November 2025's top new Steam games revealed...
Also: lotsa lotsa news & this week's Steam debuts...
[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 veer dangerously close to the weekend, time for another GameDiscoverCo newsletter, this one filled with known knowns (and unknown unknowns) from November 2025’s PC and console sales countdowns…
Before we start, we wanted to hype a fundraising campaign from the Video Game History Foundation, timed around Giving Tuesday - consider giving? (Look at their ToeJam & Earl-featuring Impact Report - so much output from a 2-person core org!)
Oh, and breaking news: Netflix’s acquisition of Warner Bros comes with a whole bunch of video game studios and IPs, including Mortal Kombat, historic Midway IP, and more. We’ll see what the company does with WB Games if this closes, huh?
[NEED PC/CONSOLE INSIGHT? Companies, get a free demo of our GameDiscoverCo Pro company-wide ‘Steam deep dive’ & console data by contacting us today - ~85 orgs have. And signing up to GDCo Plus gets the rest of this newsletter and Discord access, plus more. ]
Game discovery news: Fortnite, ARC Raiders = big
Taking a look at the hottest new game platform & discovery news, as we inevitably do, we’ve got the following:
The latest Footprints.gg ‘trad media’ charts (from ICO) sees Fortnite atop the media mentions chart, as the Zero Hour live event hit 10.5m CCU. Also hot? ARC Raiders and Battlefield 6, of course, but also Wuxia RPG Where Winds Meet, which is Top 20 grossing on Steam right now, even tho it’s 1am China time.
Netflix updates: the pivot continues, with a new mobile daily puzzle app, Netflix Puzzled launching, and chill MMO studio Spry Fox spinning off to be independent again. (They’re still planning to launch their Spirit Crossing title via Netflix on mobile, but are open to being on other platforms now, too.)
Yes, RAM prices are on the increase, but were you paying attention to how much? UK outlet Eurogamer has a good piece: “At the higher end of speedy 64GB DDR5 RAM, you can find prices as high as £735 (up from £228!) making it more expensive than a PS5 Pro.” (This is a big deal for console hardware & Steam Machines.)
The PC Gaming Show Most Wanted streaming showcase ran yesterday, and had lot of interesting debuts, including a new Starship Troopers retro FPS and SOL Shogunate, “a J-rock-infused samurai space opera from the developers of Horizon and The Witcher.” Here’s everything revealed.
After Tuesday’s newsletter, someone asked us about the exact LTD wishlist totals for The Last Caretaker. Last week (almost a month post-launch), it had 640k adds, 29k deletes, 62k purchases off wishlist, and 900 gifts, for a wishlist balance of 549k. (GDCo estimates it had ~200k launch wishlists - that post-launch surge is normal.)
Microlinks, Pt.1: here’s a good John Davison op-ed on discovery & why “players don’t move through funnels anymore… they move through fragments”; Clair Obscur is the most-downloaded third-party Xbox Game Pass title of 2025; Stream Hatchet included our data in a look at Advanced/Early Access strategies & livestreaming.
Valve’s push for Windows games on Linux for Steam Deck is well-documented, but for Windows games on ARM processors? Less so, so this Pierre-Loup Griffais interview discussing how Valve has been helping fund the FEX emulator and continues to push ‘play Windows games on other devices easily’ is notable.
Reddit game tales: this dev got 4,500 wishlists in 7 days for his new game Stop The Press, and details how/why; another indie hired a marketing agency to do outreach and got ~50 wishlists, so claims DIY grunt work is better (YMMV!)
A new Switch eShop innovation? Nintendo added a ‘more from this publisher’ link at the bottom of each eShop game page for cross-promo. (The bad news we just heard? Allegedly, you have to set it manually for each game and territory. Augh.)
Microlinks, Pt.2: Pew Research has numbers on U.S. social media use, headed by YouTube (84%) and Facebook (71%); the UK gov’s information commissioner is turning to kid privacy in mobile games; Circana says the (Kinect-like!) NEX Playground was #2 in U.S. hardware sales recently, beating individual PS5 SKUs.
November 2025’s top new PC (& console) games..
Every month nowadays, tada - here’s GameDiscoverCo’s estimates of top new PC games of the month. Why? Because we think you might want to know. (If you missed them, here’s Oct. 2025’s, and here’s Sept. 2025’s, for starters.) So let’s start out with the top new Steam games of November by units. And guess what - we have notes:
Two deep, hardcore strategy games performed well in Nov: both Paradox’s Europa Universalis V (#1, 547k units) and Ubisoft’s Anno 117: Pax Romana (#5, 352k units) are deep, expensive, incredibly complex games. And they did good - not giiiant, but very competently, and EU V in particular should have a long life.
The rest of the Top 5 is a serious melange of titles: we have the pre-order heavy Football Manager 26 (#2, 430k units), which has had seriously divergent views on the new UX from its core fans, as well as ‘finally on Steam’ OG extraction shooter Escape From Tarkov (#3, 403k units), and CoD Black Ops 7 (#4, more on this shortly.)
Actually, the second half of the Top 10 is just as ‘all over the place’: gotta love the diversity of Steam. There’s everything from driving game Assetto Corsa Rally (#5, 203k units) to ‘F2P turned premium’ webtoon ARPG title Solo Leveling: Arise Overdrive (#8, 152k units). The genres are wild, man…
If you compare to previous months, November was actually a bit underwhelming. Oct. 2005 had eight Steam games with >500k debut sales, and there’s just one last month. And some of the Top 10 were non-cheap to make. So.. many of this numbers are fine, but nobody massively hit it out of the park? And that’s a story in itself.
Next, let’s peruse the Top 10 new Steam releases by revenue (above). Actually, since quite a few of these games were $60-$70, this chart holds up a bit better compared to October - at least down to soccer RPG Inazuma Eleven: Victory Road. (Below that, it dips a long way - we have the #10 game at ‘only’ $2.2m gross.)
Next, let’s take a look at the top-performing paid Steam games by units in November. And - oh, this is far more interesting and entertaining:
As you can see, a bunch of October releases had some serious hangover into November. Here’s some of the trends we can spot:
Those crewlike (or ‘friendslop’, yuck!) titles keep selling: RV There Yet?, which was a late Oct. release, added another 1.7m units in November (to 4.1m), while R.E.P.O had another 730k buyers (to 16.7m!), PEAK another 650k (to 13.8m), and mimic-heavy co-op horror-er Mimesis (cute concept!) added 490k to reach 630k. (All are <$10, btw.)
ARC Raiders and Battlefield 6 are the big 2025 winners in the shooter wars: Extraction shooter standout ARC Raiders added 3.4m copies to hit ~5 million on Steam (and 2m on PlayStation and 1.5m on Xbox), and Battlefield 6 adds 1.5m (and has 9.6m Steam, 5.2m Xbox and 9.5m PlayStation, for an insane 24+ million.)
And then there’s the misc. more surprising big Steam hits - narrative smash Dispatch (1.3m units in Nov, 2m LTD on Steam alone, and another 600k on PlayStation) and 2D extraction-er Escape From Duckov (670k in Nov, 4.3m overall.) That’s some spicy sales.
Finally on ‘all Steam game performance for November’, above are our estimates on monthly revenue for Nov. 2025. You’ll see F2P stalwarts like Counter-Strike 2, PUBG, and Apex Legends mixing things up with… a bunch of games we already discussed.
Sidebar: the ‘mystery’ of Call Of Duty Black Ops 7?
Before we continue, a note on the performance of Call Of Duty Black Ops 7. The reason you’re not seeing definitive Black Ops 7 sales estimates from anyone is that the combined ‘Call Of Duty HQ’ app that Activision uses makes it difficult to differentiate BO7 performance from other CoD modes, esp. on console.
But here’s what we do know:
UK physical retail performance for the Black Ops 7 disc in launch week was 61% less than Black Ops 6, according to GFK data.
Our friends at Stream Hatchet registered 29.4m hours watched for BO7 in Nov. 2025 (~2 weeks of full release), vs. 40.8m in Oct. 2024 for BO6 (first 6 days) - and another 56m hours in Nov. 2024. That’s also likely a >50% underperformance…
We tried to estimate the first 7 days of Steam sales for BO6 and BO7 - including pre-orders - using top-grossing rank only (above), since CCU can’t be used. And we think 1.3m for BO6 and 331.3k for BO7, a decrease of >70%. (BF6 was at 5.7m!)
This is more approximate than our other estimates. And also, Steam is a relatively minor part of Call Of Duty’s universe. But we definitely think the other big 2025 shooters have contributed to CoD being >50% off last year’s iteration. We’ll know more - at least abstractly - in Xbox’s next financials, we presume…
Finally, let’s bring this home by doing a quick verbal rundown of the consoles for November:
Besides Call Of Duty: Black Ops 7, the other new PlayStation releases of November - besides Inazuma Eleven: Victory Road - all sold <100k so far, including SpongeBob Squarepants: Titans Of The Tide, STALKER 2: Heart Of Chornobyl, and Football Manager 26 Console.
Freshly launched on PlayStation Plus, cyberpunk cat game Stray really struck a chord, with 2.1m new players. And Totally Accurate Battle Simulator added ~2m new players, with EA Sports WRC 24 hitting 1.1m new players.
On Xbox, besides the mysterious Black Ops 7, no new Game Pass titles crested 500k players, although Cloverpit and Pigeon Simulator got close. And >200k players also sampled Football Manager 26 Console and the silly Egging On. Non-Game Pass new titles all sold way under 100k, inc. leaders like Silent Hill 2.
Finally, for new Switch and Switch 2 Western eShop games, Kirby Air Riders sold >200k eShop copies - likely multiples more on physical. Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment did >160k (will also retail perform.) Third-party wise, Tomb Raider (85k), Winter Burrow (55k), and Dinkum (25k) were the titles doing the best.
Steam this week: Octopath, Marvel do decent…
