How Cairn grabbed 500k demo downloads on Steam/PS5…

[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 to a brand new week, discovery crew. There’s plenty going on over here, and while we know there’s a released (goofy fun co-op) mountaineering game doing stellar (ahem, Peak), our lead story today is about an unreleased one crushin’ it (woo, Cairn.)

Before we start: Helldivers 2 reversed Sony’s ‘PSN login mandatory on Steam’ post-launch move last year, after much fan backlash. Now an official in-game cape inspired by the furore has been made available, called ‘Pillars of Freedom’ and modeled on the fan-created designs for the “then-plummeting Steam review score graph.” LOL?

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Firstly, let’s take a close look at relevant platform and discovery news for the week so far, starting with:

• GameDiscoverCo’s ‘trending’ unreleased Steam games by new followers (June 23rd-30th) are topped by co-op pirate survival game Crosswind, which ran a popular Alpha playtest. (The cross-promo-ed OKU (#2), this week’s F2P shooter Mecha Break (#3), ‘return to Raccoon City’ survival horror standout Resident Evil Requiem (#4), and ‘moving base’ train survival-er Railborn (#5) complete the Top 5.)

• Further down the list, scary co-op horror puzzle sequel Little Nightmares III (#9) got a follower boost from pre-orders starting. And Expedition: Into Darkness (#12) is a medieval co-op dungeon crawler (mm, lots of things people like?) with permadeath, Dark & Darker-stylee, and a public playtest.

• Nintendo published, then unpublished some Switch sales milestones, apparently revealing Switch 2 sales of 5 million units from June 5th to 30th, 2025: “Americas: 1.8 million units, Japan: 1.47 million units, Europe: 1.18 million units, Other: 550,000 units.” (We’re guessing this is true, just an accidental early reveal?)

• Remember how we said Canada’s initial Digital Services Tax payments might affect Valve, among other companies? Well, uhh, never mind: “On Friday President Trump said he was suspending trade talks [cos of DST]… On Sunday evening, hours before that tax came into effect, the Canadian government announced it was scrapping it.”

• Since FPS performance has been a hot topic recently, Steam is rolling out an in-game performance monitor “to help you understand how your PC is performing and how it is impacting your game’s performance.” The first version focuses on Windows users and on the most common GPU hardware – yay, transparency?

• Microlinks: new Xbox Game Pass additions for July include Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 + 4, Minami Lane & Ultimate Chicken Horse; Twitch’s CEO says that two thirds of its revenue comes from subs, and only a third from ads; Nintendo is (likely!) increasing pricing for the OG Switch in Canada starting in August.

• New Circana consumer research in the U.S. suggests that 18-24 year olds are cutting back on weekly spending on leisure items, with video games being one of the key areas impacted (between a 20% and 25% YoY decrease in April 2025.) Higher credit-card delinquency rates also figure in here… not great.

• One disadvantage of Switch 2 permanently disabling consoles that try to use hacked games? Some of these consoles are now popping up for secondhand sale, and: “There are currently no options to remove a console lock, so [buyers] must turn the console on and check that it can connect to Nintendo’s servers before purchasing.”

• While doing some client research, we spotted slight errors with our research around ‘Not-E3’ 2025 top showcases & games. (We didn’t start checking wishlists the day before the showcase, in a couple of cases.) So the graphs in the article are now updated – some estimates went up, but nothing major changed.

• Talking of framerates, according to Ars Technica, testing on the Lenovo Legion Go S portable PCs “finds recent games generally run at higher frame rates on SteamOS 3.7 than on Windows 11.” The details are complex, but: “Changing operating systems [to Windows] can lead to [FPS] drops of anywhere from 8 to 36 percent.”

• Microlinks, Pt.2: idle typer Bongo Cat has almost 200k CCU but only made $3,800 in Steam revenue in May; the Xbox 360 operating system got updated (!) with dashboard ads plugging the Xbox Series S/X; AI firm Runway is planning ‘generated video games’ for later this year. (We’ll see how slop-py, hm?)

So you may have noticed that ‘games about climbing’ got kinda hot. There’s the masocore angle to them, like Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy or the Only Up! games. But also: titles like Don’t Nod’s cult hit Jusant and Aggro Crab x Landfall’s current smash hit Peak, which we’re planning to cover in more detail next week.

Anyhow, we were chatting to Lauranne Cauduro at French devs The Game Bakers, whom you might know from neat titles like Furi and Haven, and it turns out their latest game, Cairn, is a ‘survival-climber’ due out later in 2025, and it just hit 500,000 demo downloads (impressive!) This includes:

• >440,000 demo downloads on Steam (launched Dec. 2024, 44 minutes median playtime, 99% positive reviews.)

• >100,000 demo downloads on PlayStation 5 (launched June 4th, 4.6 stars out of 5.)

The first thing to say is that yes, the demo is being successful because the game is, as far as we can work out, genuinely excellent. It’s single player-only, and less goofy than Peak, but its hardcore gameplay approach to precise climbing handholds & gradually methodical (but stressful!) progress is an excellent twist on the microgenre.

The Game Bakers are a mid-sized team of 25, btw. And as Lauranne told us: “We can’t beat the absurd quantity of good indie games out there, but we can bring something genuinely… fresh to the table.” It true: as one Steam player says, in a “vast sea of fast paced games, it’s actually nice to be play it slow, and yet somehow still be stressed the f out.”

So sure, Cairn’s success isn’t assured – though it’s in the Top 75 for ‘Popular Wishlists’ for unreleased Steam games, and GDCo’s estimating it at ~500k wishlists on PC. This success to date has been due to the game, but also good marketing tactics:

• An early public demo led to a better Steam demo launch: Lauranne told us: “We launched the demo as part of the PC Gaming Show Most Wanted, six months after Cairn’s reveal at Summer Game Fest 2024. Having the demo playable at Gamescom 2024 and winning Best Game of Indie Arena Booth helped, as the [PC Gamer] team played it there.”

• Being incredibly methodical about Steam showcases helps: the list of Steam festivals that Cairn was in spans eighteen (!) since the demo was out, from Indie Live Expo and Demospree to the Earth Appreciation fest and Actu Gaming France Direct. (Efficient excavation of the HTMAG Festivals list paid off?)

• Using Steam’s new demo visibility functionality boosted launch: Lauranne says: “We were able to send everyone who had wishlisted an email that the demo was out, and Cairn was featured in the Trending Free tab on Steam frontpage for two months straight.” That widget also (unexpectedly) stayed up during the Steam Winter sale, leading to a lot more visibility.

The Game Bakers’ Lauranne also noted of an additional download driver: “We were also at the top of the Steam Free demos page for most of that [Dec 2024-Jan 2025] time, where the Overwhelmingly positive rating was really pushed to players.”

Some other excellent and relevant demo discovery tips directly from the Bakers’ mouths:

• Launching outside of a Next Fest gives a better shot at keeping that featuring

• It’s good to launch with an event or showcase to support the outreach

• Steam seasonal sales are still a good time to launch a demo

• Localize your demo – the English featuring went away on January 8th, but we were still on Spanish, Russian and Chinese frontpages until March.

There’s also a lot to talk about regarding content creators and social video for Cairn. Lauranne told us: “Several videos went viral… including some of ours!”, with multiple third-party social videos reaching >1 million views. Example: a key Indonesian TikTok ‘game showcase’ creator saw their Cairn video (1.8m views!) doing way better than peer videos. Here’s demo players vs. virality:

It’s also interesting that basically all of this interest is based on creator enthusiasm. The Game Bakers tell us: “We also have not started spending our budget for content creators – all the coverage is organic – and have only spent minimal amounts in advertisement to test some creatives and audiences.”

All of this doesn’t guarantee a hit for Cairn, but it’s interesting to see how certain game themes are just, well, naturally attractive to players. Why do we all want to climb things and fall off them? We guess it’s playful human nature at work, and something Cairn is well positioned to survival-climb its way to success with…

We enjoy partnering with livestream analytics platform Stream Hatchet to analyze the Top 100 games in terms of total hours watched, monitoring big (non-China!) streaming platforms like Twitch & many other smaller platforms over the last month.

A lot of usual suspects mill around in the Top 10. But there’s also movement further down, if you look at the full ‘Top 100’ for June 2025 (Google doc), as annotated by us. Let’s have a quick look here:

• Grand Theft Auto V goes even further ahead atop the charts: it saw a 22% jump in viewership to 210 million hours watched, after already increasing ~30% last month, solidifying the #1 spot. Can you imagine how big GTA 6 is going to be?

• Roblox – as a platform – broke into the top 10, thanks to Grow A Garden: it’s not that easy to differentiate between individual Roblox games on Twitch & some other streamers. But with Roblox up 83% to 44.8m hours watched (#9)? It’s gotta be Grow A Garden, which had 5.3m hours watched on YouTube Gaming alone.

• New games are console-first, headed by Mario Kart World, wahoo: despite it being trickier to stream from consoles, Switch 2 launch title Mario Kart World topped new entries (#14, 33.8m), followed by (current) PS5 exclusive Death Stranding 2 (#34, 11.4m).

Also notable & new? Social co-op climber Peak is at #35, with 10.8m hours, Souls-like Lies Of P made #43 (7.4m hours) due to its Overture DLC, and other new entries include this ‘hot in Asia’ Shadowverse CCG (#47, 6.4m), horror game Five Nights At Freddy’s: Secret Of The Mimic (#58, 5m), and the clonetastic The Alters (#68, 4m.)

Oh, and a sidenote from the Stream Hatchet crew: “If you counted Summer Game Fest as a game it would have ranked ~#63, with 4.8m hours watched.” BTW, Stream Hatchet’s blog has been doing some good analysis pieces recently, for example this piece on why SNK’s Fatal Fury influencer marketing didn’t end up paying off. And that’s it – 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.]