Kingdom Come: Deliverance II hits big on Steam!

Publikováno: 7.2.2025

Also: a look at next week's notable games, and lotsa 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, for our end of week links round-up (for everyone) and our analysis of the week in Steam releases (for Plus and Pro subscribers), both including the obvious game mentioned in the title, but also the other major releases of the week….

Before we start, we enjoyed this recent UK Guardian piece touring a large toy trade show, for ‘kiddie zeitgeist’ reasons. Yes, Skibidi Toilet is featured, and there’s also a section on the ubiquitous Squishmallows. (Did you know there’s a Warren Buffett Squishmallow, since Berkshire Hathaway owns the parent company of Jazwares?)

Game discovery news: Rise of the Ronin… rises!

Chonking through the game discovery and platform news for the rest of the week, of which there is, frankly, more than we thought possible, here’s what we got:

We caught up with the ‘trending’ unreleased Steam games, by 7-day follower additions, discovering that Koei's (PlayStation timed exclusive!) ninja-festooned action game Rise Of The Ronin (#1) got confirmed for Steam, and quickly built interest.
Also notable: Saber/Focus' MudRunner-ish heavy equipment sim RoadCraft (#4) is picking up some pretty good buzz, the renamed Vaultbreakers (formerly Project F4E) is a PvPvE top-down ARPG at #7, and first-person open world base builder StarRupture (#8) and the very silly-named Escape From Duckov (#10) also chart.
We’ve talked about the Quest store’s recent issues around Meta prioritizing other things (Horizon Worlds, younger-focused F2P apps), and UploadVR has a giant must-read article looking into it. Related: a start-up stealthily made a Gorilla Tag F2P ‘fast follow’, Animal Company, which seems to be doing pretty well.
Ah, and late-breaking news: Meta put out a blog post called ‘The Evolution Of Our Ecosystem’, explaining where it sees Quest going: “We expect free-to-play (F2P) to become a broadly viable strategy for developers, who up until now have relied almost exclusively on premium apps. But we don’t think F2P will replace premium apps.”
Looks like the ESA (lobbyists, former E3 honchos) are planning a ‘thought leader’-y game exec event, IICON, for Las Vegas in April 2026. It’s aimed at “visionaries across industries”, but doesn’t seem a million miles away from the AIAS’ DICE, which is also in Vegas (in Feb.) & does a great job on the networking side.
Deep Rock Galactic released its 2024 stats, and sure, the sales numbers are great (10 million!), but it’s awesome to see Steam DAU data for the game’s entire history - we generally only see Steam CCU. (Looks like a spike with Season 5 up to ~350k DAU, and 80-120k DAU on the PC platform for most of the past few months.)
A thought-provoking editorial suggests: “With gamer trends pointing towards long-term loyalty to specific games, increased interest in free-to-play, and a lack of trying new games, subscription services do not make sense for most people.” Why? The average gamer plays for 58 hours per month, “but only plays 4-5 games per year.”
Footprints.gg’s weekly ‘trad media’ game mentions chart is topped, of course, by Kingdom Come: Deliverance II, with 2,000+ mentions, followed by Switch 2, Forza Horizon 5 (on occasion of its PlayStation SKU announce), GTA 6 (even ahead of its re-confirmed Fall 2025 release date) & The Sims (25th anniversary!)
ICYMI, Steam added text to seldom-updated Early Access Game overviews - such as here for Heartbound: “Note: The last update made by the developers was over 13 months ago. The information and timeline described by the developers here may no longer be up to date.” (Might want to check your own titles!)
Roblox things: in latest financials, it added 19% DAUs year on year, up to 85.3 million (!), but missed analyst consensus of 88.2m, so its shares went down by >10%. Tough market! Elsewhere, private equity & VC-backed Voldex purchased Top 10 Roblox title Brookhaven, presumably with a view to ‘revenue optimizing’.
Apple has confirmed you’ll need a local publishing partner to put your iOS game out in Vietnam, a continuation of the local licensing issues which led to Steam being blocked in Vietnam last May - though not 100% blocked, and there are VPN-y ways around it on PCs, of course.
Another update for fascinating Garry’s Mod follow-up S&Box: Facepunch’s Source Engine 2-based creator may give you permission to publish royalty-free standalone, paid Steam games using it, “as long as you don't blame us for anything that goes wrong.” Sounds like they are close to agreeing a license with Valve.

This week: it’s a Kingdom Come Deliverance II jam!

Sure, a few other games came out this week. But open-world medieval ARPG Kingdom Come: Deliverance II ($60-80) did even better than we thought, with 91% Positive Steam reviews and much love overall: “Imagine an AAA game with stable performance and little to no bugs on release.” (And 73% of buyers of the sequel already own the original Kingdom Come: Deliverance on Steam, btw - that’s a v. high overlap.)