Why don't we talk about console game discovery?

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[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.]

And we’re back, and… what, there’s another video game event on the horizon? GDCo’s head of biz dev Matt Styles will be attending Reboot Develop Blue 2025 in lovely Dubrovnik, Croatia in two weeks. (Hit him up if you want to check out our extremely comprehensive GameDiscoverCo Pro PC & console data insights solution!)

Before we start, given the success of medieval-set PC games like Manor Lords or Kingdom Come: Deliverance II, you may enjoy this new survey on what Americans think of medieval times. Spoiler: ‘violent’,‘dark’, and ‘dirty’ are key attributes, and almost nobody has heard of Hildegard of Bingen. (Jeez!)

[HEADS UP: support GameDiscoverCo practically by signing up to GDCo Plus, inc. more from our second weekly newsletter, Discord access, data & lots more. And companies, get even more ‘Steam deep dive’ & console data access org-wide via GameDiscoverCo Pro, as 55+ have.]

Game discovery news: Dune Awakening… awakens

Time to tuck our napkin into our collar, and tuck into the large steak of game platform & discovery news we’re carving up for you, as follows:

• Looking at GameDiscoverCo's countdown of'trending' unreleased Steam games by 7-day new follower velocity, March 24th-31st, Funcom's multiplayer survival crafter Dune Awakening (#1) kicked into high gear due to pre-orders, while Chucklefish's Witchbrook (#2) had its first ‘look’ since its 2016 (!) announce.

• Brand new at #4? Dreamhaven’s Wildgate, which "blends tactical ship-to-ship combat with fast-paced first-person action". (Also new at #8? Brass Rain, a WWII-themed title from a popular CG YouTube channel.) And Hollow Knight: Silksong popped back up the charts due to basically nothing at all, haha.

• A reminder: Nintendo’s big Switch 2 ‘reveal’ Direct takes place April 2nd at 6am PT (3pm CET), and we’ll be covering details in Friday’s newsletter. But there’s also two days of Nintendo Treehouse: Live on April 3rd and 4th (7am PT, 4pm CET) “featuring hands-on gameplay of Nintendo Switch 2 games.” Get hype?

• VGC pulled out a provocative quote from Netflix Games boss Alain Tascan’s GDC presentation, via The Game Business: “Look at the younger generation. Are eight year-olds and ten year-olds dreaming of owning a PlayStation 6? I am not sure. They are wanting to interact with any digital screen, whatever it is, wherever it is, even in the car.”

• Big news from Roblox, which is officially adding ‘rewarded video’ to its platform: “Rewarded Video ads enable users to opt in and watch up to 30-second full-screen video ads within immersive Roblox games and experiences. In return, users receive in-game benefits from the creators of these games and experiences.” (Free IAP for ads, yep.)

• From last Friday’s newsletter, we wanted to add GameDiscoverCo data on games with high player overlap and high ‘affinity’ with Schedule I - more likely than average player to own. For the record, top titles include: R.E.P.O (40% player overlap!), Supermarket Together, Content Warning, Chained Together & BattleBit.

• MobileGamer.biz notes that Apple Arcade exists via its inclusion in the Apple One bundle: “Apple Arcade is one of several [Apple services that] ‘struggle with low usage and profits’, according to a report from The Information… it ‘likely wouldn’t be profitable’ if it were strictly a standalone service.”

• New Kickstarter video game campaign notables, via ICO’s KS newsletter: super popular animation YouTuber Alan Becker has a stick man fighting game already at $560k (!), and ‘cozy monster collecting RPG’ Monsterpatch hit ~$150k on a $15k goal, just a handful of days into its campaign.

• Specialist PC store GOG (currently owned by CD Projekt) has been surveying users on whether it should introduce subscription options, centered partly around its self-described “mission to preserve games”, which it’s been playing up recently as a differentiator.

• Digital Foundry has worked out that PlayStation 5 and PS5 Pro have issues with VRR (variable refresh rate) and certain games. In “titles that support 120Hz VRR with unlocked frame-rates”, which include The Last of Us Part 1 and 2 & Kingdom Come Deliverance 2: “the gameplay works just fine for around 20 minutes, but at some point soon after that, a noticeable stutter manifests every eight seconds.”

• Take Two’s Strauss Zelnick had a new Bloomberg TV interview with 2 notable tidbits for us: the GTA Plus subscription service is “up 10% year over year”, and the company’s ‘AAA only’ strategy for PC/console: “If we release one or two new IP… in console and PC… we can launch 3 to 10 in mobile.”

• Esoteric media microlinks: Deloitte’s 2025 digital media trends survey highlights social platforms as a “a dominant force in media and entertainment”; why ‘peak TV is over’, content volume-wise; the hit movies of 2024 on U.S. streaming, as well as box office - you may be surprised by the #1 most-streamed in its first four weeks.

Why don't we talk about console game discovery?

You may have noticed that a big chunk of the ‘hot new’ games featured in GDCo’s newsletter are PC games. And this might lead you to a related question - do we not talk about console hits because of the ‘mysterious’ data underlying console sales? Or is it for a more fundamental reason, based around market dynamics?

We checked Circana’s Mat Piscatella and saw his excellent anecdata: “Over 70% of US active PS5/XBS players played at least 1 of the top 10 live service games of the month during January. More than 40% of all time spent playing on PS5/XBS in the US during January went to those same top 10 live service games.” And it made us want to poke at the data.

GameDiscoverCo does have estimates for PlayStation and Xbox ecosystems. And so we thought we’d go very deep into just how top-heavy the console ecosystems are versus PC, which we have the impression has more niches and player diversity than console, nowadays. So let’s start with the following graph:

This is our estimate of the percentage of DAU (daily active users) on PlayStation for the Top X games, for a particular day - February 28th, 2025. So you can see here:

• The top game on PlayStation (duh, it’s Fortnite) had 14.3% of all DAUs.

• The top 5 games (Fortnite, plus EA Sports FC, Call Of Duty HQ, Roblox & Rocket League) had a whopping 43% of daily cumulative actives & the Top 10 had ~56%.

• Also: the Top 50 titles had ~77% of all DAUs, and the Top 100 had ~84%.

So far, makes sense. But let’s compare this to Xbox, which has a lot of Game Pass players who can easily shift between multiple titles in their subscription. (And a smaller percentage of PC and cloud players also using Xbox accounts.) The results?

So briefly comparing these:

• the top game in here (yes, Fortnite again!) accounts for almost 10% of DAUs, about 30% less than on PlayStation.

• the Top 5 is ‘only’ 35.5% of DAUs, compared to 43% on PlayStation. Minecraft is in the Xbox Top 5, dropping Rocket League to #6, btw.

So - this still looks like a fairly top-heavy situation - the Top 100 games are still 76% of all cumulative DAUs. But it’s a bit less so than on PlayStation, at least according to our estimates. (And none of this should be surprising, to those versed in power laws.)

So let’s finish out with Steam, and you’ll see that, although the #1 game (Counter-Strike 2) accounted for over 10% of all DAU, we’re seeing the Top 10 as ‘only’ 31% of DAU, the Top 50 as just 50%, and the Top 100 at just under 60% of all DAU.

This is quite different to console, where the Top 100 was 76% (Xbox) and 84% (PlayStation). It really does re-confirm our impression that Steam is a more diverse ecosystem geography and niche-wise, and less top-heavy from a DAU perspective.

This shouldn’t be surprising, since certain ‘types’ of people have historically bought console game hardware. And there’s still huge hits to be had on console. (Look at EA Sports College Football and Black Myth: Wukong in 2024, for starters!) Here’s a chart comparing the three platforms more fully:

Concluding, we remind y’all: you don’t need massive DAUs years after launch to do well in PC and console games, if you’re a small or medium-sized businesses. (You just need to keep attracting people to buy your premium game and/or DLC, play it for a while, and get what they consider ‘good value for money’!)

But for those targeting DAU, the same ol’ games are certainly hanging out in console top spots & making it difficult to break in. For example: Marvel Rivals is the sole newer game in PlayStation’s Top 10 by DAU which isn’t a) older or b) a yearly sports franchise update. (Monster Hunter Wilds is the only other ‘new’ title in the Top 20.)

Console discovery woes: less >100k new IP games

Moreover: we feature games at GameDiscoverCo when they’re new and have sold hundreds of thousands of copies. Steam examples have been rife, but console examples have been thinner on the ground.

So sure, our articles on Hypercharge’s Xbox success and Little Kitty Big City doing well on Switch as well as Steam are the two examples that come to mind. But can we look at overall success of new games in 2024, to see how big the opportunity is?

Of course we can - at least based on our nifty, but quite unofficial third-party estimates. And let’s do that on a per-platform basis to finish out this newsletter. Firstly, let’s look at Xbox:

According to our data, there were >1,100 releases on Xbox in 2024, and we estimate that - excluding Game Pass downloads - 29 of those new titles (2.6%) have sold >100,000 units lifetime until March 2025.

We also created a subcategory of those games, which is ‘new, original IP titles’ which aren’t either a sequel, spiritual successor, or third-party IP licensee. Around eight of the twenty nine >100k-selling games on Xbox in 2024 - not in Game Pass - were in that category. (And yes, Hypercharge was one of them.)

When it comes to PlayStation, we’re monitoring almost 1,300 releases in 2024, and seeing around 63 of them - just under 5% - selling >100k units (excluding PlayStation Plus downloads), and 18 of those being ‘original IP’ titles.

Bear in mind that a few of these 63 titles are lower-cost & shovelware-adjacent - like The Jumping Ice Cube, haha. But the vast majority are ‘real’ titles like Star Wars Outlaws, Path Of Exile 2, and so on. (Selling >100k copies is not necessarily a surprise for these games, though! So that’s probably why we don’t feature them…)

We also have some data on Nintendo Switch’s eShop. We don’t track physical units, but have a Western-centric eShop view on performance.

In this case, we’re seeing around 2,900 Switch games released in 2024, around 36 of which (1.25%, a lower figure than Xbox or PlayStation) sold >100k on eShop, and 15 of those being ‘original IP’ titles in some way. And finally, to Steam:

Look, we know, there were ~19,000 games released on Steam in 2024, and that’s ridic. Of those title, we see a whopping 233 (a high number, but 1.2% of all titles) that sold >100k LTD. And a notable 147 of them - a majority - were ‘original IP’ titles.

That’s a whole lot of PC games compared to console - more than three times the totals for PlayStation, Xbox and Switch eShop combined, in fact. (Bearing in mind that some of these Steam titles were much smaller and inexpensive - units & revenue don’t map.)

So - the above graph explains well why most GameDiscoverCo ‘this new game sold well!’ newsletters discuss PC games. There’s still room for ‘new game success’ on console. bBt a lot of success nowadays is PC-first, partly due to trickier console discovery processes, the prevalance of Game Pass/PS+ for smaller title choice & audience wants…

Finally, we skimmed all ‘original IP’ console successes in 2024, and wanted to call out select games, alphabetically: Animal Well, Another Crab's Treasure, Balatro, Black Myth: Wukong, Grounded, Hypercharge: Unboxed, Little Kitty Big City, Metaphor: Refantazio, Phasmophobia, Rise Of The Ronin, Sker Ritual, Stellar Blade, Stray, Undisputed, Unicorn Overlord, V Rising. (All of these sold >100k on 1+ console!)

And we’d divide these title roughly into ‘PC/console crossover hits’, ‘good PC-first games coming to console later’, and a handful of high-profile third party PlayStation exclusives. Yet there’s no hidden cache of console-first hits here. (Oh, maybe Undisputed, a little bit?) And that’s all we’ve got - toodles…

[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.]