How YapYap jammed its way to 1 million copies sold in just 6 weeks
Also: some GDC 2026 recorded talks you might wanna see & lots of discovery chatter.
[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.]
Another week? Really? You’re having us on. Anyhow, we had to be actively persuaded from not making today’s headline about ‘piss (wands) and vinegar’, but sanity has prevailed. So you’ll simply get analysis of YapYap’s sales triumph, not an ‘obscure regional saying’ pun-based take - phew.
Before we start, our buddies at the Video Game History Foundation just helped digitize & put Vidiot magazine into their game media archive, “a video game spinoff of the rock music magazine Creem” that ran for 5 issues in 1982-1983. If you want to see Dan Aykroyd playing Space Duel or John ‘Q*Bert’ Mellencamp - you’re in luck?
[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 - >90 orgs have it. Or, signing up to GDCo Plus gets the rest of this newsletter and Discord access, plus more.]
Game discovery news: we’re not bored of pirates…
Let’s start out with a check into game platform & discovery news, shall we? Here’s what we’ve got:
Looking at GDCo's 'trending' unreleased Steam games by 'new wishlists in the last 7 days', April 20th to 27th, long-rumored remake Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced (#1) shoots to the top of the charts (mm, pirates!), and MiHoYo’s F2P ARPG Zenless Zone Zero (#2), long on other platforms, gets mucho Steam interest.
But wait, there's four new entries in the Top 6, with 3D fighting game sequel Dragon Ball Xenoverse 3 (#3) and giant MMO sequel Aion 2 (#6) also seeing plenty of new wishlisters. (Metro 2039 and Cartel Pilots Wanted, both hot from last week, round out the Top 6.)
Valve confirmed the Steam Controller for a May 4th ‘add to cart’ release on Steam, and here’s the sales page for the $99 controller, with magnetic (non-drift) thumbsticks, rumble & grip-enabled gyro. (There’s a good GameDeveloper.com overview, Valve’s video overview & the LinusTechTips rundown.)
As spotted by TOS.gg’s Zach Bussey, “Amazon is experimenting with the ability to play games through Twitch. Game Lift is being tested with a 20-minute ReAnimal demo in the USA and Canada on Desktop Web... I'm told explicitly that this was ‘developed by Amazon’ and is primarily intended as an ad product.”
A Steam Deck 2 WIP update? Sure, we’ll take it, as IGN asked Valve’s Pierre-Loup Griffais, and he confirmed: “We're hard at work on it… we expect… lot of what we're doing here [with the new Steam Controller, Steam Machine & Steam Frame] will be learnings that build up to it.” So not now, but soonish(tm).
Microlinks: Enshrouded is the latest ‘game as mod/platform’, adding Adventure Sharing for castles, obstacle courses & dungeons; the Australian government demands to know what Roblox, Minecraft, Fortnite, and Steam are doing to prevent grooming, radicalization; id@Xbox’s Spring Showcase recap is here.
Here’s more from Xbox boss Asha Sharma and chief content officer Matt Booty, with definite signs from Sharma that lower Game Pass tiers are part of the equation: “I think, historically, our pricing hasn’t been as flexible.. And I think that’s the big thing we want to go work on. You saw that with Game Pass.”
As spotted by TWIV, Garry’s Mod developer Facepunch Studios recently “‘open sourced’ their entire finances” for its next creation tool/game, s&box (out today!) “including salaries, server costs, taxes, and more.” It also lists the $480k paid out to the community so far by mod - DXRP is #1 all-time with $100k.
Turkey has passed a new bill around game platforms & social media worth looking at: “Any gaming platform that has more than 100,000 daily users in Turkiye must now appoint a local representative” - and warnings, fines, and eventual traffic throttling will happen if age ratings & other rules aren’t followed.
Microlinks, Pt. 2: South Korea and Southeast Asia are the latest regions to get a PS5 price increase (up to 43%!); Xbox “unveils stylish new logo”, with a return to its classic green color; we think this new PlayStation ‘online license check’ 30-day feature isn’t intentional or permanent, but I guess we’ll find out soon?
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How YapYap jammed its way to 1m copies sold…
We recently came across Kingfisher’s YouTube video essay (above) about ‘friendslop’ and magic-themed co-op horror game YapYap, a $10 title which launched on Feb. 3rd on Steam and confirmed 1 million players by March 18th. (We have it at >1.15m copies sold now, #7 in new games released in 2026 purely by Steam units sold.)
Obviously, at a relatively cheaper price, the game has ‘only’ grossed a bit less than $10m so far. But it’s one of the breakout hits of the year, and the dev team just announced plans for new wands, monsters, hub progression & more, addressing a key adoption objection to the delightful title - there’s just not enough to do.
Anyhow, we caught up with dev team Maison Bap’s Ray G, who is based in Vancouver - though his compact ~10 person team is worldwide & remote working. And here’s some key findings from our chat about how YapYap did so well:
The dev studio shifted to friendslop after its initial title didn’t perform: Maison Bap has been around for 6 years, and most of that time was working on BapBap, which, after “pivoting, like, 5 times” became a roguelike PvP F2P party game. Ray says “we spent way too long” on it, and so a fresh, lower-lift idea was required.
YapYap was devised ‘earlier’ in friendslop’s rise, & voice-first: in early 2025, before Peak had even shipped, the team looked around at short-dev (3-6 month) possibilities, and decided on “voice as a mechanic”. (You cast spells using your voice - an idea that Mage Arena coincidentally also used in 2025.)
As TikToks for the game blew up, the team had to invent the mechanics: back in July 2025, an early TikTok for the game got 288k likes (!), but it was so early in dev that what you do in the game was unclear. One novel physics-friendly invention: vandalism as a key game mechanic. (You destroy items as an objective.)
So it’s super interesting that YapYap was vibe-first and gameplay-later - Ray told us that the vandalism mechanic “wasn’t part of the plan in the first month.” And in general, the game has been buzz-first - everyone wanted to play it, “we had so much momentum”, Ray said, but the game was shallower because it was still so early in dev.
However, there’s so many amazing design decisions in the final game - from turning everything into fish for mayhem reasons, to clever wands that control monsters, to funny word-repeating mini-games to stop you being turned into a monster.
If you look at influencers such as MoistCr1TiKaL playing the game (above), it looks, to be honest, pretty slick. This is why it had ~900k Steam wishlists at launch, and was #3 in Valve’s Top 10 uniques chart - from 2,900+ games - for October 2025’s Next Fest.
And how did people find out about this game overall? If you look at GameDiscoverCo Pro’s Steam Fan Snapshot data, we see a big over-index on word of mouth and short-form videos (duh!), and underindexing on trad media & discussion forums:
Unsurprisingly, given this, we think players skew young: only 12% of YapYap’s Fan Snapshot players were >=35 years old, compared to 27% for all Fan Snapshot participants. Oh, and ‘Boxleiter method’ fans, it has a 180x ‘review to sales’ multiplier on Steam, sky-high (60x can be more common?) due to its more casual player base.
Anyhow, we think the art direction for YapYap is its killer feature. It just looks so appealing, with real-time shadows & cloth & lo-fi texture weirdness. In his YouTube essay, Kingfisher says: “I am a huge fan of that nostalgic dark fantasy vibe”, and nothing hits that “dreamy, hauntingly whimsical energy the way YapYap does.”
This is - in significant part - down to YapYap’s art director Louis, whose X account has a bunch of interesting early tests. It’s ‘new but retro’-feeling aesthetic which still uses interesting tech, and Ray G commends the juxtaposition of the “very dark, uh, horror-esque kind of vibe with PSX graphics… but also super relatable and cute characters.”
Oddly, the vibe I got from Maison Bap’s Ray G. was, as times, a little conflicted. Sure, the game has >1m copies sold and a Very Positive (84%) review count. But when you have viral interest in a game that early, it can feel like the Wallace & Gromit train chase scene where you’re laying tracks in front of you.
In addition, some of the things people want to do in the game - or that show well for social media - don’t necessarily make for balanced game mechanics. For example, the Maison Bap crew realized: “Oh, it’d be so funny if you can piss from your wand.” (Reader, it totally is.)
But as Ray noted to me: “A lot of our spells are kind of like that, where… we kind of design it so that it’s funny, and you laugh about it with your friends, but… it’s hard to make it deep.” And with just keeping up with maintenance & patches on a super popular game, it’s incredibly difficult for a small team to do lots of live service-y new feature updates too.
So you end up with a duality of feelings, as shown by the positive (left) and negative (right) word clouds from GameDiscoverCo Pro’s sampling of the most helpful Steam reviews for YapYap:
On the one hand - ‘super fun’, ‘good game’, ‘can’t wait to see’, and on the other - ‘needs more content’, ‘over and over again’, ‘not enough’. Video games, huh? Either the public isn’t interested, or they want more and more right now, and they’re going away if you can’t provide it. (It’s ‘cos they love you - but the Veruca Salt vibes are there, anyhow.)
Anyhow, good luck to the Maison Bap crew on the new features they are planning, and it’ll be interesting to see how players re-engage at that point. And others taking lessons from this, this is yet another example of ‘early dev showcase validates the vibes and idea’. (Yes, we’re becoming tiresome on this point.)
3x GDC 2026 discovery talks you shouldn’t miss?
In case you missed it, a whole chunk of free talk videos and slides from GDC 2026 went up on the GDC Vault website. (At the same time, all talk videos from GDC 2024 were made free, by the look of it. Wow, there’s a lot of good content in there to peruse.)
Anyhow, unfortunately GDC’s YouTube channel doesn’t get updated with these new talks any more, but I thought we should point out three notable discovery-related talks & takeaways from GDC 2026 lectures, here:
Marketing/trailer veterans Dana Trebella & Derek Lieu did a talk on ‘translating your invisible marketing foundation into visibility’, and we particularly liked it because it concentrates on rationalizing & defining your audience for your game. (There’s even a SWOT analysis section in here, something we use at GDCo.)
Talking of friendslop, Nick Kaman of Aggro Crab did a talk on the making of PEAK which is full of charming detail, including the claim that the winner CEO of the sales battle between Another Crab’s Treasure & Content Warning had to pay for therapy for the other CEO. (Nick got 3 free sessions as a result of that?)
None other than Chris Zukowski of HowToMarketAGame has a ‘what to do if you had a hit game’ talk that talks about all sorts of useful things for ‘games that actually sell on Steam’ - from supporter packs & soundtracks for extra $ to bundles & discount strategies. (Less ‘GabeN as fairy princess’ Photoshops tho, plz?)
And while we’re at it, here’s three more GDC 2026 talks that are discovery-adjacent and worth checking out: Finji’s Rebekah Saltsman on her company’s perspectives on indie publishing, a marketing postmortem of solo dev hit The Operator, and the latest Experimental Games Showcase, back for its 24th year (!) after previously showcasing Katamari Damacy, Baba Is You & more. (Now that’s some heritage.)
[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.]