Wuchang, Grounded 2 lead July's new Steam hits!

Publikováno: 8.8.2025

Also: new PS/Xbox titles, and plenty of notable discovery news.

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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.]

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:

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?

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