[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 end of week, a good time to look into House House & Panic’s Big Walk. We ask a perhaps obvious (perhaps not?) question - why aren’t more PC/console games launching as ‘online co-op only’ in this very co-op friendly post-COVID world?
Before we start, our buddies at the Video Game History Foundation just acquired a relatively forgotten ‘90s book - ‘Computer Gaming World: Why Won’t This *&☠️#1 Game Work?’ So yep, beyond Steam review complaints, PC compatibility issues have existed for EVER. (It features a cartoon about a chilling “configuration nightmare jungle”.)
[LOOKING FOR MORE INSIGHT? You can get a free demo of our GameDiscoverCo Pro company-wide ‘Steam deep dive’ & console data, inc. MCP by reaching out today - >110 orgs have it. Or, signing up to GDCo Plus gets extra newsletter and Discord access, plus more.]
Game discovery news: click on that dirt, click it….
Let’s take a look at the latest game discovery & platform news, which goes a tiny bit like this:
Our look at GDCo’ latest top Steam demos for unreleased games reveals staying power for roguelike autobattler Guildrun (#1) and co-op bomb defusal game Bombanana! (#2), but rising stars including incremental automation game Dirt Clicker (#3) & nice-looking loot-driven isometric bullet heaven-er Hellforged (#7).
Some new Bain & Co surveying of 5,000+ players, as interpreted by GI.biz, reveals: “two-thirds of players prefer familiar games or sequels, and only one in five seek new titles.” Also notable: 32% of 13-17 year olds “prefer open standbox/UGC” style content, vs. 19% for 40-49 year olds.
An unfortunate leak in the ARM Steam client revealed the official Steam Frame VR/AR headset unboxing & setup videos a little ahead of time. The main takeaway so far? Valve’s how-to videos are witty, the hardware’s design looks slick, and we’re expecting pricing & availability news VERY soon. (Next week?)
PlayStation kicking off ‘shovelware’ publishers got controversial in targeting Ternox Games & STONKS-9800, since the stock market sim has sold decently on Steam: “Sony unilaterally terminated my PlayStation developer and publisher agreement without giving me any reason.” (Ternox previously put out ‘easy Platinum’-ish games, tho, but Stonks is legit/decent. But.. it’s Sony’s platform to clean up!)
HowToMarketAGame has been looking at the rise of third-party Steam sales/festivals, revealing a top chart for ‘games that got in the most Festivals’ - headed by The Wandering Village (59!), Tavern Talk (55), and Dorfromantik (47). (Chris also spotted that “Cozy and Narrative… are over represented in festivals.”)
Circana has released July 2026’s U.S. game hardware (& select software*) charts, with spend down 10% YoY to $4.5b, with all sectors (software & hardware) down, and CoD: Black Ops II #1 in PC/console games. One interesting side stat: 63% of new physical games in 2026 were Nintendo, 32% PlayStation, & 4% Xbox. (*Minor intrigue: did Xbox pull its first-party digital data from Circana & GSD? Apparently.)
The U.S. game console hardware situ in July, per Circana, is not pretty: hardware units -39% year on year, and spending -29% to $282m, “the lowest total for a July month since 2020 ($163 million).” Overall: “PlayStation 5 unit sales fell 6% versus July 2025… Xbox Series dropped 18%.” And Switch 2 units are -51%, but vs. Month 2 of Switch 2, so maybe less bad. (Yet with a price rise upcoming, should it be better?)
Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier is reporting on another shift away from PlayStation live service games, for Horizon Hunters Gathering, but his YouTube video on the history of ‘PS x live service’ is most essential. (We understand why companies wanted to put ‘5 x successful live service games’ into their future P&L, but…)
The latest Steamworks doc ‘diff’ showing Valve’s problem of the week? “Artwork Overrides are intended to call attention to new content & updates… [but] you should not use Artwork Overrides to copy the graphical assets from another product on Steam, including DLC.” (Who’s been putting their DLC art in their main capsule image?!)
The ‘couldn’t be more on LinkedIn’ folks at Polden have put out a 35-page ‘here’s how to make your Steam game’ slideshow, and we liked its section on ‘strategy development’, i.e. what needs the mechanics fulfil, looking at game positioning & promo concepts. (A lot of people finalize the game concept & then do this.)
Microlinks: the latest Footprints ‘trad media’ charts show GTA 6 (footage leaks) & Phantom Blade Zero as most-mentioned; new on Xbox Game Pass are titles including Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy; Apple’s EU App Store rates are now set (and marginally lower) but Epic ain’t impressed, since DTC $ is disadvantaged.
Will Big Walk’s 1m usher in a co-op only game era?
It may not have escaped your notice that “cooperative multiplayer adventure about teamwork and talking” Big Walk ($20, $15 on launch discount), which launched on August 4th, has done rather well. It peaked at 46,000 Steam CCU and Panic confirmed 1 million copies sold multi-platform in ~6 days*.
(*GDCo currently estimates ~3.5m players LTD across Steam, PlayStation and Switch, and rising, with ~2m of those being PS+ subscribers thanks to a relatively rare PlayStation Plus ‘Monthly’ sub inclusion at launch.)
Anyhow, there’s a number of interesting things about Big Walk. Specifically:
It’s a more sophisticated, ‘linear journey’ take on much of the ‘friendslop’ genre, but started dev in ~2020, way before friendslop was even a thing.
It’s from the devs of megahit Untitled Goose Game (>12m players, per GDCo) but there’s only 6% overlap in Steam players between UGG and Big Walk (!)
It had basically zero pre-release demos or betas, yet still managed to get to almost 1 million Steam wishlists at launch.
So what’s going on here, besides it being a great game? Well, we have some ideas on what Big Walk represents, trend-wise. But before we get there, let’s check some data, starting with GDCo Pro’s (auto-annotated!) estimates of the game’s wishlist journey:
So yes, the original reveal trailer at The Game Awards in December 2023 did a lot of heavy lifting, boosting the game over 100k wishlists quickly. If you look at that trailer, you’ll see the game’s premise encapsulated - a realistic-ish environment, stylized lead characters, and a promise of landscapes, mystery & puzzles to explore together.
From there, the longer gameplay trailer at Day Of The Devs during SGF 2025 sparked a lot more regular interest, and the ‘home stretch’ til release even more so. We actually think that the Myst (or more recently, The Witness)-ish vibes on the game really helped the unconventional hook of ‘there’s secrets here, but you have to play to find ‘em’.
Having said that, there’s no doubt that a lot of people playing Big Walk are coming across from traditional co-op ‘friendslop’ titles. Here’s GDCo data on games with high player overlap, who are also >8x as likely to have played than the average Steam player:
So, seeing obvious titles like PEAK (75% player overlap), Lethal Company (67%), and Meccha Chameleon (48%), you get the idea. But there’s also Tabletop Simulator at 49%, and Golf With Your Friends at 39%, an indication of a softer set of comps, distinct from the more action-y Risk Of Rain 2 (53%) and Helldivers 2 (51%).
The general view here is clear - these are games that you generally play with people that you know, likely with voice chat, as part of your regular social life. And I feel like this comes through even clearer in GDCo’s review sentiment overview:
The amount of time that ‘friends’ comes up in the positive review sentiment word cloud is unreal. And House House themselves, in this Reddit AmA, make it clear it was COVID-era virtual friend hangs that partly inspired the game:
“RE inspiration - when we started work on Big Walk we were in COVID lockdowns, and playing games together regularly with some friends who lived overseas. Big ones were things like Raft, or the 'We Were Here series', as well as a bunch of Roblox games: Somewhere Wales, or Everest Pipkin's Dream Diary.”
Finding this quote delighted me, because I’d already intended to link at least one of these games to our conclusion. Which is: I don’t understand why more dev teams haven’t been exploring ‘co-op only’ experiences. The precedent is there:
Hazelight Studios has made a career over exclusively co-op titles and has sold tens of millions of units: A Way Out, It Takes Two, and Split Fiction.
The curiously under-the-radar We Were Here series, which we’ve profiled before for GDCo, is also a multi-million seller, blending co-op only puzzle & exploration.
Even the micro-indie horror series Fears To Fathom made a co-op only iteration, Fears To Fathom: Scratch Creek which has been doing great on Twitch and has sold ~300k copies, according to GDCo estimates.
I’m not just cherrypicking these titles - there aren’t many of them. I think devs just haven’t seen it a genre, or have fallen back to ‘co-optional’ titles with more aggressive gameplay loops. (The space may be ‘underdesigned’ for some oldskool purists?)
But it 1000% works. So the salient points are: these type of more co-op games are often super streamable (because of the voice interactions between the participants!), and if they require lower amounts of manual dexterity, they’re very accessible. And most of all, this space - ‘next game to play w/your friends’ - is a very active buyer market.
Big Walk is a special work of art - watch the Jacksepticeye YouTube video (beyond the first 5 minutes!) for the sense of wonder, open spaces and discovery it engenders. And what it says to me is: beyond more hasty (but still often v.fun) friendslop, there’s a deeper ‘co-op only’ subgenre here to explore. Players are waiting for it?
This week on Steam: Mortal Shell II, How to Fish…
