What game descriptions tell us about the rise of co-op!
Publikováno: 13.2.2026
And a lot of other keywords, too. Also: this week on Steam & 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, crew, and we’re finishing a week in Las Vegas at DICE where we ran into excellent game biz folks, great microtalks (including one from Mixtape’s Johnny Galvatron that had much Passion[a]), and enough ‘dressed in white’ Backstreet Boys fans - they’re playing The Sphere - to convince us we’d ascended to The Good Place.
Before we start, here’s a blast from the past: the VGHF’s Phil Salvador is scanning a brochure for the E For All event, which happened in 2007-2008 in LA after the ESA temporarily downsized E3. (Spoiler: by 2009, E3 was re-constituted after publishers decided it was worth supporting again, and still continues to thrive today.)
[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: Nioh 3, Overwatch see buzz
And let’s finish out this hyper-busy week with a look at a lot of game platform & discovery news:
The latest‘trad media coverage’ charts from ICO’s Footprints.gg(above) are headed by the just-launched samurai ARPG sequel Nioh 3 at #1, followed by Overwatch at #2 (thanks to Blizzard’s decision to rename Overwatch 2), Grand Theft Auto 6 (generalized overexcitement?), Resident Evil Requiem & ARC Raiders.
Congrats to the winners of last night’s 29th Annual DICE Awards here in Las Vegas, which included Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 (5 awards, inc. Game Of The Year), Ghost Of Yotei (four awards), Death Stranding 2 (two awards), plus Hades 2 (best action game), Blue Prince (indie game) & ARC Raiders (online game).
Sony’s latest State Of Play streaming showcase dropped, and here’s a full trailer round-up: it was pretty packed. Highlights included a God of War Trilogy Remake (and a new GoW pixel-art game), a Kena sequel, the Silent Hill x Annapurna game, Death Stranding 2 on PC, a new 2D Castlevania from Evil Empire & more.
Chris Zukowski discusses whether you should keep your Steam demo up after launch, revealing that “21% of 2025’s 1,000+ review games have a demo up”, and spotting that those games had +5% review score. But this might not be why, and he concludes that post-launch demos have “no clear benefit either way”.
The folks at Upscale tested porting horror game Skinwalker to consoles with no attempts to boost its visibility, and say: “First 60 days of organic [3x console] sales: Total Revenue: ~$8,879; Total Copies Sold: ~1,800+; Marketing Spend: $0.” It was 51% Xbox, 41% PlayStation & 8% Switch by units. Fascinating baseline data…
Microlinks: PC store GOG is already working on native Linux support; an analysis of Roblox’s rewarded video ads is fascinating; Firesquid & Hooded Horses’s TactiCon Steam event/sale is looking for ‘tactical reasoning’ games to feature.
Steam hardware news: firstly just the Steam OLED, but now all three Steam Deck models are out of stock in the U.S. (memory price issues? something else?); Valve claims Steam Machine testing shows ‘the majority’ of games run on it at 4K and 60 frames per second via FSR - that’s the AMD tech for ‘cheap’ upscaling.
More great Roblox analysis from Max Power Gaming: “Roblox kicked off 2026 with another viral brainrot game, and this one is already topping the charts…. At its core, Escape Tsunami for Brainrots is best described as a mash-up of Steal a Brainrot and Be Crushed by a Speeding Wall, an old-school Roblox survival experience.”
The Xbox Excellence Awards for 2025 have alphabetically listed top games for last year, by categories including Store Rating (Clair Obscur, Lies Of P: Overture), Daily Active Users (Arc Raiders, Fortnite) and Units Sold (Battlefield 6, GTA V). (It’s a bit abstracted, but still good to see these generalized game lists.)
A couple of minor corrections/updates: first, we accidentally put Fatal Fury: City Of The Wolves in Jan’s‘new game’ Steam revenue Top 10, when it came out last April, cos its Steam release date got ‘reset’ to Jan somehow. We also confirmed that Quarantine Zone should have been #28 (12.3m hrs!)in Jan’s streaming charts.
Esoteric links: it true, we love another Doug Shapiro piece (half-free, half $) re: whether we’re all solely consuming “content ‘junk food’”. He concludes such content has expanded massively, but it hasn’t “cannibalized higher cognitive load, higher agency content.” (This depends on your definition of the latter, of course.)
What game descriptions tell us about the rise of co-op?
We love data here at GameDiscoverCo - you know that. So for our latest data analysis card trick, we thought we’d go beyond trending tags on Steam (which many have covered before!), and dig deep into… keywords in Steam descriptions!
Here’s what we’re doing, as I explained it to one of my colleagues: “Take the current capsule descriptions* for ALL Steam games, and all games that have >$100k revenue (lifetime) that launched from 2020 to 2025… look at each word mention as a % of that year’s new game descriptions.” (*’Capsule description’ is the short paragraph under the game icon!)
Why did we do this? Because we wanted to see which words were mentioned more often in new games over time, implying game trends. And we also wanted to see if games that sold well had more or less occurrences of that keyword than all games.
The end result is a giiant GDCo-created spreadsheet with the Top 1,000 words ranked in it(Google Drive doc) - we’re giving away the raw data, for you to do as you please! But here’s a few interesting examples of words that have surged in popularity:
Firstly, you may not be surprised to see that ‘co-op’ has been growing significantly as a capsule description word. (We explained back in 2023 that we think co-op leads to “easier and more stable upscaling and downscaling” among friend groups than PvP.)
And woof, the surge in new games that grossed >$100k from 3.2% in 2022 to 5.8% in 2023 is notable. (Lethal Company debuted, and a stampede of ‘friendslop’-likes and co-optional titles, as people realized virality could be compounded by adding online co-op. Just look at the 23x sales effect on Project Zomboid, albeit in the former year.)
But the percentage of all games using the word co-op went up a tad slower - tho it’s latterly surging and is up by half from 1.4% (2023) to 2.1% (2025). What does this mean? Perhaps that making co-op games is hard(er), but those who can reap the dividends…
When it comes to ‘cozy’ games, there’s been an interesting - but much more linear - change. New games that admit they are cozy in the description went from 0.4% (2022) to 3.1% (2025) for titles that gross >$100k LTD. (And a similar, but slightly smaller percentage of all games.)
We think this is partly down to cozy becoming a familiar, inviting label for Steam (and console gamers.) There’s also more people making cozy games, of course. But part of it is just that a big audience react positively to the ‘cozy’ label. So more games use it! And it over-indexes in games that gross >$100k, implying it may be a decent theme.
Finally, there’s the ‘survival’ label, and this one is pretty interesting. It looks like the % of new games grossing >$100k LTD mentioning this word peaked at 5.9% in 2023, but has now come down to 4.9%, even as the ‘all’ percentage keeps rising close to it.
What does this imply? Possibly that 2023 was the best year to release a self-styled survival game, but the genre/theme/word is still a very fertile one. (4.9% of all >$100k games in 2025 is high, more than for ‘cozy’, and only just behind ‘co-op’.)
Finally, a quick whistle-stop tour through some of the keywords with the highest multiplier % of mentions in 2020’s new games vs 2025’s. You’ll see big rises for cozy (~700%), idle and clicker (500% and 300%), roguelike (256%), horror (203%, to a giant 6.5%!) and more:
And then the >$100k lifetime words - obviously cozy (620%), but also solo (450%) - we presume with the phrase ‘or co-op’ often attached - endless (311%), loot (238%), crafting (186%), and collect (150%). There’s lots of game mechanics-first words here:
Oh and sample size? The totals for all games went up from 9,000 (2020) to 21,000 (2025) titles, btw. And for >$100k titles, it increased from 950 games (2020) to 1,350 games (2025). So only 6.5% of the games we looked at in 2025 grossed >$100k. Fascinating.