How heritage, quality & marketing made Mewgenics a million-seller on Steam!
We talk to the people behind it. Also: this week in Steam & lotsa 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.]
Almost da weekend, as we slide serendipitously into what’s next - apparently GDC 2026 in San Francisco in March. So: hit up Matt Styles or email us to chat GDCo Pro there. And premium GameDiscoverCo users, check the bottom of this newsletter for our GDC 2026 meetup plans! (Yep, we’ll be at Develop & Gamescom too, Europeans.)
And before we start, who would like to hear about sophisticated British author Martin Amis’ 1982 book Invasion Of The Space Invaders, written by the London Fields author as an early ‘arcade game addict’? This fun Infinite Review video looks into his sociological look at the ‘zonked glueys’ who play games, according to Amis. (It us!)
[WANNA CHECK OUT GDCo PRO? You too can get a free demo of our GameDiscoverCo Pro company-wide ‘Steam deep dive’ & console data by reaching out today - ~90 orgs have it. Or, signing up to GDCo Plus gets the rest of this newsletter and Discord access, plus more. ]
Game discovery news: Sparta, Kain, Reanimal hype
Let’s start things out by looking at some notable platform and discovery news since last time out, such as:
The latest ‘trad media coverage’ charts from ICO’s Footprints.gg (above) is headed by surprise pixel-y shadowdrop God of War Sons of Sparta, followed by Resident Evil Requiem, new Legacy Of Kain games, and co-op horror hit Reanimal.
You know we thought Valve’s Steam Deck ‘out of stock’ shortages were due to memory and storage shortages? (Thanks, AI.) Well, Valve confirmed that they were due to “memory and storage shortages”, so aren’t we feeling smug? (Doesn’t make the situation any better, though.)
Reminder that Steam’s February Next Fest starts on Monday - we’ll have coverage of the top titles, after it all concludes. The press preview page currently shows >3,800 demos (!), and early top Steam demos by CCU as we near Next Fest include Burglin’ Gnomes, Windrose & John Carpenter’s Toxic Commando.
Giant .PPT obsessive Matthew Ball has early released his latest ‘state of video games’ report, and The Game Business went through some highlights with him - from reduced investments, to console growth going to platform holders (via PS+/Game Pass) rather than directly to third parties. (So, lowlights?)
Chinese livestreaming game hits in Jan. 2026, according to Niko Partners, were headed by Delta Force (277m monthly average viewers, wow!), followed by Valorant, Counter-Strike 2, Peacekeeper Elite & Crossfire. (A lotta mobile/PC shooters - Tencent’s new FPS Nizhan Future also made a new entry further down.)
As Bloomberg spotted: “PlayStation is shutting down [70-person team] Bluepoint Games, the studio responsible for modern remakes of classic games such as Demon's Souls and Shadow of the Colossus.” This follows a canned God of War live-service game, as an internal Sony announce says it’s “harder to build games sustainably.”
In ‘Valve did good!’ news, the company won a lawsuit against Leigh Rothschild and associated entities over a super-broad 'system and method for storing broadcast content in a cloud-based computing environment' patent, with a jury agreeing the patent holders violated an anti-patent troll protection act. Thumbs up.
Late-breaking Circana overview of Jan. 2026 in U.S. game hardware/select software? Why yes: sales were up 3% YoY to $4.7m, with hardware spending up 16%. But that’s up to ‘just’ $248m, with Switch 2 spending increases offsetting PS5 being down 17% and Xbox Series down 27%. (Black Ops 7 was top game again.)
Obligatory ‘don’t mess up your GDC meeting timings’ PSA via Mr. T. Bidaux: “For everyone in Europe and Asia booking meetings… keep in mind that the U.S. is switching to DST the Sunday before the event (8th of March). Book your meeting times using the local time zone to avoid confusion.”
Microlinks: only 28 games recovered from a bad Steam launch in 2024 - what did they have in common? the Xbox ROG Ally PC handheld “had a nice month one and has come back down quite significantly since then”; Epic is acquiring Meshcapade, “a company that makes AI tech for animating digital humans.”
How is Mewgenics a million-seller? Cats love it…
Look, we get it, “bizarre cat-breeding simulator” Mewgenics ($30) already sold >1 million copies on Steam in just a week & hit 115k CCU (!). So we’re already seeing the hot takes and counter-takes flooding the zone on LinkedIn. (At >$40m, it’s the top Feb. 2026 non-F2P Steam game of any age, GDCo thinks - not just new games.)
Very briefly, for those who don’t know: versions of Mewgenics date back to 2011 (!) But the current version re-started in 2018, with offkilter indie edgelord legend Edmund McMillen (Super Meat Boy, The Binding Of Isaac) co-piloting the turn-based strategy roguelite alongside Tyler Glaiel (Closure, The End Is Nigh.)
Both McMillen & Glaiel grew up in the fertile Flash game scene of the ‘00s, which partly explains why the resulting title might be tonally disorienting to you. And as Garbage Day said: “McMillen sat down to make Mewgenics right at the start of the woke era and is now releasing it at what is, very possibly, the end of it.”
So, two big reasons for Mewgenics’ success (besides ‘cats!’) are almost too obvious to discuss: first, there’s a massive fanbase for McMillen’s work, particularly from The Binding Of Isaac, which was incredibly pioneering as an RNG-led action roguelite, and has had multiple DLC and expansions over the years.
So when you have almost 10 million players of The Binding Of Isaac on Steam with a median of 55 hours played (and an average of 190!), they’re going to show up to the next big thing McMillen releases - even in a different genre like turn-based battler. (We show 70% of Mewgenics players also playing Binding Of Isaac, 16.2x ‘normal’.)
Secondly, the quality and sheer depth of the game outpaced many people’s high expectations. The devs have been doing beta tests quietly for at least 2 years. And an early press embargo lift and 93% of critics recommending Mewgenics - often fulsomely - really increased the hype levels, pre-release.
So the game is really good and people love the creator(s) - big whoop? Well, there’s obviously more to it than this. First, we feel like people underestimate how good Binding Of Isaac is at giving you radically different RNG-based ‘runs’ based on the kind of items you get.
We asked McMillen about expanding this for Mewgenics, and he agreed: “It’s a much bigger version of the same idea. Isaac uses 700+ items to achieve this - Mewgenics uses 950+ items and 1200 abilities - 100s of events, mutations and many other things to create an infinite world.” Outcome depth as a ‘fun multiplier’, with breeding mechanics layered in.
And the unexpected item results are fun even for the devs, per Edmund: “There wasn't a week that went by that we all didn't experience an insane combo we never knew existed.. It's still happening now!” And this all works despite ‘run’ lengths for the game being on the high side for most roguelites at nearly 2 hours - tho McMillen did tell us they “chopped away at it a bit” during dev. But the ‘run’ and ‘meta cat-raising’ combo is irresistible…
Secondly, the Mewgenics team had influencer (& other marketing) strategy via Jake Kulkowski of Guillotine, something I was pretty surprised about, because I presumed there would be no external ‘helpers’. Things we learned via talking to Jake:
Early cultivation of journalists majorly helped the buzz: Jake says the team “invited [journos] to a Discord server [a month early] to theorycraft, boast, chat to the devs, report bugs, offer condolences to slain cats… Ed and Tyler would read a bug and patch it almost instantly! Knew it’d be a petri dish for positive sentiment and the village was being built.”
Managing Edmund’s appearances & own streams also added hype: 30+ podcast & stream appearances, including Dropped Frames, meant a gradual hype build, esp. for the core fans on Discord & Reddit. Jake says: “We built that up slowly between November ‘25 and launch. For the two weeks before launch, Edmund streamed daily… We hid an… ARG in the Features trailer and that was just for the die-hards.”
Influencer outreach/pickup was strategic & insanely high: “We curated a list of 700 highly relevant influencers worldwide (mostly roguelite and tactical enjoyers, the top 180 Isaac creators too). Of the 700 targets, 554 responded with interest. Of those, 470 converted into organic coverage within 48 hours of launch.” OMG, that pickup rate…
Anyhow, we think Guillotine - a small firm who also led global influencer campaigns for Dispatch, The Headliners, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 recently - got its ‘Edmund as influencer’, ‘normal influencer’ and press campaign outreach spot-on. And it helped amplify what was already going to be a winning proposition. Good job, y’all…
Oh, and final bonus image is GDCo Pro’s Steam review sentiment graphs for Mewgenics, purely because the positive word cloud shows ‘Edmund, cats, Isaac, Tyler’ in descending order of mentions, if you wanna grok the vibes. (Still love ya, Tyler!)
This week on Steam: a Super Battle Golf Trek…
