Revealed: the top announcements of 'Not-E3' 2025
Also: two giant Steam debuts for the week, and 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.]
We’re back in the area, we’re taking no caca, and we’re happy to crescendo our ‘not-E3’ and Summer Game Fest coverage - with a giant round-up of games whose trailers got people the most excited. (We did this last year, but we’ve expanded it!)
Before we start, we’re pleased to see Internet jokester Pixelated Boat bring a close to all that recent ‘how many people actually made that game?’ controversy, simply explaining: “If Hideo Kojima can make Death Stranding all by himself there’s simply no excuse for other solo devs not to be making games on a similar scale.” (He’s got a point…)
Game discovery news: all about the overlap, baby!
OK, let’s get going here with a whole buncha game discovery & platforms news, before it gets stale and nostalgia-festooned:
Going back to the ESA’s ‘Essential Facts About the U.S. Game Biz’ report (.PDF), we love player surveys that show multi-platform crossover for game platforms. And this one’s a great example: of the surveyed U.S. players, 21% of players game on console, mobile and PC all at once, 31% just on mobile, and 7% solely on PC.
From that same ESA report (above), interesting to see breakdowns of platform per generation. Mobile’s played truly by all ages at 80%+ penetration, and console massively drops from 69% (Gen Alpha) to 7% (Boomers/Silent Generation). Oh, and gender splits also interesting - with ladies overindexing on mobile (+9%).
Nintendo announced that the Switch 2 has sold 3.5 million units globally in its first 4 days, the “fastest selling Nintendo system ever.” Polygon notes: “For comparison, PlayStation 5 shipped 4.5 million units in its first 7 weeks, PlayStation 4 sold 2.1 million in [>2] weeks, and Nintendo Switch sold 2.74 million in its first month.”
One idea that stood out in Matt Hackett’s latest ‘game concept ramp-up’ newsletter: “Should trailer-led game development be more of a thing?.. The idea is that, instead of spending weeks or months making an entire game, you quickly make a trailer in just a few days... Then, blast that out all over the web to see what people think.”
PlayStation had a big game division presentation & ‘fireside chat’ with CEO Hideaki Nishino and studio head Hermen Hulst, with lots to look at. (Check out the presentation .PDF for a variety of interesting graphs & data. We’ll have full analysis of it in next week’s newsletter.)
Revenge Of The Savage Planet’s Alex Hutchinson is second-guessing its recent Xbox Game Pass launch, saying: “What we've seen is that content has been devalued and that people are less willing to pay for things, which in the long run will likely mean less games being made and a lot more studios going under.” (FWIW: we don’t think Game Pass cannibalizes much, but the large-scale supply/demand problem is real.)
Want to check out a prototype Steam Deck? One was sold on eBay earlier this year, and as Notebook Check explains: “it was clear that Valve was prototyping the Steam Deck with an AMD Picasso-based APU, 8 GB of RAM and 256 GB of storage.” It’s from November 2019, and Bringus Studios did a full video breakdown on it.
Is the Switch 2 the ‘last game console’? To Carli Velocci, it feels like it, in a piece suggesting the ‘death of consoles’, outside of Nintendo: “Which device matters less in a world where video game consoles are being replaced by cloud streaming, subscription services, and a world where the console makers themselves have other interests.”
Per a Niko newsletter: "Nintendo has permanently reduced the prices of its first-party games via the… Hong Kong eShop on June 1, 2025... The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild [is] being reduced from 499 HKD ($63.60 / RMB 457) to 399 HKD ($50.85 / RMB 365)." On Steam, Black Myth & Stellar Blade are RMB 268, so we get why…
Microlinks: PlayStation Plus’ Game Catalog for June includes FBC: Firebreak, Battlefield 2042 & Five Nights at Freddy’s: Help Wanted 2; what brands can learn from How To Train Your Dragon’s Roblox success; iFixIt opened up a Switch 2 and gave it a third-party repairability score of 3/10. (Nintendo doesn’t want ya to!)
Finally, the AIAS & friends’ 2025 Game Maker’s Sketchbook - promoting the best art made for games, from character art to UI - were on display at SGF Play Days last weekend, and you can see the winners here & buy prints over here. (We’re partial to this custom 100+-character poster from Nimit Malavia honoring entries.)
Revealed: top announcements of 'Not-E3' 2025
We summed up a few ‘not-E3’ showcase highlights in Tuesday’s news section. But now there’s been a bit of space - at least 5 days - after all those showcases, we have a chance to go a lot deeper. So let’s see - which games made the biggest splash?
The way we’re doing this is by looking at Steam followers & wishlists in the 5-day period after the trailer debuted. We found 704 unique games* in the ‘not-E3’ period with Steam pages, and here’s a giant GDCo Google Drive spreadsheet with every single game listed! (*About 50 of these didn’t have a Steam page, the highest-profile being PlayStation-first titles like Marvel Tokon & Ghost Of Yotei. They’re listed at the bottom.)
Let’s start with Steam followers - players who clicked to follow the game’s news section, a real, verifiable stat. Here’s the Top 10 by new followers across all showcases:
Some brief notes on this Top 10 - which has some very obvious entries, some less obvious ones, and one semi-surprise debut:
The obvious: Resident Evil Requiem, Atomic Heart 2, Grounded 2: yes, the latest in Capcom’s seminal survival horror franchise, the sequel to ‘Soviet Robo Disneyland Paradise’ adventure Atomic Heart, and the follow-up to Obsidian’s ‘honey I shrunk my survival game’ hit all charted Top 10, and we’re not surprised.
The less obvious: ILL, Chronicles: Medieval, Pragmata: Team Clout’s very icky ‘body horror’ shooter ILL made a real impression at SGF; Chronicles: Medieval rode its ‘vast medieval sandbox’ hook high in the charts; Capcom’s sci-fi action game Pragmata was first announced in 2020, and its return was heralded…
One semi-surprise: The Expanse: Osiris Reborn: it debuted in the relatively lower-profile Future Games Show. But CRPG specialists Owlcat appearing to go BioWare/Mass Effect-y, using the critically acclaimed hard sci-fi books/TV series, really struck a chord with the audience.
Besides a heady mix of horror, medieval, and sci-fi genres, and a tendency towards gritty action, there’s no precise formula here. None of the above games look cheap, though. Guessing they start at $10m dev cost, and go up precipitously from there.
Anyhow, GameDiscoverCo is now also algorithmically calculating Steam wishlist estimates for our GameDiscoverCo Pro clients. So - although extrapolated - we wanted to look at the 5-day Steam wishlist trends for the top games, too:
To be honest, it’s not that different, with more mainstream games having more wishlist adds and less people clicking ‘follow’. Whereas veteran Steam players (used to checking strategy games that have a lot of news updates!) will click ‘follow’ more….
Other than charting Mortal Shell II, this mainly dropped the chart ranking of games like The Expanse, since a lot of hardcore CRPG fans enjoy Owlcat’s other games, and Jurassic World Evolution 3, which we estimate has a lower 7-8x ‘follower to wishlist’ multiplier. (But there’s still plenty of interest, don’t panic, etc.)
We also wanted to list the rest of the Top 30 ‘wishlists increased’ games. We think ~20 of the 700 titles added 100k Steam wishlists in the 5 days after they were showcased, btw:
Plenty of very notable games in here, too. So, vaguely trying to subdivide these with the new Top 10 entries, we get:
Gritty Souls-likes with grimdark overtones: Mortal Shell II, Code Vein II (in anime flavor!) Nioh 3 (in samurai flavor!)
‘Boy, cartoons got weird’ offkilter takes: thinking of you, Into The Unwell, but also Mouse: P.I. For Hire and sorta Felt That: Boxing. (Is this all the fault of Cuphead, Bendy & The Ink Machine and that Dr. Who episode?)
Big licenses/IP, but also interesting games? Particularly 007 First Light, from the Hitman creators - but also RTS Game Of Thrones: War For Westeros and the co-op friendly Lego Voyagers.
It’s very difficult to sum up all the diverse genres and styles of game via a single trend, though. There are multitudes contained here - and also plenty of great games further down the charts. These are just the titles making the biggest splash right now…
Talking of splash-making, we also calculated the median 5-day Steam wishlist increase for each of the ‘not-E3’ showcases. And it shows up as follows:
Nothing particularly surprising here, in terms of Summer Game Fest being the top showcase (a median of 42,500 extra wishlists after 5 days), followed by the Xbox showcase (29,300) and PlayStation (22,800 - but some of their games didn’t have Steam pages yet.) Some of this is correlation vs. causation, but it’s still relevant…
From there, it’s Future Games Show and PC Gaming Show clearly ahead of a lot of the other excellent/worthy showcases - Day Of The Devs, Wholesome Direct, etc. (And yes, we left the Devolver Direct out because it’s entirely devoted to one game which added 51k wishlists, which would’ve put it #1. Did you do this just to game our charts, Devolver? :P)
Finally, would you like to know the breakdown of announced platforms across all 700+ games? Of course you would:
Our main comment on this? Duh, Steam is a big deal, and PlayStation edges ahead of Xbox on the console side of things. But we were surprised about the small amount of games specifically confirmed for Switch 2.
In fact, it seems like Nintendo’s inability to hand out early dev kits en masse has been a real issue for third-party game dev on it. Hope they get a hold of that soon. (Or perhaps they’re fine with devs shipping Switch games that also play on Switch 2, since the backward compatibility works just fine.)
This week on Steam: Stellar Blade, Dune dominate
Finally, for our GameDiscoverCo Plus & Pro subscribers, here’s some analysis on the top new Steam PC game debuts of the week - with two games in particular vaulting above all of the others. Let’s start by looking at the chart sorted by top CCU: