Sept. 2025's top new Steam (& console) games revealed...

Also: last month's most-streamed games, and 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.]

Welcome back to what can only be described as ‘another week’. We’re taking a look at the top new video games of last month on PC and console, in what was actually a pretty dynamic September. (Witness: six new games at >500k LTD sold on Steam.)

Before we start, the baseball team that GDCo sponsors, the Oakland Ballers, are now Pioneer League champions! The victory parade was last weekend, and here’s a ‘causation ≠ correlation’ gag: we did a mascot game jam with them, and now they’re champs. So if you want your local sports team to win… just do the same thing?

Game discovery news: kaiju cleanup, cults, oh my?

BREAKING: yes, there’s been some major Steam platform downtime over the past couple of hours. There are claims that this is related to a botnet DDoS attack from AISURU, which fires junk traffic from 300,000 devices at targets (!) We’ll no doubt find out more soon, but - per TCPShield - Riot and Steam were targeted last night.

Anyhow, onward to your normally scheduled programming, as follows:

• Checking GDCo’s ‘7-day trending’ unreleased Steam game follower chart (Sept. 29th to Oct 6th), Battlefield 6 (#1, finally out this week!) is top, with the newly announced Forza Horizon 6 (#3) and resurgent extraction shooter ARC Raiders (#5) in the ‘obvious’ category. (As is MMO reboot Blue Protocol at #4.)

• The less predictable? Brand new game Kaiju Cleanup (#8) is a great concept, a cleaning sim where you’re disposing of (chunks of) giant monster corpse. And Join Us (#9) is a co-op cult simulator with heavy open-world survival elements. (Both seem to have their ‘hook’ down...)

• Xbox things: The Verge says Microsoft has “started testing ad-supported games streaming internally, allowing employees to play select [Xbox Cloud Gaming] titles free without a Game Pass subscription”; Xbox removed direct DLC discounts for Game Pass subs, tying them to Rewards points - thus confused story updates like this.

• New Roblox games burning up the charts? Per Creator Games, both Build ur Base (60k av. CCU) and Plants vs. Brainrots (730k av. CCU), started with “similar tower-defense design, but they leaned into two very different popular Roblox mechanics” - building bases vs. collecting plants & brainrot creatures. (The latter won, bigtime.)

• Discord is launching some new ad formats, including Arena Quests, so that “brands can now sponsor real gaming moments on Discord by rewarding users for playing games within a curated selection of titles or themed bundles sponsored by the advertiser.” (So: a better opportunity for non-endemic advertisers?)

• ICYMI: an exploitable Unity security vulnerability led Steam to patch its client to “block launching a game… if any of the four command line parameters listed in the Unity report are present in the launch request”, and some games got pulled from Steam while they’re fixed, including Pentiment & Wasteland 3.

• How it Epic justifying its ‘in-game IAP now OK’ pivot on Fortnite? Tim Sweeney explained to Crossplay, fascinatingly: “When we make games, Epic makes decisions as a game maker. In Unreal Engine and Epic Games Store, Epic made decisions as a provider of services to other developers.”

• Sweeney’s statement concludes: “As Fortnite and Roblox have both grown… [we realized] the part of Fortnite that hosts content made by independent developers should support their independent creative and commercial decisions, whether they are similar to ours or different.” That’s actually… logically and internally consistent?

• Data tidbits: Circana’s Mat Piscatella shares a graph showing that “only 4% of US video game players buy a new game [>] once per month, with a third of players not buying any games at all”; the latest GSD European (select) weekly charts show Silent Hill F hitting #2, but “roughly a third lower” than last year’s Silent Hill 2 reboot launch.

• A recent Bloomberg report (as summarized by WindowsCentral) suggests, via an ex-Microsoft employee, that “Xbox gave up more than $300 million in sales of Call of Duty on console and PCs last year” by putting in into Game Pass on Day 1. It’s single source, and difficult to ‘truly’ estimate, but would help explain changes..

• Microlinks: Quest 3 and Quest 3S are now used for SteamVR more than Quest 2, according to the latest Steam Hardware Survey; Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 leads Golden Joystick Award 2025 noms, followed by Death Stranding 2, Ghost of Yotei & Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2; why the PC version of Helldivers 2 needs 3x the storage space - it’s largely duplicated data for HDD (vs. SSD) users.

Sept. 2025’s top new Steam/console games, huh?

We thought we’d pause and deliver a breakdown of the last PC/console month for everyone. And it was a pretty dynamic month, y’all. Let’s start with GDCo estimates of the top new games of September 2025 on Steam (above, based on copies sold during that month.) Analyzing for a sec:

• Hollow Knight: Silksong did even better than we expected: based on median wishlist conversions, we’d expect nearly 1m Steam sales in September for Metroidvania sequel Silksong. But it did 5x better, hitting 4.2m paid units there…

• Borderlands 4 & Dying Light: The Beast also performed overall: looter shooter Borderlands 4 racked up 1m Steam pre-orders, and 2.1m LTD by end of month. And survival-er Dying Light: The Beast is tricky to estimate, since some DL2 players get free access, but we have it as 910k paid Steam units in Sept.

• Breakout indies abound, further down the charts: we’ve got 3D Vampire Survivors-like Megabonk (671k in Sept, we wrote about it), Asia-first ARPG roguelite indie Shape Of Dreams (664k), indie horror standout No, I’m Not A Human (493k), co-op space blaster Jump Space (394k) & procedural creepy-gambler Cloverpit (293k, but scaling way beyond that in October!)

Next, looking at the top-grossing paid new Steam titles of the month, you get a lot of the same games, but in a different order:

It’s notable that Borderlands 4 (taking into account pre-orders) wins handily ($135m gross) over Silksong ($68.6m gross) in September. That’s due to its ‘$70 USD and up’ price point, vs. a ‘modest’ - some said too modest, haha - $20 USD for Silksong.

Elsewhere, EA Sports FC 26 makes it to #4 on the chart ($33.6m), and Silent Hill F (which was just outside the Top 10 for units) is at #6 for revenue, with $15.4m grossed. And some other more expensively priced titles like Sonic Racing: Crossworlds ($8.1m) & Cronos: The New Dawn ($5.5m) also made the Top 10 due to yield.

Before we leave the ‘new’ section, a special shout-out to key Early Access => 1.0 launches on Steam last month, including Hades II (which we have adding ~350k units, to 2.5m), Slime Rancher 2 (an extra 75k units, to 1.6m), and Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor (an extra 75k units, to 1.85m.)

Before we hit console, let’s have a brief breeze through the Top 10 performing paid games on Steam in September:

As you’ll see, seven of the ten top titles by units here actually debuted in September. But Helldivers 2 sold an extra 750k units in Sept, due to Autumn Sale discounting & the Into The Unjust patch - it’s at 12.7m now, wow. And Path Of Exile 2 (650k more copies, now at 5m) and Peak (460k more, now at 11.7m) are serious evergreens…

Finally, the overall top-grossing games on Steam in September 2025 - across both paid and F2P - has Valve stalwarts Counter-Strike 2 (#2) and DOTA 2 (#6) in the mix, with PUBG also nestling in there to disrupt an otherwise strong set of debuts.

Now let’s end things out by a brief look through the console platforms. And here’s what GDCo estimates for paid new games in September 2025 on PlayStation and Xbox:

It’s sports titles that dominate paid debuts, with EA Sports FC 26 (8.1m on PlayStation, 2.3m on Xbox) doing tremendously well again, and NBA 2K26 (4.5m on PlayStation, 2.7m on Xbox) also carving out a good-sized hit. (The different Xbox ratios are down to the U.S. market loving basketball, yet merely digging soccer, we think?)

Further down the spiral, Borderlands 4 managed 750k units on PlayStation and 600k on Xbox in Sept. (If correct, that’s a bigger PC launch month than both current console SKUs combined - unlike the sports games, which skew casual & console-first.)

And then Silksong’s totals on PlayStation are impressive for a 2D game - 750k units. We didn’t include the Xbox version on the above chart because it’s a Game Pass title, but we reckon that’s at ~2.1m units, the vast majority GP. So - love all around!

Finishing up with four additional areas that didn’t fit in the above chart(s):

• Xbox Game Pass debuts in Sept. were led by Slime Rancher 2 (2.9 million players), followed by Hollow Knight: Silksong (as mentioned, 2.1m), with Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor (320k) and Sworn (180k) also performing.

• PlayStation Plus Essential titles from September were a little quieter than the norm: Stardew Valley added 770k players for a total of 2.9m, Psychonauts 2 added ~300k players to hit 450k in total. (This compares to some months where high-end PS+ debuts can add 2m players or more.)

• The big F2P winner on console (and PC) in September was Skate.: we wrote something up for LinkedIn, but it’s got 18+ million downloads across PC, PlayStation and Xbox platforms & 4.8 million DAU (!), which is #6 ranked. Its cosmetics-led Steam revenues look a bit slow, though: ~$3m LTD?

• The Switch 1/2 eShop had some strong performers in September: we see Hollow Knight: Silksong with >850k players, Hades II with ~420k players, and Final Fantasy Tactics - The Ivalice Chronicles with >100k. Also charting: Lego Voyagers (82k), Star Wars Outlaws (48k), EA Sports FC 26 (45k), Sonic Racing Crossworlds (38k) - many of which have physical SKUs that’ll increase sales.

Most-streamed games in Sept: DOTA 2 jumps up?

Again, we’re partnering with livestream analytics platform Stream Hatchet to look at the Top 100 most-streamed games from September 2025, analyzing the big (non-China!) game video streaming platforms like Twitch & many other regional outfits.

The Top 10’s above, and here’s the full list of the Top 100 (Google Drive link) with GDCo annotations. Here’s the top trends in September, analyzed in great part (woo!) by Stream Hatchet’s Mark Rowland:

• The Top 10 remained basically the same from last month - with League Of Legends edging out GTA V for #1. But most of the top games dropped significantly in viewership. This is partially due to the end of summer, but also due to the Twitch viewbotting crackdown. (StreamHatchet has more on that here!)

• DOTA 2 was the exception to this trend: Valve’s evergreen MOBA jumped 119% to reach 3rd place on the Top 10 - though this will be temporary, and is thanks to The International 2025, the massive yearly eSports championship that’s in Sept.

• The biggest new games breaking through include EA Sports FC 26 (41.6m hours watched, #11) and Hollow Knight: Silksong (33m, #13) - a big achievement for the latter, as Metroidvanias aren’t typically a live-streaming friendly subgenre. We also have Borderlands 4 (16.6m, #25) and Silent Hill f (16.1m, #27)

But there’s also a lot of other new releases that you heard mentioned above - duh, big September for debuts! Listing them, since the order is intriguing: Dying Light: The Beast (#35, 10.4m), Megabonk (#38, 10.0m), No, I’m Not A Human (#40, 8.5m), Cronos: The New Dawn (#52, 5.3m), Skate. (#63, 4.2m), and Cloverpit (#68, 3.6m hours.)

And a special shout-out to two titles: masocore ‘walker’ Baby Steps (#67, 3.8m hours), which is punching above its weight streamer-wise, and upcoming Riot fighting game 2XKO, which reached #79 and 3m hours watched, based on only a Closed Beta. (Good luck to it!)

[We’re GameDiscoverCo, an analysis firm based around one simple issue: how do players find, buy and enjoy your PC or console game? We run the newsletter you’re reading, and provide real-time data services for publishers, funds, and other smart game industry folks.]