[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 back, and thinking carefully about a more existential question in today’s main newsletter story. (Do we want to do this? Not really. Should we do it so that everyone is on the same page, for better or worse? Probably!)
Before we start, you know YouTuber Any Austin from videos like ‘Where Do Hyrule’s Rivers Go?’ and ‘Do Grand Theft Auto V’s Power Lines Connect To Anything?’ Well, he’s continuing this line of in-game ecosystem research with his latest video featuring Cyberpunk 2077: ‘What Is Night City's Unemployment Rate?’ (Bravo.)
[NEED THE BEST DATA? You can get a free demo of our GameDiscoverCo Pro company-wide ‘Steam deep dive’ & console data, inc. MCP server, by reaching out today - >110 orgs have it. Or, signing up to GDCo Plus gets extra newsletter and Discord access, plus more.]
Game disco news: welcome back, Happy Wheels…
Let’s start out by checking out the latest game platform & discovery news from across the video game-verse:
Looking at GDCo Pro's estimates of 'trending' unreleased Steam games by 'new wishlists in the last 7 days' (above), a surprise is Flash ragdoll physics 2D game Happy Wheels (#1), coming to Steam 15 years post-launch (!). At #2 when we ran this, but out now, Dimraeth is an isometric co-op fantasy RPG with much depth.
Other newly trending titles? Furry wolf-children making sim (?!) Family Time (#6), which picked up ~70k wishlists after its announce. Gritty open-world survival-er The Dead We Knew (#7) is also adding interest. And cute/realistic zombie survival game Zeverland (interesting combo!) made it to #10.
Valve’s Steam Frame is now officially unveiled, with a USD $1,059 (256 GB) and USD $1,200 (1TB) price point, and a YouTube video from Valve takes you through the standalone VR device (which also connects to a PC!) This BBC review approximates general reception: “The hardware is excellent - a light device which feels comfortable to wear and is packed with clever technology… but it comes at a high price.”
Heavily rumored, the Triple-I Initiative streaming showcase is now happening twice per year, and October 8th is the next one, with “35+ announcements with back-to-back trailers of world premieres, gameplay reveals, launch dates [&] demos.” Teaser trailer here, and reveals from Dave the Diver, Risk of Rain 2 & more are promised.
Roblox Developers Conference had a huge announce, with the keynote revealing: “Soon, creators will have the option to make their games available as standalone apps across mobile, PC, and consoles, with Roblox powering the technology and services underneath.” (This pivot seems early, with scant details besides web play in 2026 & offline modes by mid-2027 - we’ll see if/how it interacts with Steam…)
Other ambitious Roblox things: RDC’s keynote also confirmed Roblox engine improvements to enable “2D and puzzle games” more easily, as well as Roblox Wallet, “a creator earnings account Roblox said lets creators earn directly in real currency, get paid automatically each business day”, and also a Roblox debit card.
Steam (and other online platforms!) have “implemented age verification measures for Australian users, affecting titles that carry a local age rating of R18+”, and you’ll need to link select credit cards for it to work. (This came “in the wake of changes to Australia’s online safety code made earlier in 2026”, and appears mandatory.)
In as much as Blizzcon is related to Xbox’s platform success, you can check out the big announces here, inc. a Starcraft shooter for 2030 and Diablo V in 2029. (Also: after adding CD Projekt games, Battle.net says they’ll be selective re: more games: “We're obviously not out there trying to do the Steam or Epic Game Store thing.”)
The latest PlayStation Plus Game Catalog additions for September (for higher PS+ tiers) have a pretty nice diversity of titles, including RuneScape: Dragonwilds, WWE 2K26, Ball x Pit, and Date Everything! (There’s also cult-ier titles like Slitterhead, Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound & Dungeons of Hinterberg.)
According to Circana's Future of Insights for Video Games Consumer Survey, “cost is becoming a stronger driver of US cancellations to Xbox Game Pass Essential, PS Plus Essential and Nintendo Switch Online”, with ‘couldn’t justify the cost’ reason for canceling up 4-10% from Q1, hitting at least 40% for all three.
Microlinks: there’s speculation that you might need a trailer to appear in Steam Discovery Queue (whether or not, it’s good to have one!); August’s top grossing mobile games include Honor Of Kings, Gossip Harbor & PUBG Mobile; some data on Towerpunk’s reveal to >4k Steam wishlists, good thanks to a viral trailer.
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Is the game biz.. sustainable for the average indie?
When i went on Mike Rose & Rami Ismail’s ‘wide-ranging’ (lol!) games podcast Mike & Rami Are Still Here, I was reminded that there are many possible ways to view the game biz. GameDiscoverCo tends to hover over the PC/console ecosystem like The Watcher from the Fantastic Four, finding & analyzing the games that are doing well.
But you can also zoom down to the more human level: what should the average person do? And that’s exactly what Rami asked me at the end of the podcast: "If you’re an indie right now, the question I get most is like, is this worth it right now? Right? Like, should we?” And that’s a 100% valid question that we’ve, well, mainly skirted…
Answer #1: what the data says…
So we’re going to answer it two ways: a data-led answer (which is what you’d expect from us), and then quote from what we actually said during the podcast, which is a bit more ‘feels’-based. Let’s start with indie game-ish data - which goes a bit like this:
Let’s say you spent USD $500k of your own money to make your game: no publisher, but you get all the upside. If you released that game on Steam in January 2026 (above), you’d need to be one of the 16 games of 1,230 (1.3%) that grossed >$1m LTD to have made $550k+ net back (after refunds, chargebacks, Valve’s 30%), and now be profitable, w/ongoing cashflow.
Let’s say you spent USD $500k of a publisher’s money to make a game: it depends on your recoup, but we’d think that only ~7 of the games (0.6%) released in Jan would have recouped fully by now at ‘normal’ rates. These are not exciting headline numbers.
So that gets to the following questions: how many games do you need in your catalog to build up an acceptable ‘long tail’ for continued operations, if you’re self-pub? And how much cushion do you need in your bank account between publishing deals, if you can’t rely on royalties alone to fund your indie? (Given external $ got pinched.)
Maybe you can argue January is a slow month, and we shouldn’t be using it. (It’s true that some months in 2026 have more like 20-30 new games grossing >$1m.) You can also note that some (but not many non-cozy) indie games will also add revenue on console platforms at minimal extra cost. But it doesn’t shift the fundamental math(s).
What this says to us is: even at a game funding number ($500k) that some readers will say is radically too low, and some too high, there’s indications that you need to be hitting home runs to make the ‘new PC games’ market work for you at all. (Even at $100k budget, only 80 of the 1,230 (6.5%) would be breakeven net, if self-published.)
Answer #2: what the gut says…
Then there’s what I said on the podcast, referencing my ‘I’ve been in the biz for 30 years’ newsletter where I accidentally outed myself as a dinosaur (above). As I joked with Mike & Rami, there’s no 10km-wide asteroid heading for the game biz. But “there’s also no - in my view - return to the old days.” Really, what I see for indies - and what I said - is:
There’s going to be a continuation of ‘so many people can make video games’. Many of those people are making games semi-professionally, or doing it just after they left school, or in a low-cost situation or locality. In many cases, this may not be a disadvantage for their popularity.
So for better or worse, if you want a long full-time career in games: if you don’t have a game that’s done well, that you own and have continued revenue from, it’s going to be much trickier in the future. Not impossible, but way trickier.
I think there are great, successful games out there. I’m kind of a glass half-full kind of guy. There are good things going on in the PC/console game space, and projects that impress and wow me every week.
But I don’t deny on the individual level, especially if everyone needs a salary and you’re working with multiple people on your team, it’s rough, and it’s going to continue to be rough…
I concluded: “I think people have to find ways to make games less conventionally. I’m excited about the increasing number of games doing well overall. But it’s true that the vast majority (by %) of new games in 2026 aren’t going to perform commercially…”
So: the biz works, if you’re a) a publisher with a strong overall catalog, or b) a compact dev team who’s created something notable from a lower cost base. (I think of games like single-player, moddable lo-fi Battlefield riff Ravenfield, which my 10-year old loves, and GDCo estimates has grossed $15m since 2017…)
Yet overall, as a smaller indie, I think you need to understand the odds. And - I’m sorry, I think this is the second time I’ve quoted Kenny Rogers in this newsletter - “Know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em, know when to walk away, know when to run.”
GameDiscoverCo Show: why’s Xbox going Kojima?
Just in time for the newsletter, we have The GameDiscover Show, ft. myself (Simon) and Post Games’ Chris Plante talking game discovery trends - sub to the podcast via Apple Music, Spotify & elsewhere (audio), with a video version on YouTube (above).
This time, we talk about how Xbox is doubling down on Hideo Kojima after PlayStation dropped Physint, Ubisoft's move away from its Steam launcher, smaller Steam games getting better personalized visibility, and CliffyB talking about how AAA should 'faceplant for a while' in this new PC/console game creation paradigm.
[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.]
I mean, if you’ve spent the 500k of a publisher, the chances of recoup don’t really matter anymore. You’ve been paid, the risk is transferred to the publisher.
Until you hit the home run, all you have to do is to convince publishers to fund your next attempt at making a hit.
Funding in-between deals is certainly an issue though, and it’s getting worse.
To put it differently, the AA game market is very squeezed these days.