How two friendslop hits got the 'audience format' right!

Also: the most-streamed games of Feb. 2026, and lots of 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.]

And GDC week is upon us, notable for the timed announcements from game platform companies (see below news section). However, our lead story is some thoughts & data from top co-op ‘friendslop’ (fine, ‘fun with buddies’!) titles.

Before we start, mountains of Steam player review data lead to some amazing niche revelations, including the fact that “People who misspell roguelike as ‘rougelike’ consistently review everything higher.” Also: “It seems that roguelite players view gambling, repetitiveness, masochism, wasting time, and arcade more favorably than roguelike fans.”

[BETTER ACCESS TO DATA? You too can get a free demo of our GameDiscoverCo Pro company-wide ‘Steam deep dive’ & console data by reaching out today - ~90 orgs have it. Or, signing up to GDCo Plus gets the rest of this newsletter and Discord access, plus more. ]

Game disco news: smaller teams make hit games!

From the Unity report - project hours per month (in Unity!) for games. We can’t see # of games, but: popular games being made by smaller teams?

Looking at the notable news on this fine Monday of GDC week, here’s all the fresh stuff we can spot:

• Unity put out its yearly ‘gaming trends’ report, interviewing devs and crunching engine stats, and noting: “The majority of studios are shifting focus to smaller games… for Unity developers, project development time has decreased dramatically”, by 77% from Jan. 2022 to Dec. 2025. Lots of interesting data in there…

• As spotted by the PSPrices website: “Sony is running a large-scale A/B price test: the same [PS5/PS4] games are shown to different users at different prices - with discounts up to 17.6%. The experiment involves more than 150 games in 68 regions, and the test has been running for over 3 months.”

• Steam posted its developer year in review for 2025, including a ton of good recaps. One notable change: the original version of the blog said the company “must revisit our exact shipping schedule and pricing” for Steam Machine & Frame, but it was edited post-release to clarify “we will be shipping all three products this year.” Hm.

• Here’s a (quickly fixed!) nightmare on par with ‘I’m singing at Carnegie Hall but in my underwear’ - the retail version of RoboCop Rogue City on Steam was briefly replaced by an early build of an unannounced Hunter: The Reckoning game. (Please, everyone, ensure your build steps can’t make this happen.)

• Roblox is aiming to widen its dev base, launching two new programs: “The Roblox Incubator program will help experienced development teams turn promising concepts into commercially successful games… the Roblox Jumpstart program will help creators who are new to Roblox, or are exploring new types of games, publish on Roblox Studio.”

• As Aftermath spotted, Nintendo are one (of a large number!) of companies suing the U.S. government to get tariff money back - they’re “largely targeting refunds of the previously imposed tariffs [after] the Supreme Court found that Trump could not invoke the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977.”

• We’re highlighting this impressive Kickstarter - >$800k on a $115k goal for Wonderful Neoran Valley - because it’s a popular Italian-language Pokemon YouTuber deciding to make a “monster collector roguelite”. (Fan-bases for streamers can be redirected to fund similar games: obvious, but cool.)

• Given Indonesia has >280 million inhabitants, plz note Steam’s new mandatory content ratings requirement for the country: “We’ve worked with Indonesian authorities to update Steam’s built-in ratings system to generate the necessary age ratings to comply with these new requirements.” (No action necessary for most games.)

• Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella was keen to re-iterate the company’s long-term interest in video games at an internal Q&A last week: “The trickle from that excellence to the rest of the company becomes straightforward. I joke with [NVIDIA CEO] Jensen Huang, if it wasn't for gaming [NVIDIA] wouldn't exist. Think about it - without DirectX, I don't think the entire GPU revolution… would've happened.”

• Governments & games update: Australia’s age verification for R-rated games & websites just went into force, and remember that games like GTA Online are 18+ in Oz; back to Indonesia, where accounts on ‘high-risk digital platforms’ - including Roblox, YouTube & TikTok - will be banned for children under the age of 16.

• Microlinks: PlayStation gamers are using a glitch to make it look like they’ve played GTA 6 already; Feb. 2026’s top-grossing (on-platform $!) mobile games inc. Honor Of Kings, LastWar, PUBG Mobile, Whiteout Survival, Royal Match; this giant report on the state of the creator economy has ‘just’ 53 sections to browse.

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How two friendslop hits got audience format right

We’re starting this newsletter feature - ostensibly about video games - with a screenshot of Hitoshi Matsumoto’s Amazon Prime Video TV show Documental, which you may be aware of locally (it has 30+ regional versions!) under the name LOL: Last One Laughing. Why? Because it’s a global hit due to its clever TV format:

“Ten comedians stay in a living-room-style studio with hidden cameras for a few hours… During this time, they must try to make their opponents laugh in any way and by any means, while not reacting to their opponents’ attempts to make them break.”

This is a genius setup, for sure. But we’re not all virtuoso comedians - and we also don’t want to be locked in a room for 6 hours? However, what we can all do as players is a) watch streamers playing a game with a clever setup b) decide to try that game ourselves with friends, because we like the idea & it looks hella fun to play.

That’s why we like thinking of less expensive ‘friendslop’-adjacent game hits as carefully placed bets on ‘theme and format to have fun in’, a different branch of game design than the traditional Zelda dungeon map making. It still requires skill to get this right - but it’s flexing way different muscles than singleplayer game design. So let’s examine the success of two recent Oro Interactive-published games that nailed it:

Super Battle Golf - when ‘putting chaos’ reigns…

Firstly, let’s look at Brimstone & Oro’s Super Battle Golf ($8), which hit 500,000 units sold on Steam on Feb 28th, just 9 days after release, and is now near 800k sold, with 15-20,000 peak CCU daily. (Its top CCU was 9 days after launch, the sign of a viral hit.)

The dev team behind the game made some slick-looking titles, including 2024’s ‘chaotic co-op city builder’ Overthrown,. But they didn’t break out with that more complex $25 game, which topped out at 350 CCU. Yet Super Battle Golf has been a big winner. Some notes on why, with comments from the publisher:

• The underlying ‘format’ is correctly & deliciously subversive: everyone knows how golf works - you take your turn, behave politely, and follow the rules of the game. But SBG throws that out the window, and as Oro’s Hans Haave told us, its “naturally chaotic” nature twinned with party game vibes makes it shine.

• The devs took a co-op game engine and laser-focused the output: we’ve seen this before with RV There Yet?, also made by a team who had a bigger game/engine, but focusing on doing a simpler idea perfectly paid off. As Hans notes, SBG is “polished to a very high level, and that is immediately felt when looking at and playing it.”

• This is a rare friendslop hit which isn’t quite so co-operative: Oro’s Haave notes the basic pitch is: “PvP golf with bazookas, golf carts, physics, where everybody plays at the same time”, and yep, ‘friendly PvP’ is the vibe. Haave adds: “in an environment [with] a lot of co-op games… a game that offers an opportunity to compete and destroy friendships is perhaps refreshing.” (It’s weirdly Mario Kart-y, by abstract vibes?)

As far as specifics, Oro kindly share the Steam split by country (below), and it’s interesting that Super Battle Golf is more U.S/Canada-centric than some other ‘friendslop’ hits. (We have Peak at ~25% U.S. players, for example.) Is SBG’s skew cos of golf’s lack of popularity outside of the West, or a PvP thing, or streamer preference?

Anyhow, we’d expect this game to keep scaling to millions of players, especially at the $8 price point, and Haave notes of continued influencer wins: “We’ve seen streamers come back to play 5-6 times since launch three weeks ago. In other cases creators are setting up their own tournaments, playing in teams (even though not supported in-game).”

Oh, and it turns out Jimmy Fallon reached out before Super Battle Golf’s launch, which “was not on our bingo card” for Oro, and further underscores our earlier point about underlying entertainment ‘formats’ being relevant for different media types…

Roadside Research - aliens, gas station, fun…

The second title, developed by Cybernetic Walrus and again published by Oro (whom we profiled last May), is Roadside Research ($13), a “1 to 4 player co-op gas station simulator. Except you’re aliens. And undercover.” It also made the ‘Top 10 new Steam games of Feb. 2026’ list we put out last week, with 396,000 units sold (nice!) since Feb. 12th.

We covered the game’s growth to 250k Steam wishlists last September, with 903,000 uniques on the game’s demo (each playing for a median of 1 hours and 12 minutes.) The finished game itself has 3 hours, 10 minutes median playtime LTD, with 47% U.S. players, 10% Germany, 5% Brazil, 4% the UK and Canada, and down from there.

This title is much more of a collab, too - Oro’s Sam De Boeck notes to us: “We were part of the project from day 0. We worked with Cybernetic Walrus on Order 13 previously and had a great time.” So what can we learn from this title? Some thoughts:

• The hook was chef’s kiss for streamers and players: as Sam explains: “After a few brainstorming sessions, Cybernetic Walrus came up with ‘aliens running a gas station’ and showed an alien with a dad bod and paper mask as diguise. We signed it on a concept pitch.”

• A well-honed debut trailer showed off some novel presentation: Hans notes that Sam “came up with the idea to have the trailer start with a comedic interview intro like Parks and Rec or The Office, and have an alien describing the core loop with some funny gameplay.” And yep, it totally works.

• The game’s technically co-optional, but really needs more players: unlike Super Battle Golf, 1-4 people can play Roadside Research, but as this review notes, it’s very tricky without at least 2 (and ideally more!) players. The dev team is planning an ‘automation’ update to help with some of this, by the look of it.

So again, we’re talking about a strong format, this time closer to the first-person ‘simulation’ genre of games like Supermarket Simulator or goofy drug sim Schedule I. You also need good streamer outreach & high-quality trailers & social media, but you really need solid shop management gameplay to mask all the ‘alien abduction’ memes, and it looks like Cybernetic Walrus and Oro nailed that.

Finally, you can customize the silly human pictures the aliens wear on their faces, so Sam also wanted to call out “the amount and quality of face drawings shared on the Discord and Steam community. Some are true artists. We love to see the community having fun with this.” (See above for much silliness.)

In general, Roadside Research, like Super Battle Golf, is another example of the right ‘format’ for a viral social game. If you want to watch your favorite streamers playing, and so you want to pick the game up for yourself afterwards, it’s a hit! Is it as simple as that? Well, it kind of is - but finding the idea and getting the execution right isn’t…

Top streamed Feb games: hey, REvil, Mewgenics

It’s time for another chart from livestream analytics platform Stream Hatchet, with the Top 100 most-streamed games for Feb. 2026 across the big (non-China) game video streaming platforms like Twitch & a host of other medium/small platforms.

Once again, here’s the full list of the Top 100 (Google Drive link) with GDCo notes. And we joined forced with Stream Hatchet’s Mark Rowland to check out the trends:

• Grand Theft Auto V made it past League Of Legends to #1: GTA V (166.6m hours watched) managed to overtake LoL (159m hours) this month, thanks in part to big VTubers like Kuzuha and Kanae playing on RP servers on YouTube Gaming. But both games are still huge…

• Overwatch (2) managed to break into the Top 10 again: Blizzard’s hero shooter hit #9 with 45.8m hours watched, a 313% uplift from January (!) StreamHatchet did some detailed analysis, but a rename from Overwatch 2 to just ‘Overwatch’, new story content, and an eSports bootcamp in Korea all helping surge interest.

• New game winners inc. Resident Evil Requiem, Mewgenics: you may not be surprised to learn that Res Evil Requiem hit #16 (24.8m hours) with just two days of viewership, and other debuts Mewgenics (#32, 11.5m) and Nioh 3 (#34, 10.3m) also charted impressively.

Also notable? Creepy toy standout Poppy Playtime surged towards the Top 20 due to its Chapter 5 DLC, and debuts Marathon (beta), Reanimal, Diablo II: Resurrected, and Dragon Quest VII Reimagined all made the Top 50-ish. Finally, zombie survival-er HumanitZ hit 1.0 and chomped into the Top 100, with ~3 million hours watched…

[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.]