[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 jammin’ newsletterin’, and we hope you like jammin’ newsletterin’ too, as we enter mid-July. And we’re leading off today – after the news section – with a look at another Simulator game that’s done well. And a) it’s a genre hybrid, and b) it’s another solo non-’native game biz’ creator. Which leads to some bigger questions…
Before we start, you may know GameDiscoverCo is a sponsor of the Oakland Ballers, our local baseball team (go Scrappy!). Well, congrats are in order, ‘cos they made the end of season playoffs! And more importantly, you can now order anything in a helmet from their food stands – even Dole Whip. (Good ‘hook’, Ballers marketeers, good ‘hook’.)
[HOW TO SUPPORT US? Signing up to GameDiscoverCo Plus gets more from our second weekly newsletter, Discord access, basic data & lots more. And companies, get much more ‘Steam deep dive’ & console data access org-wide via GameDiscoverCo Pro, as 70+ have.]
Let’s start out the week by covering the slightly slower (summer lull!) but nonetheless happening discovery and platform news, a bit like this:
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Looking at GameDiscoverCo’s countdown of ‘trending’ unreleased Steam games by 7-day new follower velocity, from July 7th to 14th: it’s relatively quiet, but pirate survival-er Crosswind is #1 again. And dino management sequel Jurassic World Evolution 3 makes #2, helped by a 95% off Summer Sale deal for JWE2.
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Extremely anime-ish hero shooter Fate Trigger (#3) rides a closed beta test up the charts, and is followed by a chunk of games we’ve discussed multiple times before – OKU, WUCHANG, Over The Hill, and Skate. And space station-based horror title Vicious Red (#9) is getting a lot of interest in Russia.
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Roblox is stepping up on the IP front, announcing a “licensing platform, including the Roblox License Manager and Licenses catalog”, echoing similar Fortnite moves. Initial licenses available to intergrate into your Roblox game include Squid Game, Stranger Things, Twilight, Saw, Divergent, Now You See Me, and Like A Dragon.
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Per Niko Partners’ newsletter: “Chinese video game companies are continuing to extend… games on mobile or PC to console. Tencent, who launched Delta Force: Hawk Ops last year… plan to release the game for PS5 and Xbox series this August. Likewise, NetEase has announced that Once Human will launch on PS5 and Xbox Series in 2026.”
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Wondering how much the Xbox Ally and Ally X PC handhelds will cost in Europe? A possible leak says: “If the listings are correct, the Xbox Ally will cost €599, while the premium Xbox Ally X will retail for €899.” No U.S. pricing, but this compares to €419 to €679 for Steam Decks in Europe.
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Here’s an excellent postmortem post on ‘tiny bug collection game’ Kabuto Park, which sold ~35k units at $5 in Month 1: “Playtests are the core of my game design and project management strategy… Every game feels easier to create than the previous ones.” Relevant: the dev’s previous postmortem for Minami Lane, which also did good.
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The Steam folks uploaded a small (7-minute) video about “how setting up your game with Depots and Packs can help your players update and download more quickly” – actually really important, if you want to avoid giant patch sizes for small changes to your game! (Programmers and producers: please take note.)
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Roblox things: Bloomberg ($) reports on teen Roblox creators getting their games acquired: “The creator of Blue Lock: Rivals thought kids on Roblox might like a soccer video game with an anime vibe. It sold a few months later for more than $3 million.” Also: an interesting behind-the-scenes video on some mid-tier Roblox creators.
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‘State of biz’ vibes at the Develop Conference in the UK last week? GI.biz has an op-ed wondering if “the economic malaise that has crept across video games over the past three years is a sign of an industry reaching maturity, with no space left to grow”, and Will Luton spotted “new, young faces” but also plenty of ‘floating’ veterans.
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What should we call the ‘goof off with friends’ game subgenre like the recently featured Peak? We’ve now seen ‘friendslop’ suggested multiple times. And ‘friendjank’ was a write-in, suggested by Interpret’s Em Diener (& Mike Schramm.) A cousin to the more RPG-first eurojank? (All are a tad prejudicial, maybe?)
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Switch 2 things: Nintendo is gauging player opinion on Switch 2’s Game Key Cards (the ‘physical cart that unlocks a digital game’ ) in Japan; there are rumors that a new Switch 2 Direct is happening before the end of July, but it’s unclear if Nintendo has any other first-party Switch 2 games to reveal for 2025.
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Steam seems to be working on a new Steam Store menu. We saw an accidental leak of it back in May, and some new icon-based work surfaced this week via LambdaGeneration and SteamDB’s xPaw. (Difficult to tell how it’ll affect discoverability at this stage, but worth keeping an eye on.)
Reddit is one of the best platforms for game promotion. But it’s also tough – with proxies, custom browsers, anti-detect setups, and endless rules. One wrong move, and your account is banned, the comments are roasting you, and all the time and money you spent is wasted.
At Trapplan.com, we crush Reddit with our promo campaigns. We’ve generated thousands of wishlist clicks — even for games like Arma Reforger — and delivered results for everyone from small publishers to AAA studios.
Here’s what we’ve pulled off:
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12,000 wishlist adds for an indie title from a single r/Steam post
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850 sales in 2 weeks — without spamming memes in r/IndieDev or r/gaming
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40% wishlist conversion boost using our own Reddit tactics
Is this an ad? Of course. But it’s a genuine one — because we actually know what we’re doing. If you want a Reddit campaign that actually works — head to trapplan.com!
As always, GameDiscoverCo keeps a close eye on new, trending PC games. And in recent years, we’re finding they don’t always come from the same ‘usual suspects’. The latest example of this? Parcel Simulator, which debuted on Steam on Jun 20th, and has already sold >55k units and garnered Overwhelmingly Positive reviews.
That’s close to the Top 20 (by units) for June debuts on Steam, and the game is still hitting 1,000 CCU even today, with all-time highs at ~3,600 CCU – that’s great retention. The game’s UK-based creator Dan (from Dansan Digital) is a newsletter reader and GDCo Plus subscriber (woo!) So we chatted to him, and found out:
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This was a solo-dev effort* from a programmer with a dayjob: Dan told us he “works full-time as a software engineer (totally unrelated to video games), and I have no background in marketing/game development/business! I made this game in just over 2 years in my free time and over weekends.” (*Excluding use of graphic asset packs.)
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The game cleverly evolves the simulator microgenre into automation: a lot of big first-person shopkeeper simulators keep the ‘busy work’ going. But Parcel Simulator, starting as a “parcel inspection simulator” with checking-based mechanics inspired by Papers, Please, morphs into SatisFactory-style automation.
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The result? Hook-heavy gameplay without annoying genre fans: one positive Steam player review says that “this is one of those high quality simulator games that transcends streamer bait.” And Dan says he was concerned about sim/automation fans getting turned off, but “because the automation isn’t super complex Factorio-style”, it’s very “approachable” for a wider range of players.
Parcel Simulator was only being worked on a couple of hours a week back in 2023. But “in the last 6 months or so it’s been practically every hour outside of my 9-5”, Dan tells us. And the public demo (released Feb. 20th just before Next Fest) “was invaluable for collecting feedback and understanding what players wanted from the full release.”
If you look at the history of Steam wishlists for this game (below), Dan noted to us: “I had many months of getting 0-3 wishlists per day, and then from the demo onwards, things just spiralled. My game is definitely one that people needed to play to know they liked it.”
Dan also “ran a private playtest with friends and members from my Discord community. The playtesting really was the key to understanding what players wanted from the game, and to track where the pain points were.” So again – lots of pre-release polishing to the fore…
Another important point is stickiness and replayability. Given the newness of the game (less than a month old), to have median play time of over 10 hours and average playtime of 14 hours+ is… very good indeed. Full stats as follows:
Maybe that’s down to the kind of demographics playing the game – but also that the gameplay really is clever, and influencers are loving the idea of ‘fully optimizing’ their parcel sorting. (Optimization is a hook both for the game & for YouTube audiences.)
Talking about geography, the U.S. had 29.2% of Parcel Simulator’s units, with Germany at 19.7% (above average!), the UK at 9.0%, France at 6.9%, Canada at 3.5%, the Netherlands at 3.3%, Australia at 3.2%, the Czech Republic at 2.3%, and Poland at 2.0%. (<750 units have been sold in China, though, despite it being localized.)
Using GameDiscoverCo Pro data on player overlap, the game overindexes somewhat on players of hits like Schedule I (55%), Supermarket Simulator (50%), and Satisfactory (48%) – but has big ‘affinity multipliers’ with niche-ier games like Recycling Center Simulator (41%) and the recently GDCo-covered Cash Cleaner Simulator (39%).
We also wanted to talk to Dan about how he ended up getting discovery traction. And here are the key points, according to him:
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Paid marketing wasn’t really a thing he did: “I spent a grand total of about $50 on marketing (my Keymailer subscription) – no ads, no sponsored content, nothing.”
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Conventional media just wasn’t a fit for him: “My trailer got put on the GameTrailers YouTube channel and the ‘normie’ audience of gamers wasn’t interested at all… I’ve had pretty much 0 “typical” press coverage on my game since launch.”
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When he had a playable version, influencer outreach worked great: “Email outreach worked pretty well for me, I had a fair number of creators appear to make videos after having emailed them. Keymailer worked great for me too.”
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Steam’s algorithms were a significant source of post-launch discovery: “Steam did most of my marketing for me, as they just started placing me all over various pages on Steam, including the featured and recommended carousel at the top.”
A couple of notes to end. First, we still think some ‘trad game devs’ find the Simulator space a little lowest common denominator-y. So we enjoyed this Xander Seren piece on simulators, which tries to be a bit redemptive about the microgenre:
“There’s a gut reaction to label these types of games as slop or brain rot. Critics will point at the unlit environment art, asset-pack props, seemingly recycled game mechanics. But I think they’d be missing the point. There’s meditative bliss to be found in between the shelves of Supermarket Simulator.”
And secondly, we’re not denying that the barrier to entry is hyper-low in the simulator subgenre. The result is a mass of releases it’s difficult to rise through. For debuts in June 2025 on Steam alone, GameDiscoverCo Pro/Plus tracked 39 games with Simulator in their title. Here’s the Top 15 (with est. LTD gross revenue):
It’s still worth profiling the top-performing Simulators and working out what made them rise above, though – while acknowledging the market is crowded! For example, Plant Nursery Simulator also has near-100% Positive reviews, but only peaked at 200 CCU. Why? (Hook/differentiation issues with streamers, we suspect.) Fun times…
You might recall that in early 2024, Steam Labs veteran and Totally Human Media founder Ichiro Lambe did a blog post about the number of genAI games on Steam – around 1,000, which was “about 1.1% of the entire Steam library” at the time. (Reminder: Valve requires you to disclose AI use on your Steam page.)
Well, he’s returned with an updated, in-depth blog revealing: “7,818 titles on Steam disclose GenAI usage. That’s 7% of the total Steam library (there are now around 114,126 titles). We’ve octupled last year’s figure! In fact, a little under 20% of all games released in 2025 have disclosed such use.”
Ichiro, who is running excellent Steam game discovery site We Love Every Game nowadays, ran through a whole bunch of extra data, which we’ll try to concatenate down to three bullet points:
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Most genAI Steam games use AI in one of four different areas: those are all ‘using AI to help make things to go into the game’, including visual asset generation (about 60% of all disclosures), audio generation, text and narrative generation, marketing & promotional materials, and code & game logic.
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Runtime-AI games are rare and generally don’t sell well, but exist: popular games like inZOI do use runtime AI for side elements like ‘image and text to UGC’ prompts. But titles using it centrally – from Never Ending Dungeon to Dreamio and beyond – haven’t really scaled.
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Some million-sellers disclose AI, but not in major gameplay areas: games like My Summer Car (“There are some AI generated paintings found inside the main house”) and Liar’s Bar (“The character voices… were generated by artificial intelligence”) are doing just fine. There’s little AI backlash, but minor use and/or casual audiences.
One important point here, per Ichiro: “there’s a vocal anti-AI sentiment among artists and gamers who simply won’t buy games with this stuff in.” And that’s why you’re seeing a lot of semi-pro and smaller titles using AI, but most seriously commercially published titles staying away from it.
The conclusion we’d reach from the piece? Devs are definitely using AI around the fringes of some top titles, and if anything, this number is under-reported. Ichiro asks: “Are a significant number of games using some form of GenAI without disclosing it?” We rather suspect they are, but have no idea how to work that out… 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.]
