[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 for the end of the week. And this time, we thought we’d bring some cuts of our Steam Fan Snapshot data (from 16k+ keen Steam players) to talk about something we don’t see discussed much. Specifically: people often aren’t solely ‘a PC gamer’ or ‘a console/mobile gamer’, they’re… a blend of those things! Data within…
Before we start, via the indispensible 404 Media, we can’t believe the physical doll of our new favorite mascot, Bezzy, is sold out. Bezzy, of course, is a “plush data center toy that plays the high-pitched hum of a real AI data center when hugged”, made to promote a new album from music project Big Data. *static noises increase*
[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: are we bored of GTA 6 yet?
Let’s finish out the week with a whole heap of game discovery & platform news - ah, and Steam just officially announced its ‘achievement sets’ feature we teased earlier in the week - go look, devs, if you have DLC or archived achievements. Anyhow:
Our buddies at ICO’s Footprints.gg keep printing their ‘trad media’ game coverage charts, and Grand Theft Auto VI keeps being #1! (This week: rumors over PC version in Q1 2027 helped.) Also hot: Gears Of War E-Day post-launch, Arc Raiders (thanks to F2P weekend, update & more) and Forza 6 (PS5 version in Jan ‘27.)
Top new Steam demos for unreleased games, per GDCo Pro, as people start to launch Next Fest demos? Deadzone Rogue 2 (#1, 3,300 peak CCU) continues the popular FPS roguelite series, with co-op survival sim Arctic Drive at #3, party game Worst Class Ever at #4 & extraction fantasy RPG Vaultbreakers at #5.
AI-aided decompilation of games is becoming a big subject of concern and discussion for devs: the decomps SubReddit shows a bunch of console exclusives getting unofficial PC or web ports, and Naavik did a good overview of the space. (The debate on whether this is a vibe-y slopfest or a ‘trend to watch’ continues.)
Steam Early Access flags for… DLC? It’s true, Caves Of Qud got special Valve dispensation for an EA flag on its Diaspora DLC, out in December, because of the “unpredictable, emergent gameplay” of the base game and the fact “Caves of Qud development is slow.” (And looks like The Long Dark has one too for Iron Road.)
Epic Games is hyping its new/faster PC launcher: “We vibe coded the Epic Games Launcher to be faster than the other guy.” The blog post, claiming ‘cold start to store’ is 46% faster than Steam, is a goofy ‘we just jammed this out’ vibe, leading to Internet snark. (But also: Fortnite’s coming to Linux alongside an Easy Anti-Cheat rebuild.)
‘Engine platform’ news: DayZ and Rocketwerkz’ Dean Hall has revealed the BRUTAL engine, a free to use, low-level custom framework: “You can make a game directly using it, like we have with Kitten Space Agency, or use it as the foundation for an entirely separate engine, like Ludeon have [in porting from Unity to their own Waylith Engine] with RimWorld.”
Xbox things: there’s a surprise new $50 pocket-sized Xbox Nano game controller; the company is launching Xbox Labs, “a small group of game makers, engineers and scientists” to experiment with decompilation & more; Gears Of War E-Day partly solves the Xbox Series S memory issue by using its SSD as random access memory.
We posted on LinkedIn with our update on the Meta Quest VR game charts in Sept/Oct, barely discussed nowadays. New F2P sandbox superhero game HERO x HERO is crushing it at #1, with 'chaotic social multiplayer beloved by pre-teens' F2P (Gorilla Tag, Scary Baboon, Animal Company) most of the Top 10. (The premium games in there: Beat Saber and Blade & Sorcery, btw.)
Important HowToMarketAGame research here, concluding that in recent years on Steam: “wishlist counts have inflated (each wishlist sells fewer units), but wishlists predict* sales just as well as they did 3 years ago (the 0.05 difference is within the noise for this sample size.)” (*With ‘predict’ being median, and a very wide range of results.)
A new Steam client update rolls out Personal Calendar to the Recommended tab on the home screen (increasing its profile further!), officially adds the Pyrowave video codec for “high bandwidth, low latency video streaming”, improved app startup speed, and a whole bunch of Big Picture mode fixes, among others.
Microlinks: PS+ Game Catalog additions for October inc. Mafia: The Old Country & Horizon Forbidden West; Apple Arcade additions for Nov. are led by Crossy Road spinoff Crossy Road Rush; Steam Frame has reservations queued way into 2027; Sept’s top mobile titles by $ include Honor of Kings, Gossip Harbor, Roblox.
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What other devices do Steam fans play games on?
We’re still expanding our Steam Fan Snapshot data, where-in GameDiscoverCo asked >16,000 worldwide Steam players (& counting - should be >20k shortly) a bunch of Qs about how they play games, and tied it into their Steam catalog, with their permission. (Data’s available for GDCo Pro subs - oh, and we redesigned our homepage!)
We have a bunch of free GDCo newsletters upcoming, ft. results from the current push - inc. data on co-op games, gifting, and Next Fest. But our ‘master’ set of questions includes a look at the platforms our worldwide-located ‘Steam fans’ play games on for >1 hour per month. And here’s the overall result:
We may have featured this once before, but the notable takeaway: even for these PC-first ‘fans’ (who we recruited by offering giveaways online), they also play games on a bunch of other game platforms - both mobile & console-centric.
It’s important not to have a monolithic view of the market, and this helps. A bit. But it doesn’t show overlap across all players in an intelligible way, given some people chose two platforms, and some ticked 4. So we grabbed that data and visualized it, as follows:
Ah, this makes a lot more sense. So, summing up the data on this chart:
Of the 91.5% of our respondents who played PC games for at least an hour a month, 42.4% of those - just under half - only play PC games.
Then we have 22% of respondents who play PC and mobile games (but no console), and 11.5% who play PC and console games (but no mobile.)
Overall, there’s 15.6% of respondents who play PC, console, and mobile. That’s just under one fifth of the total PC players.
Again, we’re not saying this is perfectly indicative of all PC or Steam gamers. We’re surveying a more turned-on, online-savvy subset (and more international than many similar surveys!) But getting any of this data will give us all a better mental model.
Next up, we thought we’d break down the PC vs. console data in the same fashion. Here’s the results of that:
You can see that 64.4% of the 91.5% (around seven in ten) of all the PC players in our survey don’t indulge in console playing at all. But for those who do:
Nintendo Switch is the top ‘PC & one console’ choice, at 7.5%, followed by PlayStation at 6.4% and Xbox at 3.2%. (We didn’t ask about console generations.)
The biggest two-console overlap is PC alongside ‘PlayStation and Xbox’ at 4.3% - only about one in twenty of those surveyed who played on PC.
The fabled ‘yes, I play PC and PlayStation and Xbox and Switch, monthly’ hardcore are at 3.2%, only about one in thirty of all PC players.
Finally you may have noticed that our Steam fans have an unusually large percentage of Steam Deck play, at 17% of the 91% - just under one in five. (This is a big multiple on our recent estimates of Steam Deck playtime at 2-4% of total Steam playtime.)
Which, fair enough, these are harder-core Steam players! But how does it compare to these same players’ Nintendo Switch (1 or 2) usage? Here’s what we’ve got:
In this demographic, Switch still has an edge, with 16.4% Switch/PC players of any kind, versus 13.4% Steam Deck/PC players. But the triple overlap of PC, Steam Deck and Switch players seems quite large at 5.5%.
We suspect there’s a fair amount of Steam players who have historically been attracted to the form factor of the Switch, but want the cross-compatibility and greater catalog available on Steam Deck*. (*Anecdotally: our 10-year-old, who spends a lot of time on Steam Deck & almost none on Switch, is one of those.)
So there we have it: visualization, from a PC-first end, of the fact that people play multiple devices! Of course, if you were to survey more ‘casual’ console players, you’d see way less crossover with PC. And the same for casual mobile gamers. But many of you here are targeting a core PC audience, right? So here’s what a sample are up to…
This week on Steam: zoo, scam, drive & Castle…?
