to attract an under-served audience, but fundamentally is still about self-expression and creativity. We double down on that by making just about everything customizable, stopping only at technical limitations (and some cut features that we hope to add in future updates), and then try to make the creations easy to share.”
Deep knowledge of the subject matter helped build out the ‘hook’: “Dressmaker was inspired by Sabrina’s real-world sewing experience, and her deep passion for clothing. So instead of ‘minigames’ that are skinned to seem as if they’re fashion-themed, each part is based on its real-world counterpart, even though we simplify these to make them better fit the game format. I think this allows our mechanics to feel fresh rather than generic.”
What we see with Dressmaker - which had a full-time core dev team of only 3, and started with an Itch.io playable prototype in July 2025 - is skilled devs and subject matter experts going beyond the typical job sim-style ‘let’s reskin Supermarket Simulator’, and carefully originating a lot of well-crafted gameplay & creativity tools.
Our other key takeaway from Dressmaker is that this was a novel idea for a game that the public already knew they wanted, based on the popularity of other media. Crafts are huge on shortform video, and the rise of Bridgerton-ish dramas and period romance has raised the profile of more elaborate vintage-style dresses.
In fact, according to the Engadget interview, a very basic (pre-Itch) prototype of Dressmaker’s ideas got “some 600,000-plus views across TikTok and Instagram, and was filled with comments of people asking what the name of the game was and where they could play it.” What a great example of early validation. (The Itch proto also got 30k downloads in a month, but more importantly, some big content creator videos.)
A few other stats from GameDiscoverCo Pro: we’re seeing a median of ~6 hours and an average of almost 10 hours played (just 2 weeks after release), and we’re estimating 33% U.S. players, 9.5% China, 9% UK, 8% Canada, 5.5% Australia, 5% Russian diaspora, 4% Germany, 3% Poland. (Fairly Western-first, in the grand scheme of things.)
Looking at GDCo’s Steam Fan Snapshot data, we’re seeing majority (52%) female players (rare for our core fan-skewing data), and an overindex in 25-34 year old players, who are >50% of the total, vs. ~35% normally. And notably, 48% of Dressmaker players own a Switch 1 or 2, vs. 19% of our entire sample.
Player ‘affinity’/overlap-wise, Dressmaker overindexes in players of games like House Flipper (42% overlap, 11x more than normal), Cult Of The Lamb (30%, 15x), Potion Craft (25%, 24x) and Libarian: Tidy Up The Arcane Library (23%, a whopping 46x more likely than the normal Steam player to own.)
Most of all, we wanted to say re: Dressmaker - we love it when a novel game (& creation tool) comes along that captures the zeitgeist in such a charming way. The game has Overwhelmingly Positive reviews, and if you look at the positive word cloud in GDCo’s Review Sentiment readout (below), it positively glows. Good vibes all round:
This week on Steam: Gears, Star Wars, Hellraiser, hi
