[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.]
End of week, almost time to clock off, so we move forward. And today’s lead story looks at Valve’s good ‘ol Steam Deck, as we take another look at the games that work best on it, a year after our first attempt…
Before we start, yes that’s comedian John Mulaney playing EA founder Trip Hawkins in the full trailer for the Nicolas Cage-starring John Madden biopic. (Trip says John’s “a wonderfully believable supernerd, and the script and cast nailed the heart of the story”, and it’s fun that the trailer references the technical limitations delaying the first Madden.)
[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 discovery news: how many needles, again?
Let’s finish up the week by examining some notable discovery and platform news for games, as follows:
Checking in on the top Steam demos for unreleased games by concurrent players, as of Sept. 23rd, 2026, according to GameDiscoverCo Pro data, and with Graveyard Keeper 2 (last week's #1) now launched, cute anime desktop companion Character House is #1 with a rocket, showing almost 30,000 CCU.
From there, cyberpunk shop job sim Probably Stolen (#2) is still performing at ~10k CCU. There are two 'find the needle' first-person search games in the Top 10 (!), with Find The Needle (#3) followed by Needle In A Haystack at #7. Also new: sailing friendslopper Grr Grr Gnomes at #4 (2,700 CCU).
Want to feel better about our recent ‘is the game biz sustainable?’ Steam analysis? Adriaan de Jongh pointed out: “Release your games multi-platform (desktop, mobile, console)… Steam makes up for “only” ~20% of Hidden Folks’ multi-million dollar revenue.” Also: maybe “finding a niche” & fans gets you away from the red ocean?
Roblox things: social deduction game Murder Mystery 2 & viral hit Steal An Egg were the platform’s biggest titles by average CCU in August 2026; Offpath’s Tim Elliott made a great tool exposing ‘earning efficiency’ on Roblox, showing games like Gakuran & Grand Blue hitting the Top 50 by $, despite ~10k average CCU…
China game consultant Wojtek Jaworski did a video walkthrough of big Chinese mobile Steam ‘mega-app’ Heybox, “using a few different titles, including Iron Nest: Heavy Turret Simulator and Kingmakers, to show what a single game page can tell you.” (Reminder: Heybox is a fairly big deal and we covered it in depth back in April.)
Meta VR updates: Janko Roettgers sums up the new $1,300 VR Glasses as “the company’s biggest bet on TV-like entertainment to date”, as some games like ‘no controllers needed’ Beat Saber got showcased. But as M.G. Siegler notes: “Meta unveils the Vision Pro Apple should have shipped.” (It’s not really games-first..)
We looked at most-watched games on Twitch, ‘released in the last month’ edition, using GDCo Pro data. And EA Sports FC 27 pipped Wardogs to #1 (but both are ~10m hours watched in the last week!) Also hot: Silent Hill: Townfall, Aniimo, NBA 2K27, Control Resonant, and further down, Active Matter & The Plant Shop.
Trend-analyzing media smart guy Doug Shapiro posted something (semi-paywalled) about how “the relationship between time and value is breaking down” in media. A must-read & made us think of ‘incremental games’ on Steam which are a) inexpensive and b) compressed in a lot of ways, gameplay-wise. (It cites a BCG estimate that $0.70/hr was the average video game spend in 2025, inc. mobile.)
Also in Meta’s presentations: fascinating that the pivot on the Horizon virtual world/UGC creator is multi-platform and AI-first, with tools to “turn any idea into a complete 2D or 3D mobile game.. with progression systems, balanced difficulty, art direction, multiplayer, and more.” (And easy publish to Facebook & Instagram?)
Microlinks: Discord is launching its age estimation tech, noting “more than 90% of you won’t be asked to confirm your age”; People Playground is the latest game affected by Steam Workshop hacks; the top ‘trad media’-mentioned games of the week include GTA 6, Control Resonant, Physint & Silent Hill Townfall.
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What’s Steam Deck’s biggest 2026 hits & genres?
We ran a piece about the games played the most on Steam Deck in Sept. 2025. A year later, we thought we’d check back in, with an overview of Valve’s SteamOS-powered PC gaming handheld. (We only have vague third-party sales LTD estimates, but we’re guessing 6-8 million are out there, up from 5-7 million last year. Could be more, tho!)
So it’s hardly the 23 million shipped of Switch 2. But it’s def. a platform that appeals to existing Steam fans who want to play on the go. And we do have some data to draw on to talk about both overall popularity and ‘most Steam Deck-ish games’.
Firstly, there’s a Steam Deck Top Played official chart made by Valve. Thus - here’s the most-played games overall on Deck in the last 12 months:
Notable: there are some new games shouldering their way in since 2025, with roguelike deckbuilder Slay The Spire 2 - only released in March - still making it to #1. We’re guessing the game’s 50 hour media playtime (!), per GDCo data, is a big reason…
Also notable in here: slick ARPG Hades II (#2), other roguelite-y entries like Megabonk (#4) and Ball X Pit (#9), and stalwarts like Stardew Valley & Balatro still in the Top 10. A lot of these ‘feel’ like handheld-ish games, but there are others that don’t 100%, like Baldur’s Gate 3 (#5), Palworld (#7), and Cyberpunk 2077 (#11).
So that’s interesting - but perhaps not unexpected. What we wanted to do next, though, is revisit the only external way to see interest in Deck across all Steam games, which is ‘see what % of the reviews were made after playing >50% on Deck’. So we looked across all games with >$1m grossed and >100 Deck reviews, and found this:
So, as last year, the very highest end is around 19% of Steam reviews from players who majority played it on Deck, and:
The Top 3 games are the same as last year: since we’re looking lifetime, they’ve retained those review %s, and delightful ‘fake game platform’ compilation UFO 50 is still #1 at 19.2%. (Minishoot Adventures & Dungeons Of Hinterberg are next.)
New entries in the Top 5? Mina The Hollower & Rogue Prince Of Persia: not surprising to see retro 2D love letter Mina up there with 13.7% ‘majority Deck’ reviews. And while we don’t think Rogue Prince Of Persia performed as wanted, 13.5% of players ‘majority Deck’-ed it - and even more partially, we presume?
The rest of the Top 10 had some other titles that feel really handheld friendly, including vampire life sim Moonlight Peaks (#10 with 12%, and one of the top-performing third party Switch games of the year), as well as narrative/social RPG Bloomtown.
Here’s a look at #11 to #30, inc. Discounty and Caravan SandWitch, and honestly, one of the main takeaways we’re having here is - if your game is reviewed in high percentages by Steam Deck-first players, you’re also going to do decently on Nintendo Switch. (And less so on Xbox/PlayStation.)
In fact, we found multiple examples of games above selling 50k units on Steam & another 50k on Switch. It differs a lot, and it’s not huge multi-million seller #s. But for smaller indies, being able to straddle Steam Deck & Switch interest for cozier & more pixel-art led games is a really good multi-platform strategy.
Finally, we did something we didn’t try last year, and looked at median ‘majority Steam Deck played’ review percentages across all of Steam’s genre tags. This gives you a great idea of the kind of genres people love to ‘snack on’ on the Deck:
The overall tag median is just 0.55% of reviews being Steam Deck majority-played - and here’s our full data set, But the higher % tags (above) include things like 2D Platformer (2.3%), Roguelike Deckbuilder and Metroidvania (2%), Boomer Shooter (1.7%), and JRPG and Farming Sim (both 1.5%).
And the kind of games people really don’t want to play majority (or at all) on Steam Deck? That’d be the above genres, with Grand Strategy (0.12%) and MMO (0.1%) at the very bottom, and going up from there, Colony Sim (0.2%), FPS (0.22%), Base Building (0.26%), Idler (0.34%), Looter Shooter (0.37%), and near-median, CRPG (0.52%).
Based on some data we’ve seen, we believe that Steam Deck playtime is 2-4% of many publisher catalogs, but can rise as high as 10-20% or more for some specific titles. That’s enough for you to keep an eye on and optimize compatibility for certain genres, but not enough for you to mount an entire Steam Deck-specific strategy?
This week on Steam: FC, graveyards, resonance..
