[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.]
And we’re back, with our lead story being a further musing on the late-breaking news from Tuesday that Steam is changing how games are promoted on its front page to be, well, even more algorithmic. Should we be excited?
But before we start, a quick PSA. After a multi-month process, our GameDiscoverCo data service has gone from ‘great data, the interface looks a little homespun’ to ‘great data, also nice-looking, contextual UI’. You can see the results for our Pro interface below:
Reminder: you get access to a subset of this data (formerly ‘Plus’, now called GDCo Basic, but same functionality!) when you sign up for our paid newsletter & Discord. And we do free demos of the multi-platform Pro service for interested parties. Thx for supporting us - we can work on the newsletter ‘cos 110+ firms use our Pro tools…
Game disco news: Witcher remaster, Resonant hit..
Let’s finish off the week by wandering through a whole range of game platform & discovery news, as follows:
Our buddies at Footprints.gg tracked ‘trad media’ mentions for the week to Sept. 29th (above), and beyond GTA VI (duh!), the remaster of The Witcher 3, the launch of Control Resonant, and news from Minecraft Live (as well as EA Sports FC 27) rounded out the Top 5 most-mentioned.
PC Gamer’s piece on why so many games have weirdly similar (and forgettable) names has a great Hannah Flynn quote - “suddenly everything's called Rise of the Bonelord: Origins of Dust” and also includes my 2c: “naming isn't that important, since most people buy a game based on video footage… or a recommendation.”
YouTube things: around games, YouTube has quietly rolled out web gaming Playables to over 50 markets, with IAP testing planned for 2027; new creator features unveiled at Made In YouTube include interactive split-screen livestreaming, episodic shorts & more.
GDCo Pro (it’s us!) analyzed the top ‘streamed on Twitch’ games released in the last 6 months, and the top 3 duplicate last week’s: EA Sports FC 27, Wardogs and Silent Hill Townfall. But rising entries further down include Minecraft Dungeons II (#6), Gears Of War: E-Day (#8), Dressmaker (#10), and Ace Combat 8 (#11).
Praise The Verge for explaining this so we don’t have to: “Steam has been accused of being a PC gaming monopoly that extracts unreasonable fees… the 9th Circuit has agreed to hear Valve’s proposal to stop mass arbitration” under the name ‘Valve Corporation v. Users of Valve’s Video Game Platform, Steam’. (It’s complicated.)
The European Commission is going after what it sees as ‘dark patterns’ in games: “Video games should not make you spend more than you want. EU consumer authorities are stepping up action against 9 video game companies, including those behind Candy Crush Saga, Minecraft, Valorant, Clash of Clans and For Honor.”
We at GDCo took a look at the top unreleased Steam demos of the week. And cute anime desktop companion Character House won’t quit, hanging at 23,000 CCU, #2 is first-person search/automation game Find The Needle, which hit a whopping 21,000 CCU, and cyberpunk shop job sim Probably Stolen is at #3.
If you developed a Steam Deck Verified game, it’s now possible to track FPS performance of your games: “The new [Steamworks] chart displays a distribution of framerates, using data from customers on Steam Decks who opted in [to] provide a clearer overall picture of what customers are experiencing with your game on Deck.”
Xbox stuff: a sweeping New York Times feature on ‘em has Asha Sharma saying “Xbox is not for sale*” (*followed by “we will look at the right partnerships, the right operating model”); the Mythic Achievements update rolled out to Insiders; Xbox console users got a splash screen for Minecraft Dungeons II w/Game Pass upsell.
PlayStation things: October 2026’s monthly PS+ Essential games are F1 25, Hunt: Showdown 1896, and the quirky Earth Defense Force: World Brothers 2; the regular PS5 will get a downgraded version of the PS5 Pro’s PSSR AI upscaling tech, as QSSR arrives on first-party titles Marvel's Wolverine and Ghost of Yōtei.
We’re the weirdos who track the top Apple Arcade games by new U.S. reviews. And in Sept. 2026, regular App Store convert Block Blast!+ was the winner with ~4,400 new ratings; followed by Madden NFL 27 Arcade Edition, Sneaky Sasquatch (again!), Subway Surfers+ & fishing adventure Creatures of the Deep+.
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Studios use it to build Steam momentum before launch. Anomaly Control Simulator picked up 2,952 wishlists in two days, at around $0.79 each. Across 224 campaigns so far, creators have posted 15,000+ videos with 287M views on TikTok, YouTube Shorts, Instagram.
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No more (universal) Daily Deals on Steam... is that good?
So, as we trailed earlier in the week, the announcement is out. Steam is changing a notable part of its promotion for its PC game store to become more algorithmic. Breaking down the shift, with a little interpretation, here’s what is going down:
Until now, the key Discounts & Events section on the Steam app/homepage is “made up of curated placements that are either scheduled directly by partners via Steamworks, or by us here on the Steam team.” (In Feb. 2025 there was a major Steam blog post re: the system expanding up to 6 Daily Deals, w/discovery wins hyped.)
Today, everyone sees the same Daily, Midweek & Weekend Deals: if your game is featured, either by being invited by Steam or pitching them, you’ll see one single large revenue spike, as your discounted game is visible as a deal Steam-wide.
The new system, launching in ‘early 2027’, will have ‘dynamic and personalized’ recommendations in this section, but no universal Daily/Weekend Deals. And Valve has already “paused scheduling curated placements” for Daily Deals - maybe the most surprising part of the announce. (Existing deals will still run.)
We spotted Valve doing tests of this change with Midweek Deals, starting a few weeks ago. And there’s also been a move since August to low-level algo-feature unlabeled discounts in that section more: Hooded Horse CEO Tim Bender expanded on this, suggesting those changes “took a source of traffic that was non-existent for niche indies, and suddenly made it the best source of traffic in the entire store.”
So, two big questions here: why is Steam doing this, and is it good? On the ‘why’, Steam says that in tests, they “were able to show 10x more games to customers in a given day in that section. As a result, we saw meaningful increases in store page visits, wishlists, and cart additions.” So, they’re saying: it’s a rising tide to lift all boats.
(The other reason, in our view, is that negotiation over deals in such a busy and tight market has become a real friction / inefficiency. Key comment from Steam’s announce: “Our goal is to let developers focus on crafting the most compelling games and deals for customers, and not spend time trying to convince someone at Valve to feature their products.”)
The end result for deals here? Sounds like Valve “will have new and updated tools to help developers better manage their discounts and sale events on Steam.” But the general idea seems to be: you’ll get ‘X Deal’ featuring in this section for interested players - in smaller #s - more times you are on sale, not just based on a one-time Daily Deal.
And during the test, we did see, for example, that fans of CRPGs were being shown smaller, but still highly-rated CRPGs, instead of ‘boomer shooter that is 80% off today!’ We think there might also be positive ‘platform satisfaction effects’* from this, as players buy more catalog games of relevance to them, vs. just ‘cheap, buy now!’.
(*Related: we’ve always thought the Switch eShop lost momentum in third-party games sales by featuring too many ‘90% off’ games of high hook but dubious quality, due to how its unit-based chart algorithm worked ‘til recently. That’s v. difficult to prove, though.)
Public reactions to the change have been guarded to positive. If you’re a larger entity who has managed to get an excess number of Daily or Weekend Deals in the past*, you might be more nervous. (*Increasingly difficult in recent years, as Valve shifted to a ticket-led system for platform interaction, and got more empirical with Deal awarding.)
But companies with a wide range of titles seem enthused by the possibilities: over at This Week In Videogames, Fellow Traveller’s Chris Wright says “The more a store is personalised and the less ‘blunt’ it is, the greater diversity of games it can support… that’s important because the amount of new games is only going up.” And Hooded Horse’s Bender thinks it’s “a wonderful trade and a big win for both players and developers.”
As for GDCo, we were surprised by the change - we’d just finished a project to track Deals Steam-wide back to 2020, shakes fist 😆. But we think it’s a positive shift that’ll lead to happier players. We expect (incremental) winners & losers on the $ side. But if you make great games, we’d be surprised if you ended up with less $ as a result.
One final note: Steam’s blog post says “more discounted games or sale events will have the chance to be visible on the homepage and elsewhere on Steam.” We’ve heard nothing so far about how publisher/third-party event features will now be prioritized in Discounts & Events. So it’ll be interesting to see what (even partial!) changes take place there…
This week on Steam: Ace Transport Idle Dungeons!
