Managing the 'tail' on hit games: trickier than you think?
It's about skillsets. Also: how Quarantine Zone got big & lots of discovery 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.]
Once again, we stand before you not holding a boombox over our head, but rather a series of sequential words designed to lull you into a false sense of security. What comes next? We’re afraid it’s the graphs…
Before we start, GameDiscoverCo’s Matt Styles (head of biz dev) & Simon (founder) will be at DICE Summit* (Feb 10-12, Las Vegas) and GDC (Mar 9-13, San Francisco) if you’re adjacent. Hit us up to chat GDCo Pro & data goodness. (*There’s also a mini-meetup at DICE for Plus/Pro subs, check the #events-meetings channel in our Discord for more info.)
[WANT A FREE DEMO OF GDCo PRO? Studios, get a 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. ]
News: PlayStation achievement hunters = bereft?
Let’s check out some news, pre-empted by late-breaking changes to Steam’s AI disclosure form which make it clearer you can use LLM ‘code helpers’ and not flag:
As we noted on LinkedIn, PlayStation achievement-hunting dev ThiGames had its games removed from the PS Store. (People play ‘The Jumping..’ shovelware series to get easy Platinum trophies.) It wasn’t >1,000 games, but GDCo estimates (above) the removed apps as 150+ total, grossing ~$10m lifetime revenue (?!)
Rockstar is trying to get its UGC plans sorted by launching an official GTA V paid mods marketplace on Cfx.re, the creators of the FiveM mod framework, and who Rockstar bought in 2023. (The paid mods page makes sense, tho right now, companies like Tebex help modders monetize their FiveM servers.)
Valve announced its Steam events for the second half of 2026, alongside reg for them. It’s unsurprising, with Next Fests in Feb, June, and October, the quarterly sales the same as 2025, and a similar ‘fix’ for no megasale on Black Friday: ‘We plan to highlight games doing… discounts by directing traffic to the Special Offers hub.”
Is there one game biz, or lots? We liked this The Game Business thinkpiece with various imagined subdivisions of game-ish experience, inc. ‘AAA Console/ Forever Games/ Indie/ Mobile’ (by Nicholas Lovell) & ‘Stories / Socializing / Competition&Sport / Passing The Time’ (by Christopher Dring.)
Following up on the late-breaking news in Tuesday’s newsletter: as Meta further exits VR game dev, Armature got closed as well as Twisted Pixel & Sanzaru, with the Supernatural fitness app mothballed & Camouflaj no longer making games, and dev on the Batman VR sequel (at Sanzaru) stopped. (It’s a biig pivot.)
Aream’s Q4 2025 quarterly video game report has handy high-level data on the whole biz: “M&A volume grew 34% YoY to 39 deals, with deal value settling at $0.5bn.. public market financing reached $1.7bn, anchored by Tencent investment in Ubisoft… Mobile IAP spend stabilized at $20.7bn.”
China’s official gov regulator approved 1,771 games for mobile, PC and console release in 2025, the highest since 2018, though “1,676 were developed by domestic studios, while foreign projects accounted for just 95 approvals.” (Reminder: on PC, ‘Steam Global’ is played by a lot of folks in China anyhow, sidestepping ISBN.)
PlayStation things: check Sony’s most downloaded PS5 games for 2025 in the US/Canada (NBA 2K6, Battlefield 6, GTAV) & Europe (EA Sports FC 26, GTA V, EA Sports FC 25), with PS4 headed by Red Dead Redemption 2; PS+ Game Catalog for Jan. 2026 includes Resident Evil Village & Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth.
Don’t sleep on the Minecraft-ish Hytale ($20-$70) cos it’s not on Steam: reports say 2.8m CCU at one point, it’s #3 most-watched on Twitch over the last 3 days, and there were 1m mod downloads in ~48 hours. (A wild ride for a game that was mothballed by Riot and then bought back by a Hytale OG - but ‘Riot sized success’ vs. ‘standalone company success’ may explain why everyone comes out happy.)
Microlinks: Steam’s Community Awards for players awarding reviews, guides & forum posts are back, minus the gamified points transfer element; Nintendo’s share price is down 33% in the last 5 months on price hike worries; the top-grossing mobile games of 2025 are headed by Honor Of Kings & LastWar: Survival.
Delicious macro-research into attention? That’d be this global McKinsey report into monetizing attention in media from mid-2025, and this more recent UK-specific variant which is more granular (in a good way!) on time vs. $ spent - for everything from book to video games to live music.
In-depth: managing the ‘long tail’ on hit PC games
The subject of ‘catalog management’ is sometimes overlooked for PC and console games. Which is weird, because when a game is actually ‘evergreen’ and making great money, it’s a great time to optimize. (Even 10-15% revenue uplift can be a chunk of change.)
So when we were approached by Sebastian Bastani from Rekoup - one of a number of companies doing long-tail revenue services in addition to self-publishing support - we thought it was a good time to look at it. And they have a case study - Subset Games’ two strategy classics FTL (2012) and Into The Breach (2018), which have both grossed many millions of dollars.
According to Sebastian’s comments in late 2025, “Into The Breach had +46% revenue and +130% units vs last year… and FTL: +46% revenue and +61% units vs last year”, and that’s PC/console store performance alone, not including sub deals, third-party sellers, etc.
Impressive numbers! And there are other folks like IndieBI, whose partner program uses data from analysts looking at pricing and discount optimization, doing similar. But let’s get real - what do these programs do, and are they worth it? Here’s our view:
Smaller indies - with medium/big hits - want peace of mind: we talked to Subset’s Matthew Davis, and he explained: “We’ve struggled with balancing business and development the entire time we’ve been a studio. Both Jay Ma and I would much rather be making video games than worrying about sales and marketing or managing additional employees.” So this is a clear use case - the outsourcing of a skillset.
Discounting the right percentage at the right time is very important: if you look at Into The Breach’s price history post-Rekoup, we agree it was time to go >50% off regularly, and the sale frequencies are more dynamic. (Switch discount history even more so!) Rekoup also told us “we were prioritizing events that offer
curated visibility rather than just raw discounting”, which also requires thought.
Proactive outreach to platforms on particular deals: Subset’s Davis again noted, honestly, that “Jay and I… don’t have a first instinct to reach out and personally ask storefronts for anything (promotions or otherwise). And usually when I do need to talk someone, my contact information is years (decades!?) out of date.”
One interesting side note: Rekoup’s particular deal with Subset is actually a fixed rate, rather than a percentage of sales, which many other catalog optimizers work on. Subset’s Davis noted: “While we have no objection to revenue sharing, it does seem odd that it’s the norm in games when it comes to publishing/business.”
We’re betting some of you may be thinking - huh, catalog management isn’t that difficult - just stick it on discount at the right times? And we’d agree that in most cases, the majority of the upside is doing just that. (That bit’s not rocket science.) But there’s clearly additional upside here which is more complicated.
The most important of those are: a more careful look at on-platform deal and sale opportunities, featuring through better platform/bundle relationships, influencer outreach for catalog titles, and third-party Steam key distribution, which Sebastian notes is a whole subject in itself*.
(*We may come back to this, but Rekoup closely manages third-party Steam keys, and region-locks games based on price rather than region. They use VaultN, which allows you to fully manage your own keys, but is not a full-service Steam key distributor such as Genba. There’s 10-15% upside here, but a myriad of possible ways to access it, and pitfalls - it’s complex.)
So, this entire process is a time-consuming complexity which sometimes has poor ownership in small and medium companies. (It’s sometimes assigned to marketing folks whose core role is promoting games, and may not actually have a ‘methodical revenue optimization’ mindset as default, tho dedicated roles are getting more common.)
And if you want to see the upsides of being in the right place at the right time with targeted sales? DayZ’s Dean Hall notes that, thanks to its prominent 90% off Steam Winter Sale featuring, “ICARUS sold just under a million new base game units during the sale (984k). We also did quarter of a million DLC units (243k).” That’s… nice?
[ADDENDUM: we’re actively ashamed as to how little of Rekoup and Subset’s interview responses we used in this piece, so here’s a lot more great detail from Rekoup on catalog management and here’s more from Subset on why this approach worked for them.]