How Hozy went cozy to sell 100k on Steam in 4 days...
Also: a new eBook for Plus/Pro subs, and lots of discovery 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.]
Returned, we have, for more video game discovery news, we have. (We hope you had a nice weekend, wherever you were.) And it turns out there’s plenty of things to discuss, yet again, including a lead story on a cozy title that’s fared pretty well on Steam.
Before we start, did you see the rare prototype ROM for Nintendo’s Punch-Out!! for the NES, as analyzed by the Video Game History Foundation? Some of the boxer names in this proto that never made it into the home version include Vodka Drunkenski (replaced by Soda Popinski in the NES version!), and, uhhh, Pizza Pasta?
[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 - >90 orgs have it. Or, signing up to GDCo Plus gets the rest of this newsletter and Discord access, plus more.]
Game discovery news: Triple I floods the charts..
Let’s check out the latest game discovery & platform news, starting with a look at the hottest unreleased Steam games:
As we noted in GDCo’s latest ‘trending unreleased Steam games’ by 7-day wishlists chart (above), the Triple I Initiative showcase made for a busy time: buoyed by a giveaway on the original, Graveyard Keeper 2 is at #1, shortly followed by Don't Starve Elsewhere (#2), continuing Klei's hit spooky survival series.
Also in Triple I: creepy farmer Crop (#4), AI-themed visual novel Prove You’re Human (#6) & macabre party game Machine Party (#7) - it’s 2026, we all like dark content now? Also: puppet-y co-slop Too Deep To Quit (#8) and creature collector Temtem: Pioneers (#9) Unrelated: also check Trees Hate You (#14) for a giggle.
The Verge spotted this re: Game Pass: “In an internal memo to Xbox employees, [Xbox boss Asha] Sharma admits that ‘Game Pass has become too expensive for players’ and that Microsoft needs ‘a better value equation’.” Timed to rumors over Call Of Duty exiting Game Pass and all-’first party’ GP, we’re wondering what’s next.
The Galaxies Spring Showcase is happening April 16th, with co-streaming bringing good reach to the streaming showcase founded by an ex-Twitch exec. IGN notes that “announcements and updates on over 50 games” are due, inc. Atomic Heart DLC and a new look at Supermassive’s Directive 8020.
Ars Technica discusses the ‘SteamGPT’ leak from Valve, with a theory (after looking at source files!) that the company “may be looking to use AI tools to streamline internal evaluations of in-game incidents and sift through potentially suspicious [Steam] accounts.”
Fresh from frustrating Valve with its ratings roll-out, the Indonesian game ratings board has also been leaking video/data: “A security flaw with the Indonesian Game Rating System (IGRS) had left gameplay footage exposed for many unreleased games”, including the upcoming James Bond game and Echoes of Aincrad.
Despite I (Simon) not jibing with podcasts - one reason why the GDCo Podcast lasted a grand total of 4 episodes (lol), we consistently hear great things about the Gamecraft podcast with Mitch Lasky & Blake Robbins. And their new Season 4 ‘trends & predictions’ kickoff episode is a great place to start?
Some new PlayStation Store Beta UI screenshots have revealed “a new-look layout for the storefront, complete with large Netflix-style tiles and a bunch of different filtering tags. You can see from the Starfield entry, for example, that the game is labelled as ‘Open World’, ‘Story Rich’, and ‘Cinematic’.” (Mm, new taxonomies!)
Looks like Roblox has announced its new Plus subscription, with the $5/month sub giving discounts, private servers, and no-fee Robux transfers. (It’s an alt. for Roblox Premium, which is solely a Robux-based sub. Note the upsell: “soon after launch, we will offer multiple optional bundles—Plus 500, Plus 1000, and Plus 2000.” )
This list of last week’s Japanese (and LTD!) console sales is fascinating: “Switch 2: 59,543 (5,011,059); PS5 Digital Edition: 12,141 (1,248,515); Switch OLED: 7,468 (9,526,329); Switch Lite: 4,807 (6,903,964); Switch: 4,067 (20,271,045); PS5 Pro: 840 (341,548); PS5: 558 (5,910,474); Xbox Series X: 525 (325,952)… Xbox Series S: 129 (341,622).” (Switch dominance, less recent PS5 gray market sales into China?)
‘PvP too toxic’ news: Dune: Awakening is “finally making Deep Desert and shipwreck PvP fully optional”, saying “over 80% of our lifetime players [are] exclusively engaging with PvE”; this interview with the devs of Windrose notes the game renamed and pivoted from PvP to PvE; stealth game Thick as Thieves also just dropped PvP.
Our Sponsor: Reach thousands of playtesters in minutes
Finding playtesters is a grind. Discord posts, Reddit spam, begging friends, and you still end up with few people who play.
Player.gg finds them for you, for FREE, with a community of thousands of players looking for their next game to try. Studios can get listed in 5 minutes for free powered by FirstLook.gg. Here’s what it looks like in practice:
Playtesters requesting access within hours of going live
Zero ad spend, zero outreach efforts
Feedback from players who actually want to be there
Join games like Defect, Dead as Disco, and Wardogs, onboarding thousands of playtesters a day using Player.gg. If you want players flowing in today, reach out to our CEO eden.chen@firstlook.gg or set up your free account today.
How Hozy sold 100k copies on Steam in 4 days…
If you didn’t spot it, Come On Studio & Tinybuild’s ‘clean, restore, arrange’ roombuilder Hozy ($15) has been a decent-sized hit, confirming 100k sold on Steam in 4 days, as the publisher tells us it launched with 500k outstanding Steam wishlists, and “has now sold over 175k copies.” (We imagine a Switch version could do well, too!)
Anyhow, we caught up with Tinybuild’s Vladimir Tolmachev & Vera Lubbers, who were kind enough to give us a whole bunch of insight into the game’s pre-release planning. Here’s some of the things we found most interesting:
Hozy had decent organic wishlists from the very start: Tinybuild tells us that after the game’s announce trailer in May 2025, “the game quickly gained 24k wishlists, followed by a steady pace of around 250–270 wishlists per day.” We think the striking isometric visuals and clear ‘tidying x room design’ combo were key to this.
The game announced a playtest from Day 1, helping hype: this is pretty notable - a playtest was announced on announce in May, even though Tinybuild only signed the game in late February. There were also constant tweaks & updates (inc. Halloween & Xmas-themed level redecoration!) due to player/influencer feedback.
There was a big step-up in August due to a co-ordinated campaign: the game was in a Wholesome Games showcase & the Tiny Teams Steam sale, also updated the playtest version, and added paid shortform video campaigns around then too, targeting the majority female audience Tinybuild believed were the target.
You can see the first step-up in wishlist velocity from the following Steam graph - look how it takes off later in August 2025:
The Tinybuild duo also gave us links to some of the key shortform videos that helped this to happen. Firstly, here’s a paid shortform inclusion (via direct sponsorship):
But Tinybuild notes: “the results of the paid placements - combined with the updated playtest - encouraged creators to start making content organically.” Here’s one of those - which really shows off the great cleaning/renovating effects in the game:
We’ll be talking more about shortform video later in the week, but Tolmachev & Lubbers had two notable conclusions from marketing this shortform-friendly title:
Shortform content takes longer to start driving wishlists, because “it depends less on subscriber bases and more on platform algorithms. That means it takes time for content to be pushed to its full potential audience.”
A single level is enough to make a great TikTok or Instagram Reel: “Creators do not need [many minutes or hours] of new content in a build to show something fresh to their audience, unlike YouTube or Twitch.”
Anyhow, from there, the 8-person dev team at Come On Studio did a great job of finishing the game while providing constant playtest updates, with monthly (!) paid/organic campaigns ft. new content every time. (That’s not easy.)
Following the August inflection point, the game gained 1.3k average daily wishlists (whoa!) all the way up to its big public demo showcase in Feb 2026’s Next Fest, where it added 74k wishlists and then kept increased momentum until launch:
The post-launch result? 175k LTD units & 81% Positive reviews, with the U.S. (27.3% of revenue, 20.3% of units), Germany (12.9% revenue, 9.2% units) and China (6.5% revenue, 12% units) the Top 3 countries by revenue, and a pretty diverse geographical split beyond that.
Overall: the tactile-looking gameplay & relaxed, gameplay-lite arranging ‘flow’ made Hozy visually irresistable to fans of games like Unpacking. The game’s not perfect - it’s a tad short (3-4 hours) right now, unless you want to play in freeform modes. But that’s what post-launch patches and DLC are for, right? Congrats to all involved…
Why the ‘production point’ matters for all devs…
We’ve been enjoying Thomas Stewart’s YouTube channel, including neat things like an interview with the dev of A Game About Feeding A Black Hole. So when we saw him recommend an eBook (above video), Production Point from popular YouTube tutorialist Benjamin ‘Heartbeast’ Anderson (also physically available), we took notice.
Disclaimer: Anderson’s eBook was originally intended for indie/solo devs starting out. But it talks intelligently re: something that’s becoming more important: playable prototypes & iteration with small teams, and when/how to go on and make a full game.
Here’s an extract from Production Point’s intro on the subject. (Benjamin also produced a Substack post back in 2022 which details some of his ideas, btw):
“After looking back on my own experience and researching other developers, I was forced to acknowledge that committing too early leads to wasted money, time, and effort. This led to the realization that:
Effort ≠ Progress
Knowing exactly when to commit is paramount to making progress and finishing a game. The developers who can identify the correct point at which to commit are the ones who finish games… For these developers:
Effort = Progress
When I committed to [a previous title of his] Demonlocke, it was at the potential point. [He says earlier in the intro: ‘The potential I saw in the game had enamored me’.] Unfortunately, this is when most developers commit to their idea, and it’s a grave mistake.
Experienced developers know to avoid the potential point. Instead, they commit to their projects at what I call the production point. At this point, all the major uncertainties of a project have been addressed. These developers can safely commit to the idea and know that their efforts will lead to immediate progress toward a finished game.”
Given there are all kinds of game jams (with public voting) and other arenas to bounce off your ideas and ‘game hooks’, deeper thinking re: ‘when and how to move forward to complete games efficiently’ is well worth sampling.
Anyhow, that’s why we arranged with Benjamin Anderson to add ‘Production Point’ to GDCo’s eBooks section for all GameDiscoverCo Pro & Plus paid subscribers. We now have 10 titles in this section ‘free’ for company/solo subscribers, inc. Derek Yu’s book on the making of Spelunky, Kim Nordström’s biz book Up Down Up, and lots more…
Also, yep, we’re kinda behind on making new GameDiscoverCo first-party eBooks, so there may be a couple more ‘best ofs’ sidling into that page soon… toodles.
[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.]