January 2026's top-selling new Steam games revealed
Also: this week's Steam debuts and lotsa 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.]
OK, we’re back, what did we miss? Oh, like three console earnings calls, a streaming showcase or two, and a partridge in a pear tree. (Not that Partridge.) But fear not, we’re going to outline them, along with a look at January’s top new PC/console games…
Before we start: watching Raiders Of The Lost Ark with my 10 year-old, he just went obsesso over Indiana Jones Lego sets. Funny YouTube comment on this ‘flying wing’ Lego overview? “Lego: We will not make sets based on war. We are a family company and this would go against our values. Also Lego: Hey kids! Who wants to buy a Nazi fighter plane?”
[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. ]
Game discovery news: Resident Evil hype builds…
Kicking off with our customary look at the breaking game discovery & platform news, it goes a little like this:
Checking the latest ‘trad media’ mentions from ICO’s Footprints.gg, Resident Evil Requiem continues super-strong momentum ahead of its Feb 27th release, as aftershocks from Highguard’s messy Steam launch continue, and Arc Raiders (new patches) and Dispatch (new Switch versions) also cause susurrus.
PlayStation had pretty good PS5 holiday 2025 sales: it “sold in some 8.1 million… just 0.1 million less than PlayStation 4 managed during the same period of its lifecycle”, 1.5m less than last year, but more than Switch 2’s 7 million. PS5 now has 92.2m sold-in, and Ghost Of Yotei “significantly” contributed to Sony’s overall positive results.
Analyst Serkan Toto told VGC re: Sony’s results, which included 132m MAU for PSN, up marginally: “Microsoft‘s continued focus away from hardware and rising prices in PC gaming of course helped [PS5]… it’s great for Sony that the biggest driver for hardware sales is still to come, namely the eventual launch of GTA VI.” Agree.
A heads up from Ishtar’s Bruno Laverny, who previously warned us about fake YouTube channels trying to get free Steam keys, on “how key resellers create fake Twitch channels with 15/20k subscribers to ask free keys from developers.” (Different platform, similar problems - watch for no chat in the ‘real’ Twitch archives?)
Steam has updated on its Steam Machine & Steam Frame hardware launch timing & price, explaining: “The limited availability and growing prices of… critical components [like PC memory & storage] mean we must revisit our exact shipping schedule and pricing.” They’re still planning for H1 2026, but ask for our patience.
Take Two’s Strauss Zelnick has suggested re: claims that Grand Theft Auto 6 won’t be available in a physical version on Day 1 on PS/Xbox, “That’s not the plan.” (Next question: will there be a physical disc in the physical version, or will it be a redemption code in a box? We have no idea, but Battlefield 6 managed a disc fine.)
Interesting to see the open-source Godot continue to increase engine market share for ‘jam games’ in a multi-year graph of Global Game Jam entries per platform: “Godot grew from 1.4% to over 25%” from 2019 to 2026, partly at the expense of Unity. (Godot hasn’t made it into as many fully commercial games yet.)
Nintendo financials follow-up: president Shuntaro Furukawa acknowledged that “overseas [Switch 2 holiday] sales were slightly weaker than our expectations”, while exceeding estimates in Japan; he also said that there were no current plans to increase Switch 2’s price due to memory price surges. (Emphasis on ‘current’.)
Some good Gamesight data on how influencers respond to game sequels: “Across [Ghost of Tsushima, Borderlands, Hollow Knight, Kingdom Come: Deliverance, and Death Stranding] and more than 8,000 creators, sequels outperformed original titles by +6.3 percentage points [in av. concurrent viewers] relative to each creator's baseline.”
Mobile game things: this handy overview of 2025 game/app spending notes that downloads are “up just 0.8% year-over-year, while in-app purchases surged 10.6%” - it’s a yield play; Jan 2026’s top-grossing mobile games are headed by Honor Of Kings, Monopoly Go!, LastWar: Survival, Royal Match, Roblox, and PUBG Mobile.
Microlinks: AMD says it’s ready to support Microsoft launching its next Xbox as soon as 2027; Nintendo’s Direct showcased Indiana Jones and the Great Circle & Fallout 4 for Switch 2, plus co-op exclusive Orbitals; Roblox creators can now “use a simple text prompt to generate a fully functional car, get in it, and drive it around.”
Jan 2026’s top-selling new Steam games? Yes!
Since we got to February, we thought we’d take our lead story to profile the top new PC game performers of last month on Steam. Jan. is traditionally slower, but there were still some standouts in early 2026, as our GDCo Pro estimates show:
Quarantine Zone headed the charts with >650k sold: we covered ‘inspect for zombie infection’ Papers Please-like Quarantine Zone: The Last Check on its debut, noting: “the border-checking gameplay of Contraband Police showed you could bring the details checking microgenre into the very streamer friendly, ‘simulator’-adjacent first person perspective. And if you add the undead to the mix? Potent influencer catnip.”
StarRupture & LORT also did great, hitting #2 and #3: we’re on top of the biggest games this month, huh, given we did a whole piece on first-person factory action-er StarRupture, which hit >500k and another one on co-op roguelite LORT, which managed >250k? (Both will scale handily over time.)
Half Sword - and a late-breaking Cairn - headed the best of the rest: physics-based medieval combat game Half Sword released too early (tech & physics issues galore!), but still has a chance to redeem itself. And survival-climber Cairn (we covered its demo!) debuted at the end of the month, and has already hit 300k sales.
Overall, January was actually a month with a bunch of interesting, high quality original IP games from small and medium devs hitting the charts! That’s… good, right?
Next, looking at the top revenue non-F2P new Steam games in Jan, we still have StarRupture & Quarantine Zone duking it out atop the charts. But some more expensive titles: including Code Vein II ($70-$100) & the CCU-frontloaded Fatal Fury: City Of The Wolves ($50) did increase their chart rankings vs. units sold, as a result.
Moving into the overall top Steam games in January 2026 by paid units, it’s Embark’s extraction shooter ARC Raiders which is blasting it. GDCo has it at 2.1m Steam units for the month (and 3.8m for Jan. including console, hitting 15m units lifetime):
Also notable in this set of top-sellers: R.E.P.O. (850k more, 18.4m copies sold), Peak (700k more, 15.5m copies sold) and RV There Yet? (650k, 5.5m copies sold) are flying the freak flag for ‘friendslop’ in style. And the co-op addition for ARPG No Rest For The Wicked has skyrocketed sales - 1.5m copies LTD, and 650k more in January, according to us.
A lot of the rest of the Top 10 ‘all’ are new games. But that’s not the case if we look at top performers by total revenue in January 2026, since F2P/IAP dominates:
You’re seeing ARC Raiders at #2 with $75m on Steam, but also Counter-Strike 2 flexing its perma-dominance at #1. There’s also PUBG at #3, and Marvel Rivals (still a threat!), Warframe, and Chinese MMO-ARPG Where Winds Meet (doing great with an international audience) in the Top 10, starting at ~$15m and going up from there.
We’re covering console games only briefly this month, since January was incredibly slow for new paid games. On PlayStation 5, Cairn & Code Vein II were top new sellers but were <50k during January. And on Xbox, it was only late port Final Fantasy VII Remake Intergrade (also <50k so far) which stood out.
There was some interest in new F2P console games, though, with fighting game 2XKO, hero shooter Highguard, and ARPG factory-builder Arknights: Endfield each snaking towards 1m players in their first weeks of availability on PS/Xbox. (That’s not amazing, but also not terrible in today’s saturated F2P console space.)
Finally, on the Western Switch 1 & 2 eShop, GDCo estimates see Final Fantasy VII Intergrade approaching 100k there (and prob. better still worldwide, given Asia!) Other games doing decently: Suika Game Planet, Dispatch, Wizard101, and MIO: Memories in Orbit, which are >25k and trending higher. (Both good, but sluggish?)
Steam this week: Nioh 3 tops a busy set of debuts
