[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.]
A new week, and a busy one for those at Gamescom, but we’ll just keep on keeping on. And our lead story is a look at some ‘crunchy’ Steam tag data to work out how trends around PC game genres have changed in the past half-decade or so…
And before we start, I (Simon) just made an appearance on Mike & Rami Are Still Here, the newish pod/vodcast from No More Robots founder Mike Rose and industry stalwart Rami Ismail. (Expect silly questions and recounting of joint histories, but a bit of prognostication, especially towards the end…)
[THE DEEPEST PC/CONSOLE DATA? You can get a free demo of our GameDiscoverCo Pro company-wide ‘Steam deep dive’ & console data, inc. MCP, by reaching out today - >110 orgs have it. Or, signing up to GDCo Plus gets extra newsletter and Discord access, plus more.]
Game discovery news: hey, Wardogs, Sally Face 2..
Let’s start out by having a hack at the newest notable game platform & discovery news. And we’ve spotted the following:
Looking at GDCo Pro's estimates of 'trending' unreleased Steam games, Aug 17th-24th (above), AA 100-player FPS Wardogs (#1) is looking rather hot, given its playtest hit 105k CCU on Steam recently. And at #2, it's the newly announced Sally Face 2, which follows up the very creepy cult hit 2D adventure.
Friendslopper Dear Passengers is at #3, the recently re-hyped Phantom Blade Zero hits #4, and there's a brand new entry at #5 for Northern wilderness co-op survival-er Rerouted. And there’s 2 other new announces: visual novel Tulpa The Unseen Lover (#7) and '00s Need For Speed-y indie street racer Heatwarped (#10).
Steam is testing personalization on normally curated Midweek Deals, which “are featured on the Steam homepage… from Monday at 10am Pacific until Thursday at 10am Pacific. There are up to six Midweek slots per week.” (If you’re logged in, you’ll see a wide selection of discounted games this week, largely different per account.)
Remember timed console exclusivity? It’s always been lurking, and Silent Hill: Townfall’s latest trailer shows a prime new example: “Alongside reiterating that Townfall is a PS5 console exclusive, a caption confirmed: ‘Also available on PC. Not available on other consoles until at least 6 months after release date’.”
As Geoff Keighley reminds us, “Valve was founded 30 years ago today [on August 24th, 1996] by Gabe Newell and Mike Harrington.” PC Gamer has more on the history, spanning Half-Life and sequels, the Source Engine, and - of course - a little PC gaming platform called Steam. (Congrats!)
This ResetEra thread on the state of ‘big box store’ physical retail for games documents the decline of Xbox footprint, w/just “a small case for [Xbox] consoles with some controllers…. Honestly even the PlayStation section has shrunk a bit… The Nintendo one is still large… and I think is the only one that still has a demo unit.”
We don’t generally see indie devs announcing an immediate 50,000 pre-orders on Epic Games Store, but that’s what ‘magical girl’ co-op action RPG Kernel Hearts managed, thanks in large part to an exclusive Fortnite skin for those who pre-ordered. (That cross-promo is, at least initially, looking quite effective…)
For those devs who have Steam pre-orders for their game, there’s a change to SteamWorks documentation explaining that (encrypted!) preload should ideally be activated for “Games with large file sizes [and] extremely anticipated games”, and warning that multiple big pre-load patches can clutter a Steam player’s hard drive.
Roblox things: some bots got blocked in Roblox, leading to CCU decreases; Offpath’s Tim Elliott spotted that “Steal an Egg on Roblox set a record for fastest time to 500k CCU in just 497 hours of organic traffic”; doomscrolling and short-form video features “are no longer allowed in games targeted towards children on Roblox.”
More ‘web browser gaming’ - not cloud-streamed, locally run? Exhibit #1: Entity just raised $5.8m “to bring console-quality games to what it calls the ‘new web.’” Exhibit #2: Moon Studios’ Thomas Mahler has a browser-first version of new game Luma (also w/downloadable PC/Mac versions.)
Finally: ‘keyword squatting’ is still an issue on consoles, i.e. picking a game name that includes words from another popular game’s title. The latest unfortunate example would be Lethal Corporation on Switch eShop, which clones the Lethal Company logo but isn’t even co-op. (Can’t we do more about this, platforms?)
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How have hit PC genres changed since 2021?
Look, the PC game market has changed significantly over the last 5 years. But how can we quantify that? At GameDiscoverCo, we have a lot of underlying data on this, so we thought we’d use ‘purified’ versions of Steam tag clouds to compare the market in 2021 to that of 2025.
Rather than just cloud-ifying all tags on all games released in that year, we’re a) keeping this to ‘genre’ tags, b) excluding the ‘mega-genres’ like strategy, action, and RPG c) using tags only from new games with >50k copies sold in that year, and d) only using tags that are ranked in the Top 5 for a game - i.e. the most important.
The results (above) for 2021 are interesting, and def. feel like a ‘five years ago’ market snapshot: survival is huge, as is city builder and action RPG, with JRPG, turn-based strategy & base building also big contenders. Now, let’s look at 2025, same view:
Well, that’s a difference. At first, I presumed that maybe Roguelite (#1, up 39 spots!) and Roguelike (#2, up 37 spots) might have been introduced as tags since 2021. But nope, SteamDB’s ‘tag additions by date’ say they’ve been around since ~2017, just under-used. (So yep - the ‘run-based randomness’ trend is kinda on fire.) Other things of note:
Action RPG continues to be a super-solid genre: it covers a multitude of sins, from Souls-likes to action/strategy hybrids, but it’s up one spot to #4 vs. 2021.
JRPG, RTS, and Turn-Based Strategy are on the way down: they’re down 24, 17, and 19 spots overall. Why? We suspect more hybrid-genre, roguelite-y games.
Life Sim is on the way up, City Builder slipping down: life sim, which a large # of cozy games brush up against, is up 31 spots (!) to #6. And City Builder is still in the Top 10, but is down 5 spots to #7.
Other big gainers, subgenre-wise: Idler - up 46 spots to #15, and Racing - up 22 spots to #9, mainly due to more indie/niche racers? And on the other side, Survival Horror is down 17 spots to #26, whereas Psychological Horror is down 6 to #13. (We still think horror is hot, mind you - just a particular uneasy/creepypasta flavor, maybe?)
But, I hear you yelling, is ‘units sold’ really a good comparison? There are lots of cheaper games (some of them shorter, some of them very replayable!) in 2025 vs. 2021. Well, fair, cos:
The Top 10 games by units we pulled for 2021 included only one game under $20 (Devour, an early Phasmophobia-like), and five at $60 (inc. Forza 4, Halo Infinite.) Even co-op breakout It Takes Two was a ‘mid-price’ hit at $40.
The Top 10 games by units for 2025 has three big hits under $10 (R.E.P.O., Peak and RV There Yet?) and only two games at $60+ (Battlefield 6, Monster Hunter Wilds.)
That’s a bit more anecdotal, of course. (Though we’ve surveyed for decreasing price before.) But across all the games we surveyed, 2021’s 261 games had a median current USD price of $19.99, and 2025’s 469 games were 15% less at a $16.99 median.
So if you think we’re over-concentrating on cheap $5 games that sell 50k copies way more easily, let’s switch things up to be revenue-first. Here’s the same tag clouds, but with output by >$1m gross Steam revenue in that year, starting with 2021’s releases:
This tag cloud, from 196 games, looks fairly similar to the ‘units’ one for 2021, but with Survival downgraded quite a bit, and FPS and JRPG downshifted not much at all. (It’s good to know it doesn’t make a titanic difference.)
The good news: it’s our new baseline to compare to the top Steam tags for 2025 by revenue, as inexpensive games that sold 50-100k units are now excluded from this tag soup, while $50 games that sold 30k copies during that year make it in here:
Well, some of this is kinda the same - Roguelite is again #1 in 2025 (up 37 spots from 2021), and Roguelike is #2 (up 28 spots from 2021!) But here’s differences we spotted:
Some key genres like FPS and JRPG drop less in this view: FPS is only down 2 spots to #3 here, and JRPG down 8 spots to #10 (vs. #28 in the ‘copies sold’ view!)
Hack And Slash is an intriguing over-performer: we think this tag gets added to a lot of more $ ARPG & Souls-likes, and even some roguelikes, and it’s up 11 to #5, vs. #12 in the ‘units’ view.
Immersive Sim makes a bit more of a bid for interest: this subgenre is making a bit of a stealth comeback, and there’s indies in the space like Shadows Of Doubt - so it’s up 13 spots to #15, higher than the ‘units-only’ version.
We find all this pretty interesting because, minus all those other less genre focused Steam tags (no disrespect, Dwarves and Capybaras), it feels like a true ‘flavor test’ of the zeitgeist right now. (Whether we like the direction of flow or not.)
And that’s it! To write this up, I’ve been consulting a ‘cheat sheet’ documenting the exact tag ranking changes from 2021 to 2025 (thx Alejandro!) And heck, we’re going to leave it in the newsletter in its raw form below, because it’s pretty interesting. Hurray!
[A final reminder: we’re not saying you have to make games in these subgenres, or that Steam tagging is a perfect way of documenting them. We are, however, saying that this is real data on new game popularity via Steam tags, regardless of dev team size and dev time.]
GameDiscoverCo Show: Advance Access = 98% play early?
Finishing things up, it’s The GameDiscover Show, with myself (Simon) and Post Games’ Chris Plante zipping through the stories of the week - sub to the podcast via Apple Music, Spotify & elsewhere (audio), with a video version on YouTube (above).
On this episode, we talk about changes for GDC 2027, why pre-orders and Advance Access for many games seem to be 'pay to get access early', why some PlayStation 'shovelware'-adjacent publishers are being kicked off (then re-instated!) on the platform, and discuss Big Walk's success and the future of the 'co-op only' game genre.
[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.]