What are the most-hyped Q1 2025 PC game releases?
We look in detail. Also: Dec. 2024's top new Steam releases & lots of links.
[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 another GameDiscoverCo newsletter, folks. Since this is Friday, we’ve got excellent game discovery news for all, and then our GDCo Plus/Pro subscribers get a look at the top Q1 2025 Steam releases - and Dec. 24’s top debuts.
Otherwise: it’s been a rough week for Los Angeles, which is a place that many top game devs - and game biz people we admire - live. So, to suspend our normal flippancy, please look out for your fellow humans in difficult times like this. Thanks.
Game discovery news: Marvel Rivals enchants…
It’s a quieter start to the year, sure, but we still have a number of game platform and discovery highlights to hit. Let’s take a short amble through them:
The latest ‘trad media’ mentions analysis by ICO’s Footprints.gg service (above) has the smash hit F2P action-er Marvel Rivals at #1, as its first season featuring the Fantastic Four rolls out. Also hot: Elden Ring (& the Nightreign spinoff!), Minecraft, CoD: Black Ops 6, and Fortnite, which round out the Top 5.
Bill Young (Twitch) notes the percentage of ‘Profile Features Limited’ games on Steam has been going up. The % of new titles that didn’t sell enough to have Trading Cards, badges, etc: “2018 = 33%; 2019 = 66%; 2020 = 68%; 2021 = 71%; 2022 = 72%; 2023 = 73%; 2024 = 79%” (Yes, there’s more released games each year, and older games may eventually reach the threshold. Nonetheless, interesting stats.)
It’s not surprising, but the UK has seen a big drop in physical game sales, at £324.4 million ($399 million) in 2024, down almost 35% compared to 2023. The game market as a whole was ‘only’ down 4.4%, but “this means the video game market will sit behind film and video in the UK for the second consecutive year.”
December’s top PlayStation games in North America & Europe saw Marvel Rivals atop the F2P charts - alongside soccer game UFL - and PS5 games dominated by the normal Call Of Duty x sports x GTA combo. (Alien: Rogue Incursion made it to the Top 5 in PSVR2, but it’s slow there - GDCo estimates that’s <30k units sold.)
Game File has the scoop - via court filings in a school shooting lawsuit filed against Activision - that Call Of Duty: Black Ops III (2015) cost $450 million to dev (and sold 43 million copies!), CoD: Modern Warfare (2019) cost $640m & sold 41m, and CoD: Black Ops Cold War cost $700m & sold 30m. (Big budgets.)
One results of Meta pushing its Horizon Worlds ‘metaverse’ & in-world games super hard in the Meta Quest app? Besides core Quest game fans getting a bit grumpy, it’s leading to decreased discoverability for regular ol’ VR games. (And devs are also noting that Gorilla Tag clones are crowding out other new apps.)
How’s investing in games adjacencies in 2025? We nodded at Dylan Collins’ take: “It’s entirely possible for the future to be both knowable and very difficult to invest in. Looking at both creator and Roblox ecosystems (both growing at healthy double-digits), it’s generally difficult for investors to extract value here.. new builders are smaller, more capital efficient and frequently highly cashflow-generative (they don’t need your money).”
The Chinese government officially approved 1,416 games in 2024, including 1,306 domestic and 110 foreign titles. Context: “The 1,416 approvals is up 31.7% from 1,075 last year and nearly 2.8x the total of 512 titles licensed in 2022… [but] well below the 2,095 approvals in 2018.” (No approval req. to appear on ‘Steam global’, btw, but large companies have pledged not to circumvent gov regulations TOO obviously.)
More Switch 2 rumors? Peripheral maker Genki turned up at CES with a detailed mockup of Switch 2, and also made a CG video of the console, and U.S. retailer GameStop’s internal stock-ordering system is now showing microSD Express memory cards marked ‘Switch 2’. So we’re almost there… right?
What’s in Steam’s realtime global top-sellers right now? #1 with a bullet is Marvel Rivals, with Path Of Exile 2 still hanging out handily in the Top 5. Also notable? Warframe performing well due to the 1999 expansion, and PlayStation Portable ARPG remake Freedom Wars Remastered making an initial splash.
The Verge managed to grab Microsoft’s Jason Ronald, who is in charge of ‘Next Generation’ there, to talk Windows x Xbox mash-up plans for games, vaguely. The company’s “bringing the best of Xbox and Windows together, because we have spent the last 20 years building a world-class operating system, but it’s really locked to the console.” First port of call: better Windows interfaces on Steam Deck-like handheld PCs?
Weird & retro microlinks: the most entertaining fix on a LCD screen on a ‘90s Koei Go handheld you’ve ever seen; the new Dungeons & Dragons pinball machine is a roguelite where you can “roll the dice with randomness”; a fascinating new ‘zine’ on how to crack protection on 1984’s Pitfall II for the Commodore 64.
Q: the most-hyped Q1 2025 PC game releases?
