[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 from Gamescom, for those who gaily attended, and it’s all uphill (downhill?) until the end of the year from here. But we all have a few video games to launch and monitor in the meantime. Let’s get to it…
Before we start, we can’t be the only ones low-key obsessed with the McDonalds UK x Xbox special food menu? Specifically, there’s spicy chicken nuggets ‘inspired by’ the Moa bird in Halo, and, uhh, “Blamco Cheese Bites inspired by Fallout 76’s™ Blamco Mac & Cheese.” You can also “engage with content” and unlock in-game items. Synergy, folks!
[NEED THE BEST DATA? You can get a free demo of our GameDiscoverCo Pro company-wide ‘Steam deep dive’ & console data, inc. MCP server, 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: PS5 gets... ad-supported TV?
Let’s kick things off for the week with a whole mess of game platform & discovery news, as follows:
There’s a new Steam data leak from earlier in the platform’s history. The “so-called ‘teraleak’ contains over 12 terabytes of file depots served through Steam from 2003 to 2013”, including early builds of Valve games (Portal, Left 4 Dead, Dota 2), but also third-party titles with private Steam builds. (Misconfigured endpoint leak?)
An unexpected launch on PlayStation would be ‘Live TV on PS5’, which offers “a free ad-supported experience from Sony Pictures Television” in the U.S., including movies (a 50 Cent-themed action channel!), TV shows (Community, The Walking Dead), anime (Naruto, Death Note, exclusive Crunchyroll channels) & more.
After signaling it would, Xbox is cutting out other platforms from trailers on the Xbox YouTube channel, with no mentions of the non-Xbox SKUs for Minecraft Dungeons II. (The full platform list is on other versions, but the fans are sated…)
Gamescom 2026 was, in general, a hit with attendees, with 368k (non-unique) visitors from 131 countries & 1,743 (!) exhibitors. (The organizers might have done a tad better responding to indie dev/publishers laptop thefts tho, since their literal ‘let’s tell you about the regulations’ response was seen as non-sympathetic.)
We talk about console hardware price hikes, but how about PC? PC Gamer helps us understand: “Before the memory crisis, there was quite an abundance of RTX 5060 gaming PCs… [as low as] $749… these days you're looking at almost $1,000 for the same thing, and that's if you're lucky.” (PCs can be upgraded more modularly, but..)
Valve was chatting to devs at Gamescom, and Yaroslav Shalashov passes along two tidbits: “Steam Networking will support crossplay, and you'll be able to build multiplayer for [console/other] platforms on a single system.” Also: “the Steam game analytics section [inc. the] median time metric will be reworked”, hopefully by EOY?
PlayStation things: ahead of the GTA VI launch, “PS5 Pro is currently sold out across [U.S.] retailers online… it’s still available on PS Direct or at significant markups ($1,200+) from third party sellers”; State Of Play showcase is back on Thursday Sept. 3rd, inc. first & third-party games (and a warning about licensed music for co-streaming.)
Not the cheeriest, but Kim Nordstrom’s post-Gamescom trend commentary is worth a peek: “Early Access looks pretty broken on PC… Ship a solid core loop immediately, or focus on quality with AA.” But here’s a plus: “Our global TAM is only 3.5B of 8.3B alive - 4B in a few years, maybe 5B in a decade-ish.” Number… go up?
Former Gamefam founder/firebrand Joe Ferencz has opinions about Roblox’s algo changes to prioritize ‘highly retentive games’ vs. meme-y hits: “[Roblox] is a company looking at the greatest hit factory in the history of interactive entertainment and deciding the hits are the problem. The hits are not the problem. The hits are the product.”
One thing that we missed in that BBC x Xbox Asha Sharma interview last week that The Verge picked up on: “We’ve been hard at work on a great next generation and a great family of devices for Helix, and we’ll share more soon.” Family of devices, huh? (Perhaps both first and third party-made ones, rather than multiple first-party?)
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What are the top new games of Gamescom 2026?
Like us, you’ve probably been tracking the many titles that got promoted in multiple ways (show floor, creator outreach, streaming showcases) at Gamescom 2026 in Germany last week. And thanks to GDCo Pro’s new Streaming Showcase Tracker (above, for ONL), we’re monitoring the Steam side of things in impeccable detail.
Here’s the streaming showcases we were monitoring last week, with an important caveat - some (with a *) haven’t reached the ‘7 day’ limit we compare wishlists against, so their numbers will still go up. Nonetheless, here’s the general direction of travel:
You may not be surprised to see Gamescom’s official Geoff Keighley-collab-ing Opening Night Live 2026 as the leading showcase. (It actually has >5x median wishlist increases than any other showcase.) So we’ll initially concentrate on that showcase’s charts, to see what made a big splash. Here’s the Top 15 games, by 7 day wishlist gain:
You can see a variety of titles crowding in here, including some very close to release, and also a bunch of new games. Some notes on them:
New takes on existing IP were two of the top three games: Wizards Of The Coast’s new third-person ARPG using the D&D license, Warlock, came out at #1 (+375k wishlists), and a double-IP game - Lego x existing city-builder Cities Skylines, in LEGO Skylines - also got a ton of interest at #2 (+315k WLs).
A strong showing for Asian devs is topped by Ananta: the anime open-world RPG published by NetEase hit #3 with +350k wishlists, and other strong AAA-looking titles from Asia include Arthurian ARPG Tides Of Annihilation (#11) and F2P creature-catcher Aniimo (#12). (There’s also two MiHoYo games, Nodusfall & Petit Planet, that aren’t going onto Steam soon, but have lots of interest.)
The rest of the Top 10 has a fascinating mix of new & existing IP: there’s a rejigger of a hot old PC franchise (Heroes Of Might & Magic III Remake, +210k WLs), first-person cyberpunk-er No Law (+160k WLs), Paradox’s post-apoc grand strategy game Afterworld (+150k), and upcoming Metro & Rainbow Six titles.
If there’s a ‘feel’ across these titles, btw, there’s a lot of deeper, grittier titles in a variety of genres. To us: (non-cute) fantasy, post-apocalypse, cyberpunk, and distressed, ‘lived in’ worlds are in. (With some anime-ish & Lego exceptions, we’re not seeing bright, happy aesthetics in these charts. Every day is like Sunday, rite?)
BTW, it’s very notable that 65 of the 72 games mentioned in any way in Opening Night live had a Steam page at that point. (The only ones not: Worms, Nodusfall, 1001 Threads Of Mizan, Silver Palace, Monster Hunter Outlanders (mobile), Petit Planet, and Zoopunk, and >50% of these will get Steam pages in due course.)
Next, let’s look briefly at just the debuts we spotted in Opening Night Live. We see 17 of the top 50 announces in there that were (basically) brand new for the showcase:
We’ve already talked about a bunch of the Top 15-ranked, but there’s a ton of other interesting titles lower down: top-down ARPG Tarae: The Unbound, the Starship Troopers-y Exterminauts, fascinating-looking puzzle adventure Lofsong, roguelite PUBG expansion DED.NET, a new Rollercoaster Tycoon game, and more.
Since a lot of these games were blitzing Gamescom, they often appeared in multiple of the showcases - as well as talking to the press & sometimes on the show floor. And reminder: we don’t try to separate wishlist increases by showcase. (We’re just showing wishlists in the 7 days after the showcase, no matter how they turned up…)
Anyhow, a quick audit of the other showcases reveals a few uniques: the kinda adorable raccoon co-op-er Dumpster Gang and strategy/tower defense sequel Kingdom III: Rising Realms both added 50-70k wishlists while appearing in the longform 2-day Xbox showcase. (More like a magazine program, less of a trailerfest!)
But the Future Games Show @ Gamescom was more traditionally trailer-y, and in addition to overlap even with Xbox, showed unique games like hack & slasher Wolcen 2 and cozy tavern sim D&D: Long Rest Tavern, both of which started nicely with at least 50k more Steam wishlists. And that’s the shape of Gamescom - congrats, all…
GameDiscoverCo Show: Valve’s 30 years, checked
Last but not least, we’re back with The GameDiscover Show, ft. myself (Simon) and Post Games’ Chris Plante zipping through the stories of the week - sub to the podcast via Apple Music, Spotify & elsewhere (audio), with a video version on YouTube (above).
On this episode, we talk about Valve's 30 year anniversary and the inexorable (?) rise of Steam as a platform, ruminate on Battle.net getting third-party game additions with The Witcher 3, examine a change to more personalized midweek deals on Steam, and discuss how hit PC game genres have changed since 2021. Check it…
[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.]