What the Steam Fan Snapshot tells us about PC game players
A new thing we've got! Also: the most-streamed games of March & all kinds of news.
[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.]
The latest GDCo data addition? It’s inspired by the lyrics to a Spinal Tap song: “In ancient times... Hundreds of years before the dawn of history, lived a strange race of people... the Druids gamers. No one knows who they were or what they were doing. But their legacy remains, hewn into the living rock... Of Stonehenge Steam.” Full info goes to 11, below…
But before we start, IGN has a funny headline: “After Hundreds of Hours, Some Crimson Desert Players Are Complaining That the World Has Become Too ‘Peaceful’ Because They’ve Basically Killed All the Enemies.” 100 hours in, one player says “zones are becoming ‘too peaceful’ to even try out most endgame builds or cool maxed-out gear variants.”
[THE DEEPEST PC/CONSOLE DATA? You can get a free demo of our GameDiscoverCo Pro company-wide ‘Steam deep dive’ & console data by reaching out today - >90 orgs have it. Or, signing up to GDCo Plus gets the rest of this newsletter and Discord access, plus more.]
Game discovery news: Car Mechanic Sim tunes up
Let’s kick things off by checking out all the game platform and discovery news that happened since last time, like so:
GameDiscoverCo's latest trending unreleased Steam games by 7-day new wishlists is headed by Car Mechanic Simulator 2026 (#1 with >200k wishlists), following up CMS 2021 (which sold >2.4m units.) And Wyldheart (#2) is a co-op fantasy ARPG with "bite-sized campaigns" ft. strong visuals and interest.
Elsewhere, fascinating Garry's Mod spiritual sequel s&box (#3) has a confirmed release date later in April, hence new interest. And two other more 'chill' games round off the Top 5, albeit at lower wishlist increases: Boxroom (#4, design a room for your Steam library), and Sandcastle (#5, build relaxing sandcastles.)
Sony is removing more ‘suspect’ publisher catalogs from the PlayStation Store: “it looks like all titles from GOGAME Console Publisher, VRCFORGE Studios, and Welding Byte (previously operating as RandomSpin Games) were removed… on April 2nd.” (Jesus Simulator - itself a clone of I Am Jesus Christ - is no more on PS5…)
As spotted in our Discord, that new optimized Steam homepage beta deprecates Popular Upcoming as a direct link (although one of the Upcoming tabs still lists more popular games first?) There’s also a rename: New & Trending will just become Popular New Releases when this ships.
Microlinks, pt.1: Lenovo’s Legion Go 2 handheld gaming PC has increased in price 36-48%, to $1,500-$2,000, thanks to GPU/memory shortages; Deconstructor Of Fun on how to build a ‘real’ Roblox business in 2026; Valve just added a native Steam Link app for visionOS, allowing Steam cloud play on Apple Vision Pro.
Here’s a good piece on the “risks and opportunities of a contentious but rich design space” re: the rise of gambling-lite mechanics in Balatro-likes and Luck Be A Landlord, also noting the skill element in many roguelites: “With time, you’ll improve at gambling-likes such as Balatro and Raccoin; this isn’t true of slot machines.”
PlayStation’s most-downloaded PS5 games in March 2026 were headed by MLB The Show 26 (U.S.) and Crimson Desert (EU), with Red Dead Redemption once again leading the way for PS4 downloads. And Netmarble’s little-discussed The Seven Deadly Sins: Origin is #1 in F2P, we estimate with >1m PS downloads LTD.
The latest Xbox/PC Game Pass additions coming this month include Double Fine’s Kiln, a post-launch GP addition for Hades II, a day-one debut for Vampire Crawlers, Day-Z getting added on PC, and, uh, uhh, Microsoft Bubble? (It’s a PC only casual up-port, but there’s some even Xbox ‘port begging’ from players!)
This ‘Two and A Half Gamers’ analysis of new mobile launch Last Asylum: Plague is worth reading, even if you’re not in mobile: big Chinese mobile firm does ‘plague hospital management => medieval 4X’ with strong execution, heavy gameplay ‘fast follow’ and AI ads galore. (It seems to be scaling impressively.)
Microlinks: PlayStation debuted The Playerbase, a promo pilot project to 3D scan fans into games, starting with racing franchise Gran Turismo; a PC Gamer survey has 43% of readers switching to Linux for gaming (many via SteamOS?) now or soon; PlayStation re-arranged its corp website to slightly de-emphasize PC.
What Steam Fan Snapshot tells us about players…
Here’s a fact: we know people buy our games on Steam. But we actually don’t know much about them. How old are they? How do they find out about games? What else do they do with their lives? That’s why GameDiscoverCo decided to make the Steam Fan Snapshot, a new feature that just rolled out to all GDCo Pro subscribers.
So we thought we’d highlight some of the initial data from our opt-in player surveys in today’s newsletter. And first up, here is what the Steam Fan Snapshot is and isn’t:
It is a large, increasing survey of core Steam game fans: incenting players via giveaways & other methods, we’ve got ~10,000 initial survey responses to 8 initial questions, and plan to scale response #s to 5-10x that over time.
It does have individual data ‘cuts’ for every Steam game: with explicit player permission, we’ve tied in survey responses to a player’s Steam catalog, and anonymized & abstracted them. So you can compare any game to the average.
It is a snapshot of a particular type of Steam player: everything is a ‘filter bubble’ - and this is no exception. The surveys are fielded only in English (so there’ll be Western bias), and 16% of our respondents own a Steam Deck, more than a 5x overindex on all Steam players. They’re fans, folks…
It is not a replacement for more detailed player surveys: we designed Fan Snapshot to be high-level and instructive to understand general trends, like device usage, age/gender, and discovery preferences. This doesn’t negate more detailed surveys, playtesting, etc. It’s just an extra set of data points.
Anyhow, let’s bust out some real-world examples from the first set of Steam Fan Snapshot data. First, for reference, here’s the questions we asked so far:
For the purposes of this newsletter, we picked a large range of games to contrast - everything from newer, cheaper casual hits (Peak, Webfishing) through cozy standouts (Hello Kitty Island Adventure) through old school stalwarts (Civilization IV, Train Sim Classic), and even American football franchises (Madden NFL.)
Why? Well, if you compare just one game vs. the ‘all survey participants’ benchmark, you may see overperformance, due to it being a newer game being bought by a more active player. You need more data points to zero in on the key differences. Like so:
What’s interesting here? Well, gender-wise, Hello Kitty Island Adventure skews as low as 49% male. But these games also ramp as high as 93.5% male (Madden NFL 25), with the average on Steam Fan Snapshot being just over 80% male.
And then age-wise, the average age of all respondents is 30. But across these titles, averages go up to 36 (Civ IV) and as low as 25 (Webfishing.) And you can see significant, related changes in age ranges. 39% of Peak owners and 55% of Webfishing owners being 18-24 is a clear, interesting age split, showing in some newer hits.
As for devices used for games for >1 hour per month, newer games overindex vs. the averages (which include 16% Steam Deck players, 17% Switch 1 or 2, 16.5% PS4 or 5, 10% Xbox, 10.1% iOS, and 32.5% Android. Remember that’s ‘game playing’, specifically.)
The biggest overindexes of Switch players are for the cozier Hello Kitty Island Adventure (45%) and Webfishing (38%), with Train Sim players (13%) underindexing on almost everything non-PC. Oh, and Madden players try iOS games a lot more, we’re guessing ‘cos the U.S. is a heavy iOS country.
Here’s our question about the main ways people find out about games. Webfishing is a big overindex (69%!) on ‘word of mouth’, and short-form video usage for discovery varies by >2x across different types of game. There’s also interesting differences in usage for Steam as a platform, trad media sites, Discord/Slack, and more.
We actually think this data is actionable, both at ‘overall average’ and genre and game-specific levels. Why? You might want to know where your prospective audience is if you’re planning your marketing. (There’s nothing worse than data which looks pretty, but has no use case, right?)
And for this question, we thought we’d ask about what activities people did every week, in addition to playing video games! The big headline here is: Madden players do sport(s), and Webfishing players don’t? (Kidding - that’s probably not the big headline.)
But seriously, it’s interesting to see some of the generational differences, like manga reading vs. trad. text-based book reading for different player ages. And the same for shortform vs. longform video watching - it makes Steam players feel more ‘real’, and it may help you work out how to target players ‘where they live’, habit-wise.
Anyhow, Steam Fan Snapshot has data for every Steam game* (*tho some sample sizes may be smaller), and it’s available to all existing company-level GDCo Pro subscribers. (If you have GDCo Plus or, heaven forbid, none of the above, ping us and we’ll get you a free demo.) And we’ll keep putting free data from it in newsletters for everyone…
Top streamed March games: Requiem still goin’!
Finally, here’s the newest data via livestream analytics platform Stream Hatchet, bringing the Top 100 most-streamed games for March 2026 across the big (non-China) game video streaming platforms like Twitch & other medium/small platforms.
As we do, here’s the full list of March’s Top 100 (Google Drive link) with GDCo notes. Once again, Stream Hatchet’s Mark Rowland joins us on commentary to check trends:
The top 10 most-streamed have a lot of the ‘usual suspects’ in there: it’s worth re-iterating, but games like League Of Legends (#1, 155m hours watched), Grand Theft Auto V (#2, 141m), Counter-Strike (#3, 119m), and Valorant (#4, 74m hours) continue to do spectacularly in livestreaming, and it underpins their commercial success.
Res Evil Requiem, Crimson Desert make strong Top 10 appearances: Requiem “soared to #5 this month with 59m hours watched”, per Mark, who says: “as a non-live service, non eSports game this is some outstanding viewership”, and notes it also had 25m hours watched in late Feb. Crimson Desert (#8, 47m hours) also did great.
Blizzard’s Overwatch rebrand seems to have stuck its landing for now: the hero shooter’s switch from Overwatch 2 to Overwatch & related 10th anniversary promotions saw it hang out at 40.3m hours watched in March (#11), only down slightly from its Feb. high. (We’ll see where it goes from there!)
Other new games making the chart include Pokémon Pokopia (#13, 32.4m hours, outstanding for a game that’s trickier to stream as a Switch 2 exclusive), Slay the Spire 2 (#23, 18.7m), Marathon (#25, 17.7m), and custom Minecraft server QSMP II (#41, 10.5m), which is being tracked separately from ‘vanilla Minecraft’ at #6.
Stream Hatchet also took a look at the recent Hexi expansion for F2P standout Where Winds Meet, which drove an 8x initial viewership increase compared to baseline watchers, and saw hours up 77% to 4.75m viewed during March - not bad.
[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.]