Look, we have to talk about Meccha Chameleon....
Why it exists, and what it means. Also, new GameDiscoverCo Show & lots of 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.]
Well, we’re back, fresh from our baseball faves the Oakland Ballers’ Phish night. (That’s how we roll - hanging with the Phish cover band ‘Chum!’, not grabbing lower-level Lakers tix like those too-cool-for-school Puck writers.) Five days left to enter our ‘Scrappy Saves The Animals’ game jam on Itch, btw…
And before we start, yes, Dbrand decided to make a neat Portal Companion Cube skin for the Steam Machine without licensing the Portal IP from Valve. One Reddit poster says: “You guys are f***ing stupid, you know that?”, to which the Dbrand Reddit account sadly concurs: “Yes.” We can only presume that somebody has a humiliation kink…
[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: cat mail is the best mail…
Let’s take a wander around trending things, platform things, and discovery things, as follows:
Here's GameDiscoverCo Pro's 'trending' unreleased Steam games by 'new wishlists in the last 7 days', June 22nd to 29th. And on the indie side, ingenious co-op bomb defuser Bombanana! (#1) is going giant from its demo, with heavy turret sim Iron Nest (#3) following a strong Next Fest with release date confirmation momentum.
On the AAA side, Resident Evil Veronica (#2) continues as a juggernau & JRPG sequel Persona 6 (#4) is getting much hype too. Also: there’s multiple Next Fest games still trending, and first-person job sim Cat Mail Co. (#9) is tracking nicely ahead of its release. (Cos who doesn’t want to clean up a messy cat postal office?)
In more ‘Steam Machine $ not extortionate?’ news, PlayStation head Hideaki Nishino confirmed: “It is not realistic for us to absorb all component cost increases [for PlayStation hardware]… as a principle, we do not intend to sell hardware at significant losses.” (Reminder: the PS5 Pro went up +$150 to $900 in April, and PS5s are $600.)
An important PSA for a Steam Summer Sale change from me: “If you're getting complaints from Polish gamers over your Summer Sale discounts, it's not a bug. It's actually a Poland-specific implementation of discount %s… due to strict local laws on showing it compared to 'the largest discount in the last 30 days' if the game was off sale.”
Roblox stuff: some excellent analysis of the company’s economics from a bear-ish POV - “a great business that captures little of its own economy”; how Roblox is rebuilding its UGC avatar economy; some real-life effects of its recent discovery algorithm changes - some games immediately down ~70% in CCU, others up.
Third-party publisher launchers on top of Steam? In general, players haaate them, and Owlcat ran into that issue, rolling back its launcher within 24 hours: “Some players claimed that Rogue Trader wouldn’t even launch through it, [and] the launcher itself takes up more processing power from your PC.” (Unclear if true, but etc.)
Xbox things: Windows Central is correct and Xbox has not frozen all third-party Game Pass license deals, despite viral reports to the contrary. (They may be cutting back, sure!) And CharlieIntel spotted that Activision is running ‘not on Xbox Game Pass this year’ text in ads for Call Of Duty Modern Warfare 4.
Steam things: GameDiscoverCo Pro just added ‘Steam page creation date’ to its giant filter set - as we note, “this might be a really interesting way to track games for indie publishing signing”. Unrelated: we guess Valve officially changed the name of Advanced Access to Advance Access. (It’s the ‘pre-order and play early’ flag, ICYMI.)
According to Circana, May 2026’s U.S. game hardware & software market “reached $4.2 billion… an increase of 3% when compared to a year ago.” 007 First Light topped the charts, hardware was up YoY, tho PS5 was down 43% in spending (& 58% in units), due to price increases, and Mat Piscatella notes: “Will be last month with [YoY] HW growth for a... while. Pricing and Switch 2 launch comp will be a nasty combo.”
ICYMI: Grand Theft Auto VI got custom PlayStation 5 OS dashboard promotion like you’ve never seen, inc. “an entire screen takeover animation [on boot-up]… open the PlayStation Store and you immediately see the option to pre-order the game.” Even first-party titles never had it this good - here’s a video.
Microlinks: PlayStation Plus is experimenting with spacing out new game debuts, but only in the US, UK, and Japan (what??); Valve will be hoping for more third party Steam OS-running Steam Machine-like PCs like this one; social media bans may not matter if badly enforced - “Four in five under-16s in Australia using social media despite ban.”
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Look, we have to talk about Meccha Chameleon…
When we do our end-of-month round-up for June’s top new PC games, you probably all know what game will be at the top, right? It’s Meccha Chameleon, the $6 ‘hide & seek x painting’ multiplayer game from a two Japanese indie devs, which has sold >10 million copies and grossed >$50 million since its Steam release on June 9th. Wooof.
We wanted to zig where others zag and skip discussing it, but… it’s just too big. So it’s worth going through some of the things the devs did right, to set themselves to even have a chance at this. But… we’ll get into why this is a bit problematic afterwards:
They had an existing multiplayer game framework to build on: as they explained in an interview, having standalone Unreal Engine titles running allowed the devs to very swiftly stand up their new game. (It uses the free Epic Online Services for matchmaking, and has no dedicated servers, so it scales great and no-cost.)
There was some ‘shipping and learning’ along the way: the devs have 6 games on Steam since late 2024, including co-op bridge building game Link Penguins from April, which sold about 5,000 copies. Epic also claims that “creators lemorion_1224 and Haganeiro spent years prototyping the camouflage and social deception mechanics inside Fortnite Creative.” (Mebbe? Epic’s getting $2.5m engine royalties, at least.)
Bitesized price and good game legibility: look, it’s $6, easy to understand and get into, and you can understand what’s going on with the game immediately. For your other ‘why a hit?’ bullet points, Jon Hanson already did a piece on LinkedIn that’s pretty no-nonsense.
But let’s be clear - Meccha Chameleon is fairly far into ‘unforeseeable megahit’ category. Doing the above won’t make you have a similar sized hit, and I’m not sure that many publishers would have signed it, if it had been presented to them. (It just reads too ‘sloppy’ and gameplay-minimal at first glance.)
The actual inspiration for Meccha Chameleon was clearly a combination of things. And it’s been pointed out that Japanese variety TV shows are a partial antecendent, with stunts like celebrities hiding (& painting themselves!) in big environments:
But in explaining the game to a friend, I hit an epiphany: “It’s ‘Prop Hunt’, but paint to conceal yourself.. I gather the in-game paint program is fun, too, so you get to do art AND hide badly from your friends. It’s silly cos people can see your hiding character model by moving around in 3D space. Everyone disguises themselves super badly… but that’s the point!”
So yes, the game doesn’t have strong, rigid game design, but it works because of the situations it creates when people play it. If you look at the linked ‘Best Of’ video above, it’s clear Meccha Chameleon creates memorable situations. Above all, it’s a framework for players being funny, silly, and creative… and basically playacting*, which is such catnip for streamers. (It’s #3 on Twitch in the last week with 10.4m hours.)
(*That’s part of the charm here. Funnily enough, when my son was younger, he would insist on playing ‘hide & seek’ in a similar way. Me knowing where he was hiding - but pretending I didn’t - was a lot more fun for him than the actual act of finding him. )
This ‘playful novelty’ is tricky to aim for. And I’m going to suggest that even the devs might not 100% have planned for this happen. (Very few devs, with the exception of frequent flyers like Landfall, seem to have a recurring sense for this type of design.)
One big takeaway? We’ve previously discussed the idea of ‘friendslop as TV reality/game show format’ with regard to games like Super Battle Golf. Well, guess what? Meccha Chameleon is another game that’s close to a ‘TV format to showcase human ingenuity’ than a traditional game. It could practically be a Taskmaster challenge….
So are there takeaways? Is any of this rubbish actually actionable? Well, there’s thinking out there about how you play games. For example, there’s designer/academic Doug Wilson, who created no-graphics ‘playground game’ Johann Sebastian Joust, part of the now-free Sportsfriends PC/console compilation.
Back in 2011, I covered a talk he did at GDC Europe, where he said: “In a game setting like a party, ‘it's really fun to argue about the rules’, Wilson notes, citing a '70s theorist called Bernard De Koven, whose book 'The Well-Played Game' argues: ‘It's not the game's that sacred, it's the people who are playing.’”
Concluding: this whole area of games is sky-high reward, but ‘you have the same chances of making it work as being struck by lightning’-adjacent. (There are very few middling friendslop hits, unlike in some other spaces.) But if you want to go there, maybe ask: why would humans be enchanted about the experience you let them create?
GameDiscoverCo Show: hardware, Next Fest, more
Look, The GameDiscover Show is back (above), with me (Simon) and Post Games’ Chris Plante jammin’ on hardware expense, Next Fest & beyond in <40 mins. We also briefly hit something more ‘insider’-y - the restrictions on publisher cross-promo put in place by the ‘you can only have one publisher sale per year’ Steam change.
The second edition of The GameDiscoverCo Show is, once again, available on our YouTube channel (in video) & on Spotify, Apple Music & elsewhere if you’d like to indulge (audio). Like and subscribe, like and subscribe, etc.
SIDE NOTE: Google AI thinks that I present this show with Chris Zukowski of HowToMarketAGame (who we love, tiki drinks every GDC!), and not Chris Plante (our actual, awesome co-host.) Trying to work out why this is exciting to the cursed algo, or Chris P. is going to do a Mission Impossible-style ‘face off’ in a few weeks…
[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.]