Why 'How Many Dudes?' gets pre-release discovery right!

Also: Roblox standouts in December, and 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.]

Welcome to the week, folks! Before we start: we just picked up a July 1957 copy of IBM’s Think magazine about the International Geophysical Year, a ‘50s global collab for better science. Now we’re lusting after an imagined era based on co-op & fact-based vibes. (We do what we can by, uh, bringing fact-based data to video games?)

That IGY project is referenced in Donald Fagen’s gorgeous ‘science optimist’ 1983 song: “On that train, all graphite and glitter, Undersea by rail; Ninety minutes from New York to Paris.” Nostalgia’s a powerful drug. (But we also note an Alistair MacLean thriller set in the IGY ft. a military tussle in Greenland (!), before you get too optimistic.)

[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 - ~90 orgs have it. Or, signing up to GDCo Plus gets the rest of this newsletter and Discord access, plus more. ]

Game discovery news: Masters of.. Resident Evil?

Well, we gotta get on and analyze some video game discovery. So let’s have at it:

• Which unreleased Steam games are trending this week? Per 7-day charts from GDCo Pro (that’s us!), Resident Evil Requiem (#1) breezed way over 2 million Steam wishlists, as racer Forza Horizon 6 (#2), Chinese action-RPG Phantom Blade Zero (#4), and samurai ARPG Nioh 3 (#5) continue to trend handily.

• Brand new? Akina (#8) is a Japanese 'drifting' racing game set in the '90s, and Moorestech (#15) is an anime RPG mixed with a factory automation game. Finally, Peter Molyneux's 'last ever game' Masters Of Albion (#13) got its April release date confirmed, boosting its wishlists to >100k. (Related: bye-bye Peter Molydeux.)

• The Game Developers Choice Awards also announced their nominees, with “Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 represented in eight categories. Ghost of Yōtei follows with five nominations, and Blue Prince with four.” Game of the Year contenders are those games plus Donkey Kong Bananza, Hollow Knight: Silksong, and Split Fiction.

• ICYMI: the ‘game pricing’ discussion of the last few weeks, via Stephen Totilo’s GameFile (sub!), is Peak’s Nick Kaman explaining his philosophy: “You know, twelve bucks… that’s ten bucks. But thirteen bucks is fifteen bucks… and eight bucks is still five bucks. It doesn’t become ten bucks. Seven ninety nine, that’s five bucks, right?”

• Judging by some data leaks from the Hoyoverse side, hit third-person gacha ARPG Genshin Impact might finally be coming to Steam soon. (“Current beta added a new DLL for a new unified SDK, which links against the Steam API.”) Could be another Hoyoverse game, tho - Honkai Impact 3rd is already on Steam. We’ll see.

• Mobile game links: the state of post-Block Blast F2P block puzzle games; looking at the rise of Match-3 and Merge games like Royal Match & Gossip Harbor; Matej Lancaric’s state of mobile in 2026 goes hard: “AI didn’t help you stand out; it made standing out harder… Production is cheap, attention is expensive.”

• A notable stat from Circana’s Dec. U.S. player engagement tracking: “[Around] 4 out of every 10 people that turned on their Xbox or PlayStation in the U.S. during December played Fortnite.” (They also played other things, with Grand Theft Auto V and Call Of Duty in the Top 3 for both consoles, but nonetheless…)

• We mentioned upcoming co-op ‘steampunk robot cowboy’ shooter Far Far West in a recent trending list, and here’s some Beta data: “Peak CCU of 9,358… over 19k new Discord… over 11k feedback form responses with 99.2% of people saying they would play again… we've now had over 400k playtesters to date.” (Plz muse as to why, genre-wise…)

• Xbox Cloud Gaming’s much-discussed ad supported layer may be arriving shortly, heralded by a “1 hour of ad supported play time per session” loading screen. Per Windows Central: “The ads will appear separately on Xbox Cloud Gaming, for those who have purchased Xbox games digitally, but don’t have Xbox Game Pass.”

• Microlinks: just after adding new monetization, Fortnite blocks creators from selling prize wheel spins; new Xbox Game Pass additions include Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine II & Death Stranding Director’s Cut; Steam is now (and/or shortly) allowing ‘complete the set’ game bundles to be gifted.

Why ‘How Many Dudes?’ gets discovery right…

We keep a close eye on trending Steam games. So we were truly intrigued to see ‘dude-builder roguelike’ How Many Dudes? picking up a load of interest, thanks to LOTS of streamer pickup and a hit demo that peaked at 3,000 CCU (within the top 5 most-played Steam demos) and led to >100k more wishlists in just a month.

And then we spotted the game was made by indie devs Butterscotch Shenanigans, who’s been making intriguing Steam games for 10+ years, inc. the Crashlands series of world-crafter pixel RPGs. (They did a truly memorable GDC ‘making of’ talk for C1.)

This fills us with joy. Why? Because when game dev is feeling a bit like a lottery, seeing that a previously successful smaller team (hundreds of thousands of units sold) is getting somewhere with a brand new idea - shows that maybe experience helps?

So we reached out to the brothers who run Butterscotch Shenanigans - Adam, Sam and Seth Coster. They gave us access to an internal timeline (similar to Balatro’s public one), which gave us a ton of insight. So here’s what we learned:

• How Many Dudes? was created as an explicit ‘hook-first’ roguelike: while Crashlands 2 has done decently, it’s not got a killer upfront hook. So the devs decided to make their next title idea-first, and then gameplay-strong via prototyping. The hook? The internet debate “Could 100 guys beat up a gorilla?”

• The gameplay’s not an afterthought - it’s a clever autobattler blend: the title has a clever ‘you’re the mob, not the main character’ take on Vampire Survivors-style visualizations. The devs say it’s “a kind of mixture of Balatro and TABS, with the design focused on building a hyper-synergized army rather than any individual dudes.”

• The team discovered both the theme & gameplay style worked with streamers: the devs noted: “Because the battle happened [without player input], the streamer basically became a commentator. And in between battles, the streamer had choices to make, so they would rope in their chat to weigh options.” (Or just chat about it solo.)

What happened next? Well, the devs started by making a prototype version for the GMTK Game Jam on Itch.io back in July-August 2025 (which placed in the Top 30 for enjoyment), while working on updates for recent bigger-scope release Crashlands 2.

And what’s key here are the ‘builds’ you can create for very different gameplay success approaches in HMD. As a PC Gamer article explains: “In the two runs I played, I went for a defensive build - paladins, clerics, and ninjas who could turn invisible - and a more offensive build, stacked up with frankendudes who got angrier the more dudes had fallen.”

The Butterscotch Shenanigans folks have a long-running podcast, and the latest, Episode, 554 (!), goes into some depth onto what happened next. There were some promising early indications, but things really took off in late Nov. and Dec.:

• A single YouTube Short drove >2,000 wishlists: the November YouTube Short about in-game vampires farting themselves alive again after eating bean burritos - an unexpected item combo, very cute - got 941k views in just its first week. (This ‘horse-sized duck’ one also did good - who doesn’t like horse-sized ducks?)

• Early streamer outreach didn’t work - but releasing a Steam demo did: still at 6,400 wishlists at the end of Nov, and with little response from select custom streamer outreach, the team pivoted to putting out a public demo on Dec. 17th. (Why? They were very confident in the virality of the underlying idea…)

• As the demo rose, influencers picked it up cos it’s popular! DangerouslyFunny making a video with >600k views in two days led to a golden age, where the devs explained on scaling: “we are seeing that any time [an influencer] makes content about HMD, that content draws an outsized audience and uplifts their viewership.”

From there, the Butterscotch Shenanigans team peppered influencers with proof that their game had audience lift. And key influencers - Lirik, Moistcritikal, Imcade, and big Chinese influencers - hopped on board, whether directly contacted by the devs or seeing it from other influencers. (The player CCU peak didn’t even hit until Jan 6th!)

And here’s one clue you might have made a banger. The Butterscotch Shenanigans team were all playing their own game in their spare time, pre-demo release in December. Seth says he “accidentally played it for 20 hours” one weekend, for example.

Obviously, the game isn’t out yet. But we’d be surprised if it wasn’t a medium/large hit. And what’s interesting about it is that it started as a ‘we want to make a roguelike game that people notice’. And by logically layering in a conceptual hook with clever executional goodness, a veteran team is breaking through in a dumb busy market.

Roblox’s top December games: hail, The Forge

Finally, we’re still trying to cover Roblox more as a platform, and December 2025’s top-earning charts (above), as documented by David Taylor at Creator Games, are a prime example of why. (We also have an exclusive Top 20 earnings chart [Google Drive link] adding specific average & peak CCU, visits, and session length - mm, data.)

The Top 10 earning is a mix of much older titles (Brookhaven RP, Adopt Me!, Dress To Impress), and already-huge games that broke through in the last few months (99 Nights In The Forest, Steal A Brainrot). But as David highlights: “Two very different breakout stories showed up in December’s Roblox charts” as a whole. Specifically, per him:

• “[Mining/crafting/combat RPG] The Forge generated $12M in revenue in December, landing it squarely among the top earners on the platform almost immediately. It was a highly anticipated game from developer, FireAtacck who had achieved modest success previously on Roblox.”

• “[Fishing sim] Fish It, on the other hand, continued its growth story - quietly becoming the #1 game on Roblox by minutes played. In contrast to The Forge, its growth has been slow, steady, and compounding - roughly tripling engagement month-over-month for nine straight months. That trajectory is unusual on Roblox.”

The folks at MaxPowerGaming also have an in-depth look at The Forge, noting: “At a glance, The Forge has a straightforward core loop. Mine for resources, craft gear, defeat enemies, repeat. But beneath that simplicity sits a much deeper system of progression that demands active engagement.”

They continue: “In less than two weeks, The Forge peaked over 1 million CCUs. That milestone places it among just 17 games in Roblox’s history, to ever cross the one-million concurrent player mark.” (The combat is almost Souls-like-like, btw.)

So it’s a deep, complex crafting game that almost immediately hit 1 million CCU. In a world where we’re specifically mentioning many launch games on Steam that make it to ‘just’ 1,000 CCU, you can see why we might want to keep an eye on this space, huh?

[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.]