[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.]
Hey folks: breaking news we’ll cover more on Friday, but Steam is moving away from ‘viewable by everyone’ Daily, Midweek and Weekend Deals, toward more personalized deals on Steam’s homepage. (We’ve been pointing out tests in the Discounts & Events section to you, so not 100% surprised - but this’ll be a notable change.)
Before we start, yes, “Counter-Strike co-creator Minh Le [claimed] that Valve boss Gabe Newell got so obsessed with Mongolian throat singing at Valve HQ that staff started closing their office doors to escape the noise.” But did you see somebody got Gabe to admit it? “I worked on sygyt, kargyraa and other styles and got to the point where I was really… annoying.”
[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 Basic gets extra newsletter and Discord access, plus more.]
Game discovery news: Family scam time, Aion?
Let’s get going on the game platform & discovery news for the week, shall we? It goes like this:
Here's GameDiscoverCo Pro's estimates of 'trending' unreleased Steam games by 'new wishlists in the last 7 days', Sept 21st-28th, and 'take care of a giant family of wolves' sim Family Time made it all the way to #1 now. Elsewhere, MMO sequel Aion 2 hit #2 on the back of pre-orders opening for the Oct 5th release.
Thanks to a viral demo, Find The Needle (it's one of multiple incremental / automation games based on this idea) hit #3, and Scam With Your Friends (job sim where you run a scam call center) quickly memed its way up to #4, with 'military tank as ARPG protagonist' (!) title Slam Tank also in the Top 10.
Discord things: its September update includes this: “We’ve made some adjustments to the Trending Games page to allow you to filter it a bit. You can now peep trending games in entire genres!” Mm, discovery. Also Discord is working on a ‘Game Mode’ to reduce Discord CPU/GPU usage while gaming.
Games as a platform news: ARC Raiders is testing a PvE mode and has some super interesting research on increasing co-op fans (37% and rising) in their player cohort; Activision is now letting players hide other player’s Call Of Duty skins if they take away too much from immersion (ahem, Beavis & Butthead.)
An interesting new PlayStation ‘Wallet Credit’ experiment: “Sony’s unannounced-but-very-real cashback scheme is starting to pop up in more places… Reports of £10 [UKP] kickbacks for [digital PS5 purchases of] The Blood of Dawnwalker and Halloween have started to circulate… but it’s unclear who’s exactly eligible for the rewards and why.”
Steam changelog news of the week: there is now “a 21-day waiting period between when you paid the app fee and when you can release that game” for your first release, down from 30 days previously. But if you’re transferring a game from elsewhere to this new company account, there’s no ‘new’ waiting period. (Hurrah?)
Roblox has a lot of teens suddenly making a lot of money with UGC, and therefore a lot of lawsuits with much messiness, such as this Tower Defense Sim one profiled by Aftermath: payroll using Robux, and $35 million in damages demanded from a ‘high school computer science project’ now making megabucks.
The platform split on GTA VI got spicy, with Xbox’s chief strategy officer Matthew Ball pushing back on The Verge’s Tom Warren over alleged poor pre-orders: “The title is breaking records for Xbox… our internal analysis shows our share of pre-orders to be matching our share of the console market..” (We don’t find out what that share is, though… Xbox at 25-30%, with PS5 at ~75%, do people think?)
The folks at GIES have been looking at naming frequency for Steam games, spotting that in 2025, “Simulator is the most common title word on Steam, with 2,398 titles, or 1.9% of the total. VR follows with 2,308. No other word reaches 1%.” Also up-trending in actual game name: Survivors, Backrooms, Idle, Cozy.
Bonus ‘game as platform’ news: Minecraft’s highlights from its Minecraft Live event play up “improving tools and systems to make it easier to create, manage, and share your game content.” (Minecraft’s official, paid UGC ecosystem has been a bit ‘exclusive’, it’s true, so “lower[ing] the barrier to entry” seems to be a priority.)
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What do s&box’s issues (so far) tell us about launching platforms in 2026?
We don’t generally lead newsletters by talking about something that isn’t (currently) working. But we think its creators are big and popular enough to deal with it - it’s Facepunch, the UK company led by Garry Newman who made Garry’s Mod and savage open-world hit Rust, which we estimate at ~$600m gross (!) on Steam alone.
This is S&box (sandbox!), which, per Wikipedia, us a “video game development engine and online game platform by Facepunch Studios built on [Valve’s] proprietary Source 2 engine. S&box was released on April 28, 2026, and is intended to be a spiritual successor to Garry's Mod, allowing users to create a variety of games and experiences.”
The project, which first unveiled an Unreal Engine 4 prototype in 2017, and switched to Valve’s Source 2 in 2021 (it’s the only non-Valve game to use Source 2, which powers Half-Life: Alyx, Deadlock, Dota 2 and Counter-Strike 2!) is being built incredibly transparently. So real-time revenue is just one of the data points:
The platform launched on Steam at $20 in April 2026 (after a pre-release ‘limited cosmetic items’ sale earlier in that month), and according to its finance page, has grossed ~$6 million so far. But its player-base is languishing - even after a $10 price-drop - with <500 CCU, down from a ~13,000 CCU peak at launch, five months ago.
YouTuber Eridium, whose video is above, is one of the only regular third-party chroniclers of S&box goings on (tho the technically super-impressive dev team has been posting frequent and super-detailed updates on their gargantuan task!) So, two ways to deconstruct this. First, let’s examine S&box-specific issues:
The $20 price point concentrated the fanbase to the hardcore: the difficulty of starting S&box as free-to-play was obvious. But starting the tool at $20 - esp. since ‘how do you do discovery for a game-making tool?’ is a tricky question - has meant you’ve got committed, opinionated initial users. (Not older, though - GDCo Steam Fan Snapshot data sees overindexing in 18-24 year olds & students…)
Initial fans of the game expected something more Garry’s Mod-like: GDCo estimates 86% of S&box makers/players also own Garry’s Mod. And that’s the main reference point. And so launching without Steam Workshop support and with a relatively unfinished sandbox mode didn’t fit their expectations.
There’s a lot of ‘boil the ocean’ technical wizardry in S&Box: I continue to be super impressed with what the S&box team is doing. Yet as Eridium opines in his video: “Their focus is mostly on being a game engine, and then a platform second.” (There’s a lot going on, but not all perfectly aligned with player/maker happiness.)
There’s still a lot of interest here. We see hundreds of thousands of players/users and some impressive median (5 hours 14 mins) and average (29 hours and 42 minutes) usage times. But here’s the Steam review sentiment, and it ain’t so pretty:
So I think it’s worth zooming out a bit to the bigger, and probably more interesting issue. Facepunch was always going to have a spiky, opinionated worldview on game creation, given they make ‘most brutal/Darwinian multiplayer game of all time’ Rust, plus a boss who talks about pooping a lot on social media.
Thus, more universally, here are the issues with launching any kind of tool that helps people make & then play games in 2026 (also looking at you, Meta Horizon, etc):
No ‘lead’ game means there’s no initial hook: one YouTube commenter said: “I hear some people blame how they didn't make it a gmod 2 or the sausage people for the launch's failure, but really it was the lack of easy-to-find good games.” And if you don’t have a signature reason to play/make only on that platform, why even commit?
Player complaints about ‘AI/slop’ in the games are difficult to shift: as soon as you make an open platform, players are going to be drawn towards certain games - clickers, survivors, job sims - which are high-hook, a bit interchangeable, and lower complexity. And the old skool will say - ‘this is slop’. (Maybe it’s just… now?)
Platform differentiation & discovery is the real problem: looking at the games available on s&box right now, from My Summer Cottage to Mow The Lawn & beyond, they look fun to try - but I’m just not sure why I would play it in S&box, even if it was free. (Why this and not Steam, or Itch, or Roblox, or Xbox…?)
There are definitely people working on more ambitious games for S&box. And opening it up to F2P may swell interest. Eridium also did a great YouTube Shorts showcase of available games. In the end, this feels like the overall game supply/demand issue we talk about all the time, writ large….
Specifically: when everyone can - and does - make games, the ‘maker to player’ ratio on smaller platforms like S&box becomes so lopsided as to be unworkable, even when there’s interesting games out there. (Particularly see: Media Molecule’s gorgeous 2020 PlayStation exclusive Dreams, which suffered from this problem in droves...)
The GameDiscoverCo Show: Xbox’s road to….
As we jam onwards, we also have The GameDiscover Show, ft. myself (Simon) and Post Games’ Chris Plante talking game discovery trends - sub to the podcast via Apple Podcasts, Spotify & elsewhere (audio), with a video version on YouTube (above).
The latest GDCo Show chats on the next part of the Xbox re-org, how a media smart guy says 'the relationship between time and value is breaking down' in media, the rise of Steam demos whose saves transfer to the full game, and Meta’s announcements of a revamped, AI-centric Horizon game creator and its latest VR plans. Enjoy!
[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.]
TitanFall, TitanFall 2, and Apex Legends all run on a fork of Source that Respawn internally called "ReSource".. so maybe not the ONLY non-Valve game.