[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.]
It’s the week of Halloween, and I’m currently sitting upstairs in my house trying to work out whether the spooky noise I’m hearing is a) from the ambient album I’m listening to b) the neighbors’ animatronic Halloween decorations c) a squirrel gnawing obnoxiously on a branch outside the window. (Spoilers: it was c).)
Spooky buds, before we start, LitRPG (audio)book hit Dungeon Crawler Carl has a new pinball machine from Multimorphic, and Pinball News recorded a full ‘making-of’ talk from the recent Pinball Expo. With Stern (Pokémon, Fallout) alongside a number of niche manufacturers, pinball is a) not dead b) having an interesting 2026, and we dig it.
[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: Ebbtide brings the zombies
Let’s get going here with some notable game platform & discovery news, this fine new week:
GDCo Pro's estimates of 'trending' unreleased Steam games by 'new wishlists in the last 7 days' (above) sees zombie survival strategy game Ebbtide (+206k wishlists) #1 with a bullet - it’s fairly public about AI use, btw. And #3 is Phantom Blade Zero, the wuxia action Souls-like launching this week & looking very strong.
Beyond Next Fest winners we’ll get to shortly (Probably Stolen, Abyssal Lapidary, ArcheAge Chronicles), we're still seeing Valve's own Deadlock solidly in the Top 10, nostalgia for Shrek 2 Remastered at #7, & soccer sim Football Manager 2027 scaling wishlists at #10, as a free pre-launch demo is about to debut.
‘Games as platforms’ news: shortly after The Witcher 3 did it, CDPR’s Cyberpunk 2077 now also has expanded console/cross-platform mods, though initial PS5 mods are modest in scope: “There are several new quests that reuse existing assets and lines of dialogue, and there are a selection of ‘Romance Enhanced' mods.”
Steam officially shipped its Personal Calendar into full release, with a blog post and a related video with good tips: set your release (EA or 1.0!) date at least 60 days before launch; the more ‘real’ wishlists, the more likely you are to be on the Calendar. Oh, and DLC is only listed on Personal Calendar if the player owns the base game. (Seriously, watch the video, at least once.)
Microlinks: the top PlayStation downloads for September, per Sony, were topped by EA Sports FC 27 & Wolverine on PS5, with Call Of Duty Warzone doing F2P #s; Game Pass is now a perk with more expensive U.S. T-Mobile phone plans; Epic’s running a $50k Unreal Engine/UEFN ‘AI Game Jam’ starting Nov. 12th.
The latest Matthew Belloni x Puck newsletter ($, spicy) has some notes on new Netflix sub-boss Peter Rice: “Rice is said to favor less investment in video podcasts, games, and YouTube-style creators - the engagement-bait inning eaters that have diluted the premium roots of the Netflix brand and given members a ‘What the heck IS all this?’ feeling when they open the cluttered app.” Hmm…
Streaming showcase follow-ups: we have the Triple I Initiative’s Oct. showcase at ~15k median 7-day Steam wishlist increase, 75% down on April’s. (Still 4x any other Oct. showcase, which all have slower than earlier-in-year comps, tho. Why? Less ‘hot’ games to 100% debut, a lack of Steam featuring, and a v.busy calendar.)
Circana’s U.S. hardware & select software #s, Sept. 2026 was overall down 1% YoY to $4.8 billion, and Circana’s Mat Piscatella also documented a decent jump in PS5 hardware sales in the week of Wolverine’s debut, as console hardware as a whole was up 12% to a (still relatively modest) $362 million. (It’s a ‘meh’ market…)
Surprising game milestones: Gaijin’s $25 PvPvE shooter Active Matter has 500k sold in 6 weeks multi-platform, inc. their own launcher, despite an initial 4.5k Steam CCU, thx to great stickiness; not a shock if you read our newsletter, but GDCo estimates the PS5 SKU of BeamNG.Drive at ~1 million sold in just a week!
Microlinks, Pt.2: an Australian court ordered Fortnite to be put back onto the iOS App Store there; Pantaloon launched a boutique indie game subscription service, Playbill; 42% of U.S. gamers say they may be less productive at work due to GTA VI; there’s a late-breaking Nintendo Indie World showcase on Oct. 28th.
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Who ‘won’ October 2026’s Steam Next Fest?
Firstly, yes, there are a lot of meta-questions about why so many demos - even compared to the 5,000+ expected - showcased Steam’s Oct. 2026 Next Fest, which just concluded. We’ll have a follow-up to this newsletter on Friday, looking into that…
But let’s put ‘that question’ in the corner for now, and do what everyone should do, which is look at what games were actually popular, and why! As they do recently, Valve put up its list of the Top 50 most-played demos, from the ~7,300 we’re tracking.
Anyhow, our GameDiscoverCo Pro data offering now has real-time updates on Steam Next Fests as they happen (below). But if you don’t have access to that, we’ve exported the raw data to a Google Drive document so you can analyze it at your leisure:
Two comments on this Next Fest - quite a lot of the trending games we see on wishlists already had strong demo momentum pre-NF, and a number of the top new unique player/CCU games are co-op/friendslop adjacent. Looking at Top 10 uniques:
‘Just playin’ around’ co-op had the obvious CCU blow-ups: we don’t rank them so high on wishlists (tho we’re possibly underestimating?), but asymmetric ‘naughty student’ game Worst Class Ever hit #1 on uniques, with 600k players, and ‘raft farting’ (yes, really, yes) title Fart Together was #4. This trend is very strong.
Many other top titles continued strong pre-event interest: if you look at GDCo’s top demos CCU chart 3 weeks ago, cyberpunk shop sim Probably Stolen (#3 then, #2 in uniques now), anime desktop companion Character House (#1 then, #7 now), incremental-er Find The Needle (#2 then, #3 now) were all heavily in the mix. There’s an argument that Next Fest is now just a boost for existing demo trends…
A handful of ‘brand new’ Next Fest break-outs did scale: we’re looking at you, gothic gem/jewelry crafter Abyssal Lapidary, which launched its demo just pre-Fest & hit #8 on uniques. Huge fantasy MMO ArcheAge Chronicles also timed its demo closer to Next Fest and hit #5 in uniques.
Our general comment on trends at Oct’s Next Fest, btw, is ‘there’s no major genre trend, just all the existing microtrends playing out in 10-15 different subgenres’ - crafting sims, shop sims, desktop companions, co-op ‘hijinks’ games, cozy builders & more…
Next, here’s GDCo’s Top 10 estimates of new wishlists during Next Fest. You’ll see a bunch of ‘top uniques’ games in here too, like cozy ‘sustainable MMO’ Loftia (#9), and round-based co-op zombie FPS (on procgen maps!) Mortuus (#7), also both great microtrend examples.
But there’s also some new entries including ‘deeper Stardew Valley x combat’ pixel standout Emberville (#4), which just smartly last-minute delayed release into Jan. due to Next Fest feedback. And ‘dark first-person fishing adventure’ Dreadmoor (#5), plus powered-train ‘mover’ survival FPS Frostrail (#8), both of which look v.good.
Part of the point here is - people already cared about these games way before Next Fest. (We estimate Frostrail already had 650k+ wishlists, for example.) But how many of you were following it closely? And that’s the point of Next Fest - it’s not a hype originator for most games, so much as a hype amplifier….
The #11 to #30 by wishlist increase during NF is a good look at other key titles, tho it spans +30k to +50k, down on June 2026’s Next Fest #11-30, which were +40k to +78k…
It can be difficult to visualize the diversity of games in this list, but there’s so much good-looking stuff - cyberpunk ARPG ReBlade: The Death Spiral (#11), clever soul-processing (!) incremental game Deadline: Afterlife Processing (#15) & early FromSoft-inspired first-person RPG Queens’s Domain (#18) being just three of them.
One other visualization we generally do (thx Michael Chan!) is the ‘Top 5 Steam’ tags chart for the Top 15 ‘most new wishlists’ games:
This includes a couple of remasters (The Wolf Among Us, Godzilla: Destroy All Monsters) that also charted in the Top 15. Other shared tag points include incremental games (Find The Needle & ‘reverse farmer’ Unharvest), crafting (a bunch of games!), and intriguingly, ‘Lovecraftian’ (Abyssal Lapidary & Dreadmoor.) Sinister vibes in effect…
It’s also worth printing out data on the Top 20 games by highest Steam CCU during the event, according to us. (You needed ~1,500 CCU to make the Top 20.) We talked about many of these, but not Just Volleyball (#5, simple co-op fun!) or creepy drilling game Bore (#12), which epitomizes the new skool co-op, horror, incremental trend.
Finally, let’s talk trends. Before the October Next Fest, I’d predicted we’d see just over 5,000 demos, which would continue the trend line. And… nope. Although some demos were pulled late, we still got to >7,300, up 66.6% (!) on June 2026’s ~4,400:
So yes, a startlingly large amount of these games are competent & handcrafted. But there’s something going on here - and it’s not easy to deconstruct it just with Steam’s AI disclosures, which are arguably useful but somewhat of a fig leaf.
Anyhow, as a result of this, the percentile chances of ‘success’ on a comparative scale to other Next Fests, you won’t be surprised to see, tanked:
We use Steam follower increase here, since it enables us to benchmark to more Next Fests, and: a game in the top 10% of all Oct. Steam Next Fest titles added +63 followers (so +1,500 wishlists, maybe?), down 48% compared to June (+121 followers) and down 64% on Oct. 2025 (+173 followers.) That’s fairly representative of all tiers…
Things might look better if we compared rankings directly. But I think more games are moving their ‘big demo reveal’ out of Next Fest as it gets too crowded, and Oct. has been a slower Next Fest anyhow. (For the record, the Top 10 in June had a median wishlist increase of +143k, vs. +80k in October, down 44%.)
We think - partly because it’s platform-promoted - Next Fest might have assumed an outsized source of importance or worry for many. It’s harder to get seen on-platform: but off-platform, if you can get traction, the world is still your lobster. But it’s a bit of a mess. And unlike Marie Kondo, we do not love mess. More trend clarity? On Friday…
GameDisco Show: played games, console hacks…
Of course, here’s the latest The GameDiscover Show, ft. myself (Simon) and Post Games’ Chris Plante talking trends - sub to the podcast via Apple Podcasts, Spotify & elsewhere (audio), with a video version on YouTube (above).
The latest GDCo Show talks about 2026's debuts that got played a lot by the average player on Steam, a survey into AI use at bigger game studios, Sony fighting back against the PlayStation console jailbreaks, and how often the average player actually buys games. (This might be less than you think….) 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, devs, and other smart game industry folks.]