Wuchang, Grounded 2 lead July's new Steam hits!
Also: new PS/Xbox titles, and plenty of notable 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.]
We’re back! Before we kick off - Tuesday’s fourth guest ‘Summer Special’ joke article, on Puglips, was… divisive. Some people loved it: Matthew Hawn made a ‘playable’ version of the game. And somebody now owns Puglips.com (hi, Eugene.) But we also got notable ‘why are you wasting my time and abusing my trust?’ feedback, some heartfelt.
So: its author Matthew S. Burns is still a genius. (Check out Kaizen, which just shipped and he contributed writing & music to.) But you have our word we won’t do a spoof article in the same form again. It’s not what you subbed for, & life’s too short to be bamboozled by your local game info provider & wannabe art prankster, rite?
News: BF6, Fatekeeper zoom up ‘trending’ charts…
Starting off, let’s catch up with some of the game discovery news we missed while out earlier this week:
GDCo's countdown of 'trending' unreleased Steam games by 7-day new followers, ending Aug. 4th showed EA's Battlefield 6 (#1) is absolutely blasting it, with beta tests (300k+ CCU!) starting. And first-person RPG Fatekeeper (#2) is a very strong reveal, too - lots of Dark Messiah Of Might & Magic comparisons here?
Also new? ARPG Darksiders 4 (#5) is also a debut from THQ Nordic’s showcase, and surprise remake Plants Vs Zombies: Replanted (#6) reboots the OG. THQ Nordic stragglers? Economic life sim The Guild: Europa 1410 (#8) & RPG Sacred 2 Remaster (#12), with Nintendo Direct JRPG reveal Octopath Traveler 0 at #13.
PlayStation’s quarterly results were pretty decent, with revenue up 8% YoY (despite exchange rate headwinds), and profit up 128% to $1b. MAU and total hours played were up 6% year on year, and 2.5m PS5s were sold (LTD 80.2m!) Bungie’s Marathon - delayed - is a key upcoming question, though, with CFO Lin Tao agreeing the overall live service transition is “not entirely going smoothly.”
Let’s keep an eye on YouTube’s ‘age protection for kids/teens’ tech being tested in the U.S. It uses AI to work out teens and “disable personalized advertising”, and age verification (with ID) gets adult access back. As Night’s Reed Duchscher notes, “gaming, challenge videos, or animation” may have monetization affected, long-term.
Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella mentioned that Xbox/PC Game Pass made “nearly $5 billion” in the last year in their recent earnings call. That’s around 35 million paid subscribers, each contributing an average of $140-$150 a year, we’re guessing? (Game Pass Ultimate is now $20 per month or $240/year in the U.S.)
Microlinks, Pt.1: the specifics on Switch 1 price increases took the OLED version to $400 (vs. $450 for a Switch 2!); Epic “just won its Google lawsuit again, and Android may never be the same”; Xbox Game Pass’ initial August titles include Assassin’s Creed Mirage, 9 Kings (in Game Preview), Rain World & more.
Roblox is adding a content descriptor around ‘sensitive issues’ for games, including, wait for it, “immigration, capital punishment, gun control, marriage equality, pay equity in sports, prayer in schools, racial profiling, affirmative action, vaccination policies.” Any Roblox game tagged with this “will need a parent to enable access for users under 13.”
CI Games’ CEO Marek Tyminski announced a permanent price drop for Lords Of The Fallen, “now… $29.99 (was $69.99 console / $59.99 PC). Keeping games full price on digital stores while physical copies drop is wrong.” (Maybe a ‘novelty’ sales effect, but physical & digital have parallel audiences & discounts sell catalog, so we’re ‘??’.)
Nintendo just busted out an Indie World showcase (here’s the full PR!) including a Switch/Switch 2 announce for Content Warning, an immediate release for ‘50 games in 1’ standout UFO 50, co-op spiritual sequel Ultimate Sheep Raccoon & more. (There were no Switch 2 exclusives, but a number of separate SKUs.)
Xander Seren has an op-ed on ‘making games faster’: “You must know your team’s skillset intimately, pick a genre you know well, come up with an idea that sticks, define an appealing art style, and then execute excellently. Skillfully applied leverage is how a game built in three months can earn four times more than one that took three years.”
The ‘NSFW PC games removed’ saga continues, as Mastercard denied directly requiring censorship, followed by a rare Valve public statement that the issue was payment providers citing Mastercard’s rules. (Also: 404 Media has a good history on how “the anti-porn crusade that censored Steam & Itch.io started 30 years ago.”)
Microlinks, Pt.2: July’s top-grossing mobile games are led by Honor Of Kings, LastWar, Whiteout Survival & Royal Match; Meta is suggesting Quest devs build for “20-40 minute session length ‘Goldilocks’ zone” for VR headset wearing; Xbox branding for PC titles has swiftly gone from ‘Xbox PC’ to ‘Xbox on PC’.
Wuchang, Grounded 2 lead July's new Steam hits!
To lead, GameDiscoverCo is taking a look at July 2025’s top new games on Steam (and elsewhere!), in what was a quieter month for debuts (June had 6 new Steam games at >$10m gross, yet July has only 3.) Perhaps the Summer Sale played a part?
Nonetheless, above are our estimates (all data you can get as a GameDiscoverCo Pro subscriber - ping us for a demo!) And here’s the trends we spotted:
Wuchang: Fallen Feathers followed Black Myth to China AAA glory: it’s more China-specific (82% China on Steam, vs. Black Myth: Wukong’s 74%), but the first few days were a big hit for Souls-like ARPG Wuchang ($19.1m.) (However, 49% Positive reviews have led to a big continued revenue drop-off - Hype mismatch?)
Grounded 2 came out of the gate strongly in Early Access: despite being Game Pass Day 1 (more on that shortly!), Obsidian’s mini survival crafter sequel grossed nearly $16m for the month - and is still adding $100s of k per day. 66% of its Steam players own the OG Grounded, and ‘38x more than normal’ play Smallands.
Killing Floor 3 also started well, before running into expectations: long-awaited co-op action/horror shooter sequel KF3 did brisk business - >$10m gross - up front. But Mixed reviews from hardcore players of the first two games (which have many years of updates) have slowed post-launch interest, for now.
So those are the Top 3. And it’s notable that two of them may have bigger long tail issues than average, due to expectation management at launch. Next: smaller - but still decent multi-million $ grossing - titles round out the overall Top 10.
These include well-received strategy game remaster Stronghold Crusader ($4.5m), ambitious PvPvE multiplayer space shooter Wildgate ($3m), and breakout roguelike kingdom builder The King Is Watching ($2.4m). And reminder - many of these titles will gross 3-5x these numbers in the long-term, thanks to ‘long tail’, discounting, DLC.
While we’re looking at new Steam releases, here’s the Top 10 paid titles, by copies sold:
You’re seeing a lot of the same titles in the mix here. But some cheaper ones do vault up the charts. And there’s one standout - $3 voice-activated first person wizard battler Mage Arena (>700k), which we covered as it blew up, and maxed out at 17,000 CCU.
Next, our GameDiscoverCo Pro data also monitors PlayStation and Xbox titles. And here’s unit estimates for the Top 5 new paid titles across those platforms in July 2025:
Interestingly, the two big winners here are not on our Steam charts. That’s because they’re EA Sports College Football 26 (>3m units), the American Football game which is skipping PC, and is 97-98% U.S.-based (!) in sales, and Ready Or Not (now >2m units), which we covered in-depth recently & already launched on PC.
(It’s also rare to see games perform nearly as well on Xbox as PlayStation, btw, since Xbox hardware installed base is smaller. That’s down to both of these titles being very strong in North America and the UK, and with more casual players there - the main places that Xbox still has a stronghold, even as it pivots from hardware.)
Finally, you’ll note that a few of July’s Steam debuts did have decent console momentum, with Wuchang picking up >400k paid units on PlayStation 5 (only about 60% of which were in China!), and Killing Floor 3 adding 100k units across console.
We didn’t integrate Xbox Game Pass and PlayStation Plus debuts above, because we really think it’s ‘apples to oranges’, monetization-wise. But we estimate Grounded 2 and the Tony Hawk Pro Skater 3 + 4 each had >2m players on Game Pass, Wuchang added ~1m GP players, and Abiotic Factor added ~700k players across GP and PS+.
Finally, as a bonus, let’s look at all top-performing games on Steam in July 2025:
Brief takeaways from this: yes, Valve’s own Counter-Strike 2 ($150m) is always #1, and $8 co-op climbing megahit Peak ($32.8m, #3) had another crazily good month. A lot of the rest of the Top 10 is the evergreen F2P games - PUBG ($61.8m), GTA V ($25.3m), Destiny 2 ($23.8m), Apex Legends ($23.5m), as well as this month’s debuts.
The two games that are a tiny bit more surprising? Marvel Rivals ($30m), as the vanishingly rare ‘new F2P PC hit’ that continues to perform, and horse-racing anime girl game Umamusume: Pretty Derby ($19.6m), which has gone viral in the West on PC after years of mobile-first Japanese mega-success. Surprise!
This week on Steam: Mafia dominates, capiche?
