How RimWorld's latest DLC was its biggest so far
We talk to the team. Also: streaming charts from July & lots of 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.]
We’re back - our lead story features a game that’s been on Steam for nearly a decade, but is still going from strength to strength - incredibly complex (in a good way!) sci-fi colony sim RimWorld. But before we start: historical game discovery artifacts!
Wha? Yes - the Video Game History Foundation acquired & digitized Computer Entertainer, the “only.. publication in the United States that regularly covered home console video games in the mid-1980s.” It’s readable in full here, & VGHF spoke to Marylou Badeaux, who ran CE with her sister from 1982-1990 - amazing stuff.
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Game discovery news: PlayStation’s ‘other $’ push.
Let’s start out by checking out some of the notable game platform & discovery news for the last few days, which goes a bit like this:
After the recent Sony results, interesting to see this graph from Derek Strickland of PlayStation’s ‘other software’ revenue - all $ not on the PlayStation platform (PC publishing, Destiny 2 multi-platform $, etc.) It was $175m in Q1 (fiscal) 2025, which is a) not nothing & likely higher-margin, but b) only 4% of total PS division revenue.
GameDiscoverCo looked at trending unreleased Steam games for the week ending Aug. 11th, and continued momentum for EA's Battlefield 6 (#1) has seen it hit >500k CCU (on Steam alone) in Open Beta, and hit Top 10 for wishlists. First-person RPG Fatekeeper (#2), and ARPG Darksiders 4 (#5) are also still trending.
Otherwise, China-specific roguelike item-combiner SealChain: Call Of Blood (#3) got extra Asian interest, and brand new on Steam is ambitious RTS sequel Ashes Of The Singularity II (#9), as well as Capcom's MonHun spinoff Monster Hunter Stories 3 (#13) - which isn't out until 2026, but is already getting early interest.
On Steam, did you know that your first 4 Steam page screenshots are the most important? Michal Napora points out multiple instances of this, including front-page Discounts and Events, Steam dev and publisher hubs, and ‘Featured’ titles, all of which show or cycle only these four pics.
Lots of interest in this Reddit piece on Do No Harm’s pitching to 58 (!) publishers, after which they got “got 3 low offers, 16 rejections, and lots of silence”, before deciding to self-publish and “grossed ~$750K in 5 months [&] kept full revenue.” (We’ve got an article on that self-publishing choice for the hook-y game.)
PlayStation’s own U.S./European ‘top downloads’ charts for July 2025 are always interesting, with Ready Or Not and College Football doing great (as we also predicted!), and soccer (EA Sports FC & Rematch) at #2 and #3 in Europe on PS5. F2P is dominated by Fortnite & Roblox, with Rainbow Six Siege X at #3.
Talking of PlayStation sales, we inadvertently omitted Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 & 4 in our paid units chart for July. (In the fixed chart, it made #5 for the month, with >130k copies sold on PlayStation - alongside the >2m Xbox Game Pass units we already mentioned - and another 40k units on Steam.)
We’ve talked about “async autobattler meets deckbuilder” The Bazaar multiple times, because it was that rare PC game not to debut on Steam, opting for a F2P-based standalone client. Well, no more - it’s heading to Steam at a $45 premium price, with $20 character DLC. (The monetization shift is proving controversial, tho.)
One more notable Sony exec quote? VP Sadahiko Hayakawa: “In the gaming business, we are moving away from a hardware centric business model more to a platform business that expands the community and increases engagement.” (Context: Sony as a whole is getting more content-centric, and less consumer electronics-centric.)
According to a Steam FAQ, “Steam purchases using PayPal in currencies other than EUR, CAD, GBP, JPY, AUD and USD” are still unavailable, after “PayPal notified Valve that their acquiring bank for payment transactions in certain currencies” was terminating the relationship in July. (We presume this is NSFW game-related.)
There’s been reluctance to drop last-gen console versions of GaaS games. But after Hunt: Showdown did so in 2024, the next major game to do so is Genshin Impact. How? No new DLs Sept. 10th, IAP delisted Feb. 2026, shutdown Aug. 2026. (We estimate 450k DAU across both PS4 & PS5, which ain’t nothin’.)
Microlinks: Steam will stop supporting macOS 11 Big Sur on October 15, 2025; Amazon Prime’s free games for Aug. 2025 include Civilization 3 Complete and Thief: Definitive Edition; the Steam for Chromebook Beta program will conclude on January 1st, 2026.
How RimWorld’s latest DLC was its biggest so far…
Having been reading Puck’s excellent, if gossip-y newsletters about other types of trad media recently (many updates about the Paramount-Skydance deal), I’m reminded how wide-open the landscape is - especially on PC - for building hit digital games, vs. the same incumbents on the LA/New York ‘old media’ nexus.
This is one reason why GameDiscoverCo doesn’t do endless exec interviews or scuttlebutt - there are plenty of direct-to-market winners in games who a) made a great game b) stuck with it, and c) built a franchise. And Ludeon Studios’ sci-fi colony sim RimWorld is an amazing example of that.
The $35 game, which now has 5 DLC expansions at $20-$25 each, first released on Steam in 2016, but actually had an initial Kickstarter back in in 2013 - so it’s had an epic decade-plus of development. And the latest DLC, the spaceship exploration-themed Odyssey, has smashed it.
Rimworld’s creator Tynan Sylvester & marketing director Tia Young tell GameDiscoverCo: “Odyssey launched with ~45k more wishlists than Anomaly (which launched with ~305k in 2024), and it generated more revenue than any other RimWorld expansion in their first two weeks. Our all-time peak concurrent player count went from 62k to nearly 100k; weeks after release, it’s still holding steady well above its previous peak.”
Yep, 100k CCUs on Steam for a paid game is spectacularly good. That’ll get you into the Top 10 most-played on Valve’s platform, including F2P titles. GDCo isn’t sure of total LTD RimWorld revenue - DLC bundles make estimating tricky - but we believe it may be >$300 million gross on Steam alone. (That’s… rather good.)
Oh, and the team says the most-played countries for RimWorld are “the U.S., then China, followed by various European countries”, and it’s played 242 hours on average - and was 223 hours in 2024. (GDCo estimates >65 hours median, #12 on Steam (!) for >100k sellers, adjacent to fellow megahits Mount & Blade II & Baldur’s Gate 3.)
So we quizzed Ludeon’s Tynan & Tia about how they’ve built & scaled RimWorld, and they came up with some pretty interesting answers. Summarizing the game’s overall business model, which is intriguing:
RimWorld releases high-value DLC, but also gives away a lot: Tynan explains “every DLC update cycle comes with a large free [base game] update in addition to an expansion pack. We do expansions because there’s lots of demand for new gameplay, and we have ideas for new gameplay directions.”
The game has a lot of UGC, and DLC plays nice with it: Tynan adds “RimWorld is a fully systemic game… designed to be fully adaptable to new content. That’s how it supports thousands of [player-created UGC] mods, with many players using hundreds at a time.” But new DLC is fully tested to make sure major mods work with it.
DLC often heads off in one particular direction, but aren’t a ‘must buy’: “We… never try to force players to buy expansions. We have a design principle where… the game will never make a player feel like he’s missing something... We even modify text strings to ensure they don’t refer to expansion content the player doesn’t have.”
If you look at previous paid DLC, they’re both surprising & intriguing. Biotech adds child-raising and cyborgs (fine, mechanoids!), Ideology integrates belief systems - meme, precepts & rituals, and Anomaly is a side-story jaunt into a horror-themed expansion. All are layered on a super-complex simulated world which rivals or surpasses Dwarf Fortress in complexity.
RimWorld’s USP is that endlessly fascinating level of management. Tynan says that, though everyone is experiencing the game slightly differently: “There’s no community fragmentation, as long as the game is true to its fully-systemic identity.” And the emergent gameplay is amazing for creating longform player stories, like this Hazzor video:
Before we move on to marketing and why RimWorld Odyssey outperformed the other DLCs, a brief stop at… pricing. We were surprised that RimWorld has never - ever - been more than 20% discounted, in its entire history. Ludeon’s Tia explained:
“Originally we were inspired by Factorio’s discounting approach… they believe their game is worth full price, and that discounting it would be disrespectful to people who bought it at full price. Ludeon had a similar philosophy early on in RimWorld’s life. That said, I discussed in a past marketing talk that we don’t see that as the best strategy anymore. We know we left money on the table by not running >20% sales sooner and more frequently. So now you’ll see RimWorld and its expansions go on sale fairly often.”
However, the team still don’t plan for giant discounts, because they “don’t necessarily want to bring in a large number of players who just bought it without thinking” And frankly, if we’ve done our math(s) right, they just don’t need the extra money, hah.
Finally, Tia wrote a whole bunch of amazing stuff about marketing RimWorld’s latest expansion. And it’s rough to cut it down to just three bullet points. But we’re going to try:
The DLC had a specific, compressed promotion timeline: Tia explained that they only announce each DLC just a month before launch, teasing it two days before the debut trailer, and then, “once per week leading up to launch… feature blogs to build hype, answer questions, and drive wishlists.” These blogs are large & meaty!
This slightly counter-intuitive choice is for multiple reasons: Tia says “wishlists for expansions plateau fast… after a month of visibility, we’ve usually captured our audience.” Also, “this shorter period between announcement and release reduces the risk of leaks.” So - rabid (in a good way!) audience, alongside content & concept-strong DLC, allow you to break the ‘announce early’ mold?
RimWorld Odyssey’s marketing got several new tricks: the team “partnered with a Chinese marketing agency, set up a Bilibili page (now with ~22k followers!) and got Chinese creators to join the early access period.” They also ran paid ads that “helped us target existing RimWorld players”, many lapsed, and launched the DLC with support for 15 languages on Day 1, an all-time high for the team.
All this doesn’t quite answer why Odyssey was the biggest DLC launch. But we’ve got views: firstly, the ‘spaceship’ angle is particularly compelling for a normally planet-bound sim. Secondly, the game’s community and CCU is trending up during every DLC anyhow, as sheer weight of features compound.
And third: we think the previous horror themed DLC, Anomaly, was a little more ‘off-topic’ - in a cool way, tho - than some other expansions. Odyssey - which also adds multiple new biomes, landmarks, and wildlife - just feels more core to the RimWorld experience to us. And players consumed it accordingly! Congrats to the Ludeon folks…
Most-streamed July games: Roblox keeps surging
Finishing off swiftly, livestream analytics platform Stream Hatchet again (kindly!) gave us the Top 100 games from July 2025, from big (non-China!) streaming platforms like Twitch & many other smaller platforms.
Here’s the full list of the Top 100 (Google Drive link) with GDCo annotations. And here’s the highlights from July, partly scribed by Stream Hatchet’s Mark Rowland:
League of Legends got a big boost of 41% to #2, w/202m hours watched: that’s thanks to two esports events: The Mid-Season Invitational, and The eSports World Cup. But GTA V (#1, 215m) still won out overall - it’s having a giant quarter.
Roblox hit #5 with 68m, after a 72% growth in hours watched: this further shows the Grow a Garden user surge wasn't a flash-in-the-pan phenomenon. (There’s a whole host of different games contained within this ‘game’ listing, of course, and StreamHatchet also tried to separate GaG out - it’s at #42 with 9.98m hours.)
Co-op (also indie!) mountaineering game darling Peak continued to rise: it was up by 15.1m hours watched to hit #18 (25.9m). And there were big boosts for colony-builder RimWorld (#40, +609.9%, see above, haha) and "anime horse girl racer" Umamusume Pretty Derby (#46, +773.5%.)
New releases charting? Wuchang: Fallen Feathers (#45 with 10m hours), Switch 2 exclusive Donkey Kong Bananza (#48 with 9.3m), and F2P title Mecha Break (#54 with 7.7m) - StreamHatchet has an interesting blog about market collabs for its launch, btw.
[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.]