June 2026's top new PC & console games, revealed..
We look multi-platform & at Twitch trends: also, Summer Sale big guys, news and more.
[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 we head into the July 4th weekend here in the U.S., let’s buckle down for a little hardcore video game data reporting, before we disappear for a burger or two. (Grilled meat is, at least, something that unites many of us on the political spectrum...)
Before noshing, a reminder: the most American game to play for the 250th anniversary of the USA is, of course, FromSoftware’s objectively insane mech brawler Metal Wolf Chaos (trailer), an additionally piquant act because it was actually made in Japan….
[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 - >100 orgs have it. Or, signing up to GDCo Plus gets the rest of this newsletter and Discord access, plus more.]
Game discovery news: GTA 6 is all, all hail, etc..
Let’s finish off the week with a little bit of that game platform & discovery analysis, then? As follows:
Our friends at ICO’s Footprints.gg put out their latest ‘trad media’ coverage report (above), and it’s GTA 6 that looks oversized, thanks to its pricing and pre-order reveal. Also big: Persona (due to a live-action TV show in dev) and Star Fox for Switch 2 (thanks to its June 25th Switch release!)
Sony confirmed that physical disc product for PlayStation consoles is ending in Jan. 2028. That’s all physical discs, inc. those printed for third-party publishers, boutique labels. So? It’s bad news for disc rental firms like Gamefly, and more pressure on Switch as the chief PC/console physical format that’s monetizable.
Bloomberg games reporter Jason Schreier started busting out YouTube analysis videos, and several are relevant to us: this one on indie games being ‘lottery ticket-adjacent’ at times, and another on why big game companies have been obsessed with getting live-service game hits.
The folks at MobileGamer.biz did some analysis of the top Apple Arcade games of all-time, based on our review # charts: “This top 20 [headed by Sneaky Sasquatch] shows that Apple’s decision to shift attention away from the indie-style Arcade games it pushed at launch in favour of licensed and family-friendly fare has been the right one.”
This dev interview on RV There Yet?’s break-out explains why the team paused on a five-year game project to make it in just 9 weeks, quoting CEO Tim Badylak: “I think it was a good decision of us to do this game now, and we actively had the conversation about 'This might be irrelevant in a year’.”
Microlinks: Xbox is testing a ‘disc to digital’ feature that digitizes a physical game collection; some more ‘easy Platinum achievement’ publishers are exiting the PlayStation Store with their games; indie data? “In 2019, my first Xbox game sold 1,508 copies in its first year. In 2025, my new one sold 542. Plus 15 on Steam.”
One under-considered point mentioned in HowToMarketAGame’s analysis of the Steam Personal Calendar: “I can see that [later] in July and August there are only about 1-2 games showing up in each day… You should be setting your release date 2 months in advance so you can spend more time on the calendar.”
One way to make $ fast in recent Steam Summer Sales? Make it into the ‘Featured Deep Discount’ box at the top of the sale page. These curated games are 90% off at least, and we see games like Binding Of Isaac: Rebirth & Don’t Starve Together hit an all-time highs of >100k CCU, due to the big player influxes.
More PlayStation stuff: a Sony Q&A said PlayStation wants to deliver “a seamless experience that can be enjoyed naturally beyond the living room” with its next-generation platform. (More portable hints?) And they also said “we are not focused on MAU growth as our sole KPI.. [but] on achieving profitable growth.”
Inflation & games? We liked this Jason Schreier comment on the situ: “A lot of people (accurately) point out that premium video games are cheaper than… 30 years ago thanks to inflation. But discussed less often is how much bigger the margins are for game companies now sales are 80-90% (soon.. 100%) digital. No more retail or packaging costs!”
Microlinks: Sony also announced it’s closing the PlayStation Store on PS3, as well as on PS Vita this/next year; popular Next Fest demos see 1,600% increase in Discord messages after launch; Amazon Prime’s 12 ‘free’ games for July include critically acclaimed RPG Symphony of War.
June 2026’s top new PC/console games, revealed..
Once again, it’s GameDiscoverCo’s top new Steam (& console) games of the month, powered by our Pro data - here’s May, April, March, Feb and Jan’s, if you missed ‘em in 2026 so far. And it’s a lopsided view for brand new Steam games by units (above):
Meccha Chameleon essentially broke our graph on units (thx!): at 11.5 million copies sold, the $6 ‘hide & seek x painting’ multiplayer game, which we covered in detail in Tuesday’s newsletter, is the breakout new title of the month by farrrr.
Gothic’s remake did rather well - if frontloaded - on Steam vs. console: much beloved in Central and Eastern Europe, the 2001 fantasy RPG Gothic had its $50 remake sell 575k on Steam, largely to fans of the original. (It only managed another 80k on PS/Xbox, which makes sense, given geography & OG platform.)
A real mix of other titles rounded out the Top 5: Chinese FMV adventure sequel Road To Empress II (627k, $18), friendslop standout Burglin’ Gnomes (409k, $10), and the inexpensive Early Access for the ambitious first-person fantasy game Fatekeeper (346k, $10) were all also in the mix somewhere.
We definitely feel like there’s a bit of a downward trend on pricing for some of these top-grossing titles. Another example: former Epic Games Store PC exclusive co-op roguelike 33 Immortals (#6) debuted on Steam at under $10 (via a launch discount from a $15 default), helping push it to 275k copies sold during June.
Ultimately, if we look at the Top 10 new Steam releases by revenue for June, it was a quiet month. (May 2026 had 6 new games at >$10m Steam gross, but June only two - release shifts due to Next Fest & Summer Sale are two key reasons for that.)
Moving up vs. units? ‘Walking mech fortress’ co-op PvPvE extraction shooter SAND: Raiders of Sophie (#4, $25), which grossed ~$5m in just the last week of the month, and has good CCU and daily sales momentum. Also: 3D shooter x monster collector Voidling Bound (#5, $25) is under the radar, but quite a lot of fans at >$3.5m gross…
Turning to the top $$ performers of June 2026 on Steam across all titles, you’ll see Counter-Strike 2 continuing to dominate (as it always does). But driving franchise sequel Forza Horizon 6 (#2) selling another $47m worth of product is notable. (We have it at >3m units LTD on Steam, and ~15 million players inc. Xbox - a result.)
Also in the mix here? isometric ARPG Path Of Exile 2 (#3, +$37m), which put up huge numbers with its Return Of The Ancients expansion, topping out at 408k Steam CCU. And then there’s the usual F2P stalwarts (PUBG, Marvel Rivals, Apex Legends, and an exiting Destiny 2.) Plus, there’s 007 First Light (#7, +$20m), which we peg at 1.3m+ on Steam & >3m units across PC/console, a great result in today’s market for $70 games.
We decided to add ‘all Steam games, #11-#30 by revenue for June’ this month - because it’s a really interesting way to view longer-term success for some of these games. You can see other F2P stalwarts, from Warframe to Overwatch, also lurking in here. (As well as ‘heavy IAP’ games like EA Sports FC 26, which fares way better on console.)
Of particular interest? F2P gacha stand-out Wuthering Waves (#12, $16m) had a very strong June in part thanks to a Cyberpunk Edgerunners crossover, and Subnautica 2 added another ~$10m to reach ~$110m (ignoring off-Steam sold keys) - it’s maybe looking a tad frontloaded in interest & CCU?
Finishing off this section by looking at PlayStation and Xbox, we’ve barely talked about EA’s latest mixed martial arts sequel UFC 6. The game has a EA Play trial version & had a closed Beta - so is trickier to estimate. But we think it did close to 1m units between PlayStation and Xbox - while skipping a PC release again, intriguingly.
Most other brand new console titles did a little marginally, tho PS/Xbox’s reputation as a ‘sports machine’ showed up with NBA The Run, a $30 NBA Street-style 3 on 3 basketball games - we reckon it’s sold a decent ~200k copies multi-platform so far.
Over on PlayStation Plus, Xbox’s own Grounded: Fully Yoked Edition which did the best in the Essential tier, adding >2m new players, followed by Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl 2 (nearly 1m) and Warhammer 40,000: Darktide (nearly 600k). New additions to Xbox Game Pass, headed by Solarpunk, didn’t top more than 3-400k in June…
Examining GDCo Pro’s Switch eShop estimates for debuts, yep, Nintendo’s own Star Fox remake tops the charts - many hundreds of thousands sold in the eShop, more physical? Next tier down, hitting the ~50k eShop units category in June? Devil May Cry 5, Rise of the Tomb Raider, eFootball Kick-Off! and Final Fantasy VII Rebirth.
Finally, now we’re tracking Twitch data in GameDiscoverCo Pro (get a free trial, if curious, of our full data suite!) - here’s what we spotted:
The Top 20 most-watched games on Twitch in June have a lot of the usual suspects, headed by the holy trinity of Counter-Strike, League Of Legends, and GTA V. Some impressive numbers? Dead By Daylight (#9, 25m hours watched) and Path Of Exile 2 (#10, 24.6m hours watched) both gained, and Meccha Chameleon at #11 (23.6m) is wild…
And here’s a great view we haven’t seen before - the most Twitch-able games newly released in June. We’ve talked about many of them, but not all - Fears To Fathom: Scratch Creek ($8, #4) is a casual co-op horror title, and Don’t Sleep With The Fishes ($2, #6) is a weird, sloppy survival horror microjaunt.
Also in the mix: floating island eco-survival game Solarpunk ($23, #8), which made multiple charts above, tho underperformed vs. organic shortform-impelled wishlist hopes - and Mole ($13, #9), a short(er) claustrophobic indie horror game. Great stuff!
Steam Summer Sale winners, next week’s notables
