July 2026's top new PC & console games, revealed...
Also: a whole bunch of game discovery news, inc. trending unreleased Steam games.
[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.]
As August kicks off, we’ll be the first to ask: who stole seven twelfths of 2026 so far - the time bandits? Well, since time has certainly elapsed, whether or not Sean Connery disguised as a firefighter was in the mix, we shall hasten on with today’s newsletter…
Before we start, remember when Sony was lavishly courting PC gamers? No, not 2025, this was back in 1996, when it took out a 16 page ad supplement in PC Gamer magazine to hype up its "PlayStation mega-hits" with "CD-quality audio." (Also, how crazy is it that surreal cult classic Eastern Mind was mentioned in here?)
[THE DEEPEST PC/CONSOLE DATA? You can get a free demo of our GameDiscoverCo Pro company-wide ‘Steam deep dive’ & console data, inc. MCP, by reaching out today - >110 orgs have it. Or, signing up to GDCo Plus gets extra newsletter and Discord access, plus more.]
Game discovery news: the Reincarnation of Walk?
Let’s kick off the week with the lightning of discovery news, followed seconds later by the thunder of some game platform updates:
Looking at GDCo Pro's estimates of 'trending' unreleased Steam games, July 27th-Aug 3rd (above), planeslop standout Dear Passengers (#1) is now over 2 million wishlists, and multiple hot games releasing this week also make the Top 10, inc. Beast Of Reincarnation (#2), Big Walk (#6), Iron Nest (#9), and Marvel Tokon (#10).
Also trending: much-discussed autobattler roguelike Guildrun (#5), and 'WWII from the Chinese perspective' FPS (!) The Defiant (#6). Brand new? Slick (& AI?) looking Gunfire Reborn-a-like co-op roguelite shooter Guns & Dragons (#9), with last week's horde survivor FPS Guns 'N Goblins (#7) also hanging in there.
Info on emulated Xbox 360 games coming to PC has surfaced via a dev document - The Verge explains: “With [Xbox] 360 games developers… will have control over things like a game’s price and if it’s available on Game Pass.” It’s due 2027-2028 for Project Helix & PC, but more OG Xbox games on PC may hit by October 2026, after “the initial program announced in July included just four games.”
Roblox’s results late last week weren’t stellar for the platform, as “daily active users (DAUs) fell 7% sequentially to 123 million in the second quarter”, and SeekingAlpha notes “decelerating monetization [growth and]… a decision to pull FY26 guidance, unleashing a flurry of [analyst] downgrades.” (Kid safety-related barriers are part of it, as well as viral game hangover from 2025 - here’s the full .PDF with more deets.)
When we covered co-op sandbox hit Project Zomboid again in June, we ‘warned’ that the full launch of the much-delayed Build42 upgrade would prob. send interest through the roof. And indeed it has, with Steam CCU quadrupling after its July 29th debut, and an all-time high of 121k CCU set last weekend. Score!
Steamworks text change alert of the week - when you prep graphical assets for your Steam publisher/franchise sale pop-up message, Valve doesn’t want you to put discounts directly on the image: “Please DO NOT include messaging like “Up to XX% off”. Steam will automatically show that message on the store.”
A leak via a soccer game YouTuber suggests that EA Sports FC 26 had 9.8 million daily active users across PC/console recently. (GDCo Pro estimates agree on ~10m DAU, btw - the game’s #3 behind only Fortnite & Roblox across Steam, PS & Xbox, with >75% of the DAU on PS4/PS5 & only ~5% on Steam. Impressive!)
More Xbox things: some of the regional Xbox hardware price increases are hefty, it turns out, with the UK’s Series X digital going for £620 (previously £450, +38%, vs. +25% in the U.S.); post-earnings, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella says they are “making the necessary decisions… to reset the [Xbox] business for long-term growth.”
A new interview with Nintendo’s Shigeru Miyamoto has him saying: “I was happy that the Switch lasted for 8 to 9 years. I think that customers are no longer just looking for specs. I think the ideal is that ‘if you buy the software, you can play it on the device you have at home.’” (In other words: more horsepower ain’t the main thing, chief.)
Here’s another micro-indie success on Reddit: “2 person [short incremental game], launched with 61k+ WL, game made in 7 months, 7 years of making games, Bills Must Be Paid is our first successful game, 100k+ copies sold in less than 72h.” Notably, the devs are ex-hypercasual mobile and web casual (CrazyGames, etc) - so they ‘get’ hook…
PlayStation things: Sony says it’s been talking to retailers about its disc-free future, suggests U.S. retailers may still sell codes in a box; it also reiterated it has secured enough PS5 memory chip supply for the current financial year: “There is no change to our plan for hardware profitability for FY26 to remain similar to FY25.”
This Naavik analysis of SensorTower H1 2026 mobile game trends is v.useful for context, noting - absent intel on off-platform (DTC) $ - “Downloads: -13% YoY, Android-driven… Revenue: -2% YoY, but not a healthy market”, and: “The market has become increasingly dependent on an aging base of long-standing incumbents.”
Creators.gg: free creator programs for studios
FirstLook just launched Creators.gg, the first free creator program tool for studios. List your program with no subscription, no per-seat fees and no request caps. Onboard creators and distribute keys at $0, paying only when you fund a paid campaign or add additional creator functionality.
You can setup a campaign in under 10 minutes, reaching 10,000+ creators. Get keys in their hands the same day. We already power the Esports World Cup’s $2M creator program,
Creator relationships are one of the most underrated growth channels in games. List your program free at creators.gg.
July 2026’s top new PC/console games, revealed..
It’s back! It’s GameDiscoverCo’s top new Steam (& console) games of the month and more, powered by our Pro data - here’s June, May, April, March, Feb and Jan’s, if you missed ‘em in 2026 so far. This time out, July’s been ‘fine’ for new releases:
The Assassin’s Creed Black Flag remaster proved we all love pirates: those scallywags, we’re not fed up with them! With >1 million units on the platform inc. off-Steam keys, plus at >1.4m on PlayStation & >650k on Xbox, this competent $60/$70 remaster of a fun 2013 original has been a palpable (>$200m gross) hit.
Shift At Midnight was the inexpensive viral hit of the month: topping out at 37k CCU on Steam, and with great staying power, this $10 co-optional mashup of first-person job sim with creepy ‘bad customer’-identifier (a la Papers Please & Quarantine Zone) is also close to 1m sold during July on Steam.
A vast diversity of games sold 200-300k for the month: games spanning extraction Souls-like Mistfall Hunter ($25) - which has serious CCU staying power - to sim game eSports Manager 2026 ($20), first-person tornado survival sim Funnel Runners ($15) & adorable shipping sim Cat Mail Co. ($15) topped 200k.
One trend we definitely seem to be seeing here is clustering of cheaper or mid-price games around breakout microgenres. (First-person sim is the obvious example this month, but roguelike twin-stick shooter Pathogenic ($10) also hit it out the park.)
If we look at the Top 10 new Steam releases by revenue for July (not including off-Steam key sales), you’ll see Assassin’s Creed way in front, and the more expensive hits crowding to the front: Halo: Campaign Evolved is #2 in this list with >$10m gross, tho with Mixed Steam reviews, with Master Chief Collection preferred by some.
Also popping up with a ‘just fine’ reception is Bandai Namco’s $70 action JRPG Echoes Of Aincrad (which has grossed >$20m, almost half of it on Steam.) And $30 ‘gacha RPG without the gacha’ DragonSword: Awakening is doing nicely & nearly at $10m PC gross, with strong continued CCU for a clever ‘alt Genshin’ angle.
Next, moving past new games on Steam and checking on all-game revenue, Valve has the top two, with its long-running MOBA Dota 2 (>$70m) joining Counter-Strike 2 atop the charts. (With the Assassin’s Creed remaster making it to #3.)
Immediately after them, Palworld’s 1.0 release catapulted it up the charts, with >$55m revenue and >3m units in July alone - we now have it at >20m units sold on Steam alone, and way over 30m players, cross-platform. Also notable: F2P-ers Apex Legends, PUBG, and Marvel Rivals all had good months. And Meccha Chameleon added $23m and ~5m copies, mainly early in July, to hit 14.5m units and $65m gross.
Since you liked it last month, we’ll briefly feature ‘all Steam games, #11-#30 by revenue’ again. It mainly shows chunky F2P games like Warframe and Wuthering Waves can make >$10m monthly, as well as now-discounted evergreens like Baldur’s Gate 3.
Finishing off this section by looking at PlayStation and Xbox top-sellers around new releases, there’s a bit of an eye-opener on the PlayStation side of things:
There wasn’t a ton of noise in our ‘filter bubbles’ about the Call Of Duty Black Ops 1 & 2 remasters for PS4 and PS5. But for core CoD fans, it was a huge deal. (Both were originally PS3 games, and got v.competent updates from Iron Galaxy at a $40 price point - with the price point dropping to only $20 if you have PlayStation Plus.)
We see online rumors that the two ports already sold >7m units combined as of July 28th, and we have them up at 11m (Black Ops II) and 3.8m (Black Ops) for the month. Too high? Possibly, but unlocking PS4 (& PS5) shooter OGs to replay BlOps games for $20 has been a huge win for both Activision and PlayStation.
Anyhow, EA Sports College Football 27 (at 1.4m on PlayStation and 1.3m on Xbox) was the other hefty new console seller of July, alongside the Black Flag remaster. And we have Halo: Campaign Evolved at a reasonable ~250k on PlayStation, with ~2m Xbox players in total, and ~250k of those paying $ outside of GP. Makes sense…
Oh, and scanning Switch Western eShop new releases for July briefly, first party Nintendo games dominate as per usual: Splatoon Raiders hit >350k eShop players & Rhythm Heaven Groove >300k. But there’s a biggish third-party hit: vampire farming sim (!) Moonlight Peaks neared 200k, and sold similarly well on Steam, a great result. (Not much else topped 50k in its debut month, a predictably ‘meh’ result…)
Finally, you may recall GameDiscoverCo Pro now analyzes Twitch monthly for the most popular games. And we’re contractually obliged* to show you the Top 20 across all titles (above), which shows how many of the OGs are still hot - tho Palworld surged due to 1.0, and Black Flag Resynced acrually made it into the Top 20. (*Not really!)
But the Top 20 most-watched new games on Twitch in July is way more interesting, and always a view that shows us some unexpected games:
The surprise for us in here is ‘darkweb’ hacking game Welcome To The Game III (#2), which had 4.3m hours watched from folks like MOONMOON and xQC, and sold ~30k units to date. Otherwise, we’d expect great numbers from Black Flag Resynced (#1) and Shift At Midnight (#3), and ineed we got them….
There’s a few other titles in here that are underdiscussed, though: always interesting to see Switch 2 exclusives do well (that’s Rhythm Heaven Groove & Splatoon Raiders, at #8 and #10.) And Photomaly (#11, 1.15m hours, 25k units sold) is “a PSX-style horror game where you manage a photo studio” - yep, looks horrifically streamer-appropriate!
GameDiscoverCo Show: compulsion loops… good?
Finally for this week, The GameDiscover Show is returns with myself (Simon) and Post Games’ Chris Plante talking about game discovery goodness - sub to the podcast via Apple Music, Spotify & elsewhere (audio), with a video version on YouTube (above).
This time out, we talk about whether your target PC/console device for dev should always be the PC, chat about vertical video taking over the Internet, the rise of 'compulsion loops' in games, and analyze new Steam demo hit Guildrun. Toodles…
[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.]