How Tainted Grail hit its Steam 1.0 release out of the park
A rare megawin at 1.0! Also: Steam's top new games 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.]
We’re here again to do the creep, fans of video game B2B goodness. And as we wend our way towards Halloween - the best holiday of the year - let’s get wigged out by the spooky Arthurian legends, powering the game that’s our lead story for today?
Before we do, we were reading this expose on why Bubble Bobble’s megaboss is called ‘Super Drunk’ (?!), when it dropped this forgotten alcohol knowledge: “The character that debuted in the 1984 Nintendo arcade game Super Punch-Out!! as Vodka Drunkenski became Soda Popinski for the home console version.” Best character rename… ever?
[WANT LOTS MORE DATA? Companies, get much more ‘Steam deep dive’ & console data SaaS access org-wide via GameDiscoverCo Pro, as 80+ have. And signing up to GDCo Plus gets (like Pro!) the rest of this newsletter and Discord access, plus ‘just’ basic data & more. ]
Game discovery news: Yotei, CoD, Battlefield trend
And let’s take a quick skidoo around the game platform & discovery paradiddle, shall we? Avast:
Looking at the top ‘trad media’ mentions for the week ending Oct. 7th, per Footprints.gg, it’s Ghost of Yōtei (which GDCo estimates at 1.7m units so far), CoD: Black Ops 7 (multiplayer/Zombies beta), and Battlefield 6 (literally launching now!) which get the most interest.
We heartily recommend this Jonas Tyroller YouTube video on ‘what sells on Steam: you don’t need a hook’, in which the Thronefall co-creator says that some ‘catchy’ game mechanic hooks “do work, but you’re putting yourself in danger, because a lot of people who do this - they forget to care about the experience.”
The latest Circana U.S. hardware & (select) software charts - for August - show “NBA 2K26, Mobile and Nintendo Switch 2 helped boost US video games spending 11% in August, to $4.7 billion.” (NBA 2K25 launched in September last year, tho! But game hardware spending’s up 32% to $312M, based on Switch 2 success.)
More on U.S. Switch 2 sales: “With 2.4M units sold LTD over its first 3 months market… Switch 2 is now 5% ahead of the previous record setting pace of PlayStation 4, which sold 2.2M units during the 3 months ending January 2014. Nintendo Switch 2 unit sales are trending 77% ahead the time-aligned sales of the original Nintendo Switch.”
Former Nexon CEO Owen Mahoney is back with a piece on “a unified theory of moronic hype cycles”, discussing VR, crypto, cloud streaming and the metaverse to do a ‘fad audit’ for each: “[Does it] unlock something new? [Is] user experience much better? [Is it] tangible?” Expect much brutality.
The EU’s proposed Digital Fairness Act is causing worry for mobile devs right now: Matej Lancaric sums up the possible issues, including real-money pricing, a single in-game currency, no bundling/welcome packs & no post-launch economy tweaks. And Supercell’s Ilkka Paananen posted an open letter voicing his concern.
Xbox things: Game Pass’ initial October game rollouts include Ninja Gaiden 4, Keeper, Ball x Pit, and Supermarket Simulator; Microsoft delays Xbox Game Pass Ultimate price hikes for some subscribers, likely “related to local regulations on subscription price changes” and giving notice to consumers.
Netflix is leaning into the ‘party games using your TV’ angle for its new game strategy: “All you’ll need is Netflix and your phone [as a controller]” to play games like LEGO Party!, Pictionary: Game Night, Boggle Party, Tetris Time Warp and social deduction game Party Crashers: Fool Your Friends. (‘Coming soon’/this holiday.)
Consumer advocacy campaign Stop Killing Games (about keeping online games playable past ‘end of life’) gets a vigorous probing from Paul Kilduff-Taylor: “[It’s] a sad situation all round, fruitlessly pitting players and devs against each other on an issue where they fundamentally agree.”
There’s an extract from Victoria Tran’s ‘Mastering Community Management’ book on GameDeveloper.com, and we liked the discussion on functional communities: “A mutual sense of trust is maintained by: A willingness to help others out… Taking actions to gain understanding… A lack of conflict… Shared values.”
Waiting for a lawsuit where UGC creators ‘botted’ their own level to increase their platform payout? Wait no longer, since Adam Starr spotted one being sued by Fortnite: “Between Dec. 2024 & Feb. 2025, the defendants created thousands of fake bot accounts to increase engagement payouts”, getting “tens of thousands of dollars.”
Microlinks: the ESA’s Power Of Play survey says for U.S. gamers, they do it to have fun (66%), relieve stress (58%) and keep their mind sharp (45%); AMD and PlayStation’s Mark Cerny have been talking ‘Project Amethyst’ next-gen console tech; why Meta wants its Horizon metaverse everywhere, not just VR.
How Tainted Grail made its Steam 1.0 release big…
When we spotted first-person Arthurian open world RPG Tainted Grail: The Fall Of Avalon earlier this year, it was having a very good Steam 1.0 release. So good, in fact, that it’s one of those vanishingly rare ‘did fine at release, blew up massive at 1.0’ games.
We definitely want to be clear - this largely doesn’t happen. GDCo estimates it sold ~25,000 copies in Month 1 of Early Access on Steam (April 2023), and then 200,000+ copies in Month 1 of its 1.0 release (May/June 2025) - on the way to what we think is >550k copies and ~$20m gross on Steam alone. (Console versions also launched at 1.0.)
So we reached out to the publisher, Polish company Awaken Realms, whose in-house subsidiary Questline made the game, and chatted to CEO Marcin Świerkot about the game’s success. He was able to give us the following official data points:
The game’s lifetime sales units (multi-platform) recently hit 700,000 units.
Looking at copies of the game sold post-1.0, PlayStation 5 & Xbox versions account for ~30% of sales, “with PS5 selling significantly better.”
Tainted Grail has 1.9 million Steam wishlist additions LTD. Wishlist balance-wise (minus purchases & deletes), at 1.0 it had 607k, and now has 1.34m.
Average time played for the game on Steam is an impressive 25 hours & 1 minute, and median is 13 hours & 15 minutes.
This whole project is fascinating, btw, because Awaken Realms is a board game titan. They’ve had >$40m in crowdfunding since 2015, spun out Gamefound, and the Tainted Grail IP started as a board game, with Questline putting out a roguelike deckbuilder PC game in 2021, and then pivoting to this epic Oblivion-like.
So let’s talk about why this game did decently to start, and WAY better at 1.0 launch, shall we? Starting with why the game performed at all:
The ‘hole in the market’ - there’s a significant lack of first-person epic RPGs: Świerkot told us there were no competitors “on the horizon” at project kickoff, but Avowed, Kingdom Come II, and the Oblivion remaster all arrived. Nonetheless - that’s ‘just’ 3 games, a tiny competitive set for an under-served market.
Choosing a focused subgenre, with a higher cost of entry: your average indie can’t make a game this detailed/complex. (The game’s team had 20 people at kickoff, and scaled to around 50 people for release.)
Picking a clear set of ‘comps’ to emulate and build on: some of the leaders in the space haven’t been delivering reliably (ahem, Bethesda.) Świerkot said: “We grew up playing Morrowind, Oblivion, & Gothic” and felt most PC RPGs “shallow in comparison” - except CRPGs like Baldur’s Gate 3.
We can use GameDiscoverCo Pro’s Affinity tool to see ‘enhanced overlap’ for public Steam players of Tainted Grail: The Fall Of Avalon. In this case, it’s sorted by highest overlap, filtering games >8x as likely to be owned than the average Steam player. You can see sky-high overlap with both CRPGs and first-person fantasy RPG titles:
So OK - we get why Tainted Grail: The Fall Of Avalon could be a hit. But it was stubbornly doing ‘just fine’ throughout its two years of Steam Early Access, barely topping 1,000 CCU, and then went bananas at launch, topping out at 25,600 CCU (!) Why? It’s actually straightforward, just unexpected to us:
This was a true ‘Early Access is incomplete’ title, like BG3: we consider these risky in today’s market, but the game was deliberately advertised as ‘only’ 10-15 hours at launch, whereas the 1.0 version had the full 50-70 hours and ‘complete’ game. In recent years, only Baldur’s Gate 3 has very successfully navigated this approach.
Early Access taught the team a lot of lessons for 1.0: after EA launching with only 18 months of dev, Świerkot explains what they learned: “Making a good game is so much more important than any marketing activity… gameplay is king*… [tech] optimization matters.” (*The team knows it’s not a flashy UE5 game, but that’s OK.)
Being transparent about active dev & save-wiping shifted buying patterns: this is a story-led game, and Świerkot told us: “We were very clear about the save-wipe that will happen at 1.0. So I guess the majority of interested people waited for the full game, so they can enjoy the story without big gaps and need to replay the content.”
As for 1.0 launch, the team worked to get the word out, and it peaked at 260 unique daily Twitch channels, with a lot of high-profile YouTube coverage. Świerkot singled out influencers like WolfheartFPS, Luality, CohhCarnage, Mortismal and The Spiffing Brit’s funny videos. (There’s a lot of ‘oh hey, new Skyrim/Oblivion?’ comps.)
A couple of other interesting tidbits to end. Firstly, we asked Marcin what he had learned from 1.0, and he noted to be careful on embargo times for lengthy games: “We gave ‘reviewers access’ only a week early to media / influencers, and a lot of them did not manage to make it in time [to put out a review/video] for launch.”
And secondly, the console versions of Tainted Grail have done ‘fine’, not amazing. GDCo estimates PlayStation and Xbox combined at between 100-150k units since May. Marcin said - without confirming/denying our numbers: “It is not bad - but honestly, we thought it could be bigger.”
He also speculated that “perhaps this is how the market is looking right now” on console. And we’d agree that, minus a large visible IP to appeal to more casual console players (Silent Hill, Resident Evil, etc!) it’s just difficult to get players to understand your game exists, if they’re not watching streamers. (There’s sooo much catalog on console.)
Last point, giant reminder, don’t forget: games are also successful because they’re good! Tainted Grail does get a little stick for jankiness, but here’s a Steam player review, with 76 hours played: “Often described as ‘indie Skyrim’, Tainted Grail offers perhaps a less polished, but more thoughtful action RPG with more deliberate combat and interesting perks than the game it’s being compared to so frequently.” Amen to that.
Steam this week: yes, Battlefield 6 is smashing it…
Before we go into subscriber-only mode, a word on this week’s top debut on Steam. Yes, it’s EA’s first-person shooter reboot Battlefield 6 ($70-100), which topped out at 747,000 CCU on Day 1, and may well go higher this weekend.
So yes, EA has knocked it out of the park on this one - not easy, given Battlefield’s diminished rep in recent years. The campaign seems decent, but people are here for multiplayer, which has well-honed classic gameplay and well-designed maps. It’s a very effective counterpoint to Call Of Duty’s overplayed novelty DLC.
As one top-liked Steam reviewer says: “Press F to pay respects to Call of Duty. It’s almost like the Battlefield devs listened to their community about the stuff they wanted in their video game. Now all we need is a Bad Company 3.” Ouch.