How Small Spaces sold ~15x its Week 1 sales after a year (!)
Also: this week's biggies on Steam & a heap of relevant 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 back, in what is a busy week in games - Steam Summer Sale kicking off, some unfortunate layoffs at the game studio level at both PlayStation/Bungie and over at Xbox. But nonetheless, we proceed, and it’s another bumper newsletter for y’all.
Before we start, the Video Game History Foundation’s searchable Digital Library just added Blip magazine, “a monthly video game magazine for children published by Marvel Comics” which ran for 7 issues in 1983, scrapped as the OG video game crash hit. (Yes, of course Stan Lee’s in it, helping Spider-Man play Atari 2600 Spider-Man in Issue 2.)
[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: Steam Machine dream…
Let’s start out with some video game platform & discovery news - shaken, not stirred:
You can view it above, but Valve posted their official video overview of the Steam Machine which is a slick look at unboxing and starting to use the console-like PC. (Notable: the video shows you can easily get to the Windows-like SteamOS desktop mode, and plays up the Steam Machine Verified program for games.)
We know the Steam Machine is ‘expensive’, but on Aug. 1st the Xbox Series is also more expensive - “increasing by US$100 for 512 GB models and US$150 for 1 TB models.” (A digital Series X goes from $600 to $750.) And Apple just put up prices by ~20% on all its hardware except the iPhone, with that shoe to drop soon? Fun!
Here’s piquant new Tim Sweeney thoughts - he says it’s “nearly impossible to move [an] entire group of friends from an existing game to a completely new one”, but his cross-game Unreal/Fortnite ideas might let ya “form parties via voice chatting with friends in Game B while connected to Game A, and encourage them to try a new game.”
That Grand Theft Auto VI price? It’s $80 for the regular version and $100 for the Ultimate Edition (with extra in-game stores/apparel), folks. We knew it was PS5/Xbox Series only on Nov. 19th (PC later!), but it’s also single-player only, with no GTA VI Online info yet. And the physical version is purely ‘game code in a box’.
Another unwritten Steam rule that’s now written explicitly into Steamworks docs? The curated promo slots (Daily Deal, Midweek Deal, Weekend Deal) are “generally restricted to once a calendar year, with at least three months’ gap between promotions.” So stop asking for them weekly, ya crumbsnatchers.
Microlinks, Pt.1: here’s a good ‘explainer’ on the frontier AI-model created World Of Claudecraft; Brazil collectively fined a bunch of game companies $55m over loot boxes for teens/kids; the Nintendo Switch Online service is getting a price increase of ~25% in Japan - no news on elsewhere, though.
GDCo Pro is tracking various most-streamed game charts now, and our look at unreleased games by 7-day ‘hours viewed on Twitch’ see Valve’s Deadlock at #1 (1.1m hours), with Next Fest titles coming next: Mistfall Hunter (#2, 546k hours), The Mound (#3, 153k hours), and Iron Nest (#4, 133k hours) are all doing great.
Steam stuff: the latest client update added support for the Malay language (which is related to Indonesian); did you know Steamworks is now showing wishlists by language? (go look!); Steam is blocking LGBTQ+ category browsing in China, citing violation of local laws & regulations.
Physical game sales in the U.S.? They topped out at $11.5 billion in 2009, and are now at $1.6 billion in the 12 months to May 2026, according to Circana data shared by Mat Piscatella. (Yes, that’s up 3% year on year - but we’re in ‘bobbling around’ territory here.)
More tidbits from the Steam Machine announce: “Valve’s Pierre-Loup Griffais says his team is ‘collaborating with Nvidia very closely’ on SteamOS support for Nvidia hardware.” But don’t get too excited - expanding past AMD support might not arrive this year, since “it’s certainly something that we’re working on in the background.”
Microlinks: Night School & Netflix’s new horror game Unhinged is an interesting ‘phone as in-game flashlight’ take on alt interaction; Google’s Play mobile App Store is making off-store payments way less attractive for devs (duh!); is Stop Killing Games actually about safeguarding game preservation, or?
How Small Spaces sold ~15x its W1 sales in Y1!
Our last analysis on ‘long tail’ in 2025 says Steam games with >1,000 Week 1 unit sales have a 2.7x ‘Week 1 to Year 1’ median revenue multiplier. So when the dev (Niklas Tomkowitz) and publisher (Pretty Soon) of apartment decorating game Small Spaces ($13) told us they had a 14.3x W1→Y1 revenue multiplier (& 14.1x units!) we went 👀.
Specifically, Small Spaces - which launched into Early Access in late May 2025 - did 9,980 units and $97k gross in Week 1, and 18k units and $180k in Month 1, but stretched all the way to 141k units and $1.4m gross in Year 1, an amazing result for a tiny title. We talked to its creators, and here’s why the game just ‘works’:
Great genre, with a construction, not deconstruction focus: you know the ‘cozy room arrangement’ genre from hits like Unpacking and Hozy (which we covered recently.) But as dev Niklas Tomkowitz explains, those “focus on completing a level by restoring a space or unpacking boxes - Small Spaces is really about designing a space.”
Less explicit objectives, more abstract creativity: Niklas notes he comes from a design background, was inspired by games like Townscaper and Tiny Glade, and “wanted to make a game that gets players in a creative flow effortlessly.” An inspo was YouTube channel Never Too Small*, showcasing small room interior design.
The largest design issue was balancing accessibility and depth: he notes: “The biggest design challenge for me was to make it easy to get started while enabling endless possibilities as you play and unlock new content and features, like modular kitchens, different surface materials, more furniture, more levels.”
Niklas also did all the right things for today’s market, dev-wise: a Discord community, regular playtests, a demo six months into dev, and regular GaaS-style patches to improve the game. And due to its success, the dev team has scaled from just Niklas solo (with freelancer help) up to 5 people.
(*We wonder why more devs don’t look at what is popular on the rest of the Internet, and make construction games around them. For example, I’m enchanted by the micro-aquarium making YouTube channel Tanks For Nothing. So why not make a cozy aquarium builder?)
So - let’s talk more about that long tail? Pretty Soon’s Krzysztof Masternak was kind enough to put together some of the game’s monthly sales data, noting: “The game launched with roughly 85,000 wishlists, and sold around 10,000 units in its first week and around 18,000 units in the first month” - which is pretty conventional.
Yet the game’s played extensively - and organically - by influencers. This has led to continued monthly sales for Small Spaces, particularly after its devs decided to launch an ‘Unpacking Mode’ in Nov. 2025 - in which you can unpack and style room contents designed by the community (clever angle!)
From there, you can see an even higher units peak early this year. And that’s def. worth talking about, as seen in this Pretty Soon-prepared graph:
Other notable stats: the country-based sales of Small Spaces are 25% U.S., 13% China, 10% Germany (high!), 6% UK, 4% France and Canada, and 3% Brazil. And the playtime is 1 hours 37 mins median (a little lower, but it’s a casual game), but 5 hours 9 mins average (a large differential, showing some committed players!)
Pretty Soon’s CEO Jakub Radkowski and team can also take some credit for both of the spikes. Why? Sure, this game is perfectly pitched and is naturally ‘sticky’ with cozy game influencers and fans who spread the word - but:
The Unpacking Mode update had a triple marketing whammy: in addition to the mode launch, a Steam Daily Deal was timed for the same day, and Jakub told us they reached out to ~700 new creators (plus thousands of pre-release ones.)
Outreach to shortform creators paid off in February 2026: the creator Simmary - who is obviously The Sims-focused but plays other cozy construction games, and posts on longform and shortform platforms - had a huge hit with a video showcasing the game on both Instagram & on TikTok - 11m views and 1m likes!
Reach was expanded by using a short-form influencer agency: you may have heard this trend is hot (it is!), but Jakub notes a “curated group of [paid] short-form creators… generated around one million additional views across TikTok and Instagram.”
In this case, we suspect the sales ‘chain reaction’ was partly due to reach expansion into fans of The Sims & other titles who hadn’t heard of Small Spaces. If you look at GameDiscoverCo Pro’s ‘affinity’ data for games that are also played by Small Spaces players, the data (highest overlap, >5 times as likely to play) shows strong Sims 4 overlap:
There was a lot more we didn’t get to in this overview, and we’ve included the full Q&A with the Small Spaces team (Google Drive doc) - which we recommend checking out for additional insight from both the dev and the publisher.
Concluding: whether you like it or not, a lot of less ‘core’ players in 2026 like systems to play with, not explicitly gated and goaled games. And the cozy & female-friendly (but not female-only) audience loving Small Spaces don’t get many games like this - even as we totter under the weight of shooters and puzzle platformers.
This week on Steam: SAND & Empulse both land…
