Why did this game's trailer spawn ~150k Steam wishlists?
Musings on the nature of 'hook'. Also: the latest Steam debuts & lots of 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 weekend-adjacent, so it’s time to examine the tea-leaves and take a look at a PC game with a viral concept for our lead story. (Before we wander into new Steam game performance analysis for GDCo Pro & Plus subscribers, and thank you all…)
Before we start, our buddies at the Video Game History Foundation just unearthed rejected voice lines from Midway’s 2003 MLB Slugfest baseball game, and woof, the commentators were going hard: “Enjoying some smoked whale meat up here in the booth today… I don’t really care for it, but I can’t stop eating it.”
[WANT LOTS MORE DATA? Companies, get much more ‘Steam deep dive’ & console data SaaS access org-wide via GameDiscoverCo Pro, as 80+ have. And signing up to GDCo Plus gets (like Pro!) the rest of this newsletter and Discord access, plus ‘just’ basic data & more. ]
Game discovery news: ARC Raiders is resplendent
Finishing off the week in style, we have a large (mega!) amount of game platform & discover (explore!), so let’s do it:
The latest Footprints.gg ‘trad media’ charts (from ICO) have extraction shooter ARC Raiders reigning supreme (which GDCo estimates at >2.5m copies sold, already), with Battlefield 6 (big hit!), Fortnite x The Simpsons (don’t have a cow, man?), and Call Of Duty: Black Ops 7 (hopefully not shooter-overshadowed) next.
Ampere did some fun analysis on 18 games “ripe for remake or remaster success”, noting: “remakes and remasters released across 2024 and 2025 attracted 72.4 million players across Xbox, PlayStation, and Steam, with these consumers spending some $1.4bn.” (And yes, a Bloodborne remaster is on the wannabe list…)
Nintendo’s financial results added English-language slides with interesting details, and “84% of Switch 2 players have transitioned from Nintendo Switch” - a big number. Also notable: there’s 400m Nintendo Accounts, 128m yearly unique players, and 34m Switch Online subs, and new interest in acquiring game devs.
October 2025’s top-grossing mobile games are headed by Honor Of Kings, LastWar: Survival, Roblox, Monopoly Go!, and Royal Match - all with >$100m for the month. On the way up? Digital CCG standout Pokémon TCG Pocket “is up 15 places and raked in $20m more in IAPs than September, hitting $44m for October.”
Microlinks, Pt.1: Disney’s theme-park inspired Fortnite Island mini-games are out ‘for a limited time’; Discord is updating its parent/guardian tools, including visibility into purchases, call minutes, and top servers; the now Amazon Luna-branded PC game giveaways for Nov. got announced, inc. Two Point Hospital.
Steam confirmed a much-requested add-on for its handheld: “We are adding a new feature to Steam Deck, enabling it to complete all active downloads in a new display-off low-power mode, before going to sleep.” Players are excited, but are still looking for a ‘download all updates at once’ option. (There’s always something…)
The Epic lawsuits against mobile app stores continue to bear fruit, as “Google is agreeing to reduce its standard [Android app store] fee to 20 percent or 9 percent, depending on the kind of transaction and when an app was first installed.” And alternative app stores will be easier to install, too? Double rainbow…
The manic number-crunchers at Hushcrasher have had a go at estimating the budget of all Steam games, using game credits length, studio experience & more. We think it’s overestimating ‘out of pocket’ budgets somewhat, due to a lot of sweat equity in the space, but it’s also a) amazing data depth b) directionally right.
Microlinks, Pt. 2: remember that Steam Award nominations start on Nov. 24th, and you can use Steam Events to poke your community about them; the ‘three distinct eras of Kickstarter’ for video games, analyzed; 68% of U.S. adolescents say that video games make them feel connected to their friends.
We spotted an early leak, but ‘direct to PlayStation Portal’ cloud streaming is now official, allowing you to play “select digital PS5 games from your own library” on the handheld without it needing to stream from a PS5. (There are also rumors there’s some cross-buy functionality coming, based on new icons, but it’s very unclear.)
Max Power Gaming has a good overview of Roblox UGC cosmetric trends right now, noting that “10 of the top 30 items (33%) are emotes. Popular emotes range from trendy dances to hyperactive movements like ‘Crazy Jumping Spider.’” (OK, some of these are wild.) Anime-style black floppy hairstyles are also hot, apparently.
Some good game discovery tips from Joe Henson of Don’t Scream Together ‘fame’: “Game devs, if your trailer or gameplay clip relies on sound to make sense, it’s already losing most viewers. Most people scroll with their phones muted. If it can’t show what the game is in three seconds of silence, they won’t stick around for the sound.”
Esoteric microlinks: how poor leadership slows down game development; what the UK government thinks of the ‘Stop Killing Games’ movement for always-online games; how the idea of ‘TV watching’ is growing beyond televisions into social media videos and shortform ‘micro dramas’.
Why this game’s trailers spawned ~150k wishlists
Many of us in the PC/console game biz have been having existential crises about how games get popular recently. Why? It’s been changing…. a lot. Exhibit 1: this thinkpiece from Curious Expedition dev Riad Djemili:
“A common consensus used to be: ‘Ideas are nothing, execution is everything.’ I think we have to reverse that. We are back to the point where ideas are everything. Specifically, an idea that is easy to understand, clickable, and marketable on its face.”
So it was good timing when Johannes Knop of Randwerk - whom I knew from their intriguing (but only mid-level selling) 2023 physics destruction game ABRISS - contacted us for advice on the Berlin co-operative’s newly announced Wanderburg.
After quickly realizing it was not a game adaptation of a popular German aperitif, and was “a minimalist open-world roguelike in an ecosystem of Castles on Wheels”, we talked to Johannes to discover that two versions of an ‘announce trailer’*, plus inclusion in misc. Steam events have created nearly 150k Steam wishlist additions since June.
(*Johannes told us: “We have literally posted like 3 pieces of media about this game ever, and two of them are trailers with 460k and 220k views respectively.” Yes, we’re jealous. The initial trailer was edited by Zwi Zausch of Dorfromantik fame, btw, so his expertise def. helped.)
What’s going on here? This isn’t paid acquisition at work, it’s simple pure joy about the game’s trailers - which went viral on YouTube of their own accord. Look at the upvotes - and super-cute comments - from Randwerk’s own June YouTube trailer:
So yes, of course you still have to execute on a good game. (As games like Cuffbust have shown recently, delivering the correct final product is vital.) But expectation management is a better place to be than ‘nobody knows about my game’. So we talked to Johannes about how the team came up with the concept. Our notes:
A public playtest helped the team pivot back to Wanderburg: after trying “a wild mix of different prototypes”, Johannes explains, “We were working on a prototype for a card-based city builder (imagine Stronghold x Bad North x Stacklands).” But they showed both it and Wanderburg at a local in-person playtest event, and WB “got so much attention” that they switched focus to it again.
The game didn’t start remotely like a (Vampire) Survivors-like: he notes: “At the beginning, it had a lot more resource management, was much slower, and played more like a slow MOBA and had clunky controls. Our inspirations were… Sid Meier’s Pirates!, the Spore Cell stage or Agar.io.” But as they prototyped, it gradually assumed some ‘growing with resource trees & random cool power-ups’ roguelike conventions.
Expectation management was part of the gameplay refinement: we really like this statement from Johannes: “We knew the hook was really strong, and worked from the fantasy towards usability and gameplay that people that liked the fantasy expected. We always knew that ‘another Survivors game’ wouldn’t be enough.”
So when do you know your hook is good? Folks like MadMorph (711k YouTube subs) recuts a shortform video to highlight the hook - ‘Play as a castle on legs* (that EATS OTHER CASTLES)’. (*There are spider-castles as well as wheel-y castles, folks…)
(SIDE NOTE: everyone should go look at the titles of MadMorph’s YouTube Shorts to get an idea of the kind of titles he uses to help his posts get attention. He has a strong idea of what people want to see in games, and he is repackaging many games’ hook for virality...)
Anyhow, back to the ‘player expectation’ discussion. We asked Johannes whether he was worried people wanted something different from what the actual game offers. And we liked his response so much, we want to reprint it in full:
“I think cities or castles on wheels is generally an idea that people have always liked… we saw the ecological system that Mortal Engines has, described as “municipal Darwinism” in the film, and thought hey - isn’t that really similar to that game with the fish, where you eat fish and grow larger and then eat larger fish? And then kind of went from there…
The mechanics match the fantasy in a way that from the first second, people understand how it’s played, and can therefore imagine themselves playing it. We like to ask people that come to play the game at conventions if it is what they expected when they saw the trailer, and it always seems to be the case. Some people are hoping for multiplayer, but that’s not something we can pivot to now.”
And we’re not saying Wanderburg is a guaranteed smash. It could be ‘fast followed’ or cloned - though it includes vehicle physics and modular 3D, so is more complex to copy. And gameplay-wise, maybe vehicles are trickier to control vs. people, for ‘turn radius’ reasons. (Anyone remember Interstate ‘76? We’ll see when we play it…)
But the devs are iterating smartly, with a small Steam Playtest planned this year, and a demo release and then Next Fest in early 2026. They also told us: “Early Access release will be some time before GTA 6.” (They meant the original Grand Theft Auto VI date, not the half-a-year later version announced since our interview, lol.)
And look, megaviral titles like Wanderburg are not the whole market. Check Master Of Command, a new Napoleonic strategy game, for a counter-point. This game is popular, but will never go viral on TikTok. But as HTMAG’s great megapost about this new era of Steam virality says - it’s a golden age for discovery if you get hook right.
This week on Steam: football, diplomacy are hot?
