[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.]
As we roll into the weekend, let’s take another look around the wild and wacky world of video game discovery, shall we? We thought this time, given the importance of China as a market to Steam, we’d go back and look at the local platforms & strategy to care about, thanks to our buddies at Hidden Player…
Before we start, FYI: the only company I (Simon) have ever invested in is No More Robots, mainly due to founder (& former co-worker) Mike Rose’s ‘chaotic neutral’ energy. A decade later, his decision to launch two unrelated games named Piece by Piece on Switch on the same day has moved him squarely into ‘chaotic evil’ 😂.
[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: GTA & Zelda - ubiquitous?
Let’s finish up the week with a bunch of game platform & discovery news, as follows:
Our friends at ICO & Footprints.gg rounded up the ‘trad media’ game mentions again, and it’s GTA VI inevitably #1 (digital pre-load now live!), with Switch 2 exclusive Zelda: Ocarina Of Time (sold 5.2m units in its first 4 days) #2 and World Of Warcraft (Forever!) & the newly named Elder Scrolls VI: Sentinel next up…
Anyone with IAP should keep a careful eye on Europe’s proposed Digital Fairness Act. Video Games Europe sums up why - automatic in-game currency prohibition & restricting of ‘pay to progress’ for minors among them. (Supercell’s Ilkka Paananen has more reasons why he thinks it adds confusion & is too ‘nanny state’.)
Top Steam game demos for unreleased games by CCU as of Nov 11th, 2026, per GDCo Pro? Idle games do great, with desktop companion Character House at #1 (~13k CCU) & Runescape idler Melvor Idle 2 at #3 . And 'friendslop on a plane' clone Mayday Airways made it to almost 10,000 CCU (sorry, Dear Passengers!)
PlayStation things: Sony says “from December 10, we will be retiring the PlayStation Plus app on PC”, mainly used for PS3/PS4 game streaming, due to “a very small number of eligible PS+ Premium members (less than 0.4%)” using it; PS+ Game Catalog for Nov. includes Death Stranding 2, Atomfall & Like A Dragon: Hawaii 5-0.
ICYMI: Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier did a YouTube video about not taking budgets like ‘$500 million’ too literally, given all the accounting tricks people use. Great piece, but our visceral reaction to that was: ‘sure, but some games also cost $50m, $5m, $500k, or $50k’. (In other words, orders of magnitude still matter.)
Microlinks: December’s The Game Awards will be live-streamed on Disney Plus (wagering on The Muppets being included is now pointless!); Steam capsule / asset over-rides have been set to 14 days max length, as opposed to 30; Steam’s ‘complete the set’ discounts now show in the search bar on a per-game basis.
PC F2P/1.0 things to mention: just ahead of Grand Theft Auto VI, sloppy “brutal crime sandbox” Rob Run - released Nov. 4th - just hit 300,000 CCU (!) on Steam. It’s full of hacks/toxicity but lots are jumping on - only $2m gross tho. Also: Lightyear Frontier (6k) & Sulfur (3.5k) saw all-time CCU highs at Steam 1.0, recently.
New Steam features: devs, you get cool new sales graphs in Steamworks with discount performance highlighted & ‘days on discount’ comparisons; the achievements update (revamped organization & new DLC doesn’t break ‘100% achievement’ completion) got rolled out to all Steam players.
Nintendo things: we recommend skimming through their full H1 fiscal results .PDF for some interesting slides on digital/physical split, 20-year (!) first-party units/revenue trends & more; the Switch eShop is adding gifting (yay), but only directly to family group members (boo?)
AI stuff: here’s Sandro Maglione’s two AI-coded games Inkline Town & Spirit Call, and here’s the simple beat ‘em up game Lex Toumbourou made for his nephew. (Both were popular posts on Hacker News recently, and we recommend trying out Inkline Town even if you abhor AI, to get a sense of where we’re at.)
We looked at ‘top games watched on Twitch debuting in last 3 months (or unreleased)’ via GDCo Pro. F2P standout Rob Run is #1 by a mile with 7.8m hours watched, Valve hero shooter/MOBA Deadlock is accelerating at #2 (3.6m hours), EA Sports FC & Phantom Blade Zero still chart, and Moon Sweepers, Potato Please and Playrooms are the incremental/tidying novelties in the Top 10.
Microlinks, Pt. 2: PlayStation 5 has officially sold more than 100 million units LTD as of Nov. 10th; games such as Australia Did It are missing Steam launch dates due to slower review times, amid vibecoded submission surges; thus, this piece on best practices for announcing a delay suddenly becomes more relevant.
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What’s your China playbook for game discovery?
How big a deal is China for those publishing games on PC? Well, in GameDiscoverCo Pro estimate of lifetime Steam revenues per country, the U.S. is #1 (with $25.8 billion) but China’s a strong #2 with $14.9b, and only two other countries make it over $5b (Germany and the UK.)
But many of us in the West reading this newsletter? Not 100% clued in on how the Chinese PC game ecosystem works. (I know I’m not.) So, in our second collab article with China game consultancy Hidden Player, we got them to provide a China Community Playbook (available in full & ungated on their website.)
As they say in the intro on China outreach mis-steps: “What we observe often is the instinct of going wide: open a Bilibili channel, a Weibo account, maybe Douyin, and start posting everywhere at once. Within a few months most of those channels are half-maintained, and the one place that actually matters a lot has been ignored the whole time.”
So let’s run down a concatenated version of their best practices, starting with what you should do on the actual ‘game-buying’ platform:
Steam global - localize completely and carefully, even the title: Chinese-language purchases on ‘Steam global’ are where it’s at, so “localize your game title into Simplified Chinese” for searchability & also do the capsule. And make sure you localize every graphic on your page, inc. roadmaps - not just the searchable text.
Localized Steam news announcements & feedback matter: there’s a lot of ‘fire and forget’ on Chinese language support. So timely translation of Steam news posts matters, as does replying to Chinese forum posts: “Even modest, consistent engagement counts, because so few Western studios do that.”
Heybox can be a strong second ‘platform partner’ for China: the unofficial mobile Steam companion app that a lot of Chinese players use is useful for pushing out content (via a developer account), in-app messages, community posts, and ‘Heybox to Steam’ wishlist sync. (It’s a different ecosystem entirely.)
So that’s the game platform (or platform-adjacent?) info. But how about individual social media platforms? Some good notes here, too:
Bilibili is a complex platform, and if you lean in, you’ll win there: the platform is “another unique beast… a combo of platforms like YouTube, X and Twitch - with 370+ million MAU.” It hosts videos, has a social feed & livestreams with Twitch Drops-y rewards. (Having a CN-speaking community manager for comments/Qs is great.)
Check out the official Helldivers 2 Bilibili account for inspiration: “It retells the game’s satire through Chinese memes, classic literature and pop culture. It also runs China-only series, such as “Super Earth CN Branch” propaganda clips and a tutorial show parodying a national youth study campaign… the community sees it as one of the most down-to-earth accounts run by a Western studio.”
Western studios ask most about Douyin and RedNote (Xiaohongshu): "Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, may have >1 billion MAU & “[using] it well takes custom production: vertical cuts, editing styles popular among CN viewers, and content built around what’s trending locally.” (Cultural adaptation: helpful.)
RedNote seems like Instagram at first glance, but it’s more: “As… noted in a Marketscreener article… ‘it has also become a de-facto search engine for young people’. It is a lifestyle platform built on sharing, curation and aesthetic ‘vibes’, with over 400 million MAU according to the platform.” And it’s leaning into games more, with its physical RedLand convention in Shanghai showcasing them in bulk.
The Hidden Player crew also note that Weibo (Western equivalent: X/Twitter) “used to be the No. 1 choice of gaming companies to build social presence in China, but has been quickly overshadowed in recent years by rising social platforms.” (A bit like X.) They also shout out Baidu Tieba (a Reddit-like to check), WeChat Channels, QQ Group & more.
But I think the main point Hidden Player’s Jacky Chen & Katya Baukova are making here is - if you do the minimum in China re: localization & socials, it’s better than nothing. But players will notice lack of attention to detail/’rapid response’ to community issues. So go that extra mile, if the market is large/important to you….
Finally, here’s a handy infographic that the Hidden Player crew put together for GDCo, summing up the above (& other bits mentioned in their playbook.) So helpful:
Debuts on Steam: football, schools... Warhammer?
