How StarRupture hit 500k sales in <2 weeks!
Also: some fun Apple Arcade stats & lots of news. Of course.
[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.]
Welcome back to January 2026, where the crypto is rife, the AI is swarming, and we still can’t get Crazy Frog’s version of ‘Axel F’ out of our heads. Luckily, we have sweet, sweet PC and console video game data to distract us?
Before we start, we loved this deep-dive history from Drew Mackie asking: ‘Why does Donkey Kong throw barrels?’ The answer may relate to Popeye the Sailor Man, and includes rare Gunpei Yokoi lawsuit testimony ft. spinach. (‘Ug gug gug gug’, indeed.)
[DEMO OF GDCo PRO, GRATIS? You too can get a free 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: the Knight’s Strange Path?
Let’s start things out with a whole bunch of game discovery & platform news, a little bit like this:
According to GameDiscoverCo Pro's 7-day unreleased Steam game wishlist charts (Jan 19th-26th), Knight's Path (#1) is a medieval combat/adventure game that added >100k WLs via a hot trailer. And Life Is Strange: Reunion (#2) is quite the contrast - the latest story-first narrative game in Square Enix's popular franchise.
Also surging: the games showcased in Xbox's latest Developer stream, Forza Horizon 6 (#4), Fable (#5) and Beast Of Reincarnation (#6). New entries? Burglin' Gnomes (#12) is some quality 'gnomeslop' (sorry?), and Super Battle Golf (#13) has a winning co-op formula, involving golf cart-related shenanigans.
The ‘Advanced Access & DLC’ combo is a good way to get megafans to pay for deluxe versions of games. And Forza Horizon 6 is stretching the $ up, with a Standard Edition at $70 but the Premium Edition (4 days Advanced Access & 2x DLCs) for $120. Game Pass subs pay $60 for the Premium upgrade. (And “in the UK, the Premium Upgrade is £59.99, the exact same cost as the game itself.”)
Jordan Brown’s done a handy guide to Steam Next Fest from a dev/marketing PoV, and his 2c is: “Launch your demo at least a few months before Next Fest > Make a big marketing beat out of it > Fix bugs and react to feedback > Go into Next Fest with a big demo update and polished demo.” (We def. agree not to debut demos in NF, if poss.)
Some additional ‘fun facts’ from 2025 U.S. game console sales via Circana: “49% of PS5 and 66% of XBS hardware sales in 2025 did not include a physical media drive; 13% of PS5 purchases in 2025 were of Pro models; PlayStation Portal now has a 7% attach rate to PS5 hardware LTD.” (Lifetime Pro share of the PS5 market is 3%, by the way.)
We recently highlighted F2P VR standout UG, and RoadToVR caught up with the devs of the top-grossing Meta Quest title in which you’re “hatching, raising, riding, trading, and adventuring on virtual dinosaur pets”, revealing 1.2m uniques, 100k DAU & a peak of 40k CCU. The dev funding? Via the devs of Quest F2P hit Yeeps.
Platform microlinks: YouTube explains its 2026 direction, saying “the era of dismissing this content as simply ‘UGC’ is long over”, and here’s analysis; Meta’s CTO explains the Quest layoffs, saying “VR is growing less quickly than we hoped”; Epic and Google “have a secret $800 million Unreal Engine and services deal.”
There are rumors that Grand Theft Auto VI may delay its physical PlayStation & Xbox versions significantly past its Nov. 19th, 2026 release. This is to prevent leaks from physical copies shipping early with non-Day 1 code via distro/retailer leaks. (We’d bet this is true - reminder, there’s no PC version at launch either.)
You can get a Fortnite character skin if you pre-order Crimson Desert on Epic Games Store, and EGS’ Steve Allison commented: “This is among the first of many Fortnite crossovers led by the Epic Games Store team granted as a with gift with purchase”, saying it’ll “scale to over 100 partnerships per year.” (Good cross-promo.)
An esoteric link: this piece on ‘The Art Of (Attention) War’ is worth musing on: “Venkatesh Rao argues that we don’t live in one ‘real world,’ but in near infinite overlapping belief-worlds – different religions, fandoms, economic theories, political ideologies… as Anaïs Nin said, ‘We do not see the world as it is, but as we are.’”
How StarRupture hit 500,000 sales in <2 weeks!
The first big hit of 2026 on Steam? That’d be StarRupture from Polish studio Creepy Jar (not to be confused with Creepy Paper), a *deep breath* co-optional “first-person open world base-building game with advanced combat and tons of exploration” that’s already sold 500,000 copies in Steam Early Access in just 11 days.
According to the devs back then, in addition to a 42,000 CCU peak on Steam, nearly 40% of players have spent >10 hours in StarRupture so far. (A few days later, GDCo is estimating its median time played at 7 hours and its average at just over 12 hours.)
The user-base for the game seems geographically diverse, too. GDCo Pro estimates it at 21% U.S. players, followed by 10% Germany, 9% China, 6% France, 4-5% each for the UK, Brazil and the Russian Federation, with Poland and Canada also getting >3% of players.
As for player overlap/’affinity’ data, you can see that - per GDCo Pro data - players of StarRupture are over-indexing majorly (‘affinity multiplier’) in factory games like Satisfactory & also survival crafters like The Planet Crafter, Icarus and Enshrouded:
While all that data is just lovely, we need to get to why. So we chatted to Creepy Jar’s biz dev/marketing director Marcjanna Lipińska, and we came to the following conclusions:
The game threads the needle between multiple genres cleverly: Marcjanna told us: “We wanted to create a more accessible factory builder [and] we gradually added other elements such as exploration and combat.” It’s a multi-genre melange - bug shooter, crafter/explorer, factory game - that feels like it shouldn’t work, but does.
There’s also some differentation & hook woven into the game: Lipińska highlighted “the idea of the titular Rupture - the star that emits fire waves which scorch the whole planet, and the drone pull system instead of conveyor belts.” People want to blast bugs and build self-defending industrial bases - it’s on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, Steam version - but there needs to be some twist in the formula.
The dev only makes big, complex games & has good history to pull on: Creepy Jar’s only other major title is Amazon jungle survival sim Green Hell, which is oddly under-the-radar for just hitting 10m copies sold. It prototyped StarRupture in 2019, with almost 50 people working on it by launch. So: scale, and experience.
It’s also worth noting extensive playtests for StarRupture in Summer 2025, first single-player and later co-op, with over 158,000 playtesters in total, They had an average of 4.5 hours played, and the review score being 91% positive. (But no 100% public demo, interestingly, keeping things more focused.)
One of the reasons that StarRupture has thrived on launch is that it’s managed to not get lost in the shadow of ‘genre behemoths’. (Early on, some of the most upvoted player reviews were from Satisfactory megafans causing trouble, since the game isn’t as complex and focused as that title.)
Now, some of the most-loved player reviews say things like this: “StarRupture is a good game that could become a very good game… [it] lacks Satisfactory's signature verticality, but replaces that with much better feeling combat (and a lot more of it). And, of course, StarRupture's signature is replacing the normal day/night cycle with a fiery destruction & regrowth cycle that necessitates having nearby shelter when the next firestorm is incoming.”
And if you look at GDCo Pro’s Steam player review sentiment data on StarRupture, it shows very positive sentiment across the main review topics. (And the weaknesses are largely smaller Early Access-related ones, which should iron out over time.)
Finally, pricing! StarRupture launched at a $20 base price with 20% off, so it was only $16 for U.S. players in its launch discount period. We thought that was cheap. We asked Marcjanna, who said: “We wanted our players to feel that by purchasing StarRupture, they are getting excellent value for money. At the same time, our Early Access price is a ‘thank you’ to those who joined us on this journey from day one.”
But, perhaps unsurprisingly for an Early Access game, she added: “As the world of StarRupture expands with new content and features, we reserve the possibility of increasing the price of the game to reflect its growing scale.” And indeed, Green Hell started at $20 and went up to $25 at its 1.0 release.
So perhaps some incremental price increases, eventually. But we still think it’s a deal, given that Satisfactory and Helldivers 2 are $40 when not on sale. Perhaps momentum is important, and price sensitivity is more of a thing nowadays? We’re not sure, but with sub-$10 games doing so well, something is in the air…
Apple Arcade in 2025: what games were hot?
Look, we know that not many of you are talking about Apple Arcade, the ‘get 200+ iOS games with your subscription’ service. But it’s still included in all the tiers of the Apple One subscription, which costs $20-$38/month in the U.S. nowadays.
So tens of millions of people get access to it worldwide, given extra iCloud data is also bundled, as is Apple TV and Apple Music. (Numbers? Apple is irritatingly vague, and many Apple One subscribers won’t use Apple Arcade, but way more than 45m people have access to Apple TV.)
Anyhow, while the service isn’t an obvious standalone success, it’s nestling nicely into Apple’s aggregated portfolio, keeping to its ‘10-15 exclusive new games per year, and another 30+ games ported from the regular App Store’ cadence. Cos we’re keeping track of U.S. player review counts, we can run the above ‘top AA games of 2025’ chart. Notes:
Family-first titles like Sneaky Sasquatch & Hello Kitty Island Adventure win: Apple actually acquired the two-person Sneaky Sasquatch (#1) studio during 2025, possibly to stop paying them so many royalties (jk). And Hello Kitty (#2) has been an enduring Animal Crossing-like hit, both on and latterly off of Apple Arcade.
Casual card/puzzle games also do great, unsurprisingly: for this mass-market audience, looks like non-exclusive Balatro+ (#4) was a great 2024 pickup for Apple Arcade, with 26,000 ratings in 2025. And Solitaire by MobilityWare+ (#5) continues to push the card game agenda.
The rest of the ‘top all-timers by new 2025 ratings count’ chart is rounded out by a whole bunch of kid-friendly titles ported across from the App Store, inc. Fruit Ninja, Disney Coloring World, and Lego Duplo World. Also, there’s iOS AA exclusives like NBA 2K25 (less for kids, still big in the U.S. & all-ages), Crossy Road Castle and Sonic Racing.
Also, we decided to look at the top new Apple Arcade games of 2025, with the caveat being - as with the above list - that most AA release ‘incent’ player ratings in-game, but some don’t. Those that don’t may have radically lower ratings counts:
We won’t go in-depth here, but it’s notable that 7 out of these 10 titles are not Apple Arcade exclusives, rather invite-only ‘+’ games that ported from a ‘regular’ App Store title, in exchange for revenue based on percentage of playtime. (Also: no new AA games in 2025 of any kind made the overall ‘U.S. Top 10 by ratings increase’.)
This looks to have worked out for games like hyper-casual arcade title Helix Jump+ (#1), which picked up almost 11k U.S. player ratings since its June 2025 AA launch. Also big: board game adaptation The Game Of Life 2+ (#2), endless runner Rodeo Stampede+ (#3), and adorable point & click puzzler Lost In Play+ (#5).
The leading ‘original’ is PGA Tour Pro Golf at #4. And some of the more expensive originals did a bit less well, including a new Katamari Damacy game (<500 ratings) & Angry Birds Bounce (<1,500 ratings). (In this light, the tactic of mixing originals and adaptations of quality games already released on the App Store makes sense.)
Anyhow, here’s a giant GameDiscoverCo-authored spreadsheet (Google Drive doc) with our ratings counts on the game. So for the 0.02% of our audience who are interested - go wild. (We do think people should be MORE interested than they are.)
[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.]