Which games made the biggest splash at Gamescom?
We also look at Steam's Gamescom presentation & 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.]
We’re back! And let’s salute anyone doing the ‘Gamescom to PAX West’ shuffle back-to-back. (We’ve done them both individually in the past, but that seems a little… intense.) Still, could be worse - you could be flying in the air high above Burning Man right now?
Before we start: if you vibed on our recent spoof article but want pastiche clearly labeled (!) - GDCo Plus/Pro subscribers now have ‘Surviving The Game Industry’ added as an eBook. It’s a compilation of Matthew Wasteland’s (aka Matthew S. Burns’) great 2008-2013 satirical columns for the late, lamented Game Developer magazine, yum.
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Game discovery news: Roblox thru the roof again?
Starting out, let’s take a look at notable game platform and discovery news since last week, as follows:
Roblox is growing well, but timed events based around its breakout new games - Grow A Garden and Steal A Brainrot - are really rocketing peak CCU. According to Offpath’s Tim Elliott, peak CCU hit 47.4m on Saturday - 73% of which was in those two games! (Offpath’s graph, above, highlights the quarterly CCU spike.)
Gamescom released its official 2025 stats, with the German event revealing 357,000 visitors, up from 335k in 2024 (is that unique, or ‘each daily B2C show entry is a visit’, like Tokyo Game Show?) And online, Geoff Keighley’s Opening Night Live streaming event hit 72 million viewers, up 80% year on year.
The FT has a long-form profile of PlayStation ($), including intriguing comments from Hermen Hulst: “I don't want teams to always play it safe, but I would like for us, when we fail, to fail early and cheaply.” He also said that “having a diverse set of player experiences and a set of communities” is more important than X live service games.
Did you know that ‘payment platforms block adult content’ - recently a big deal on Steam and Itch.io - has previously been a massive issue for big Japanese video streaming service Niconico, which has many game streamers on it? It’s true: “For nine months, all credit card payment options except for JCB were suspended.”
This postmortem of shooter Spectre Divide talks to the founders about what didn’t scale: “technical issues in the first few hours of the launch” hindered, and a $90 IAP bundle distracted. Per Matt Hansen: “Everybody was focused more on the technical issues and pricing rather than whether the game was fun, so we had mixed reviews immediately.”
Checking GDCo’s U.S. Switch eShop charts (paid, third-party!) - boy, Tiny Bookshop is doing great (#1), with the just-released Discounty zooming up to #2. Other recent top-charters on launch include Is This Seat Taken? and Tales Of The Shire. (That gives you an idea of the kind of ‘vibes’ are a hit on Switch?)
On that ‘avoiding Hollow Knight Silksong’ quandary - some other games delayed, as I told Aftermath you shouldn’t do so "unless you feel like your buyers majorly overlap with Silksong's, or you believe you are going to go viral with the same streamers… We've seen private research indicating that player counts for already-launched rival games were only affected if the game was in the same, very specific subgenre as that big launch."
Spotted by Zach Bussey of Tos.gg fame: “Twitch's crackdown on viewbotting has intensified significantly over the last 48 hours. Many top 5,000 streamers are experiencing their lowest-performing (CCV) streams of 2025. Sitewide viewership is down 5-22% (depending on the hour) compared to the previous week.”
The Rogue Prince Of Persia crew at Evil Empire told GameDeveloper.com, after a tricky EA launch: “To be honest, the way I see it now is that unless you're coming into [Steam] Early Access with a 90 percent complete game, don't do it. Because players, they don't see it as early access, they see it a game to play.”
Indie veteran Aaron San Filippo has some wise words about the state of the biz, outlining the market and asking: “How do we validate our ideas quickly?… how can we provide more ongoing value to players without investing so much in content? What can the biggest publishers *not* do that we can?” All key questions nowadays!
Esoteric microlinks: how Weekly Shonen Jump became the world’s most popular manga factory; why Hank Green’s Focus Friend app “gamifies my attention in just the right ways”; great music data/tech analysis site Water & Music set all of its historical articles free to concentrate on consulting.
Which unreleased games hit it big at Gamescom?
Gamescom 2025 featured multiple streaming showcases & announcements. So which not-yet launched games got major Steam wishlist & follower boosts? We know! GDCo has a giant database (Google Drive link) ranking the 100+ ‘showcase-featured’* unreleased games. (*With a couple of exceptions - hi, Star Trek Voyager strategy game!)
Since Steam wishlists surge just after announce, we may be a tad low on some of these. But we have >3 independent metrics, and feel free to sort the DB by new Steam followers for an alternative view. The Top 10 games are above, and notes on them are:
Seven out of the 10 ‘top trenders’ were brand new announcements: they’re topped by TT Games’ new Arkham-y LEGO Batman game (#1), and swiftly followed by a surprise Warhammer 40k: Dawn Of War sequel (#3), and first-person Napoleonic Souls-like (!) Valor Mortis (#4).
New looks at much-anticipated titles also hit the Top 10: yes, Hollow Knight Silksong added >300k wishlists (#2) on its release date announce, and Resident Evil Requiem (#5) topped 1m wishlists overall, after debuting a new trailer at Opening Night Live.
Fresh IP from existing teams also performed well: vehicle experts Saber Interactive (MudRunner) scored with truck sim Road Kings (#6), the Hell Let Loose shooter franchise expanded to Vietnam (#7), and Disco Elysium’s creators busted out Zero Parades (#8), continuing the CRPG feels.
From there, the wishlist curve flattens out a lot, but also making our Top 10 estimates are ‘Jet Set/Grind Radio but you’re a train’ title (!) Denshattack! (#9), and lush-looking pixel Last Of Us-like Long Gone (#10), which we’ve previously featured at GDCo.
All of these Top 10 games were featured at Gamescom’s own Opening Night Live, by the way, except Silksong (which was teased), and Hell Let Loose: Vietnam (which debuted at Future Games Show.) We’ve also added games featured on the ‘IGN at Gamescom’ showcases. Here’s #11 to #30, with the event the game was part of:
That’s entirely too many games to summarize efficiently, but brand new at #11-#30? A Dante-themed ‘dark fantasy ARPG’ La Divina Commedia, a new He-Man themed retro beat ‘em up, and, uh, a new Bubsy 3D mascot platformer were some of the few new games. Oh, and Ron Gilbert’s scrolling pixel action-roguelike, too….
In general, about 75% of these games were already-announced titles that were showing at Gamescom, and also had slots in streaming showcases. This shouldn’t be surprising, since keeping momentum going is vital for discovery. (It does lead to long streaming showcases with ‘new trailers’ for existing games, though, meh…)
We also wanted to show the overall Top 10 by new Steam wishlists over the last week, just to prove that most of the online dialog really was around Gamescom:
As you can see, the only non-Gamescom titles in there are OKU (still pushing the boundary of ‘incented wishlists’ from Bongo Cat, lol!) and Battlefield 6, in the middle of a very successful pre-order campaign. (We have it at 750k Steam pre-orders and $50m, way ahead of Borderlands 4 and Metal Gear Solid Delta in the pre-order charts.)
Finally, we did have a quick look at median/average Steam wishlist increases, across each showcase. Nothing surprising here, and there’s probably an argument for more Gamescom-timed showcases, since the field is relatively small right now:
So, this wasn’t everything unreleased at Gamescom: we didn’t include Call Of Duty Black Ops 7 stats ‘cos it’s part of the ‘Call Of Duty HQ’ app on Steam, so not easy to separate out. (It would have ranked highly.) Also notable but sans Steam page: the new Black Myth game just entering dev, and Kirby Air Riders, which is def. Switch 2 only! (And lots more, doubtless!)
But it gives you a good idea of the general vibes from Gamescom for new games - some interesting reveals, lots of existing titles continuing to rack up interest, and the odd surprise or two. Understanding vibes? Quite important nowadays…
Valve talks the future of Steam at Gamescom…
Steam often does dev-centric talk updates at physical game events. And at Gamescom, it was Valve’s Erik Peterson doing a ‘Steam 2025 Platform Update’ talk, very handily written up for us by InvenGlobal.
As always, these are a mix of FYIs on new features that devs might have missed, with a smattering of new data around some of the ways the platform has expanded. We cover new features extensively anyhow, so here’s some new-ish data instead:
Valve added some ‘color’ on the countries growing the most on Steam: according to the write-up, “From 2020 to 2025, Japan, Brazil, China, Germany, and the U.S. emerged as the fastest-growing markets. Japan’s growth is especially notable in light of its console-heavy history, while the U.S. market continues to expand despite its maturity.”
Daily Deal semi-automation has expanded the games featured: going to 6 Daily Deal slots and ‘pushing’ offers meant going from 2,800 games (2024) to 4,000 (est. 2025) getting that feature slot. And “nearly nine out of ten featured games in 2024 were first-timers, reflecting Valve’s push to highlight a wider range of developers.”
Steam sales & new users continue to push upwards: Peterson noted that from August 2024 to August 2025, the daily average was 109,000 new accounts buying games on Steam (so ~40m new accounts!) And the 2025 Spring Sale was up 19% - and the Summer Sale up 8% year-over-year - in revenue across discounted titles.
The full write-up has pics of a few more slides, but the international reach expansion of Steam really is impressive. As one example, Peterson mentioned that in 2020, Steam hit 20m CCU on the platform as a whole, but in 2025, we’re at 40m+ peak CCU, and 12m+ peak in-game CCU. That’s some decent growth…
Oh, and one final ‘big numbers’ quote. We’d already heard that in 2024, 500+ games earned more than $4m gross on Steam, nearly 2x the number from 2020. But Peterson added that “in 2025, we are on pace to increase that number of games by almost 20%.” It might not always be your game, but the catalog compounding effect is real…
[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.]