What 1 million (immediate!) wishlists for Dear Passengers says about discovery..
Also: Steam debuts this week & lotsa 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, and we wanted to take the ‘intense interest’ in the the latest friendslop breakout and extrapolate it into: what the heck is going on with discovery for games like this, and what’s the risk factors of forging into that particular market?
But before we start, can we just say that Blink 182-izing Pac-Man for a San Diego Comic-Con collab is both a) cursed and b) perfect, no notes. “Fans can also pick up a blink-182 version of the PAC-MAN x 7-Eleven T-shirt famously worn by bassist Mark Hoppus at Coachella 2023.” (Everyone, esp. those alive in 1980, plz chant: what’s my age again?)
[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 - >100 orgs have it. Or, signing up to GDCo Plus gets the rest of this newsletter and Discord access, plus more.]
Game discovery news: Black Flag, Palworld go big..
Let’s finish out the week with a little game platform & discovery news, a little bit like this:
Our friends at ICO’s Footprints.gg put out their latest ‘trad media’ coverage report (above), and the two big winners are the Assassin’s Creed Black Flag remake (zipping over 3m units), and Palworld, which has seen Steam CCU crest over 800,000 again, as it hits 1.0 and (old & new) players come to (re-)explore it.
We just added full Steam demo CCU sensing/analysis to GameDiscoverCo Pro, hence a new weekly post analyzing top demos for unreleased games. Bombanana! is #1 again (booring!), but roguelike autobattler Guildrun (#2), RV repair/explore sim Nomad Drive (#3) and Eggstreme Farming (#4) are new to us. (Megacomplex cave-exploration 2D survival sim Casualties: Unknown (#5) is also doing well.)
PlayStation Plus’ included Game Catalog titles for July are pretty good, actually, including Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, Team Ninja’s Sony-published Rise of the Ronin (>2 years after its full-price launch), Firefighting Simulator: Ignite, Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: Rita’s Rewind & more.
Chris Zukowski recently posted data on the overlap between Steam Next Fest demo players & wishlisters, noting that “the median percentage of players who went on to wishlist the game after playing the demo” was just 19.3%. This isn’t ‘bad’, just normal, and he suggests: “You can’t bring funnel logic to Steam.”
Meccha Chameleon things: a Reddit analyst pointed out that Roblox clones of the ‘paint & hide’ title - some competent, some less so - swiftly topped 200k CCU; analysis of streamer support for the >10m seller shows it’s “#2 most popular new release of 2026 so far by first 30 days’ hours watched (behind Resident Evil Requiem).”
Some analysis from me on LinkedIn: “Interesting to see Facepunch's s&box launch on Steam back in April, show transparent financials, and unfortunately fall on its face a little bit. (It's grossed $4.2m since Early Access, but only $57k so far in July, and CCUs are down to about 500 from 13k at launch.)” Why? I suggest the hardcore fanbase were looking for more Garry’s Mod-ish sandbox & don’t love the top, ‘slop’-y UGC.
We can’t stress enough how important (in a ‘big brain’ type way) Doug Shapiro’s latest ‘mental model of media’ is. If it’s too abstract, just skip to (some of) the bullet points: “Time spent with media is stagnant… attention is fragmenting… the consumer definition of quality is shifting.. monetization per hour is under pressure.”
A little datamining birdie told us Steam might be planning a change to wishlists to both a) allow you to categorize them b) allow you to decide which games you get notifications for. (Although it could also be a misinterpret, or a datamine of a feature they decide not to launch - YMMV, etc..)
Hey, Anna Ott wrote about the other side of the publisher view, the ‘good devs, good ideas’ list: “You know your metrics and what they actually mean… The pitch deck includes a realistic roadmap and contingency plan… Devs really listen to their players… The team already has a plan for what happens after launch.”
GameStop’s meme-y boss Ryan Cohen is saying “sales of physical games are ‘totally irrelevant’ to his business”, not worried about PlayStation dropping physical discs. (Software’s at at 18% of $ last quarter, but ‘collectibles’ - e.g. Pokemon card selling/grading - are at 42% and rising, due to scalping-adjacent pricing.)
Microlinks: Steam announced its themed fests for the first half of 2027, inc. Desktop Companion, Witch, Mountaineering and Shopkeeper; some folks tried to estimate median Steam playtime from public review stats; there’s a new public list of game publishers & funds, available on Github.
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What 1 million wishlists for Dear Passengers says…
So, yep, we’ve been covering ‘friendslop’-adjacent games quite a bit here on GDCo, not least because at least 5 of the Top 20 games by unit* released on Steam in 2026 so far have that ‘jam with your friends in a shared world’ vibe.
(*That’d be Meccha Chameleon, Gamble With Your Friends, Yapyap, Super Battle Golf and, though it’s closer to a looter-shooter, Far Far West.)
So when Flexus’ Dear Passengers puts out one (1!) initial trailer - above - and rockets to 1 million wishlists - and around 30k Steam followers - in just 3 days? It might be time to bust out the ‘wtf’ GIF (from Blink 182, already mentioned today.) Let’s start with the simple - why did this trailer alone go so viral?
Great visual presentation that has clear real-world ‘I could play this’: the ‘ugly but cute’ avatar style that’s established for friendslop is buttressed by a lot of good ideas (players buckling other players into their seats, shooting other planes from the wing, dangerous luggage loading.) The trailer’s ‘target gameplay’ tho, rite?
Streamer soundalikes in the trailer makes it super ‘clippable’: making it feel like a multiplayer gameplay clip is very smart, because shortform video folks will absolutely ‘clip’ streamers with funny hooks. And look, lots of organic (we presume) shortform ‘look at this game!’ publicity ensues.
Easter Egg edgelord-iness makes people feel clever: we’re sure many trad studios would not make Epstein & P.Diddy references in player usernames, or have a bouffant-y world leader thrown off the plane. But it plays well with the Internet meme crowd like the above ‘clipper’, and hastens virality, so… y’know.
The main thing the wishlist success (so far!) of Dear Passengers shows me is that people a) like friendslop games b) are very willing to consider rotating between low-cost ones. If you can go on holiday with your buddies to a new friendslop island every few weeks for $10 or less, why wouldn’t you?
But it also shows how wide-open the market is for PC newcomers. The Ukrainian devs of Dear Passengers, Flexus, are a 70+ person company with “300M+ downloads across 150+ countries” on F2P ad-supported mobile games, including the Splatoon-like Dye Hard, Mow My Lawn and tower-building idler Tower Craft.
As a result, they really understand hook (esp. for user acquisition), which helps explain why the trailer is so on-point. (Though they’re having to defend against AI accusations in the Steam forums, since they use AI visuals for mobile ads/IAP, as everyone in the space seems to. They’re not using AI in this, tho, afaik.)
Of course, the success of Dear Passengers will depend on the execution of the idea, now the premise has been carefully laid out. We see multiple elements in the trailer (esp. around hands) that won’t be easily doable in-game. And there’s no doubt a bunch of casual/driveby wishlists in that 1 million. But who doesn’t want a million wishlists?
And it got us musing: maybe friendslop fulfils a lot of the original promise of the metaverse? Which is, I think - you can hang out and have fun with people’s avatars online while accomplishing things together. Like, uh, throwing each other out of planes…
The other thing to remember, though? ‘Barrier to entry’ for friendslop titles is still spectacularly low, but you have to nail the execution. Somebody in the GDCo Discord noted a trailer for a different plane-based friendslop, Banana Airways, which arrived just after Dear Passengers. It has, uh, 11 followers so far.
So maybe you should look into the ultra high-risk, ultra high-reward world of friendslop for your next game. Or maybe you should try making games like Rogue Carrier, a roguelite colony management game that just announced, which we estimate has ~52k wishlists from dedicated core fans, and 4,400 Steam followers.
That’s a 11.8x ‘follower to wishlist’ multiplier, implying a steady, assured interest in the title & its latest news updates. As opposed to Dear Passengers, at a 35x multiplier, and set to ride a bucking bronco of expectation management to launch. It’s fun… if you like having a stress-related stomach ulcer? (But the payoff if you nail it? Pleasant…)
This week on Steam: SpiritVale, Ore Factory Squad
