Is 'marketing before you build' a good discovery idea in 2026?
Also: the top Steam releases of the week & 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.]
Plenty of things happening in Discoveryland - as there always is - so let’s take a look around, on this fine Friday. Is our lead story about games that aren’t (complete) games, but might be soon if the Internet likes them enough? It certainly is…
Before we start, we loved this Game File story about Panic’s ‘mail-in patches’ program for completing games like Despelote, inspired by Activision’s similar early ‘80s program for titles such as Pitfall: “Players often wrote in saying… they’d completed the game in question with a friend or family member, that it helped them strengthen a bond.”
[FREE DEMO OF GDCo PRO? You too can get a gratis 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.]
News: Vampire Crawlers ‘wines’ up a takeover…
Let’s start out with the latest game discovery & platform news, fashioned in this style:
We know Steam editorially picked ‘takeover’ banners are hot for discovery - here’s some recent ones, inc. Windrose & Crimson Desert. But did you know they can be ‘conditional’? This (above) front-page takeover for Vampire Crawlers is visible if you own or wishlist its kinda prequel Vampire Survivors, we spotted. (Conditional ‘pop-up’ IMs are far more common, tho - takeovers are a relative rarity…)
Xbox is at the ‘releasing mission statement internal emails’ stage of its reorientation, and notable in there: “Our new north star will be daily active players… we will reevaluate our approach to exclusivity, windowing, and AI… ‘Microsoft Gaming’ describes our structure but it does not describe our ambition.” (Back to Xbox as a brand.)
March 2026’s U.S. game hardware & select software spend was up 12% to $5.3b, per Circana. Mat Piscatella notes console $ was up 69% to $500m, driven by Switch 2 (PS5 $ was only up 3%), and Crimson Desert, MLB The Show 26 and Pokémon Pokopia helped console content spending be up 22%. (Not too shabby.)
An interesting new feature from Valve: “If your game has received a Steam Deck verification report and is marked as Verified”, you can now see average framerate for players (trailing 30 days, daily!), and specific categories (like Stability, Performance) for anyone who doesn’t agree with Verified status - tho >95% do.
A couple of folks pinged us, re: Tuesday’s newsletter, that perhaps the ‘Wild West’ mention for Steam key sellers was a bit harsh. So for the record: we do think third party key sellers can provide additional $, ‘discovery surfaces’ and local knowledge & reach. (There’s just a lot of companies in that space to navigate & understand.)
Max Power Gaming comes through with a profile of new Roblox hit Sailor Piece, another anime-influenced ARPG which ‘borrows’ some hype: “its player base jumped by roughly 66% (from ~33K to ~55K CCUs) on March 10, the same day One Piece Season 2 launched on Netflix.” (It’s #3, averaging 420k CCU in last 30 days.)
The latest Footprints.gg ‘trad media’ mentions charts has Capcom’s Pragmata at #1, thanks to its hyped multi-platform launch & 1 million sales already. Also notable in the Top 5: oft-discussed games Crimson Desert, Metro 2039, Windrose, and Clair Obscur (thanks to its BAFTA Awards win.)
And we’re getting a sense of some of Xbox’s ‘broadening’ moves, given this leak around a teased Discord partnership: “Xbox is planning to bundle a new Game Pass tier with Discord Nitro… Game Pass Starter Edition will offer access to ‘50+ games like Stardew Valley, Fallout 4, and Grounded’, plus 10 hours of cloud gaming every month.”
More regional age ratings are coming for consoles: “Sony has started telling PlayStation players in the UK and Ireland that age verification will be required [starting in June 2026]… they’ll have to verify… in order to keep using certain features like messages and voice chat.”
Microlinks: Roblox also settled with U.S. states Alabama and West Virginia over child safety allegations; Microsoft offering voluntary retirement to those “whose combined years of service added to their age totals 70 or more”; looks like Mihoyo’s Zenless Zone Zero F2P ARPG hit has a Steam page now - is Genshin Impact next?
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Is ‘marketing before you build’ a good discovery idea in 2026?
For those paying attention to our ‘trending unreleased Steam games’ list, you might have spotted a game called Cartel Pilots Wanted high up this week. We estimate the game, from OldYacht & Polden Publishing, at 218,000 Steam wishlists in just one week. That’s some serious velocity.
This is all based on the launch trailer (above) and then some extremely viral short-form videos based on it, such as this one on TikTok (162,000 likes!) playing up the co-op drugrunning across tropical islands.
Anyhow, Polden’s Kirill Akimkin has been quite public about their strategy here: “Over the past year we started benchmarking every project before [fully] signing it. Instead of committing early, we run a mini-announcement through short-form content and measure traction first. If a game reaches ~25-30k wishlists quickly, we move forward with funding and production. If it doesn’t, the project goes back to the developer with no obligations. Cartel Pilots Wanted passed that threshold faster than anything we’ve tested so far.”
Chatting to Polden, we confirmed that the trailer, which is GTA Vice City-ish in its sunny visuals, is using a real-time game engine (Unreal, with MetaHuman), though it’s clearly cinematics-heavy, and a lot of the prototyped gameplay hasn’t been 100% worked out. But we have a lot of questions and thoughts over this approach, such as:
Is understanding the memetics of ideas more important than anything? Beyond Polden, we know of other publishers - including PlayWay, whom we covered doing it back in 2021 - who will launch Steam pages & trailers early, and see what the public thinks about them. So why not a minimum meme threshold?
Has ‘cost to test games’ come down in price sufficiently to make this work? Given access to high quality game engines & ease of prototyping, plus ways to quickly scale & gauge audience access to ideas (organically or paid!), is the opportunity cost insignificant enough to scale this?
Is there a danger we’ll grow a ‘hypercasual’-style dev underclass? Funnily enough, a chunk of today’s successful first-person simulator devs (like the Turkish devs of Supermarket Simulator) came from the ‘test loads of ideas, only get paid if people care’ world of free hypercasual mobile games, now largely defunct/morphed. This type of conditional funding could be a negative for the PC/console biz, right?
What’s clear is that certain genres (particularly co-op first-person sims & friendslop) have dynamite reach via these ‘condensed short-form trailers’, whether paid or free. Here’s another example of the kind of shortform trailer re-cut getting great reach:
As for why the virality, we can speculate: sunny, high-quality visuals, rebellious but not repellent theme (you’re a fun-lovin’ criminal!), big ‘play with your friends’ vibes and some clear gameplay pillars (do deals, load up your airplane, then fly) that seem like they could be fun.
But with these type of most-viral hits come big ‘expectation management’ issues. For example: what is the minute to minute gameplay really like? Is it actually fun sitting in a plane with your buddy? Are plane-flying games actually entertaining? Will the cinematic island-hopping vibes translate to an actual fun, long-lived experience?
We don’t know - and likely, the devs are still working it out. But they stress-tested the underlying concept early, and people liked it. So now they have to nail the landing for what we presume will be a $10-$15 game. And we can look at some of Playway’s history of doing this to see that indeed, sometimes it works. (But other times, nope!)
Here’s a successful example - Contraband Police, whose original trailer (released 8 years ago) didn’t have any of the Papers, Please-ish gameplay that made the game a hit (1.5m units on Steam after its 2023 release), but was focused solely on vehicles:
So we presume what happened (this trailer was probably CG-based, btw) was that people wishlisted the game, and the devs gradually worked out what the fun was in the concept, all while sitting on player interest. (The final game still does have driving and shooting in it, but no ‘driving while shooting’, we don’t think?)
On the other hand, Jungle House - which we were disappointed didn’t have more jungle canyon rope bridges in it - was announced 5 years ago with a ‘target gameplay’ trailer that looks, frankly, kinda fun:
Unfortunately the actual game crafted based on the trailer seems to have trailed off into nothingness, partly due to an inability to recreate the vision and poor demo momentum, and is now delisted on Steam, despite 36k wishlists. There’s a handful of disappointed comments in the forums, but that’s about it….
Anyhow, we’re not suggesting everyone make ‘fake trailers’ - and we don’t think that is what Cartel Pilots Wanted did, tho it’s a very early/vibe-y trailer. (For certain genres, it may be impossible to do this ‘early trailer’ idea without getting sketchy.) And this approach can lead to some big pitfalls when the expectation doesn’t match reality.
Heck, we know of at least one game with huge shortform video wishlists that flopped on launch because casual wishlisters wanted ‘a type of game’ but wouldn’t pay $ for the precise game delivered. (If you’re marketing on vibes, you have to work out what the purchase threshold is for the ‘vibes-based wishlister’.)
But there’s an underlying point somewhere in here that’s difficult to ignore: why go all the way through making an expensive game, only to discover that players were never that interested? Aren’t there ways to try more ideas, earlier? (Besides early playtests, demos, and feedback, which are 1000% key nowadays.)
The super-early trailer is one way: doing lots of game jams is another. Having a larger, more diverse portfolio as a publisher and hedging is another. In a crowded market where interest is unpredictable, they are all relevant, and speak to a larger point: if you don’t know if people care about your game, try to find out now. Not later.
This week on Steam: Vampire Crawlers goes huge
