What Twitch data adds to our view of game discovery...
Also: a ton of game platform & discovery 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.]
We’re back, and Steam Next Fest is live with just a ‘few’ demos (4,358, at current count) of upcoming PC games. (Reminder: the games you see will largely be randomized until Wed. morning - and then more focused, since Valve will use data to recommend smaller titles.) We’ll have more analysis on the winners & median results next Tuesday!
Before we start, we talk about cozy arrange-y games a lot. But how about Boxroom, which just came out & allows you to “design, define and decorate a room - a sanctuary - for your Steam library”? What a deliciously meta idea (which ran into some issues with Steam approving its box art scraping, if this message is to be extrapolated from.)
[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 - >100 orgs have it. Or, signing up to GDCo Plus gets the rest of this newsletter and Discord access, plus more.]
Game discovery news: the Final Fantasy rises…
It’s the start of the week, so that must mean a sackload of new game discovery & platform news got delivered, right? Right:
Our latest GDCo Pro 'trending' unreleased Steam games, June 8th-15th, overlaps with the tail end of Summer Game Fest. But Resident Evil Veronica (#1) has bigger staying power than other early SGF announces. Other Top 5 games - inc. Stronghold 4, Guild Wars 3 & 1666: Amsterdam - were in our SGF round-up on Fri.
For newer material: brand new 'HD-2D' JRPG Final Fantasy Resonance hit #3 after a reveal during the Nintendo Direct. Other new entries we didn't talk about: narrative FPS Magicians: The Devils' Deal (#9), the return of Spyro (#11), and co-op tank horror game (!) Carcass Clad (#13), from Mouthwashing’s devs.
Roblox just announced a major discovery update to amp up ‘meaningful’ longer retention vs. novelty: “Today, we’re expanding the Recommended For You algorithm from its previous 7-day view to a 28-day view that directly measures long-term retention.” (In testing, they claim higher DAU and better engagement across the platform.)
Xbox’s pivot is what we’d call ‘rapidly moving’, with Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier reporting that “Several Xbox studios, including Compulsion, Ninja Theory and Double Fine, are negotiating with Xbox as they try to avoid closure. Some or all could spin off… Lots still in flux.” (There’s also talk of Xbox becoming a Microsoft subsidiary or JV.)
Point of fact: Xbox “shedding millions of [Game Pass] subscribers” after the Game Pass Ultimate hike from $20 to $30 per month wasn’t necessarily the wrong move if you want to generate more total revenue. (But it was def. the wrong one for longer-term momentum, which is why the reverse ferret is continuing.)
Everyone should pay more attention to the upcoming UK social media ban for under-16s (due early 2027) if you have any online comms in your game - Wiggin’s Pete Lewin has some initial comments: “The ban goes beyond social media, and will also block ‘harmful functions’ such as livestreaming and ‘stranger communication’.”
We spotted this cool blog from Sibling Aesthetics explaining a mega visualization they made: “The Steam Map is a visual 3D presentation of the complete Steam catalogue, purely based on screenshots. It started out as an in-house tool to keep track of the horror scene on Steam, and over time grew into something much bigger.”
One thing we didn’t know, which Matej Lancaric’s guide to mobile game direct to consumer (D2C) revenue illuminated: “Today: 0% platform fee on steered U.S. payments. Sometime in the next 6 to 12 months: probably 20%. Still better than 30%, but a third of the prize evaporates for traffic you haven’t habituated by then.” Gold rush!
In-game advertising in PC/console games never quite ‘made it’, but EA is rolling out a new EA Advertising division, since “EA's games reach more than 120 million players per month” & sports titles have handy in-game billboards (& custom content opps...) Partners include Visa, Lowe's, Red Bull, Xfinity and Mountain Dew.
RoadToVR passes along, re: Valve’s Steam Frame devices entering the U.S.: “As per the public records, Valve has imported some 32,000 kg (~35 US tons) of the VR devices in question, which was notably one week after the company imported 40,000 kg (~44 US tons) of “game consoles,” unmistakably its Steam Machine Linux-based PC.”
Microlinks: Dutch gamers file €220 million claim against Valve around anti-competition law; Apple’s App Store saw 84% jump in new apps in quarter amid ‘vibe coding’ breakout; Nintendo temporarily suspends sales of the multi-region Switch 2 in Japan after suspected hoarding.
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What Twitch data adds to the game discovery pic…
Until recently, GameDiscoverCo has intentionally not analyzed anything except on-platform data. (Why? There’s an awful lot of that to keep straight.) But we’re diversifying, and after launching the Steam Fan Snapshot survey data in April, we’re now adding a ‘streaming viewers’ data set to GameDiscoverCo Pro.
This includes >10 years worth of Twitch data (hours watched per day, # of channels per day, top streamers) for tens of thousands of games and hundreds of thousands of streamers. Here’s our internal Discord notification on yesterday’s new data:
So yep, 14k different games are streamed on Twitch daily. And the biggest games such as Counter-Strike, League Of Legends & GTA have 15k-25k different channels playing them each day. But look - there’s a host of existing free & paid sites that ingest Twitch data. Why is GameDiscoverCo doing it any more interesting? Some thoughts:
Due to good classification, you get accurate data for even smaller games: thanks to Twitch buying IGDB back in 2019 & streamers being mandated to select a game before streaming it, the metadata is ‘on point’ - unlike other key platforms (YouTube, shortform social video) where aggregating mass data is a real pain.
We can apply cross-data lenses that other folks can’t: seeing wishlists and copies sold directly alongside Twitch streamer data is useful. Why? Some successes are very much impelled by the Twitch ‘flavor’ of streamer interest, and some very much are not. (This is interesting in itself!)
‘Cutting’ the data in different ways provides additional context: just listing the Top 5 most-watched games will show the usual suspects. But there’s all kinds of interesting ways to sort most-watched games, from dates to tags & more. Also: there are views of top Twitch streamers that provide extra context.
So let’s bust out some examples. One great one which is very core Twitch viewer-compatible is Diablo-ish ARPG Path of Exile 2, which has grossed $300m+ direct on Steam (!), is currently in the Top 10 for most-watched, and has big sales bumps (blue line) every time it releases new updates, like Return Of The Ancients:
But this GaaS-style stickiness is the exception on Twitch, rather than the rule. So the default situation is for something like Manor Lords. It has a huge start (with a pre release streamer-exclusive period you can see (below) via purple ‘hours watched’ spike with no accompanying orange ‘channel count’ spike), but then relative fallowness:
An important thing to note here - this isn’t bad, and will be default for most paid games. In fact, we estimate Manor Lords has doubled its on-platform Steam units (from 1.7m to 3.3m), even while not a bunch was happening on Twitch. (Lots of players are aware of the game, have it wishlisted, and are waiting for updates, 1.0 and sales.)
Next, to the chart views. It’s interesting, for example, to take a look at games released in the last 3 months (since March 16th, 2026), ranked by ‘hours watched on Twitch in the last 7 days’. You get a real mix of up-and-comers, premium games that were huge on release and are coming down, and surprising entrants:
Some standout takeaways here for us, in terms of things we did/didn’t expect:
Viral multiplayer hits like Meccha Chameleon get great juice on Twitch: the $6 ‘hide & paint’ game just hit 3 million units sold, and 3m hours watched in a week is great. And lo-fi horror franchise Fears To Fathom went co-op only with Scratch Creek just last week, and multiplayer helped the $8 game sell 100k swiftly…
Recent AAA hits do ramp down fairly gradually: they came out last month, but Forza Horizon 6, 007 First Light, and Subnautica 2 are still hanging out in the mix - albeit at a much lower watch rate per week than the last 30 days…
Don’t count out ‘difficult-to-stream-on’ platforms like Switch 2: we’ve been super impressed with how streamable Nintendo’s Tomodachi Life is. The weird playhouse vibes make is irresistable to Twitch viewers, to the tune of 22m hours watched since launch. (And Pokemon Champions is doing nicely, too.)
We can also see most-streamed unreleased games, of course - and besides Valve’s Deadlock as a perpetual #1, we’re spotting survival clicker Don’t Sleep With The Fishes and Next Fest titles Mistfall Hunter and Mortal Shell II doing good. (More on top Next Fest titles in much detail next Tuesday…)
The final thing we did differently: we’re not (currently!) planning on making giant complex pages per Twitch streamer. That’s for other services. But we did want people to be able to see who was streaming particular games, and their general ‘vibes’.
So we created a leaderboard view which lists streamers with basic info (hours watched and streamed for that particular game in the last 7, 30, 365 and all-time days, channel followers, last streamed date.) And we added a lens we like - the top 3 watched games of the last 90 days for them. Here’s an example for Souls-like sequel Mortal Shell II:
What we notice here? A lot of Crimson Desert watcher overlap, as well as games like Gothic 1 Remake, Windrose, Elden Ring and others. (This all makes a lot of sense. And you can use this info to find comps, streamers to target, and gauge ‘general vibes’ related to the game.)
Showing a final example, we thought checking the last 7 days most-watched channels for lovingly made pixel art ARPG Mina The Hollower would also be interesting. It is:
What’s interesting? The top streamers aren’t skewing particularly cozy, but are definitely showing retro-first leanings, with Ace Attorney, Mario and Zelda games, Stardew Valley and Final Fantasy titles all in the mix.
Again, this is about the data, but it’s also about the impressions you get of where the game ‘hits’, genre and fan-group wise. Or that’s how we see it, anyhow. And we’ll include insights from this data in our regular analysis going forward. Toodles…
[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.]