How Far, Far West sold >500k in less than 2 weeks...
Also: today's Steam hits and lots of discovery & platform 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 Friday! As we finished this missive, news of Nintendo putting Switch 2 prices up by $50 to $500 (and by a higher % in Japan) just hit, alongside PlayStation’s results that saw PS5 “ship 1.5m units this quarter, down from 2.8m last year.” (We’ll have more on Tuesday, but console crunches continue…)
And before we start, it’s back: “This year’s My Famicase Exhibition [in Tokyo] features 250 art pieces of fictional games, displayed on physical Nintendo Famicom game cartridges”, and Super Punch rounds up successful designs (more on Instagram), including one, Mecha Mech by GameDiscoverCo logo/website designer VictoryOverAll (congrats!)
[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 - >95 orgs have it. Or, signing up to GDCo Plus gets the rest of this newsletter and Discord access, plus more.]
Game discovery news: overexcited about GTA, eh?
Let’s finish things out for this week by looking at mucho game platform and discovery news, like this:
According to ICO’s Footprints.gg and its ‘trad media’ coverage, GTA 6 hit the top spot again thanks to Take Two’s Strauss Zelnick saying not-much in multiple interviews. (But it’s still on schedule!) Also hot: PlayStation exclusive Saros, Xbox’s multiplatform hit-in-the-making Forza 6, Subnautica 2, and more…
Xbox’s new boss Asha Sharma is making major exec changes,“bringing over execs from the CoreAI engineering group where she worked before, along with a director at her previous company, Instacart.” But there’ll be less AI in the product, as Xbox will “begin winding down Copilot on mobile and will stop development of Copilot on console.”
Fresh via the Curran Games Agency, we have a new pricing tool for Steam games to try out, with Cassia Curran noting of the underlying data: “If few reviewers mention a game's price (neither complaining nor gushing over great value), it's likely to have higher revenues and is probably priced correctly.”
Some new stats from an IGN & friends report polling ‘highly committed’ fans: “38% of Millennials (people aged 30 – 44) and 42% of Gen Z (those aged 14 – 29) said they still buy full-price games, but only 20% Gen X (people aged 46 – 61) said they would.” There’s a lot of discounted games & not a lot of time, folks…
After rampant site errors during the Steam Controller’s debut, Valve is instituting a reservation queue for upcoming Controller purchases, like Steam Deck, a ‘good idea’: “Once you reserve, your place in line will be saved. When we go back in stock, order emails will be sent in the same order that reservations were made.”
In ‘surprising platforms investing in games’ news, Google Deepmind is partly behind EVE Online parent CCP spinning off Pearl Abyss, with Deepmind’s Demis Hassabis excited to: “advance AI research safely inside a player-driven universe as amazingly complex as EVE Online.” (Via those famously normal EVE Online players.)
Discovery trend news: an analysis on why ‘tavern games’ are hot - “12 [out of] 22 of the released games made over $100k”; a look at how IndieGameJoe has been making game promo Tweets go viral - yes, in 2026; good analysis of announcing real-time roguelite strategy game Everfront - spoiler, it was r/godot which did best for ‘em!
Steam oddities: did you know the More Like This game page recommendations, like New & Trending, seems to be subtly region-specific? (It’ll be 80-90% similar worldwide, but with slight changes in the UK vs. the U.S., for example?) We had to change our recent write-up and Pro data labeling to indicate as much….
Windows vs. SteamOS news: while an Ars Technica editorial suggests: “the RAMpocalypse has bought Microsoft valuable time in the fight against SteamOS”, Windows Central has a piece on ‘Windows K2’, noting Microsoft “is working to optimize the platform so.. steamOS and Windows gaming performance are comparable.”
Here’s some interesting analysis of Discord server sentiment behind recent hits such as Far Far West, Road To Vostok & Crimson Desert, with the main takeaway that Crimson Desert apparently forgot to hire strong moderators: “Users reported frequent arguments over religion, racism, and [players] asking for free game codes.”
Microlinks: Xbox just put out a dev update showcasing video from its GDC 2026 Project Helix session; analysis on how Roblox is trying to “rebalance away from kids”; Microsoft’s Xbox Mode hits Windows 11 PCs for “a controller-focused full screen experience.”
Our Sponsor: The Game Business Live returns
Popular industry podcast The Game Business is Live in Los Angeles on Monday, June 8. Hosted by Christopher Dring and Geoff Keighley, the event will feature interviews with EA president Laura Miele, industry veteran Jason Rubin and analyst Matthew Ball.
The event is part of the Summer Game Fest series of events. Tickets are available now, and GameDiscoverCo readers can receive 20% off, simply by following this link.
How Far, Far West sold >500k units in <2 weeks...
We’ve mentioned it a couple of times recently, but wanted to dive deeper into robo-Western co-op roguelite horde shooter Far Far West ($20), which has officially announced 500,000 copies sold on Steam since its April 28th release, but we suspect is over 750k and heading towards a million units. (A huge deal in today’s market.)
This wasn’t a ‘surprise hit’ - in the sense that GDCo estimates the game launched with close to 650k Steam wishlists. And a lot of them were strong, organic ones based on two Steam playtests - which hit 2,400 and 9,400 CCU - and a Feb. 2026 Next Fest appearance that saw it rank #5 on Valve’s ‘unique players’ chart from 3,500 games.
But there’s plenty to talk about, and we caught up with the devs (Evil Raptor’s CEO/lead dev Nico Meyssonnier) and publisher (Fireshine’s Rob Feather) to do just that. First, courtesy of Rob, here’s an annotated pre-release wishlists chart:
There’s definitely a takeaway here - the playtests & Next Fest demo were hot stuff for boosting interest. But there’s also plenty of showcase appearances and streamer / shortform reachouts & activations in there - it’s not just ‘demo & done’.
But before we get deeper into the marketing analysis, let’s talk about the game. Why is it popular? We have some ideas:
‘Fun with friends’ masks a well-honed lite extraction PvE shooter: this Steam review is particularly helpful. There’s clear Deep Rock Galactic & Helldivers 2 eachoes - co-op on an RNG map with objectives, boss, extract - but “lack of a hard time limit as long as you don't defeat the boss” means you can doof around more.
The dev has been ‘set free’ by a move to a less linear structure: talking to Nico, whose 8-person team also made linear 3D platformers Akimbot & Pumpkin Jack, this iteration of Far Far West “is actually the third”, with the first being tower defense and #2 being a Left 4 Dead-y “linear, mission-based game.” Going RNG sandbox-y is unlocking player ‘possibility space’ and big growth for them…
The ‘haunted magic Wild West robot’ theme really helps: Nico says the team took a speck of inspiration from Overwatch on the cowboy/robot crossover, but the “history, legends, landscapes [and] special mood” of going Wild West with a twist is a big part of the draw, and the team’s take on the worldbuilding is on point.
Beyond that, there’s an alchemy you can see in the 4-minute Far Far West microreview I link above: there’s interesting upgrades for combo-able weapons, a ton of fun micro-objectives to go after on randomly generated maps (lots of variety!), and a soul collecting system for meta-progression. Despite a small dev team, it feels expansive.
And there’s a lot of player praise for the animations, visuals and ‘game feel’, which is interesting, because the environments themselves - outside of the hub towns - are fairly minimal. But concentrate on what players actually do & that’s what matters?
Just getting some of Far Far West’s underlying data points out of the way: GDCo sees the game as U.S.-led (28% of players), with China at 8% and the UK, Canada, Germany, the Russian Federation & Brazil all in the 3-5% range - it’s an international hit.
Also notable - here’s GDCo Pro’s overlap/affinity data sorted specifically by highest game overlap with >8x Affinity Multiplier. In this list, Far Far West players are more than 8x as likely to have played that game than the average Steam player:
Finally, we wanted to talk about how well the pre-release playtests went for Far Far West. We talked to both Rob (Fireshine) and Nico (Evil Raptor) about this, and it was clear it fueled the game’s success majorly. We found Rob’s explanation of how they rolled out playtests particular helpful:
“A week before each ‘playable beat’, a few hundred VIP community members jumped in so we could gather feedback and tighten the build. Four days before, our newsletter list got a code. Two days before, the whole Far Far West Discord community could claim keys. Each layer gave us real data, more polish time, and a growing pool of people excited to share the game.
The playtest then went fully open alongside a feature in an online showcase, with ‘play now’ as the CTA across all our updated assets. Around the same time, we brought a few creators on board and supported the moment with some paid ads and short‑form videos.
This tiered access and community management built hype for the game/playtest while also allowing us to test and polish the build before it went fully public. It also greatly engaged the community, incentivizing them to stick around to get early access to future playable beats.”
Lead dev Nico added of the ‘playtest, listen to players, iterate’ approach: “This is the first time we’ve made a game with an ‘open dev’ approach…. to be honest, this was the best idea we’ve ever had for the game.. I must say it’s very enjoyable as a developer to have a constructive & straightforward relationship with the players!”
And Fireshine’s Rob explained the virtuous cycle from playtest success, noting the “huge positive response” led to a lot of organic streamer & shortform video support, and big wins via the Steam algorithm in platform support for Discovery Queue, ‘because you played’ recommendations, and even ‘More Like This’ (rare for pre-release games.)
Concluding: it sure looks to us like Far Far West hit an under-served part of the market (for well-executed games!), bringing some really nice, slightly goofier/lighter flavor to co-op looter/extraction games. And all done with a compact team, too. Small teams making games that ‘feel’ big and expansive: it’s the theme of the year?
New on Steam: Everything’s Farever Dead as Crab?
