How Over The Top sold 200k copies in just two weeks
With a four-person dev team, too. Also: Steam's debuts this week & 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.]
And we’re definitely back, before the serene mists of the weekend envelop us, to take a look at a bunch of news, a new hit game we weren’t expecting (always fun!), and - for Pro and Plus subscribers - the new Steam releases for this week.
Before we start, we shouted out Johnny Galvatron (Artful Escape/Mixtape) and his super-fun ‘Why Traditional Storytelling Breaks in Games’ microtalk at DICE 2026 last month, and hey, a video of it just went up on IGN’s YouTube channel. It’s on the ‘performance art’ side of conference talks - but that’s why we liked it.
[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 - ~90 orgs have it. Or, signing up to GDCo Plus gets the rest of this newsletter and Discord access, plus more.]
Game discovery news: SteamOS is going places…
And let’s check out the latest game platform & discovery news, which goes a little bit like this:
Valve’s latest SteamOS 3.8.0 preview is here, and as The Verge notes: “Valve is adding genuine hibernation and ‘memory power down’ modes to the Steam Deck — though just the LCD model to start”, and Steam Machine and “lots of support for Xbox Ally, Legion Go 2” and others is also added. (Lots of forward momentum here.)
The Game Business had a follow-up on those PEGI game ratings changes, notable because they’re up-rating ‘types of actions’ in games. For example: “Games that include paid battle passes where rewards become unavailable if certain objectives are not met will be rated PEGI 12.” This is a) new and b) partly to get ahead of government restrictions in Europe. (But the U.S.-based ESRB disagrees, apparently?)
Switch things: there’s public U.S. online store data that suggests Pokopia’s release was a Switch 2 system seller, leading to a signifcant increase in hardware sales on Amazon/Walmart; a Japanese analyst estimates that the Switch 2 costs ~$400 to produce, so Nintendo’s losing $160 per unit wholesale for the cheap Japanese SKU.
Two additions to ‘notable Godot engine games’ from Tuesday’s newsletter: the brand new Slay The Spire 2 (which we’re just about to add, but is the biggest grossing Godot title on Steam by 5x already!), and former Itch.io darling Buckshot Roulette - which isn’t quite so huge but is also in the Top 3. (Thx, Daniel!)
The folks at Voyer Law incrementally updated their PC/console indie game publishing survey results for 2026, with a lot of good T&C detail, showing an average advance of $600,000 and a median of $270,000, across the 100+ surveys they looked at. (Here’s last year’s, with an average of $670k and a median of $300k.)
A leaked message to PlayStation developers reveals an upcoming - Sept. 2026 - rebrand: “Sony Interactive Entertainment (SIE) has strategically decided to phase out the terms “PlayStation Network” and “PSN” across our platform.” (Or is this just a ‘de-brand’ to nothing? Magic 8-ball is slightly opaque on the new branding guidelines.)
Two Horizon Worlds updates: first, Meta’s virtual world was being discontinued on VR, since they’re focusing on mobile. But a few hours later, Meta’s Andrew Bosworth revealed: “we will keep Horizon Worlds working in VR for existing games to support the fans.” (Related: the NYT has an obit for Meta’s, uh, OG verse.)
The ‘too many games, not enough reach’ issue endemic to PC/console is also hitting Roblox, according to Hugo Dixon, who’s been making games on Roblox since 2012: “Games reach 1k CCU and 1M daily impressions, then fall off the following week instead of stabilizing or growing.”
ICYMI: PlayStation is rolling out its PSSR upscaling tech to more PlayStation 5 Pro games, as the “AI library that analyzes each frame pixel by pixel as it upscales game visuals” now officially runs with Silent Hill f, Monster Hunter Wilds, Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, Crimson Desert, and more.
Microlinks: the latest set of Xbox Game Pass titles include Disco Elysium, Resident Evil 7: Biohazard, Final Fantasy IV & more; Steamworks added a wishlist data API for your own titles, inc. wishlist totals by language for the first time; the latest Switch 2 OS patch inc. a big upgrade for Switch 1 games in handheld mode.
How Over The Top sold >200k copies in two weeks
In a week that’s seeing a giant launch for Pearl Abyss’ Crimson Desert - already at 2 million units sold - we can see the reasons for covering it prominently. But for most of us, the levels of funding to make a game like that - 7 years, hundreds of people - isn’t that likely. (We’ll still talk about it a bit below, though!)
But no, we’re going to focus on 100 vs. 100 World War I shooter Over The Top: WWI, which has sold ~200k copies on Steam (at $19.14 USD - appropriate price!) since its March 6th release, fueled by easy-to-pick-up gameplay and key influencers.
The game - created by 4-man dev (!) Flying Squirrel Entertainment and published by GG Publishing, also had an interesting ‘rising curve’ on Steam concurrents, maxing out so far at 7,000 CCU about 8 days after release, per GDCo Pro data:
So, we had a chance to chat to Henning Schmid of GG Publishing, and we identified some interesting things that helped the game succeed:
The devs have had 15 years experience (!) making similar genre titles: when you keep working on things, you get better at them. So, starting with a paid DLC for Mount & Blade Warband in 2012, and continuing with a standalone American Civil War multiplayer shooter in 2022, Flying Squirrel kept working in the genre.
World War I is a more commercial niche than the Civil War: Flying Squirrel’s Civil War game topped out at 800 CCU. But Schmid notes there are multiple hit WW1 games, both “WW1 as a core military simulation experience” (Verdun and Isonzo), and “player-driven sandbox games” (Holdfast). Over The Top blends both.
There’s also a more unique mechanic in the mix - trench digging: you’ll see it called out in the below Steam player review sentiment analysis, but Schmid stresses the “the most obvious feature of Over The Top is digging trenches and building fortifications on the map.” And people teaming up to dig trenches does feel neat!
One major concern with games that require a large amount of players is the ‘cold start problem’ - the number of CCUs you need in order to not have people write ‘this game’s ded!’ Steam reviews. So for this title, Flying Squirrel made AI bots to “ensure that the WW1 atmosphere remained in place”, in case you don’t have 100 vs. 100 real players.
This is partly a learning from their previous game, but also makes sense, given this game is a bit more fun-first than skill-first: the idea, per Schmid, was to take “fun sandbox gameplay and enrich it with the WWI war machines like tanks and airplanes.”
One thing Schmid was disappointed with pre-release was the ‘trad media’ coverage of the game - he says: “most media are click-driven, and an update about the next Fortnite event or the big AAA game not delivering on expectations gets far more clicks” than Over The Top announces.
But good news - partnering with Andri Weidmann of Metaroot (publisher of The Farmer Was Replaced), who pitched in with marketing strategy and execution, the collective team was able to get great influencer reach and buzz at launch. How?
A large, evolving set of playtests to get feedback and develop community: Schmid explains: “Each playtest was a little community event, with its own trailers showcasing the improvements and additions, and developers actively playing alongside the community and asking questions.” (It’s straightforward, but important.)
Playing up the fun - and slight jankiness - of the core gameplay: the existing Steam audiovisual material was maybe a bit too polished, and Weidmann notes: “We strongly advised… to embrace the jank of the game and to show this on all the marketing material. People should know from the beginning what they will get.”
Lots of manual work on reaching out to the right content creators: Weidmann said they “contacted more than 9k content creators and had one of the best receptions to this game we ever had in a campaign. Many quite big [streamers] then played the game like: LIRIK, xQc, Asmongold and jackfrags.”
The game is fairly North America-centric in sales, partly because of the streamers that picked it up - Schmid says “75% of Twitch streams are in English, and our sales numbers confirm that.” [GDCo Pro estimates 48% U.S. players of Over The Top, followed by the UK at 7%, Canada at 5.5%, and Australia at 4.5%.]
There were many other things that helped, such as Steam bundles with Hell Let Loose and Squad 44. But this game’s interesting to us because, well, a 4-person dev doing a 200-player World War I game that should eventually gross $10m+? That’s Steam in 2026, baby - unexpectedly low barriers to entry for genres, if you execute just right.
Steam debuts: Crimson Desert, Death Stranding 2!
