Who's winning video game Discords? We know!
Also: a look at Apple Arcade's 2025 trends & 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.]
Let’s get going, shall we, with another GameDiscoverCo newsletter? And - first and most important - do we have a Silksong update for you? No, though this fake London underground ad goofing on this real (but incorrect) one made us spit out our drink.
Before we start: our buddies at the Video Game History Foundation are launching ‘trade magazine week’, ft. >400 old B2B game mags, like Electronic Gaming Retail News & Games Business magazine. Cyclical coverage, via a 1999 issue of the latter: “So budgets are high, and most games lose money. Should we as an industry be concerned?”
Finally: GDCo’s head of biz dev, Matt Styles, will be at Develop Brighton in a couple of weeks - and also at Gamescom in August. Hit him up to talk GameDiscoverCo Pro company-wide licenses or to ask him if he’s related to Harry. (Spoiler: he’s not.)
[KEEP US AS WE’RE ACCUSTOMED? Signing up to GameDiscoverCo Plus gets more from our second weekly newsletter, Discord access, data & lots more. And companies, get much more ‘Steam deep dive’ & console data access org-wide via GameDiscoverCo Pro, as 60+ have.]
Game discovery news: Chrono, OKU, Borderlands…
Taking a look at some of the top discovery & platform news for the week so far, it goes a bit like this:
GDCo's 'trending' unreleased Steam games by 7-day follower velocity (above) is topped by New World-inspired MMO Chrono Odyssey (#1), which has a fairly international audience & a hot beta. Next? Very ‘cross-promo heavy’ (hm!) chill exploration game Oku (#2), from the devs of Bongo Cat (190k CCU idle typer).
Also hot this week? Looter shooter Borderlands 4 (#3), which opened up $70 (not $80!) base game pre-orders, plus Railborn (#4) - one of those trendy 'train x moving base' titles, and The Blood Of Dawnwalker (#5), basically 'The Witcher 3 x vampires' - yes, fine, that's a lazy categorization, sue us.
Xbox is confirming an ‘aggregated gaming library’ coming to its PC app “in the Xbox PC app for Windows 11 PCs and handheld devices” this holiday, including for the ROG Xbox Ally handheld. Yes, “other leading PC storefronts” likely includes Steam, but it’s still unclear how fiddly it’ll be overall. But it’s an interesting step…
Social sandboxes like Gorilla Tag are so hot on Meta Quest that even I Am Cat - normally a (big hit) $20 single-player VR game for Quest - “got a new update that brings multiplayer lobbies into the mix, following an increasing trend in social VR games taking over.”
Fortnite’s new, shorter-play Blitz Royale mode has got some traction: “The mode's map… is a fraction of its size, building is disabled, and there's an in-match levelling system to grant weapons and power-ups” According to Fortnite.gg stats, it’s got about 2x the CCU of OG Battle Royale right now. (But no game-wide CCU boost.)
We’d heard that not many indie (or even mid-sized!) devs had Switch 2 dev kits yet. And this GI.Biz piece very much confirms that, with Ant Workshop’s Tony Gowland saying: “…there has been a similar situation to the OG Switch, which was also like hen’s teeth for a good 6-7 months after launch.”
Continued interest in making AAA PC/console titles in China, post-Black Myth, leads to NetEase’s action-adventure Blood Message, which Daniel Camilo has been analyzing: “Currently with no major new Tomb Raider, Uncharted or other popular games in the genre announced, Blood Message might just come to the rescue.”
We know that everything’s an Xbox, but here’s a leak of the packaging for Meta Quest 3S’ Xbox Edition, a standalone VR headset, which allegedly “includes an Xbox controller in the box, so you can play Xbox Cloud Gaming with no additional hardware.” (It may cost $400, and… [EDIT, ah, it’s out in super-limited quantities.]
We’ll keep running stories until they stop breaking records, but: “Grow a Garden [last weekend] was at an astonishing 21.3 million concurrents… The microtransaction-fueled free-to-play [Roblox] farming simulator had already shot past Fortnite’s concurrent peak of 15.3 million players.” (It’s an event-related spike, sure, but a huuuge one.)
We missed one interesting graph from Sony’s ‘business update’ .PDF: 10 key franchises or services (EA Sports FC, Roblox, Call Of Duty, NBA 2K, EA Play, Fortnite, Genshin Impact, EA Sports College Football, GTA V, and Ubisoft+ Classics) made up 53% of all PlayStation Store revenue in 2024, up from 51% in 2023.
Microlinks: Nintendo's mysterious absence from selling first-party products on Amazon ends with no explanation; did you know Facebook Gaming is still a viable platform in 2025?; interesting to see UK physical game platform sales charts splits via GfK - e.g. 71% Hogwarts Legacy Switch 1 vs. 19% Switch 2.
Who's winning video game Discords? We know!
One tricky thing about Discord chat servers - although they’re great for community for games - is that it’s difficult to see how you’re doing compared to others. (There’s no global charts!) Well, all the way back in 2021, we found out that 505 Games’ Stephen ‘MrGameTheory’ Takowsky was compiling a ‘top Discord servers list’.
Fast forward a few years, and Stephen’s still at it, manually compiling a list of the top officially verified/partnered Discord servers. His daily list is available here, and we thought we’d grab the Top 10 game-related ‘active discovery servers’ on Discord and put them in the above chart.
Perhaps some of the names in there aren’t surprising - Minecraft, Roblox, Fortnite, Marvel Rivals, and Genshin Impact among them. But we do think it’s interesting how F2P gacha standouts like Honkai: Star Rail and Wuthering Waves also made it to the Top 10, alongside breakouts like Helldivers, Valorant, and Deep Rock Galactic.
This gives you a good idea of the general direction of travel - and is counting ‘active users’, as opposed to ‘total people who ever joined the Discord server’, by the way, so seems the most relevant for right now. Stephen also gave us a bunch of insight, which we’d summarize as follows:
Marvel Rivals is a big Discord hit, even surpassing AI megatool Midjourney: Stephen notes: “Marvel Rivals’ Discord now occasionally surpasses Midjourney’s Discord in active online members… Marvel Rivals’ daily activity is exceptionally strong, fueled by consistent cross-promotion from the game itself and its social channels.”
The 1 million member cap barrier finally cracks for gaming: “Historically, Discord enforced strict one-million-member caps on game servers. But over the past year… Discord is increasingly willing to allow certain AAA titles to exceed one million members without triggering automatic pruning, provided they maintain strong engagement ratios.”
We’re in the ‘Discovery Meta’ era of Discord growth: what’s that? Per Stephen, it’s “where simply acquiring members is no longer sufficient. Sustaining leaderboard presence requires full-scale community operations."
And how does that work? The bit Stephen wrote here was so good that we’re just going to quote it directly:
The ‘Discovery Meta’ era of Discord growth
“Unlike traditional social platforms that reward raw follower count, Discord heavily weights activity-to-membership ratio, keeping discovery highly merit-based. Servers like Midjourney, Marvel Rivals, Genshin Impact, Helldivers 2, and Roblox have mastered this formula and dominate accordingly.
Curated onboarding flows to engage new users immediately
Constant daily programming with events, contests, tournaments, and Q&As
AI bot integrations, personalization tools, and server-specific bots
Highly responsive moderation teams managing churn and engagement
Without serious daily operations, even AAA publisher servers struggle to maintain meaningful presence inside Discord Discovery.
Discord Alliances and UGC cross-pollination
Another ongoing trend continues to quietly expand. Many large gaming servers have formed cross-server Discord alliances. [ED: Stephen is also the founder of the United Servers of Discord Alliance, the largest server alliance on Discord.] These private alliances enable:
Coordinated promotional boosts across overlapping userbases
Shared moderator teams and dedicated moderator servers where strategies and insights are shared.
Joint community events such as trivia, UGC art contests, and worthwhile seasonal contests.
This cross-promotion model has become a reliable tactic for growing mid-to-large UGC-driven servers and sustaining momentum during content lulls.
The real Discord growth war is activation & retention
The battle for growth on Discord in 2025 is no longer about initial member acquisition. It is about activation, retention, and repeat daily participation.
The difference between a thriving 100,000-member server and a dead one is no longer driven purely by the popularity of the game, but by daily operational excellence. In the official Terraria Discord server, we host several events every day to sustain this momentum.”
Finally, Stephen - who’s also managing the WUCHANG Fallen Feathers Discord community, as that game comes into its July release with mucho China interest, helped put together a set of ‘hot’ or ‘not’ Discord servers in 2025:
HOT: “Discord servers maintaining significant growth right now”: Marvel Rivals, Genshin Impact, Minecraft, Valorant, Honkai Star Rail, Fortnite, Roblox, Geometry Dash, Helldivers 2, Tower Defense Simulator, Once Human, Wuthering Waves, Apex Legends, Rainbow 6, Stumble Guys, Zenless Zone Zero, Rocket League, Delta Force Game, PUBG MOBILE, Call of Duty, Terraria, Deep Rock Galactic, GTA Online, Rust, Destiny 2 PC LFG, Arena Breakout Infinite.
NOT: “Discord game servers falling down in the rankings”: Sea of Thieves, Splitgate, Hero Wars, Animal Crossing New Horizons, Lost Ark, Naraka Bladepoint, Mobile Legends, League of Legends.
Of course, this is all relative - the League Of Legends Discord still has ~100,000 people online right now, something most other servers would kill for. But it’s still a bit down on previous highs, so we’re pointing it out. And thanks again to Stephen for sharing all this knowledge on a relatively underdocumented part of the ecosystem…
Which Apple Arcade games win 2025 so far?
Looking for a small bonus data point to end this article, we realized - we’re still tracking the number of U.S. reviews for all Apple Arcade games in our Plus/Pro back-end, long past when most people stopped paying attention.
The fact is: Apple Arcade is doing just ‘fine’, with its 200+ games part of the Apple One services bundle. But Apple’s only commissioning a small amount of (often licensed, family-friendly) games per year (10-12?). (They’re also continuing to license across select, existing App Store games, using a ‘+’ on the end of the app name.)
AA is actually a perfectly good bundled-in service, as part of a bigger subscription. But nobody - as far as we can work out - is buying it standalone, so it’s got that ‘hey, you get this as part of these other things you are primarily paying for’ vibe.
Anyhow, we made you all a spreadsheet of 2025 year-to-date U.S. review count increases (Google drive doc) across all Apple Arcade games (see graph above). And here’s the headlines:
Basketball and Hello Kitty hold down the #1 and #2 spots: NBA 2K25 Arcade Edition is an AA exclusive, and U.S. folks love their basketball, so makes sense! And Hello Kitty Island Adventure debuted mid-2023 on Apple Arcade, and the witty, well-made game has gone on to be a big Switch hit, while still ruling AA.
The recent standout hit? It’s that joker at Balatro again: Apple did a smart deal to ‘Day 1’ debut ‘joker poker’ roguelike Balatro on Apple Arcade in Sept 2024., alongside a $10 premium iOS App. And it’s been a big hit (#3) on AA in 2025 too.
Sneaky Sasquatch is the launch game that keeps giving: perhaps you can now see why Apple recently acqui-hired the two devs of this game? Super-fun sandbox bigfoot game Sneaky Sasquatch launched in 2019 and is still #4 for most new U.S. reviews on AA in 2025. (It’s been expanded a lot.)
The rest of the Top 10 is filled out by high-quality casual games (MobilityWare Solitaire+), very kid-friendly titles brought across from the App Store (Disney Coloring World+ and Lego Duplo World+), plus other all-ages titles like Crossy Road Castle and Sonic Racing.
Anyhow, that’s your bulletin on a very under-discussed market. It’s not one it’s that easy to get Apple funding for, or even get your App Store game into. But it has a nice set of fun, evergreen mobile games without any annoying ads or IAP. It’s not nearly as ambitious as Apple’s launch vision - but it’s a pleasant enough backwater to float in.
[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.]