How Paralives sold a million copies in its first month...
Also: lots of game discovery news, innit?
[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.]
We’re back after a brief holiday hiatus - did you miss us? Just a little bit? Luckily, it’s the calm after the news storm - although there’s still a busy release schedule for new games we’ll touch on briefly, plus a lead story on a life sim that’s done v.well.
Before we start, a crazy stat from the COO of Facepunch (brutal PvP hit Rust): “Over 7 Million (PC) Rust players now have 100+ hours played… 37% of Rust's (PC) negative reviews are from players with over 1,000+ hrs played. Over half of them still play.” One reply admits they have 11k hours, left a negative review, but “if anyone asks, Rust is my favorite game.”
[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 - >100 orgs have it. Or, signing up to GDCo Plus gets the rest of this newsletter and Discord access, plus more.]
Game discovery news: The Mound, Soulframe, hi!
And let’s start out by looking at a bunch of notable game platform & discovery news, as follows:
GDCo Pro's 'trending' unreleased Steam games by 'new wishlists in the last 7 days' has bomb defusal game Bombanana! (#1) top yet again, with co-op horror standout The Mound: Omen Of Cthulhu surging to #2. And Soulframe (#3) charts thanks to playtest signups & news from Digital Extremes' TennoCon showcase.
Also notable: plague-y Napoleonic extraction RPG Hunger (#4), down to beta tests, and much anticipated vampire RPG Blood Of Dawnwalker (#8), which just keeps scaling. New titles? Rogue Carrier (#7) is a roguelite colony management game where you "build and manage a city atop an ocean-faring ship" - sounds catchy.
Steam’s Frame VR hardware may be near launch, given it’s still ‘shipping this summer’ and “Valve just published a new store landing page for Steam Frame content, which is rounding up all of the ‘best’ games and demos that are certified to work with the company’s soon-to-launch VR headset.”
Xbox things: multiple outlets claim that Game Pass currently has around 30 million subscribers, down from ~34m reported in 2024; Bethesda’s head told its studios the new strategy was “shifting from a planning model primarily centered on what's next for each independent studio to one that focuses on our strongest franchises.”
Some possible ‘red flags’ from a publisher perspective, from Anna Ott: “Wishlists without any visible audience signals… The pitch deck describes the game, but not the opportunity… The [publisher marketing] expectations are disconnected from reality.” (#2, devs not grokking “the game’s positioning & USP” is one we’ve heard from others.)
Last week’s debuts? A rare AAA multi-platform success week, with Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced the biggie with >100k Steam CCU, and already at 2m units multiplatform. Also hot: Echoes Of Aincrad (20k CCU, doing better on PS), EA Sports College Football 27 (11.5k CCU, crushing it on console, despite IAP woes!)
Bonus: there’s another four debuts with >5k CCU on Steam last week, inc. sim hit eSports Manager 2026 (10k CCU), cozy first-person sim Cat Mail Co. (9k CCU), vampire Stardew Valley-alike Moonlight Peaks (8.5k CCU, also doing great on Switch), and Chinese-first cultivation RPG Destiny Of Immortal (8.2k CCU).
Steam’s 2 hour refund policy got called out again, this time by the dev of Paddle Paddle Paddle, who claims his 21% refund rate is majorly boosted by players completing, then refunding. (Hmm - we doubt it’s more than a low single digit % effect, and agree with IndieGameJoe that Steam’s refund policies are correcto.)
Ronan Patrick analyzes the data to suggest that: “On console, new titles [that aren’t established franchises, sequels, and live services] have captured between 6% - 7% of total revenue every year from 2023 to 2025”, but it’s slightly better on PC, where “new-title share has grown from 10.3% in 2023 to 16.9% in 2025.”
Interesting to see (no-longer involved) Id co-founder John Carmack get almost philosophical discussing Xbox’s layoffs at the Doom/Quake studio: “You can’t rule out the possibility that executives are idiots, but that shouldn’t be your default belief. I don’t think there is any obvious path that would have doubled the revenue from Id games.”
Re: ‘are devs disclosing AI used in their games?’, we had an anon comment from the publisher of an indie game re: platform enforcement: “I submitted a demo to Steam and they accused me of not reporting the use of AI images. I went back to the artist (who had a ‘no AI art’ clause in his contract) and I found out that his background artist was using AI... Steam is checking. Steam is catching it.”
Microlinks: Nintendo confirmed that Switch 1s no long being sold in Europe was due to an EU law change on batteries, UK physical retail group the ERA says no PlayStation discs is “a triumph of corporate convenience over consumer choice”, Dying Light: The Beast will skip PS4/Xbox One versions due to technical constraints.
OUR SPONSOR: PWN Games - PC Paid Media Done Right
Advertise your PC game with PWN Games. With our CPA model, you only pay when a player wishlists, installs, engages, or pays.
250+ PC games promoted. 42M+ players acquired. 10 years in the PC UA business.
Trusted by top PC game publishers worldwide. Explore PWN Games today!
How Paralives sold 1m copies in its first month...
We last covered PC life sim Paralives back in early 2024, when the game hit 750,000 wishlists. And after they announced 1 million copies sold in just its first month on Early Access on Steam, we knew we had to come back to analyze the game’s success.
Once again, we got detailed insight from Paralives’ Gabrielle Boyer-Antoni & team. Initial context: don’t forget that this game added a Steam page in 2019 (!), and it ran a successful Patreon campaign of ~$50k/month to fund most of its multiyear pre-Steam development. (That in itself is rare, tho The Sims-related Patreons are a thing…)
Anyhow, the 15-person team that shipped Paralives, led by Alex Massé, and funded based on that ($3m cumulative) Patreon fan-base, really delivered in one of the trickiest competitive landscapes. Here’s their Steam overview screen as of last week:
Things to note: only 6.5% of Steam units refunded is significantly below the 9.5% median we surveyed for early in 2025, and 5 hours 30 mins is an excellent start for median time played, with 11 hours 40 mins being the average. (Also: 1.8m wishlist balance after 1.1m LTD sales will be great news for discounts & 1.0.)
We talked about some of the key reasons this game had potential back in 2024. But now it’s actually executed, let’s go back and revisit why we think it worked:
Steady, long-term dev with a community of fans who trust the creators: the team clearly says “the game was made possible by the support of the community”, and also added - perhaps referencing The Sims 4 indirectly - they “will never have paid DLCs, only free expansions.” Good vibes ensue…
Paralives passed the ‘too early for Early Access’ low bar: this wasn’t a given, due to the huge amount of content a Sims-like life sim needs (“Life sim games are basically 3 games in 1!”, the devs tell us.) But 90% Positive reviews is great for EA, even tho the devs joke that “our own Excel file compiling players’ feedback crashed on release day due to the amount of reports we were receiving.”
The modding scene took off (unexpectedly?) quickly: life sims often have eager modders, but the devs tell us “the biggest [launch] surprise would have to be the amount of mods and custom content that players immediately started making! In the Steam Workshop alone, we reached close to 25,000 items… in the first month.”
We’re also impressed with the sheer depth of content created by modders - everything from camera control changes through ‘cozy starter homes’ to tattoo packs, and beyond. (Oh, and not content with being popular Lego sets, succulents & cacti are also hot in Paralives.)
Now the Steam version is launched, all Patreon pledges are paused, btw, and the devs tell us they “are working towards making the entire page history publicly available. Every weekly post since 2019 will be public and serve as a great archive of the project.” Neat idea.
The sheer amount the devs need to keep track of between environments, characters, the core NPC-centric gameplay & game interactions/choices is certainly hair-raising. And it’s difficult to compete with the insane depth of content of The Sims series.
But Paralives’ ‘slow and steady’ apprach has really resonated with core fans - while it may still be a bit early for people who have been paying less attention (like Raptor, who said “I think I’m really excited... about the 1.0 release.”) This is reflected in GDCo Pro’s ‘review sentiment’ analysis - positive, but has some ‘excited for later’ rhetoric:
Our gut is that Paralives will handle that a tad better than inZOI, one of the only other attempts to rival The Sims recently. (It built a lot of the right framework, and sold great initially, but seems a little less ‘sure’ of what’s fun.)
Overall, it’s tricky: players want a new thing, but they already have the giant (and successful!) old thing to return to…. and right now, Paralives is threading that needle pretty well, though getting the masses to turn up for patches & 1.0 is important. (It’s got a 4k Steam CCU peak in the last day, vs. 2.5k for inZOI and 32k for The Sims 4.)
Anyhow, let’s use GameDiscoverCo Pro (ping us for a free demo!) and Paralives’ own Steam data to round out our impressions of why this game succeeded. Let’s start with the ‘real’ Steam country breakdown, which really is U.S. centric, like other life sims:
Moving on, here are the top Paralives streamers LTD on Twitch, via GDCo Pro. Besides higher-average viewer ‘variety streamers’, there’s strong overlap between Paralives & Nintendo’s own Tomodachi Life (a kind of twisted The Sims-like which has been genuinely viral!), as well as The Sims 4:
The game isn’t giant on Twitch - it’s ranked #185 over the last 30 days. But it caters to a more casual, female-friendly players than your core Twitch watcher, we suspect. And it has great reach on YouTube - and shortform video in particular cos ‘cozy’.
Finally, we really liked this view of ‘daily wishlist actions’ from the Steam back end around Paralives’ Early Access launch, data you don’t always get to see:
We spot a couple of things: first, Paralives’ purchases from wishlist are impressively front-loaded (people were waiting for this game, hardcore, leading to 78,000 CCU on launch day!) But the wishlist additions from people who weren’t aware of the game are also impressive in terms of ‘long tail’ - 25k additions per day weeks after launch.
Conclusions? Paralives had built out enough, 7 years after starting its successful Patreon (!), to launch into this ‘ultra-high barrier to entry’ genre. It’s still got a way to go, but it was plenty enough to delight players looking for alternatives. So: thanks to the creators for being so transparent, and good luck for the future….
[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.]