The surprising % of Steam games not actually bought on the platform?

Well, for some games, at least. Also, an Itch success story & 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.]

Welcome, all! This week, we have mainly been watching the Razor 1911 real-time PC demo honoring 40 years (!) of demo and intro making for the demoscene collective. (It’s quite culturally specific, esp. for aging European computer users, and a tad piracy-adjacent - but we’re here for the art/feels, not the cracks.)

Oh, and thanks to Pixel Maniacs’ organic influencer marketing tool for sponsoring today’s newsletter. (If you want to reach our audience of >43k video game professionals, just ping us and we’ll fit you in the sponsor schedule, hurray…)

Before we kick off, you likely saw the breaking news, but Xbox is decreasing Game Pass Ultimate pricing to $22.99 per month (from $30) and PC Game Pass to $14 (from $16.49), and shifting Call Of Duty from ‘at launch’ to ‘12 months after launch’ for it. We think this makes sense, but not sure it will re-establish significant momentum?

[THE DEEPEST PC/CONSOLE DATA? You can get a free demo of our GameDiscoverCo Pro company-wide ‘Steam deep dive’ & console data by reaching out today - >90 orgs have it. Or, signing up to GDCo Plus gets the rest of this newsletter and Discord access, plus more.]

Game discovery news: Metro, Cartel Pilots do gud!

Anyhow, let’s start things out by taking a close look at the latest game platform & discovery news, going a bit like this:

• GameDiscoverCo's 'trending' unreleased Steam games - by 'new wishlists in the last 7 days', April 13th to 20th - has quite a few new entries & is led by post-apocalyptic shooter sequel Metro 2039 (#1), and shortform viral sensation Cartel Pilots Wanted (#2) - everyone wants to be lawless drugrunners nowadays, pshaw.

• Besides repeat customers like Graveyard Keeper 2 (#3), Forza Horizon 6 (#4) and Fable (#5), new entries include lo-fi 'trolling Todd Howard in the trailer' first person Scrolls-like The Lantern of The Laughless Saint (#8), and pirate city-builder Corsair Cove (#9), both w/strong hooks. (In the latter case, Captain Hook-s?)

• The BAFTA Games Awards saw Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 take Best Game, as it has at most other awards, and Dispatch and Ghost Of Yotei grab multiple gongs, with No Man’s Sky winning Evolving Game and Blue Prince coming out on top for Game Design. (Full awards stream is here.)

• Big box U.S. store Costco seems to be clearing out some of its Switch 2 physical games, with Metroid Prime 4, Kirby Air Riders & Pokemon Legends A-Z all at $29.99. (We wouldn’t normally cover discounts, but we do wonder if it’s indicative of there being less casual Switch 2 cart buyers at retail…)

• Xbox Game Pass is still pushing out bangers while it muses on its future - with Vampire Crawlers joining on Day 1, Kiln and Aphelion also debuting at launch, and even the friendsloppy Sledding Game making it into Game Preview, timed with its Steam debut on April 30th. (Smaller, hotter games might be the thing?)

• Roblox stuff: The Verge spotted that “After swapping the word ‘game’ for ‘experience’… while the Epic Games v. Apple trial was taking place, Roblox is getting more comfortable with using the term ‘games’ once again.” Also: it settled with the state of Nevada for $10m around child safety concerns timed around its new kid accounts.

• Steam released its ‘top new releases of March 2026’ sale page late last week, and while we already covered the top games, we like looking at the DLC Valve puts into the mix: this time including Ready Or Not’s Boiling Point missions (Gold tier) and Icarus’ Dangerous Horizons expansion (Silver tier.)

• ESRB president and IARC founder/chairperson Patricia Vance has announced she’s retiring later in 2026, big news in the game ratings world. (She’s been ESRB president since 2002!) And there’s a search open for her successor, should you want to muse about content ratings full-time.

• Talking of Xbox’s future, there’s one more Asha Sharma internal memo quote (via The Verge) we spotted: “On the product side, our front end is a set of experiences built at different times, where discovery, relevance, and social are not first-class, and players have to work to find what to do next or who to play with.” (The solution? Investment in engineering and data.)

• Microlinks: ICYMI, Tim Cook is handing over the helm (pips?) at Apple to John Ternus; Pew Research looks at why U.S. teens use TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat; there’s a new self-publishing toolkit commissioned by Games London (but also available to those outside of earshot of the Bow Bells.)

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The surprising % of Steam games not bought on platform?

We’ve been on a journey, folks. And it started because we were looking into why some newer AAA releases on PC looked a tad underforecast in our GameDiscoverCo ‘copies sold’ algorithms. The end result? Some notable stats on the off-Steam sales boom for certain types of big-publisher titles - and some guesses as to why.

Let’s start with the facts on Steam review counts, using the example above for Death Stranding 2, because it got complicated recently:

• For bigger games, the default you’ll see is English language on-Steam reviews - 4,034 in this case. Valve’s change last August separated reviews out by language. (We’re still getting devs telling us that ‘recent reviews’ should also be language-specific to avoid regional review bombs, btw - they’re not right now.)

• If you scroll down to the reviews section you’ll see a separate ‘total reviews in all languages’ number - for Death Stranding 2, 10,706 since its March 19th debut. But wait, is that really all the reviews? No, it’s not…

• If you mouse over the ‘purchase type’ option in reviews you’ll see there’s actually been 19,000 total Steam reviews - 10,700 classed as ‘Steam purchasers’, and another 8,400 classed as ‘other’. That’s a… lot.

What are these other reviews? Here’s Steam’s official blurb for them: “These are reviews written by customers that received the game from a source outside of Steam. (This may include legitimate sources such as other digital stores, retail stores, testing purposes, or press review purposes. Or, from inappropriate sources such as copies given in exchange for reviews.)”

We were certainly aware these reviews existed - and track ‘em in GameDiscoverCo Pro. But we tended to associate them with ‘lots of Steam keys as Kickstarter rewards go here’ or ‘game was in a Humble Choice, so reviews ensue’. We pulled data on recent Steam hits (last 12 months, >$1m gross) and found some key ‘high-other’ outliers:

Overall, the median number of off-Steam reviews is around 12% for the entire cohort. You’d probably expect that if people were selling Steam keys via third-party stores and giving out keys to influencers who might end up reviewing, etc.

But a number of recently released $60-$70 titles are showing 30-45% ‘other’ reviews. What gives? Well, for expensive games that people know they want to pre-order, the ‘10-20% off’ options provided by (even more reputable) third-party Steam key stores are very tempting. For example, the upcoming James Bond game is $8-$10 off right now.

And of course, Steam - as default - only gives devs 5,000 Steam keys at launch. But for giant games like Silent Hill F or Elden Ring Nightreign, put out by some of the biggest publishers, they’ll be giving out lots more. It’s leading to a curious situation where up to 40% of these sales are unmonetized by Steam. (Their 30% platform cut is, instead, revenue - minus any discounts - collected by the third-party Steam key store.)

To give you an idea of where the keys might be going, here’s GDCo’s split of ‘on Steam’ vs. ‘other’ reviews for Resident Evil Requiem, still 18% cheaper off-Steam. There’s lots of Chinese and Portugese-Brazilian language keys helping the 42% off-Steam review total:

Of course it’s possible that off-Steam purchases are sold to demographics that over-review, or there’s a lot of promo/review keys sprinkled in. So we can’t take these numbers as gospel. But they’re indicative, at least.

On the other end of the spectrum, here’s key titles that have done well with a low percentage of ‘other’ reviews. These are mainly indie breakouts with a lower price point who aren’t pre-orderable big IP, unsurprisingly. Many, like Mewgenics, don’t seem to deal with third party Steam key stores much at all:

Finally, we also decided to check out the percentage of ‘purchased/acquired off Steam’ reviews by price across this cohort (>$1m revenue, released in last 12 months). We confirmed that, yes, the more your game costs, the more likely you are to have lots of off-Steam reviews. This is related to IP visibility, $ upside of a discount, etc, we think:

Anyhow, here’s GDCO’s full Google Drive document tracking review ratios for all new paid Steam titles with >$1m gross in the last year. Feel free to look around at your leisure. And there’s not necessarily a clean conclusion to this data, but:

• We presume big publishers will continue using third-party key stores when given enough keys, because it bulks up their sales without affecting their margin. (Even if it’s affecting Valve’s revenue, and the off-platform price difference is odd. Valve can’t ‘price fix’ keys, though, so it’s a super complex situation.)

• For smaller breakout indie hits, there’s likely a genuine 5-10% uplift to be had in intelligently using Steam keys on third-party stores after you’re a hit. (But you’re not going to get lots of keys from Steam ahead of release. And dealing with the Wild West of third party stores can be a ‘heavy lift’ for tiny teams.)

Oh, and we’ll be adding a ‘player’ estimate to GameDiscoverCo’s Steam data which partly takes into account the ‘copies sold off platform’ issue, and may reference it. It’s not going to change our copies sold/revenue estimates - we don’t know what people paid off-platform, it could be a Humble Choice, etc - but will nod at off-platform sales.

Getting a front-page game on Itch - a case study

The folks at Luden.io sent along a new blog post about how they kept their game on the front page of Itch.io for weeks. This intrigued us, because we haven’t seen much about strategy on Itch, which is generally an ultra-indie platform.

The game in question, SuperWEIRD: Automation Roguelite, ended up getting in the New & Trending section on Itch, was later editorially featured by Itch admins, but then hit the key ‘Latest Featured’ section on the site.

The full piece is useful, and includes algorithmic optimization of top tags for Itch (!) in it. But here’s the TL:DR for the article, directly from Oleg Chumakov & Yaroslav “Pangolin” Kadyshev:

• Tags on Itch.io are not optional, they are key distribution channels.

• Internal itch.io traffic matters more than external.

• Your banner and page clarity are critical.

• You can influence visibility, but you don’t fully control it.

• There are no easy standard ways to apply for featuring on Itch.

• Itch.io is great if you’re looking for: indie-friendly players, early feedback and initial community-building.

• Itch is not great for massive Steam wishlist conversion, but it is great in a different way.

From its Itch.io launch, SuperWEIRD “got around 2,500 wishlists and a similar number of closed Steam playtest applications.” So not a giant win, but also not nothing. (And there’s been Itch-first megahits in the past, including Buckshot Roulette, of course!) So it’s always good to see a little platform analysis…

[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.]