Which new games 'ruled' interest at 2025's The Game Awards?
Also: lotsa news and this week's Steam debut highlights.
[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.]
This is GDCo’s final newsletter before Tuesday, January 6th, 2026 - which is a whole new annum, y’all. Nonetheless, we do have a final update of 2025 for you, which you can read while you’re chowing down on your Steam chocolates. (You did get’ em, rite?)
But before we end the year, a giant thank-you to everyone who reads GDCo’s output, subscribes to our GDCo Pro and Plus data, and shares our content. We love doing this, and myself and my colleagues (yes, there are ~8 of us!) so appreciate your support…
[FREE DEMO OF GDCo PRO? You too can get a gratis demo of our GameDiscoverCo Pro company-wide ‘Steam deep dive’ & console data by contacting us today - ~85 orgs have it. Or, signing up to GDCo Plus gets the rest of this newsletter and Discord access, plus more. ]
Game discovery news: how’s your Steam replay?
Let’s check out the final platform and discovery news of the year, as TikTok U.S. ‘sells off’ to a weird conglomerate to allow it to keep operating, it goes like this:
Steam’s 2025 Replay tool is live (above), allowing players to check out what games they played on Valve’s platform. All-player medians: 4 games played, 6 days in a row, and 14% of all playtime was from 0-1 year old games, 44% from 1-7 year-old titles, 40% from >=8 year old games. (Also: the Steam Awards finalists are open.)
Circana’s Nov. 2025 U.S. game hardware sales were v.non-good for consoles, with spending down 27% YoY to $695m. That’s even with higher av.prices - Stephen Totilo asked more and “Xbox Series unit sales were down over 70% [YoY]… PS5 down over 40%… [and] Switch + Switch 2 [were] down >10% compared to Switch [in 2024].”
Also a real eye-opener from those Circana numbers if you read carefully: the Call Of Duty franchise “experienced a double-digit percentage full game dollar sales decline when compared to November 2024.” But Black Ops 6 launched on Oct. 25th, 2024. So BlOps 7 is >10% (at least!) off last year’s Call Of Duty minus its first week? Youch!
In a surprise move, Netflix is partnering with FIFA for “a newly reimagined FIFA football simulation game exclusively on Netflix Games”, launching in 2026 and created by Delphi Games (licensors of IO’s upcoming James Bond game.) It’ll debut in Summer 2026 alongside the World Cup.
Microlinks, Pt.1: Brotato saw 8% of all players on Steam Deck after its New Dawn update, a decent amount; GOG has added an optional Patrons subscription “to support game preservation”; Apple introduced off-platform iOS payments & alt app marketplaces in Japan to tie in with a new law.
Quantic Foundry surveyed game players about Gen AI, and boy, this cohort don’t like it: “85% of respondents have a below-neutral attitude towards the use of Gen AI in video games, with a highly-skewed 63% who selected the most negative… option.” Players who love storytelling hate it more, and older gamers (45+) are more OK with it.
We’ve heard from multiple sources that Nintendo may be ‘switching’ (haha!) away from its Switch 2 cartridge options, which were just ‘64gb game cart or Game Key Card’, and allowing smaller cart sizes - exact choices TBC. (UPDATE: publisher ININ confirmed as much - two smaller cart sizes are now an option.)
Meanwhile in mobile, Matej Lancaric surveyed big spenders in F2P mobile games on ‘fake ads’, and discovered: “75% uninstall instantly when the game doesn’t match the ad… 40% leave negative reviews… 27% ask for refunds… But 17% of paying users STILL stay… and STILL spend.” (And these mini-games are often built into onboarding.)
Fandom has released its ‘top franchises’ lists for 2025, based on its Wiki-like communities, “with Roblox taking the #1 overall spot — a major leap from its #10 ranking in 2024.” Also in the Top 10? Marvel, Star Wars, Minecraft, Disney, League Of Legends, Elder Scrolls, and One Piece…
Newzoo’s latest estimate of the entire game biz suggests “the global games market is expected to reach $197 billion in 2025, growing +7.5% year-on-year”, with mobile at $108b (up 7.7%), console at $45b (up 4.2%), and PC at $43b (up 10.4%), led by “a strong slate of premium releases” on PC - rather than big growth in F2P?
Microlinks, Pt.2: Raw Fury’s Johan Toresson reveals they looked at ~2,000 pitches this year & signed four, two from ‘cold’ applications; new research on U.S. teens & social media and on the UK’s online habits are worth reading; learning app Duolingo just launched a crossover quest featuring Genshin Impact characters.
Oh, and a correction from Tuesday’s newsletter - Battlefield 6 escaped chart containment (due to its REDSEC F2P spinoff) and disappeared from our Xbox Top 20 paid games of 2025 countdown. (It’s back in there at #1 now in the article.)
Which new games ruled The Game Awards 2025?
Last week’s The Game Awards rolled out wide, with the organizers claiming “171 million global livestreams of the full broadcast, up 11% over the previous record-setting 2024 tally of 154 million livestreams.” And we obviously know who won - it was The Muppets.
But which of the new game announcements liberally dotted around the awards got the most juice? GameDiscoverCo is well positioned to answer this, and so we made a giant spreadsheet (Google Drive doc), with reveals quantified three different ways:
Steam wishlist increase in the last week (GDCo estimate)
TGAs & IGN YouTube channel individual game trailer views (compiled by us)
‘Trad media’ mentions for each game (done by the wonderful Footprints.gg!)
Starting with Steam wishlist increases for TGA announcements or new trailers (above), here’s what we detected:
Total War: Warhammer 40,000 overperformed vs. other charts: PC-heavy lovers of a) the Total War series b) the Warhammer IP blasted the strategy game up to 760k wishlists in no time, topping these charts.
New Tomb Raider & Control franchise games hit big: both Tomb Raider: Legacy Of Atlantis (+580k WLs) and Control Resonant (+520k WLs) also did great, partly because - like Total War - their Steam page was launched alongside the reveal.
Phantom Blade Zero also saw a lot of Wuxia juice: obviously Asia-friendly players account for a lot of interest in the historical Chinese martial arts game, but by no means all: >50% of its 530k+ wishlisters are outside of China.
Other titles doing notably well include the Cyberpunk-ish surprise announce No Law, Gang Of Dragon (the new game from Yakuza’s co-creator), and silly parody PC action platformer Bradley The Badger (from the Mario + Rabbids co-creator and friends.) There’s some definite ‘if you like this, you’ll love this’ vibes among a number of these.
One point to make - trad Steam ‘follower to wishlist’ ratios can be ~12x, and some of these titles have as high as 30x. It’s not necessarily a negative, but implies some casual fans and ‘we’ll wishlist everything big in the TGAs’ player types - we note 25-30% wishlister overlaps between the above (non-Total War) titles.
Delving into the #11 to #30 wishlist increases, there’s plenty of juicy stuff too - from Star Wars: Galactic Racer (an interesting, alternate genre to take with the franchise) to Coven Of The Chicken Foot (from Uncharted’s Bruce Straley) and far beyond.
But wishlists are just one view, and will advantage games that weren’t previously announced before the event (and games that actually have Steam pages!) Let’s check out the rankings by YouTube standalone trailer views on our two picked channels:
Some of these top titles - Phantom Blade, Tomb Raider, Total War - are very similar, but the differences are two-fold. First, there’s new trailers for already announced games like Resident Evil Requiem (#3) - which added wishlists, but already had lots.
But second, there’s a tranche of games - like early-in-dev RPG Star Wars: Fate Of The Old Republic (#4), and Sons Of The Forest sequel Forest 3 (#7), which are simply too early to have official Steam pages, but still had a lot of teaser or trailer interest. (Also see: Larian’s CRPG Divinity.)
This view (just view counts from the TGAs/IGN YouTube channels) is necessarily incomplete, since many trailers appeared on other YouTube channels. (Like Fate Of The Old Republic’s on the Star Wars channel, which will have taken ‘official TGA channel’ views.) But it gives everyone an idea of general interest, at least…
Finally, we have the Top 10 ‘trad media’ mentions from ICO’s Footprints.gg (above) - an excellent source of multi-language traditional written media hype about games. Looks like Resident Evil Requiem, Star Wars: Fate Of The Old Republic, the Tomb Raider games, and Divinity* are all up there in the Top 6.
There’s also some titles we’ve talked about less in the Top 10, including Capcom’s long-awaited action-adventure Pragmata, the new Ace Combat game, and Archetype’s ambitious ARPG Exodus. (The full mention counts are in the detailed document.)
(*The Footprints.gg team had to remove some excess mentions from Divinity, because the AI controversy overlapped with the post-TGAs coverage, haha.)
Finally, we made a blended chart based on rankings in all three charts, where we weighted appropriately if the game didn’t have a Steam page yet. The Top 5, using this view? Tomb Raider, Star Wars, Phantom Blade, Resident Evil, Divinity. Makes sense to us! And we hope this mega-analysis helped you understand the top announces….
This week on Steam: pre-Sale gets the Black Hole
