Scary baboons, sim hits: the state of Quest discovery in 2026
Also: this week's Steam hits & lots more.
[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 meander towards the weekend, time to uncork some more insights for you wondrous GameDiscoverCo readers - with the main story poking at the state of the Meta Quest VR game market in 2026. (Which isn’t dead, but is certainly radically changed from its direction of travel 2-3 years ago….)
Before we start, there’s been a recent Tamagotchi tragedy, and yes, they’re still making those standalone electronic virtual pets: “Bandai Namco… reported that its latest Tamagotchi Paradise device was found to contain a glitch that makes the game behave unusually when pets in certain age ranges above 256 die.” (No ‘peaceful death’ for ancients…)
[FREE DEMO OF GDCo PRO? You too can get a gratis demo of our GameDiscoverCo Pro company-wide ‘Steam deep dive’ & console data by contacting us today - >95 orgs have it. Or, signing up to GDCo Plus gets the rest of this newsletter and Discord access, plus more.]
Game discovery news: 007, Forza top the hype…
Let’s have a careful look at the latest game platform & discovery news, which goes a bit like this:
The latest ‘trad media’ coverage from ICO’s Footprints.gg is topped by Bond game 007: First Light, whose release is going down nicely. Also notable: Forza Horizon 6 (previously a smash, still a smash), Grand Theft Auto VI (on the charts til the break of dawn), and Destiny 2 (sadly stopping live-service content updates.)
Since the last newsletter, Valve re-stocked the Steam Deck OLED worldwide, at $789 for the 512GB version (up from $549) and $949 for the 1TB version (up from $649), due to component shortages/costs. And even at those prices, it briefly sold out in North America. (It’s back in stock again as of us writing this, though.)
In ‘which platforms is a major franchise picking this year?’ news, the next Call Of Duty title, Modern Warfare 2, “will be the first entry in the modern series to skip the PS4 and Xbox One”, while also launching on Switch 2 for the first time. (With this and GTA VI, will this be a big upgrade year for consoles, price/supply notwithstanding?)
The Verge’s Notepad newsletter reports on an internal email from Xbox CEO Asha Sharma re: the Xbox Game Pass price cut: “Growth slowed down and subscriber loss accelerated after the pricing and SKU changes last year… Since our price reduction we have seen acquisitions grow and retention improve, which is a good first step.”
A cute little UK physical game sales tidbit from The Game Business’ Chris Dring: “In a very rare sight, a new Xbox exclusive (Forza Horizon 6) outside a new Nintendo exclusive (Yoshi) in the physical UK last week. Emphasis on the physical. Don’t see they very often. LEGO Batman was No.1.”
Discord just launched a ‘trending games’ page on their website, looking at the Top 10 games with the most new players (presumably via ‘rich presence’ data) and streams, with links to Discord servers. As they note: “Over 10,000 unique titles get played on Discord each month, and 55% of users try a new game in that window.”
We found this LinkedIn rant from Tolga Coşkun interesting: “As much as it makes… business sense, Friendslop is one of the worst things that happened to Steam, especially for small studios. It lowered the bar for indie pricing… [and] it obliterated the technical barrier for entry [&] the virality is absurd.”
Could paid ads for PC/console games within ChatGPT be a relevant new market? It’s certainly wacky, but with folks like Adzap getting access to the OpenAI Ads Beta (and other ad firms too, we’re sure), we’ll shortly see how programmatic ads perform within AI agents. (Tell us how it goes, if you try…)
Good intel from Max Power Gaming after UGCon re: Minecraft & UGC: “The platform has roughly 400 approved creators… but entry into the program is essentially referral-only now… creators operate largely without support or meaningful feedback from Microsoft, and veteran devs have learned to be self-sufficient out of necessity.”
Microsoft agreed to pay $250 million to settle, as Stephen Totilo puts it, an “increasingly ugly Activision Blizzard shareholder lawsuit”, which included some slightly bananas counter-allegations from Bobby Kotick, inc. that: “AP7 had brought the lawsuit to benefit the Swedish gaming company The Embracer Group.”
Esoteric indie link: want to understand indie music band touring economics? Cult UK band Los Campesinos financially deconstructed their entire 2024 U.S. tour. (Spoiler: they lost $2,500 on tour costs vs. tickets, despite selling out almost all shows, but made $54k on merch. So… buy the T-shirt?)
OUR SPONSOR: Grow your game with Ludeo
Ludeo turns your creators’ best gameplay moments into instantly playable experiences - no downloads, no installs. Creators share a clip, and anyone can jump in and play it firsthand. Your game gets discovered the moment it’s played.
The Ludeo Indie Dev Program is open to any PC game on Steam, launching soon or live. Selected studios receive creator marketing grants, access to our creator network, full integration support - and for the top 5 campaigns, up to $50K.
Apply to the Ludeo Indie Dev Program by June 15th.
The state of Quest VR game discovery in 2026…
As you know, GameDiscoverCo normally covers PC & console game discovery. But we want to keep looking in areas others don’t. And we’re vexed at the lack of coverage of the VR game market, besides specialist outlets like RoadToVR or UploadVR.
We’re using some basic YTD 2026 metrics - like number of Meta Quest store reviews, and public store rankings on highest revenue and most hours played for games. First, let’s look at the F2P games with the most extra ratings in 2026 so far:
Some of these free titles are ones that have a lot of downloads, but haven’t managed to monetize super efficiently. But the vibes are clear. Meta’s Chris Pruett divided the Quest audience into three segments in his GDC 2026 talk:
core VR enthusiasts
teens and young adults drawn to social gameplay loops
‘casual adult’ users who gravitate toward entertainment and “prefer more natural input like hand tracking.”
And there’s a lot of Segment #2 in this chart, as the offspring of Gorilla Tag (the original ‘casual x friendslop x yell at your friends’ free Quest game) continue to spread. ~Half of these titles - even dino game UG - have you sometimes playing as a monkey…
There’s some other themes, though - Wizherd has you casting crazy spells and dungeon crawling together, Shark Go is an underwater riding/combat game, and VRFS is a soccer simulator. (Oh, and Vail is the rare F2P shooter, but looks like it has lots of younger players.)
One other insight from Pruett that tracks with the above: “The top games on our platform proactively seek out their audience on Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok. Though the titles that have achieved success in the last year have been diverse, one common element between them has been user acquisition through social video platforms.”
Another note: it’s clear there’s rampant issues with social misbehavior on the top titles. If you look at the top reviews for UG and also for Zombonk, there’s multiple “people swore, bullied me and/or took my items” complaints. (We presume the voice chat, pre & early teen audience and cosmetics-led gameplay leads to generalized havoc.)
As for the top paid titles by new reviews, there’s a lot of first-person simulator titles, in particular from New Folder Games, who have expanded the ‘I Am…’ series to include cats, monkeys, and security, and also have a taxi driving game in the Top 10. (They’re the spiritual cousins to first-person job sims on PC, really…)
One interesting thing: a few of these titles, including I Am Cat ($20) and Nightclub Simulator VR ($7), have multiplayer as paid add-on DLC. Otherwise, there’s some evergreen titles in here like magic skull sandbox Waltz Of The Wizard, plus newer titles like hardcore PvP shooters Forefront and horror game The Hole Never Ends.
Turning to the top-grossing title on Quest, which we’ve worked out by looking at the top sales charts every week in 2026 and assigning points for rankings, it’s this:
Notable? Seven of the top 10 grossing games on Quest so far this year are F2P, and the others are serious ‘evergreens’. (That’s Meta-owned stalwart Beat Saber, plus combat ARPG Blade & Sorcery and sandbox title Bonelab, which have unpaid mods galore and just missed out on our ‘most new reviews’ Top 10 at #12 and #16 respectively.)
You can also see a smattering of subscription-based fitness titles (like FitXR and Gym Class), as well as the Virtual Desktop app, and some other broader game platforms like VRChat and Roblox. As for top games by hours played so far in 2026, we get this:
You can see lots of the ‘co-op world spaces’ crowding up the charts, even including some like Rec Room which are just about to close. There’s also casual titles (amazing to see Job Simulator still in there) and one (uno!) core FPS game: Ghosts Of Tabor…
Mini-profile: Scary Baboon’s road to the Top 10…
As you can see above, F2P title Scary Baboon made all of our Top 10 charts for 2026 so far. And actually, the folks at its creator ENVER reaching out to us made us decide to do this ‘state of VR’ newsletter.
And having chatted to them, here’s our takeaways on how they’ve scaled that title. (We believe it has high millions of LTD downloads, and estimate MAU close to 1 million players in recent weeks, after an update):
It’s another gorilla-like, sure, but mashed up with other things: the team noted that “arm locomotion had become one of the defining mechanics of VR”, and also: “light horror also resonates strongly with that same audience. Putting these silly, chaotic characters into a horror setting created a contrast that worked” great.
Monetization is led by, but not defined by cosmetics: the folks at ENVER noted: “Cosmetics are a major part of the model because players care about identity, expression, and how they appear to friends in-game”, but concluded: “Broadly speaking, the model sits across cosmetics, functional items, and upgrade systems.”
Social video, creators and Discord are ‘paramount’ to Scary Baboon: the team noted: “Scary Baboon naturally creates short-form clips: jump scares, chases, and players screaming and laughing together.” The company’s CEO Kyle Joyce is a YouTuber himself, and “creators like Erik1515 (almost 300K subscribers) and Parku (almost 200K)” are also vital. And the game’s Discord is now over over 200,000 members.
Part of the recent success of Scary Baboon, as noted by a new AndroidCentral article, is both recent popular update patches, and “the shift from ‘frustrating PvP’ to a friendlier co-op PvE experience.” So yet again, co-op rule, and PvP drools. (Are we seeing a pattern here?)
Steam this week: 007’s new Romestead Paralives…
