What were the top games & showcases during Summer Game Fest?
Also: this week's biggies on Steam and lots of 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.]
So, we’ve given up calling the period when E3 used to happen each June ‘not-E3’, and defaulted to mentioning Summer Game Fest. (Even though not all the showcases clustered around it are ‘officially’ part of SGF.) Why? It’s a game festival that takes place in summer, folks! And that’s the subject of our lead story today…
But before we start, we dug NoClip’s video about the history and future of game jams, not least because it showed great games - from Inscryption to Hollow Knight & beyond - originating in jams. (Psst: you can register for GDCo’s Oakland Ballers baseball league mascot game jam on Itch.io right now, you dirty animals…)
[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: Backrooms x backrooms..
Let’s start out the newsletter with the latest game platform & discovery news, which goes a bit like this:
As we noted on LinkedIn, “We've seen less talk about how games based on the Backrooms 'legend' have fared alongside the $220m success of the movie.” Looking at GDCo Steam sales & Twitch streaming volume data, Escape The Backrooms, already at 6.8m copies sold, “has added another 400k copies in just a few days, as the number of Twitch channels playing the game daily surged from 200 to 5,800 (up 29x!)”
And what’s more: “Backrooms: Escape Together, which has the official in-game event for the A24 movie, saw the Twitch channel count playing it go up from 70 to 1,000 (up 13x), and added 250k copies sold to 2.75m copies, according to GDCo estimates.” It was a good few days to be in the backrooms business…
Xbox foreshadowing: continuing the ultra-transparency, this internal Xbox memo put out by Asha Sharma notes scant profit (“We will end this fiscal year at about a 3% accountability margin, down year-over-year”) but high reach (1b players yearly.) The ‘reassessment’ of studio system/platform infra may be leading to significant layoffs in July, according to Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier.
There’s more consensus that Steam devs dig the new Steam Calendar feature for pre-release wishlists, on the revamped front page, at least if you get on it: Solarpunk saw 14-35k daily wishlists pre-launch (!), and less well-known title Moon River added 700 wishlists to its ~7,000 thanks to the Calendar.
The ESA got a bat-signal re: the proposed U.S. anti-deepfake law, and they showed up, saying it" “creates a level of uncertainty that poses a real threat to… the future of video game development in the United States.” Issues appear to be a) frivolous lawsuits and b) custom in-game avatar-creation tools getting limited?
The Verge has a strong view on Nintendo’s current portfolio announcements & its remake and remaster heavy line-up: “At its very best, Nintendo finds the right balance between being conservative and being inventive. The Switch 2 needs a few more daring ideas to push the scale back in the right direction.” (Hardcore fans worked so far, but…)
SteamDB spotted that Valve announced “Steam will no longer be restocking physical gift cards at retailers due to scammers.” The specific FAQ page about this links to the U.S. FTC page about gift card scamming in general, and from Reddit posts, it sounds like ‘your grandson is in jail’ dupes were using cards as a cash-out. Sigh.
Country ratings boards are the most miserable way to get your game announce leaked, and Automaton Media claims that South Korea’s GRAC is a prime culprit because “the rating body is only able to accommodate game publishers’ confidentiality requests while submitted games are undergoing review. The moment a decision is reached”, they’re legally obligated to make it public. That’s.. dumb?
Xbox hardware thoughts: CSO Matthew Ball noted: “We have no desire to move away from the console business… We are making an investment in… the console platform that is going to be strengthened by these exclusives.” But then Asha Sharma adds: “We must think about other ways to think about the cost construction of the console.”
Being weirdos, we still track most-reviewed Apple Arcade games every month ($) for giggles! In May, two ‘+’ ports from the regular App Store were top, vintage puzzler Flow Free+ and shop sim Good Pizza Great Pizza+. (Next up, the Holy Trinity: Sneaky Sasquatch, Crossy Road Castle, Hello Kitty Island Adventure.)
Microlinks: Russia has lifted restrictions on access to Roblox after ‘user safety’ for kids was addressed; the PlayStation Plus Game Catalog for June inc. Final Fantasy XVI, Sonic X Shadow Generations & Kingdom Come: Deliverance; if your game is on Itch.io, submit it for this North American ‘game biz/layoff hardship fund’!
Bonus: while we were researching the anti-(deep)fake U.S. bill, we made a typo on Google with such an epic AI response that we had to include it. (Sorry, faeries…)
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What top games, showcases hit during SGF 2026?
As we did last year, we’ve decided to go hardcore on data around the entire Summer Game Fest-adjacent showcase scene. And we’ve tracked 20+ streaming PC/console game showcases - including SGF itself, which had 62 million livestreams this year, up 23% YoY - but also platform showcases, Day Of The Devs & more.
(BTW, it’s interesting how top showcase livestreams are powered by co-streaming nowadays, with StreamHatchet estimating “nearly two-thirds of all viewership (64.8%, up 3.6% from 2025) came through co-streamers” for the main Summer Game Fest event.)
Anyhow, we have a lot of data to chonk through here. So here’s the giant GDCo ‘overview document’ (Google Drive doc) with 800+ games on. And here (above) is GDCo’s estimates of the Top 10 most-newly wishlisted games on Steam:
The surprise Resident Evil Veronica announce topped the charts: the remake of 2000’s Code Veronica is at #1 with 803k wishlists added. And the Res Evil series was more than 50% of Capcom’s entire total game sales for FY ending March 2026. (Wow!) People can’t get enough, and Capcom is executing very well…
The rest of the top five skew ‘gritty AAA action game’: ARPG x MMO sequel Guild Wars 3 (#2, +496k) was next, and Assassin’s Creed-y 1666: Amsterdam (#3, +494k) was also a smart surprise reveal, followed by ARPG sequel Lords Of The Fallen II (#4, +227k) and shooter reboot Crossfire (#5, +222k).
Nine out of the top ten titles were Summer Game Fest-showcased: only first-person horror title ILL - which was in PlayStation State Of Play & hit #10 - came from outside of the ‘main’ Keighley-fronted SGF showcase. (But some first-party showcase games don’t have Steam pages and had interest, as we’ll see later.)
In case you missed the rest of the Top 10, HAEX (#6, +192k) is a very good-looking co-op survival shooter, you know what the Assassin’s Creed Black Flag remaster (#7, +191k) is, we presume, and survival horror sequel Alien: Isolation 2 (#8, +185k) and horror prequel SAW: Genesis (#9, +184k) rounds out these games.
You can grok the vibes here, but in case you’re confused: epic, gritty titles (some open-world, some not, many co-op) with elements of either a) medieval/historical b) post-apocalypse or c) horror seem to be floating to the top, for this PC/console audience.
Does the escapism continue in the rest of the Top 30 by most-wishlisted during SGF & friends (above)? By and large, it does, but w/licensed titles from Gundam (#11) and Star Wars (#14) punctuating the Top 20. (And hilariously, Star Wars Zero Company actually has the word ‘gritty’ in the first line of the Steam capsule description.)
Other trends we see in here? There’s not much pixel art or generalized cuteness on display - with even Dave The Diver spiritual sequel Bancho The Chef (#29) still being a tad whimsical, but almost looking Yakuza-like in presentation. (But Nintendo titles don’t wishlist on Steam, of course - the Rayman Legends reboot (#21) is closest…)
Most of the Top 30 is either from a) established teams, like Stranger Than Heaven from the Yakuza crew, or b) established franchises, from Onimusha through Halo to Gears Of War & Tomb Raider. Takeaways from any that aren’t? Last Harbor (#13) is an open-world multiplayer zombie fishing game, smooshing two great tastes together.
It can be difficult to extrapolate precise Steam wishlist increases (which GDCo has to estimate.) So we’ve also provided Steam follower increase accounts (a real number - how many people opt in to get news about specific Steam games) in the linked document, and here’s the Top 10 (above).
You’ll see some differences here, since core strategy games - which have more news updates and have more ‘core’ Steam fans - tend to vault up the follower charts. Hence you’ll see Guild Wars 3 at #1, and medieval castle sim sequel Stronghold 4 (#4) and the JRPG remake Persona 4 (#7) also in the Top 10.
But Steam isn’t the world! (What?) And ~40 of the 860+ games we tracked in these showcases don’t have a Steam page yet. So we asked our buddies at Footprints.gg - who cover ‘trad media’ mentions - to pull the top mentions for the last week:
As you can see in here, the PlayStation 5 exclusive franchise continuation God Of War Laufey got the most mentions in ‘trad written online games media’ , followed by Xbox’s shooter reboot Gears Of War: E-Day (possibly due to its ‘late Xbox console exclusive’ move), with the next Tomb Raider and Halo titles also in the Top 5.
It’s an interesting, more franchise-led view, as we’d expect from a media who needs to interest people, many of whom are attracted to ‘things they’ve actually heard of’. (This is part of the value of known franchises in today’s too-busy media landscape!)
Finally, a couple of other views put together by GDCo’s spreadsheet whiz Alejandro. Here’s a look at platforms that each of the 800+ titles were announced for:
Remember that this includes many hundreds of titles in smaller showcases, but it’s interesting overall, with Steam listed as a platform for 96% of all games (!), and PlayStation for 27% - with Xbox only 1% behind at 26%.
It’s also notable that Switch 2 made it to being named in 13% of all game SKUs - although Switch 1 was in 12.6% of them last year, so there’s not much uptick going on. We suspect most of the changes are due to even less mobile SKUs than last year (down from ~5.5% to ~2.5% - SGF is no place for mobile, as MobileGamer.biz echoed!)
And the ultimate graph is one you’ve all been lusting over. Which showcases provided the biggest median increase in Steam wishlists? There’s no YoY comparison because we used different start and end dates, but here’s what we’ve got:
Yep, the ‘main’ Summer Game Fest showcase is top, with +72k wishlists as a median, followed by PlayStation’s State Of Play (+52k) and the Xbox Games Showcase (+46k), with the PC Gaming Show (+21k) & Day Of The Devs (+20k) rounding out the Top 5.
That’s followed by the Future Games Show, Wholesome Direct, Nintendo Direct (which was very late in our window, and has Switch-exclusive titles in it, of course), and then a host of other showcases. And we appreciate every one of you…
[BONUS: some game engine data? Among the 100 titles with most additional wishlists during Summer Game Fest & friends, Unreal represented 52% of all games, with Unity at 14%, other custom engines at 12%, and Godot at just 1%. However, over the entire set of showcase with 800+ titles, we managed to detect or extrapolate game engine technology across ~470 games, and of those, 44% were Unity and 31% were Unreal. Just 5% were Godot. Interesting, huh?]
This week on Steam: Meccha, Solarpunk, Gnomes!
