[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 hot to trot, and hitting the weekend by getting back to what we do best: firing PC/console video game data at ya in variegated shapes and sizes until you beg for mercy. Our lead story today (start begging now!) uses our Steam Fan Snapshot panel to look at discovery in a useful new way…
Before we start, our buddies at the Video Game History Foundation have a great new YouTube video out profiling Takumi Kawagoe, a seldom-discussed Nintendo programmer who pioneered the 3D camera systems for games like Super Mario 64. (That’s back in the ‘90s when 3D free-roam games were a relative rarity!)
[THE DEEPEST PC/CONSOLE DATA? You can get a free demo of our GameDiscoverCo Pro company-wide ‘Steam deep dive’ & console data, inc. MCP, by reaching out today - >110 orgs have it. Or, signing up to GDCo Plus gets extra newsletter and Discord access, plus more.]
Game disco news: Blizzard, Wardogs media hype…
Let’s end the week by all kinds of handy game discovery & platform news, as follows:
Our buddies at Footprints.gg/ICO have a new ‘trad media’ discovery chart (above), and it’s a busy one, with GTA VI (new soundtrack reveals) inevitably topping things, but Blizzcon buzz (Starcraft, Diablo, WoW) also charting hard & the released/trending Wardogs and Marvel’s Wolverine also high up in the charts…
There’s a v. unsourced rumor about a 2027 Xbox Game Pass revamp, ft. two main tiers: “Ads tier will cost $12.99 a month… Game Pass without ads will cost $19.99 per month.” There would be no (first-party?) Day 1 games on the service from Feb. 2027, and cloud streaming is an add-on. (The tipper got tier changes right in 2025.)
We used GDCo Pro data to look at trending unreleased Steam demos, and there’s two big new entries: pixel-y sim Graveyard Keeper 2 (#1) had a >25k CCU demo ahead of its debut next week (saves carry across!), and (also) Tinybuild’s cyberpunk shopkeeping simulator Probably Stolen (#2) did well with >10k CCU.
A counter-point on GTA VI sending console hardware sales stratospheric now - according to Circana re: U.S. sales, the week of the GTA VI gameplay showcase, sales were up 14%, but per Mat Piscatella: “PS5 grew 17%, XBS 9%… the combined increase… amounted to less than 8k units.” (They may go gaga when it comes out, tho.)
Steam’s top new release charts for August 2026 are out, and while GDCo already estimated top games, it’s nice to see them tiered officially. Also, top DLC in the mix includes this big STALKER 2 expansion, the Elden Ring Tarnished Pack, & various Darkest Dungeon, Jurassic World Evo 3 & Dead By Daylight DLCs.
Microlinks, Pt.1: Xbox has new Game Pass titles inc. Gears Of War: E-Day & Minecraft Dungeons II and had a Tokyo Game Show streaming showcase; the ‘kid Kinect’-ish Nex Playground got $150m in funding & ‘nears 1m active subscribers’; here’s more about Valve’s Fex & Lepton ARM/Android compatibility layers.
Re: the Steam feature to ‘name your publisher page as your franchise page’ to get a ‘more from this pub’ micro-banner on a game’s details page? Bad news: you can’t pick your publisher page any more. (Reminder: a franchise is specifically games that are ‘built in the same fictional universe, gameplay style, or intellectual property’.)
Roblox things: one hot stat from the Roblox Dev Conf: “Top 10 creators now average $65.7M a year. Top 100: $10.8M. Top 1,000: $1.4M. All roughly quadrupled since 2020.” (Though a commenter notes avg makes things look way better than median!); the Roblox Innovation Awards were won by +1 Speed Keyboard Escape, TTK & more.
Marketing consultant Arnaud De Sousa is not a fan of the Steam AI Gaming Festival. And who knows, you might not be too? (Clarifying notes: it’s a third party fest that Steam didn’t ask for, it hasn’t (?) had any front page visibility, and Arnaud spotted paid/ad elements that might make Valve re-examine it.)
‘Government x games’ things: the Australian authorities will talk to Steam about credit cards being the only age check for adult games (They want ‘fairness’, Steam doesn’t want to add more invasive checks?); the European Union is proposing social media bans for under-13s, with online games possibly part of restrictions.
Microlinks, Pt.2: images of Meta’s ‘Project Phoenix’ MR headset leaked ahead of its unveiling next week; Apple Arcade’s October 2026 additions include a Pusheen-themed ‘cozy cat collector’ & a River City Ransom-themed ‘Survivors’ title (!); top August mobile grossers headed by Honor of Kings, Gossip Harbor, PUBG.
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The one ‘game discovery by player age’ chart you need to see…
You may recall us launching the Steam Fan Snapshot data set earlier this year. It’s now up to >16,000 worldwide Steam players who responded to online giveaways and answered various questions for us, and we’ve tied responses in to their Steam catalogs.
But this time, we wanted to focus in more depth on a core question we asked: how these ‘Steam fans’ find out about video games. The options we chose are above, and here’s the percentages (you can pick multiple answers) across the whole survey:
With the understanding that these are probably less casual players, we still get a strong idea of the spread. Particularly notable?
Word of mouth is the third-strongest method: at 44.9%, it’s behind only long-form videos (57%) and the Steam platform itself (55.8%).
Shortform video and livestreaming are mounting a charge: given they’re somewhat (!) newer, 37.5% and 35.2% is a pretty decent chunk of players.
Live text/chat platforms are still fairly low: for some of us who spend too much time(TM) on Discord, you might think it would be higher than 18%. But no…
So that’s interesting enough. But we also have the ability to filter by player age. And it’s doing that which outputs the chart that really made us sit up and take notice:
Please note that we’ve color-coded this by row compared to the ‘all ages’ ranking. So if you see something in a red cell, less people in that age group ended up using that method for game discovery. And there’s some big takeaways here:
Short-form video has a massive >2x decrease as you get older: for under 18s, short-form is the #2 most important discovery method at 53.5%, even outpacing ‘Steam as a platform’. But for 45-54 year olds, at 20.2%, it’s second to last.
Things like ‘word of mouth’ and ‘Steam as a platform’ are way more stable: ‘Word of mouth’ hardly varies at all at ~45%, except a dip in over 45 y/o-s, and ‘Steam as a platform’ is strong throughout* at ~55% (ever so marginally lower, in younger folks.)
‘Traditional games media’ also has a fairly big spread: unsurprisingly, trad websites are most popular in over 45s for game discovery (42.5% in 45-54 year olds) but dips all the way to 21.2% for under 18s.
Twitch-style livestreaming has an interesting mid-age peak: averaging around 35%, it’s actually a tad lower for discovery (~31%) for under 18s, peaks at ~39% for 25-34 year olds, and goes back down to ~28% for 45-54 year olds.
Discovery from text-based social media is concentrated in the 18-34 age space: your Twitter/X, Threads & BlueSky crew dips majorly to 21.4% for under 18s (from its 27.5% average) and peaks in the 18-24 range (31.8%).
In many ways, this is obvious: it’s a microcosm of how people consume content. But seeing it clearly across >15,000 Steam players reminds us all: discovery methods are changing. A lot. And so this data really hit home for us…
(*Yes, we know over 55s generally are less responsive to all discovery methods in this survey. We presume it’s because they’re set in their ways/know what they like, or something?)
We also wanted to give a practical example of how a game’s discovery methods can be quite different than the norm. Here’s the Steam Fan Snapshot data for friendslop megahit Peak, across almost 3,000 players (>30 min playtime):
One issue with ‘trendy’ newer games is that players of them tend to be paying more attention in general. Still, Peak skews somewhat younger (average age 27, vs 29 median), so you see an underperformance from ‘trad media’ websites and discussion forums, and an overperformance from shortform video and word of mouth, among others.
Finally, we also looked at how Steam tags/genres of games varied by average age (if you played a game with this tag in its Top 5 for >5 hours), but there’s just no room to include here. (Here’s the raw data for that, if you want to check it out for giggles…)
This week on Steam: Aniimo, Trails In The Sky top..
