Its long-awaited direct sequel, Subnautica 2, was always going to be a success, with millions of wishlists locked in before its early-access release. And the early performance has been excellent.

Let’s dive into our estimates.

Subnautica 2 enjoys early-access success

Subnautica 2 arrived in early access on Steam and Xbox last week. It’s already sold 4.1M copies in its first week, generating $100M in revenue.

The vast majority of those copies were sold via Steam (4M), with Xbox selling under 100K. That said, plenty of Xbox players got their hands on Subnautica 2 thanks to Game Pass.

Across console, Windows, and cloud, 2.4M gamers have played Subnautica 2 via Game Pass. So the overall player number is well over 6M.

Wishlisters aren’t the holy grail for predicting launch sales

One assumption I hear quite a bit is that if a game gets millions of wishlists, most of those will convert at launch.

Obviously, Subnautica 2‘s wishlist numbers have been massive. It was the top Steam game by wishlists prior to launch, sitting at 5.5M Steam wishlists when it released.

It’s tempting to believe that most of those wishlisters would convert to buyers easily. But many gamers wishlist games on Steam to get notified about discounts at a later date. And the vast majority of Subnautica 2‘s week-one buyers were not players who had wishlisted the game.

To put a number on it, under 9% of Subnautica 2‘s total wishlisters have actually bought the game so far, as per our estimates. This kind of share is pretty typical for an anticipated game with a lot of wishlists – unless you’re Slay the Spire 2, that is.

Taking March 2026 in our wishlist conversion table as an example, just 9.02% of wishlisters from that month have converted to purchases:

We have this monthly wishlist conversion data for every Steam game, with columns for 30D after launch, 90D, 180D, and so on. If you’d like to see the wishlist conversion for any game, reach out for a free trial of our platform.

This takes nothing away from the fact that Subnautica 2 has been a smash hit. But it’s worth noting that wishlisters are a decent directional barometer for day-one sales, but they are not a 1:1 conversion signal. Far from it.

Subnautica 2 is 2026’s fastest-selling Steam game (for now)

Our estimates show that based on its performance so far (five days in), Subnautica 2 is Steam’s fastest-selling 2026 game so far.

In terms of copies sold five days in on Steam, Subnautica 2 (4M sold on Steam) is selling:

• 1.4x faster than Slay the Spire 2 (2.9M sold, five days in)

• Almost 2x faster than Resident Evil Requiem (2.1M sold, five days in)

• 3x faster than Crimson Desert (1.3M sold, five days in)

But owing to differences in price, Resident Evil Requiem is the leader in terms of gross revenue with $120M five days in, versus $96M for Subnautica 2, $78M for Crimson Desert, and $58M for Slay the Spire 2. Regional pricing and a high share of Chinese players limited the revenue somewhat for Slay the Spire 2.

The Requiem comparison is a neat example of the early-access pricing thesis. Capcom got $120M up front. Unknown Worlds got 4M players locked into a five-year content runway, with DLC, expansions, and an eventual full-launch price uplift all still ahead.

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Players are loving Subnautica 2 in early access

Subnautica 2 had a lot to live up to, and so far in early access it’s lived up to those lofty expectations. The positive review score currently sits at 91% across all markets on Steam.

China is dragging the average down a bit. Simplified Chinese reviews, which account for 7.1% of the total Subnautica 2 review pool, sit at 73% positive, as Chinese gamers are typically more negative in reviews.

As we covered a couple of weeks back, Steam reviews are one of the few feedback channels available to Mainland players, given the Great Firewall, so the channel skews adversarial by default.

Most of the negative Chinese reviews are about players not being able to defend themselves from aggressive fish due to a lack of weapons, with many reacting to level designer Artyom “Artie” O’Rielly’s comments on the Subnautica Discord. “We aren’t a killing game,” said Artie. “Go play Sons of the Forest or something if you want to kill.”

That comment has not landed well, and not just in China. There’s a lesson to be had in PR here – and I imagine there’ll be ways to defend against the fish when all is said and done (didn’t think I’d be typing that today…)

Lead game designer Anthony Gallegos told Eurogamer and other press that the team feels strongly about the non-violence position but is open to listening to feedback on player defence options. That’s the right tone to strike, and it’s also the kind of tension that early access exists to resolve.

Anyway, when we take Chinese out of the equation, the Subnautica 2 positive user review score jumps 2% to around 93%. Positive factors from our review sentiment analysis include the following:

• Stunning visual design: Underwater environments are beautiful with impressive lighting, particle effects, and creature designs. Biomes are visually distinct and immersive. I can vouch for this one. This doesn’t feel early access at all.

• The immersive deep-sea tension absolutely captures the thalassophobia (that’s a fear of deep water) and sense of isolation from the original. The sound design is excellent with unsettling creature noises and ambient effects, and the exploration into darker depths remains genuinely frightening.

• Base-building mechanics are also improved with dynamic scaling of walls and rooms. Players can now build from materials in storage boxes, the snapping system is more forgiving, and building feels satisfying and less tedious.

• Cooperative gameplay: Subnautica 2 marks the series’s first true co-op support with up to four players. Multiplayer is largely stable with minimal crashes, and exploring and surviving with friends significantly enhances the experience. Co-op is looking to be a major part of the game’s ongoing development.

• Nice narrative setup: The story begins with intrigue and mystery, and progression feels natural in the early stages. It got me pretty hooked quickly, while it took me a while to get into the first two games.

The positivity is no surprise. I was making good use of my Game Pass subscription last night to bounce between Forza and Subnautica 2. And I must say, Subnautica 2 is one of the most polished early-access releases I’ve seen, and definitely one of the best Unreal Engine 5 launches so far. It’s awesome.

There are also some negatives, though. Our semantic analysis shows players are frustrated by a lack of content, optimisation issues, a mandatory EULA, and the absence of basic accessibility features like an FOV slider.

So what’s next?

The roadmap is saying all the right things

Subnautica 2 is smashing it and impressing players. The foundation is amazing. Now it all depends on how Unknown Worlds addresses the complaints and continues to flesh out the game.

The team has been upfront about the road ahead. The published roadmap promises a mix of focused improvements addressing systems and smaller features, hot fixes when needed, and larger expansions that will build out the world, biomes, creatures, resources, tools, vehicles, and the next chapter of the story.

The first update is focused on quality-of-life fixes, and the second is targeting co-op improvements based on player requests:

The team has also been explicit that community input will shape Early Access development through the in-game feedback tool and the Nolt suggestion board.

That’s a sensible posture given the visible community pressure around the violence question. Player feedback being able to upvote suggestions is the kind of mechanism that lets the team gauge actual demand rather than reacting to the loudest voices.

Of course, each major content drop will produce a Steam algorithm uplift, wishlist reactivation, fresh press coverage, and a DAU spike that resembles a launch in miniature.

For a $100M-in-five-days launch, the bigger commercial question is the next year. The original Subnautica became a survival genre cornerstone because Unknown Worlds shipped consistently across early access and beyond.

Subnautica 2‘s commercial ceiling will be defined by whether the team can repeat that discipline. I reckon they can.

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[Alinea Analytics boasts the most accurate PC and console estimates in the business. Game makers use our platform to understand their audience, keep an eye on the competition, monitor sales trends, and spot new opportunities. We equip game studios and financial institutions with accurate data and the confidence to make smarter, data-driven decisions. Want to talk about all things games market data? We’d love to chat!]

• Slay the Spire 2 (6.5M sold on Steam, as per our estimates)

• Mewgenics (1.8M on Steam)

• Raccoin (550K on Steam)

• Vampire Crawlers (coming up on 1M sold across platforms)

• Saros (almost 350K on PS5), and the list keeps going!

Our estimates show that on Steam alone, the genre is already approaching $500M in gross revenue for 2026. Players are spending on roguelikes, but they’re also spending time. About a million people have already played Slay the Spire 2 for over 100 hours, and it’s only been in early access for two months.

So yes, we roguelike fans are obsessed with our titles of choice. Which is why it should come as no surprise that we also buy DLC for those games, and in droves.

Barony and CloverPit DLC both found their audiences

Four 2026 roguelike DLCs have crossed 100K copies sold on Steam this year, as per our estimates, with attach rates well above what we typically see for DLC across other genres.

Barony, a first-person 3D co-op roguelike dungeon crawler, dropped its first DLC in seven years this year. Barony: Deserters & Disciples launched at the end of January for $7.99, adding five new races and classes and a bunch of new ways to play the now-11-year-old game (where does the time go?).

Since then, our estimates show Barony: Deserters & Disciples has sold almost 200K copies on Steam, generating almost $1.2M in gross revenue. The core game on Steam has sold a little over 1M copies since its 2015 launch, so that’s an attach rate of over 19%. Pretty remarkable.

Last year’s CloverPit, the slot machine roguelike that’s shifted over 1.7M copies on Steam, also got a new DLC this year. CloverPit’s Unholy Fusion launched a little over a month ago and sold 129K units at its $2.99 price point. It had a peak attach rate of almost 8%.

Unholy Fusion has generated almost $300K on Steam. The base game has generated $12.7M, bringing our overall estimate to a round $13M. CloverPit was made by Italian studio Panik Arcade, and 13 is seen as a lucky number over in Italy. Love a bit of serendipity.

Of the 308K players who played CloverPit on Steam during the DLC’s launch month (April), 21% played Slots & Daggers and 20% also played Dice A Million, both recent roguelikes.

Our month-by-month audience overlap data makes it easy to surface these kinds of findings across Steam, PS5, and Xbox.

Monster Train 2’s first big DLC has done well, but Slay the Spire 2 has stolen its thunder a bit

Monster Train 2, a roguelike deck-building strategy game, launched a little under a year ago and completely took over my life. Since then, the base game has generated $10M in revenue on Steam via 525K copies sold.

Evidently, many of those players were hungry for more content. February’s $9.99 Destiny of the Railforged DLC has generated another $890K in revenue via 112K copies sold, with a peak attach rate of over 21%.

About two-thirds of Monster Train 2‘s player base has also picked up Slay the Spire 2 in early access on Steam, which had a noticeable impact on Monster Train 2‘s DAUs. You can see the pattern clearly in the data:

As you can see:

• Monster Train 2 was averaging around 9K to 11K daily players through January.

• The Destiny of the Railforged DLC launch on February 2 spiked DAUs above 27K and held the game in the 20K-28K band for almost two weeks.

• Engagement then stabilised through the back half of February into the 13K-18K range, still well above the pre-DLC baseline.

• Then Slay the Spire 2 entered early access on March 5, and Monster Train 2‘s DAUs collapsed to a new floor almost overnight, settling into the 5K-9K range and never recovering toward the pre-DLC baseline.

The timing here is worth flagging. Mega Crit announced back on 11 September 2025 that Slay the Spire 2 would slip out of 2025 into March 2026.

Monster Train 2‘s Destiny of the Railforged DLC was announced just a few days before its 2 February launch. You have to imagine the Slay the Spire 2 release date influenced Shiny Shoe’s planning for the DLC window.

Getting a major content drop out the door six weeks before the genre’s biggest 2026 release lands is the kind of timing call that looks obvious, but it’s genuinely hard to execute on.

If that was indeed what happened, our estimates suggest it was the right call. Without that February DLC spike, Monster Train 2 would have had a much quieter Q1 than it did.

Ravenswatch’s Merlin DLC has also done well, but it’s not without controversy

Finally, Ravenswatch‘s Merlin DLC launched on January 19 this year for $7.99. The base game has sold 1.2M copies ($17.8M) since its launch in September 2024, and the Merlin DLC has added another $662K to that number via 106K copies sold, with a peak attach rate of 9%.

Ravenswatch is a top-down, isometric action roguelite with a big emphasis on fluid combat and co-op gameplay. It’s a great game, and it’s overlooked a bit in the roguelike community. I digress.

The DLC sees legendary wizard Merlin join the Ravenswatch roster, including four skins that can be unlocked in-game, as well as three exclusive premium skins.

This is where our review sentiment data gets interesting. Our platform automatically flags review spikes (DLC launches being one of the main post-launch triggers), and the Merlin DLC produced a decent spike, with players pretty divided on it.

While the core combat, character variety, and co-op loop are widely praised, the decision to charge for a playable character in a premium-priced title that already features cosmetic DLC has driven most of the negative sentiment.

To many user reviewers, a paid playable character on top of paid cosmetics starts to feel like a model that fits a free-to-play game more than a premium one.

The audience is engaged enough to pay for DLC at meaningfully higher attach rates than other genres, but the same engagement makes them sharply attuned to monetisation decisions that can feel exploitative. T

Taking all four of these DLCs together, the picture is pretty clear. Roguelike DLC attach rates are running well above the Steam baseline for DLC, which typically sits in the low single digits across most genres.

Obviously, pricing is a lot of work for these chonky attach rates, with none of the DLC above $10 and the highest-performing by attach rate (Monster Train 2 at 21%) sitting right at that ceiling.

As always, if you’d like to see our Steam DLC data in action, including attach rates, revenues, and DLC copies sold, give us a shout! We’re happy to give you a free trial of the Alinea Platform.

Cool links and other stuff

• Our Saros analysis from Tuesday’s newsletter has been making the rounds in the press, including from IGN, GameSpot, VGC, Eurogamer, Kotaku, Kinda Funny, and Giant Bomb. And I only got two death threats on Twitter!

• Investment legend and #1 Swedish gaming voice on LinkedIn, Ali Farha, has invested in Alinea Analytics! You can read his very lovely announcement post right here. Exciting times! We can’t wait to announce more about what we’re cooking up!

• Our CEO, Rickard Linder, is off to Malmö for Nordic Game in a couple of weeks! So if you’re around, shoot us a message, and have a chat with one of the most knowledgeable people in games market intelligence.

Want to get your hands on our data for yourself – for free?

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The last word

Reply to this email – or reach out here – if you have any feedback for the newsletter – or want to request a game for us to cover.

[Alinea Analytics boasts the most accurate PC and console estimates in the business. Game makers use our platform to understand their audience, keep an eye on the competition, monitor sales trends, and spot new opportunities. We equip game studios and financial institutions with accurate data and the confidence to make smarter, data-driven decisions. Want to talk about all things games market data? We’d love to chat!]

Let’s dig in.

Saros has a lukewarm start with $22M in revenue via 300K+ sold

Saros hit PS5 on 30 April, with an advanced access period kicking off two days earlier. It’s a PS5 exclusive, and rumour has it that it’ll stay that way. In the two weeks since launch, Saros has passed 300K copies sold and generated over $22M in revenue.

Almost a third of those copies came during the early-access period, which suggests that Housemarque superfans (including myself!) are propping this one up. More on that later.

Launch-aligned, our data shows Saros is actually selling a little slower than Returnal, despite there being only about 8M PS5s in the wild when Returnal launched vs the 93M install base Saros launched into.

On first look, that seems rough. But there’s a bit more to it:

• When Returnal hit in April 2021, less than six months after the PS5 launch. Those early PS5 adopters (the ones who inherently buy a lot of new games at full price) were dying for something to play. Returnal was the first big first-party PlayStation release since launch, and it made amazing use of the unique DualSense haptics and spatial audio. Many core PS5 players flocked to it almost by default.

• It’s a different story for Saros. It’s launched not too long after Crimson Desert, Resident Evil Requiem, Hades 2 on PS5, Pragmata, and a whole bunch of rad 2026 games. This is a more niche PlayStation Studios game. It was never going to do numbers like God of War or Ghost of Yotei.

• Of course, Saros is also competing with the whole cumulative backlog of PlayStation releases that have built up across the cycle. The PS5 install base is over 11x bigger than it was at Returnal’s launch, but the share of that audience actively shopping for a new niche first-party title is structurally smaller.

It really is a shame, as Saros is a fantastic game and frankly deserves better numbers than this. But 3D bullet-hell-type games, especially those with a $70+ price tag, are a tough sell in today’s market.

Particularly without a big IP behind it, or a studio that’s recognised outside of the PlayStation hardcore.

But there’s plenty to love about Saros. I’m loving it, and so are many others. It’s also already sold more copies than Marathon on PS5, so there’s that.

The PlayStation hardcore is doing the heavy lifting

Players who consistently show up for PlayStation’s other first-party games at launch – or shortly after – make up a significant share of Saros’ early players:

• 56% of Saros‘ players previously played Ghost of Yotei (released in October 2025).

• 37% played Death Stranding 2 (released last June).

• 11% played God of War: Ghost of Sparta (a February 2026 shadow-drop).

• And 8% played Marathon (early March).

The Housemarque fandom also showed up in full force. Our audience overlap data shows that about 78% of Saros‘ players previously played Returnal. Of course, Returnal has been on PS Plus, inflating lifetime crossover numbers. Much of the genuine overlap will be early Returnal buyers rather than subscription samplers, though.

Looking at our monthly player-overlap data on PlayStation (yes, we have that!), we can see that around 17% of Saros‘ April players also played Returnal that month. I was part of that group, getting the homework in (and my arse kicked).

Many of those first-three-days Saros buyers in April also bought and played plenty of other new and recent games in April, including April 17th’s Pragmata (33% played), March 20th’s Crimson Desert (30%), and 14 April’s Hades 2 (14% played).

This is the cross-shopping reality for niche first-party releases in 2026. Wallets and time are finite, and the PlayStation hardcore is having an incredibly busy spring. I’m bloody exhausted, myself – in a good way.

Saros players are putting in the time (and hitting the credits)

The DAU data is where things get a bit more encouraging. Saros launched with around 43K daily players on its early-access day (29 April), then jumped to 83K on its full-launch day (30 April), and peaked at almost 142K on 2 May.

The post-launch curve has held up well, too, with DAUs settling into a 115K-140K range across the first 10 days, only dipping below 100K once (11 May, at 96K).

That’s a healthier engagement curve than the unit sales would suggest, and it points to something important. The players who did buy Saros are sticking with it (more on that later).

The playtime and completion data back that up as well. Our estimates show that 40% of Saros players have played for over 15 hours, and 30% for over 20 hours. That is pretty impressive engagement for a roguelike of this difficulty profile, only two weeks into release.

Speaking of difficulty, the decision to make Saros more accessible than Returnal means completion rates are higher than you’d expect, too. Right now, over 20% of Saros players have finished the game (based on the Act 3 trophy completion).

That’s double Returnal’s completion rate at this point, in part because Returnal runs were looooooong and the checkpoint structure punished mid-run drop-off in a way Saros doesn’t. But mostly because Returnal is damn hard (one of my proudest platinums to be honest – had to squeeze that one in, didn’t I!?)

This is the silver lining in the data. Saros obviously isn’t pulling in casual PlayStation owners at the scale Sony and Housemarque might have hoped, but the audience that did show up is playing the hell out of it.

That’s the audience that recommends games to friends, drives organic word-of-mouth, and converts at higher rates when the game eventually goes on sale or hits PS Plus.

What the numbers mean for Sony and Housemarque

Saros is an absolutely fantastic game and truly unique in terms of its gameplay and systems. This slow start suggests it will struggle to break even, given the reported $76M development budget.

But at the same time, exclusives sell consoles, and then inertia from previous generations does the rest, and the real PlayStation money is made on third-party launches and legacy third-party live services. Plenty of core PlayStation players have picked up Saros, which is the underlying job an exclusive is meant to do.

That said, there is a useful counter-data point worth flagging. Returnal is approaching $13M in gross revenue on Steam, and almost $5M of that happened in the port’s first month on Valve’s store.

That’s a PlayStation exclusive that arrived on PC roughly two years after its console launch, and is still generating meaningful incremental revenue four-and-a-bit years after release.

Returnal has a decent revenue tail on Steam, suggesting that Saros has a real long-term revenue case on PC relative to its budget.

As mentioned, Sony will inevitably find new revenue and players via PlayStation Store discounts and its eventual PS Plus inclusion. But if revenue is the priority on this one for Sony, this fantastic game has sadly had a lukewarm start, as per our estimates.

The broader point Saros’ launch underlines is one we’ve been making for a while in this newsletter. The PlayStation hardcore is an extraordinarily valuable audience, but it’s a finite one, and Sony’s first-party release cadence is increasingly bumping up against the limits of that audience’s wallet share.

Niche exclusives now compete not just with other niche exclusives, but with the cumulative backlog of every previous Sony hit, plus the cross-platform releases the hardcore is also buying.

The elephant in the room is that Sony recently closed Bluepoint. Now that Housemarque has presumably closed the book on Saros, I sincerely hope PlayStation keeps them on the books.

Like Bluepoint, Housemarque are some incredibly talented folks.

Next week: Forza Horizon 6

Next week, we’ll be covering the release of Forza Horizon 6 across Steam and Xbox. On Steam alone, it’s already sold almost 1.2M copies and generated over $62M in revenue, and the game isn’t even out until 18 May (15 May in advanced access).

This one is going to be big. Hit subscribe below if you want that analysis in your inbox next week, for free.

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The last word

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[Alinea Analytics boasts the most accurate PC and console estimates in the business. Game makers use our platform to understand their audience, keep an eye on the competition, monitor sales trends, and spot new opportunities. We equip game studios and financial institutions with accurate data and the confidence to make smarter, data-driven decisions. Want to talk about all things games market data? We’d love to chat!]

Let’s look at some Alinea copies sold estimates across all three platforms in April 2026, followed by an excerpt from last month’s client-exclusive newsletter on what Slay the Spire 2‘s Chinese review score is actually telling us about the Mainland market.

Let’s get into it.

The April top 5 by copies sold - Xbox, Steam, and PlayStation

• Windrose was the top game by copies sold in April, moving 1.7M units in its debut month. Like Slay the Spire 2 in March, Windrose took the top spot across Steam, PlayStation, and Xbox despite only being available on Steam. The title has since hit 1.9M copies sold and $44M in gross revenue, and is on track to cross 2M imminently. About 15% of its players have played for over 50 hours. DAUs are declining at the expected post-launch pace, but Windrose still pulls in over 250K daily players on a weekday. Smooth sailing. You can catch our write-up on Windrose’s launch here.

• Crimson Desert continued to perform extremely well in April after its debut back in March, selling another 1.6M copies. About 1M of those came via Steam, almost 450K via PlayStation, and the remainder via Xbox (console, Windows, and cloud). Around a quarter of players across platforms also played Dragon’s Dogma II. People of taste. Relatively speaking, console players have sunk the most time into Crimson Desert, with 20% across Xbox and PlayStation having played for 100+ hours already, against 13% on Steam. The word-of-mouth-driven sustained engagement curve is the real story here, and it’s the reason Crimson Desert is still moving units in volume two months past launch rather than falling off the typical AAA … Kliff.

• EA Sports FC 26 scored another 1.4M sold in April, boosted by its deepest discount yet on PlayStation ($21), which ran until April 9. The PlayStation version accounts for about 850K of those April copies, with Xbox and Steam each selling another 270K. Of those who played FC 26 on PlayStation in April, 29% also played Fortnite that month, while 20% played Rocket League, the top two crossover titles. Epic stuff (love a double entendre). FC 26 also brought in another 1M players via PS Plus Essential since being added as a monthly title a couple of days back. A very smart time to get players in the door, and spending, ahead of the FIFA World Cup.

• Pragmata, Capcom’s new IP, also sold through (so no unsold retail copies) 1.4M across PlayStation, Xbox, and Steam in its launch month. About 840K of those came via Steam, almost 500K on PS5, and almost 100K on Xbox. Across all three platforms, around 40% of Pragmata players also played Resident Evil Requiem. As we mentioned in our Pragmata launch post, Capcom is cashing in a decade of quality, and the success of new IP Pragmata reflects that. Players who buy games in launch month, an important and lucrative cohort, trust Capcom in a way they trust very few publishers right now.

• Slay the Spire 2 takes the number five spot via Steam alone while still in early access. The awesome roguelike deckbuilder shifted another 1M copies last month to pass 6.4M sold overall, generating almost $130M in gross revenue since its early-access launch two months ago. As we discussed in the Slay the Spire 2 launch post, China is the game’s top market, and this is having a significant and underappreciated impact on its review scores. More on that below.

An excerpt from last month’s client-exclusive newsletter

Last month’s client-exclusive Playbook newsletter went deep on Chinese user review divergence, as well as DLC data, Game Pass and PlayStation Plus deltas, and monthly player crossover on PlayStation (we’ve added Xbox now, too, with Steam on the way very soon). Below are excerpts from the China review part of that client newsletter.

When a single territory commands over a third of your copies sold, like with Slay the Spire 2 on Steam, its sentiment stops being a regional quirk and becomes a core business pillar.

Which makes the following Slay the Spire 2 Steam user review data worth sitting with:

• A 37% positive score in Simplified Chinese.

• A 93% positive score in English.

• The gulf between those two numbers tells you more about the Chinese market than any single data point we could offer.

To understand why, we need to understand how a meaningful segment of Chinese players actually plays Slay the Spire 2. In parts of the core Mainland China community, the pursuit of win-streaks and “infinites”, finding and exploiting overpowered card combinations, is a primary source of social pride and, for many players, the entire point of the game.

For context, I love Slay the Spire 2 (100 hours and counting…), and I’m quite tuned into its community.

When Mega Crit released its March 19 update, which made infinites harder to achieve and weakened several cards to establish a more balanced baseline, English-speaking reviewers largely shrugged. Early access balance changes are expected. But the Simplified Chinese score plummeted within days. The same thing has happened with the latest patch, too. The pattern is visible on the review tab of our Slay the Spire 2 Steam page.

For part of the China cohort, Mega Crit devalued the skill these players had spent hundreds of hours building. The review score is the response.

Conventionally, high playtime is a sign of a player who likes a game. If you’ve played 250 hours, you clearly like the game, right? Right? Thanks to its audience’s demographics, Slay the Spire 2 inverts that logic almost completely:

• Players in the 1-5 hour range sit at 93% positive.

• Players in the 100-250 hour range sit at 30% positive.

• These late-game negative reviewers, mostly based in China, are using playtime as a badge of authority to demand changes, and they are reviewing the most recent patch rather than the core product.

For a publisher reading a global Mixed score without this context, the instinct is to panic or overcorrect. The data tells a more precise story. The negativity is concentrated in a specific, identifiable cohort with a specific, identifiable grievance. It’s also why Steam now surfaces reviews to users based on their local market by default.

But there are also meaningful differences within the Chinese-language reviews themselves.

Simplified versus Traditional: Two different conversations

To manage this volatility, publishers should treat Simplified and Traditional Chinese reviews as distinct data streams rather than a single Chinese bloc.

The geographic logic matters here:

• Simplified Chinese is the written standard in Mainland China.

• Traditional Chinese is used primarily in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau.

• Whilst Simplified Chinese is also used in Malaysia and Singapore, English remains the dominant written language in both countries, so Simplified Chinese reviews skew heavily toward Mainland players in practice.

• Our platform separates these precisely because they behave differently, and for reasons that go beyond preference.

For Slay the Spire 2, Traditional Chinese reviewers are 68% positive, sitting somewhere between the Mainland score and the rest of the world (as is typical). Simplified Chinese reviewers sit at 37%. That gap reflects a structural difference in how Mainland players relate to developers in the first place.

The most direct factor is access. Discord, Reddit, X, and other community features are blocked in Mainland China. In Western markets, these channels absorb the bulk of player frustration. Complaints get posted, developers respond, and Steam reviews remain closer to purchase guidance.

In Mainland China, those outlets simply don’t exist. Steam reviews have become the normalised substitute, functioning as a primary feedback mechanism rather than a purchase signal.

This has become ingrained behaviour rather than a workaround. Mainland players tend to discuss games and share opinions on domestic platforms like Heybox and Tieba, then turn to Steam reviews specifically to direct criticism at developers.

The review section functions as a complaints department as much as a storefront. Steam itself recognised this dynamic. The decision to split reviews by language was partly a response to the outsized impact Mainland Chinese sentiment can have on global aggregate scores.

There’s a second layer worth understanding. The domestic Chinese games market is dominated by gacha and pay-to-win mechanics, which have historically fostered a, let’s face it, adversarial relationship between players and developers. Coordinated negative reviews have become normalised as a form of consumer self-protection.

When that posture meets a Western developer making balance changes to an early access title, the reaction appears disproportionate by Western standards, but it is not by the norms of the market it is coming from.

As the number of Chinese Steam and console players continues to grow, boosted by local development and recent success stories, these different cultural ways of approaching things will only become more important.

That’s the excerpt. The full Playbook piece goes further into how to operationalise monthly review tracking, including the specific dashboards we’ve built for clients to monitor regional sentiment divergence in real time. If you’d like access to the full client-exclusive newsletter or trial our platform, drop us a line.

Cool links and other stuff

• It was a fun week for Alinea press coverage, including articles from GameSpot, Eurogamer, and Kotaku.

• Our CEO Rickard posted some fun Alinea data about the share of rad co-op games being made in Sweden. It really is nuts how such a small country has had such a big impact on our industry. Check the post out here.

• Speaking of Sweden, Tobias is off to Malmö later this month for Nordic Game. He’s hosting a panel with two other very smart guys, Viktor Stadler and Gustav Nisser, covering best practices for forecasting in games. You won’t want to miss this one if you’re at the event!

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The last word

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[Alinea Analytics boasts the most accurate PC and console estimates in the business. Game makers use our platform to understand their audience, keep an eye on the competition, monitor sales trends, and spot new opportunities. We equip game studios and financial institutions with accurate data and the confidence to make smarter, data-driven decisions. Want to talk about all things games market data? We’d love to chat!]

Exclusivity continues to be the talk of the town across the games community. So, in this newsletter, we’re looking at the games that Xbox and Sony have launched on Steam since 2023 – more specifically, the ones that have sold over 1M.

Helldivers 2 nears 15M on Steam

Sony’s second-party Helldivers 2 has sold a staggering 14.5M copies on Steam alone, generating close to half a billion dollars on Valve’s platform. That single title accounts for 40% of the units in our 1M club and roughly a third of the gross revenue.

Helldivers 2 launched simultaneously on PS5 and Steam in February 2024, a decision that’s aged pretty well. Steam now accounts for two-thirds of the game’s lifetime audience. And our data shows that Helldivers 2 still regularly pulls 500K daily active users on Steam alone, well into its third year on the market.

For Sony, which is reportedly looking back into exclusivity, this is the live-service paradox. Day-and-date PC was the right commercial call, and Helldivers 2 is the closest thing PlayStation has to a consistent multi-year hit on Steam.

The flip side is that two-thirds of the audience now sits on a platform Sony does not control. This is the kind of dependency that should worry Valve, too, not just Sony

PlayStation’s prestige port machine, and diminishing returns

Beyond Helldivers, the rest of PlayStation’s post-2022-on-Steam tally comes from the prestige single-player ports that have been arriving in waves since Horizon Zero Dawn opened the floodgates in 2020. Within our 2023-onwards window:

• Ghost of Tsushima Director’s Cut has sold 2.7M copies on Steam, generating close to $120M, and continues to sell 50K to 100K units a month depending on discounting. It hit Steam roughly four years after the PS4 release, which is a long-enough gap that the novelty effect – boosted by positive word of mouth – was largely intact when it launched. This is no Starfield-to-PS5 situation.

• The Last of Us Part I has sold 2.5M Steam copies since its port three years ago, generating $100M in gross revenue. The interesting story here is the long tail, with the Steam version spiking sharply during the airing of HBO’s The Last of Us season two, which ran from 13 April to 25 May 2025. We tracked +250K Steam units sold during that broadcast window alone, an uplift that arrived three years post-port and has materially shifted the title’s lifetime revenue profile.

• The Last of Us Part II came to Steam roughly a year ago, during the second season’s run mentioned above, and has since moved 1.2M copies. Because of that direct release timing into the show’s peak attention window, the Steam version of Part II is actually selling faster than Part I did at the same launch-aligned point. This is the first PlayStation port where transmedia momentum has done the heavy lifting rather than novelty, and it is a model Sony will want to replicate.

• God of War Ragnarok, which came to Steam in September 2024 (just under two years after the PlayStation version), has sold 1.3M copies and generated around $60M. That is a respectable headline but an underwhelming trajectory in context. The Steam port of 2018’s God of War came in January 2022, about four years after the PS4 version, and at this same launch-aligned point had sold twice as many copies as Ragnarok.

God of War was one of the earlier PlayStation-to-Steam ports, and had the novelty effect working in its favour (this is something I’ve heard the boys on Sacred Symbols chat about quite a bit). God of War had also won Game of the Year and was the most critically acclaimed PlayStation game to hit Steam at that point.

Beyond that, God of War launched on Steam in the middle of God of War Ragnarok‘s pre-release marketing cycle, which gave the PC version a free hype tailwind that Ragnarok itself ironically did not benefit from on PC. The Ragnarok Steam number is a lesson in what happens when you remove the novelty, the awards, and the franchise momentum from the equation.

As for the rest of the PlayStation-made 2023-onwards million sellers:

• Horizon Forbidden West, which arrived on Steam in March 2024 (around two years after its PS4/PS5 launch), has sold 1.1M copies on Valve’s platform and generated almost $50M. At this launch-aligned point, Horizon Zero Dawn‘s Steam port had sold 2.3M, so Forbidden West is moving at less than half the velocity. Zero Dawn was one of the initial PlayStation-to-Steam ports, so the pattern is consistent with God of War.

• Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 came to Steam fourteen months after the original PS5 launch, has sold 1.1M copies, and has generated almost $50M. At this launch-aligned point, the first Spider-Man had sold 1.7M on Steam, so the diminishing-returns pattern is present here, too, but to a lesser degree. The mitigating factor is newness, though, as Spider-Man 2 hit Steam fourteen just months after PS5. The Spider-Man arrived on Steam four years after the PS4 version. The shorter window helped offset the lost novelty premium.

The first wave of PlayStation Steam ports benefited from a one-time novelty premium. Each subsequent franchise port enters a market with progressively less of that scarcity attached.

The audience that wanted to play prestige PlayStation titles on PC has, to a meaningful degree, already been served, and the new addressable audience is shrinking faster than the franchise pipeline can refill it.

Sony’s options from here are limited with these sorts of first-party prestige games is limited. Push the porting window forward and risk cannibalising PS5 hardware sales. Or hold the window and accept that diminishing returns will keep compressing Steam revenue per release.

The rumoured pullback is one read of a leadership team weighing those tradeoffs and concluding that Steam revenue is no longer worth the unit risk on console.

That read may be correct on a per-title basis. The cost of pulling back is harder to see in a spreadsheet: brand presence on the largest PC storefront, mindshare with younger PC-first players, and the pipeline that fed Helldivers 2 its day-one Steam audience.

But there are also other markets PlayStation can target using Steam.

Stellar Blade’s quiet Chinese trojan horse

Stellar Blade deserves its own little section here. The Sony second-party title has sold 2.3M copies on Steam, generating $114M, Despite launching about a year after the PS5 version, Stellar Blade on Steam is closing in on the PS5 version’s 2.5M units.

The PS5 version still leads on revenue ($173M) thanks to regional pricing, but the Steam audience composition is what makes this case study vital to Sony. 45% of Stellar Blade’s Steam audience is Chinese, off the back of a deliberate Chinese-language dub and aggressive regional pricing on Valve’s platform.

Stellar Blade is, in effect, a second-party PlayStation game that found an audience PlayStation cannot easily reach on its own hardware. We expect to see this dynamic repeated more often as Chinese PC gaming continues its growth trajectory, and it is something Sony should weigh carefully in any pullback conversation.

Based on all this, these are three ways Sony should approach its Steam exclusivity strategy:

• Genre-differentiated windowing. Helldivers 2’s day-and-date launch and Ghost of Tsushima’s four-year hold are sometimes treated as one PC strategy in online circles. They’re two. Live-service should default to day-and-date. Prestige single-player can hold longer, but the window needs to reset the novelty premium each franchise generation, not just each release.

• Second-party day-and-date as a market access tool: 45% of Stellar Blade’s Steam audience is Chinese, a region PlayStation hardware structurally cannot reach. The PC port wasn’t an incremental revenue add, it was the only viable distribution path for half the title’s eventual audience.

• Transmedia-aligned windowing: The Last of Us Part II is selling faster than Part I on Steam, launch-aligned, partly because Sony released it directly into HBO’s season two broadcast window. It’s the only mechanism in the dataset that has demonstrably offset the diminishing returns curve on a sequel. Sony’s PC calendar should be built around broadcast dates, not arbitrary years-after-console windows.

Xbox’s day-and-date thesis

Xbox’s contribution to the 1M club tells a tidier story:

• Starfield has sold 3.8M copies on Steam, passing $200M in revenue from copies alone. Bethesda’s day-in-date launch did its job, and the audience composition is largely legacy: 60% played Fallout 4 previously, 51% played Skyrim Special Edition. Reception was mixed, and the long tail has been quieter than Bethesda would like, but the launch revenue justified the day-one PC commitment.

• Oblivion Remastered has moved 2.7M copies on Steam, almost $110M in gross revenue. The Steam version has outsold the combined PS5 and Xbox console totals by a factor of two, a striking outcome given the title was a day-one Game Pass release on Xbox. The legacy fanbase data here is even more pronounced than Starfield’s: 75% of Oblivion Remastered’s Steam buyers had played Skyrim Special Edition, 64% had played Fallout 4, and 44% had played Fallout New Vegas. Bethesda properties on Steam continue to operate as a connected catalogue.

• Diablo IV is the awkward inclusion in any “Xbox on Steam” cut. The Activision Blizzard acquisition closed in October 2023, four months after Diablo IV launched on PS5 and Battle.net, and the Steam release that same month sat squarely on Microsoft’s books.

• Grounded 2 closes the Xbox 1M list at 1.2M copies. The Obsidian sequel launched in early access on Steam day-and-date last July, and Steam now accounts for more than two-thirds of total sales (Xbox and Windows combined). Xbox is also seeing diminishing returns inside its own franchises: the original Grounded sold roughly twice as many Steam copies at the same launch point, despite arriving as a port two years after its Xbox debut. Novelty cuts both ways.

Of course, this 1M+ list is going to have another entry in the coming weeks, as Forza Horizon 6 is already at about 800K sold on Steam two weeks before launch! The way that game is tracking, even Helldivers 2 is going to have a run for its money.

As always, we’ll be covering Forza’s release in detail. Hit subscribe below to get that in your inbox as soon as it’s ready.

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Two companies, another winner

Step back, and the picture is reasonably blunt.

For Sony, the question is whether the diminishing returns pattern justifies a pullback that costs presence and pipeline insurance. Sony’s prestige single-player formula is increasingly poorly suited to Steam economics, whilst its live-service and second-party output is a much better fit.

For Xbox, the question is whether MAUs as a north star is compatible with any meaningful exclusivity strategy. As we noted in last week’s newsletter on Xbox games on PlayStation, exclusivity that blocks 132M PS5 owners directly undercuts the MAU goal. The same logic applies to Steam.

A couple of years back, I made the case that Steam was emerging as the unlikely winner of the console war, with a more diverse AAA lineup than at any prior point in its history. The data above largely confirms that thesis, so nothing’s changed there. Twelve million-sellers across two console publishers in three years, anchored by one generational hit.

What has changed is the conversation inside PlayStation and Xbox HQ publishers about whether the trade is still worth it. The answer appears to be yes for Xbox, with caveats. For Sony, the answer is increasingly conditional: yes for live-service, less clearly yes for the prestige ports that built the strategy in the first place. So yes, with even more caveats.

As ever, Valve does not necessarily need to do anything substantial to keep winning this. It just needs the platform holders to keep deciding that Steam is a better release destination than the alternative, just as it convinces players it’s the best place to access PC games.

Still, the decisions made over the next twelve months on Sony and Microsoft’s side will have a huge impact here.

Sony’s PC strategy will signal whether Helldivers 2 was a template or a one-off, while Xbox’s exclusivity reevaluation will signal whether MAU rhetoric still translates into platform-wide release calendars.

The data we have today says Steam wins either way in the near term. But in the long term, who knows?

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[Alinea Analytics boasts the most accurate PC and console estimates in the business. Game makers use our platform to understand their audience, keep an eye on the competition, monitor sales trends, and spot new opportunities. We equip game studios and financial institutions with accurate data and the confidence to make smarter, data-driven decisions. Want to talk about all things games market data? We’d love to chat!]

Seems like a great time to dive into our data on the highest-performing Xbox games on PlayStation. Let’s look at the games that sold over 100K – day-one releases and after-the-fact ports.

This analysis doesn’t include Call of Duty. We’ve also excluded titles from acquired studios that were released on PlayStation before Microsoft’s ownership, as well as legacy contractual obligations like Deathloop and Ghostwire: Tokyo.

Let’s have a look.

Forza, Sea of Thieves, and Oblivion Remastered take the top spots

Thirteen first-party Xbox titles have now cleared the 100K unit milestone on PlayStation. Collectively, they’ve generated $667M in gross revenue for Microsoft, as per our estimates.

Forza Horizon 5, which launched on PS5 last year, three-and-a-half years after the Xbox/PC versions, accounts for almost half of those revenues. That’s $323M via 5.8M copies sold:

While there’s a novelty to Forza Horizon on PS5, an audience largely lacking an arcadey racer, the imminent Forza Horizon 6 is on track to sell gangbusters on PS5 when it launches later this year. The Steam version, launching next month – day in date with Xbox – has now pre-sold 700K copies.

Sea of Thieves is also doing well on PlayStation. As one of the first titles in the initial porting strategy, it has moved 2.7M copies on the platform and generated nearly $100M there.

Again, while the initial sales spike was partially driven by the novelty of a high-profile Xbox exclusive first hitting rival hardware, Sea of Thieves has shown impressive long-term retention, bringing in 300K monthly active users (MAUs) on PS5. The live-service loop has integrated well into the PlayStation’s ecosystem.

Oblivion Remastered has moved 1.2M units on PS5, about $58M in gross revenue, benefitting from a day-one multi-platform release. Our data indicates that approximately 75% of this audience previously played the PS4 or PS5 version of Skyrim.

While the original Oblivion was a defining title for the Xbox 360 (it was pretty much the lead platform), the migration of console gamers from Xbox 360 to PS4, due to the disastrous Xbox One launch in 2013, boosted the addressable market for this remake on PS5. Given the enduring commercial footprint of Skyrim, plenty of players likely wanted to see what came before, too.

Grounded, Gears, Doom, and Indy also clear half a mil

Grounded has moved 770K units on PlayStation 5, generating nearly $24M in revenue. Two years after its arrival on the platform, the title continues to sustain a monthly active user base of approximately 75K. Our crossover data shows that 30% of these players also purchased Sea of Thieves, indicating that a specific segment of the PlayStation audience was responsible for the initial wave of adoption for Xbox ports.

While the novelty of the platform shift drove early interest, Grounded’s consistent monthly engagement suggests the game has successfully carved out a niche within the survival genre on Sony’s hardware.

Gears of War Reloaded has sold 684K copies on PlayStation 5 since its day-and-date launch last summer. It has outperformed Grounded in revenue due to a higher price point and higher year-one sales velocity.

However, current data suggests that momentum has largely stalled. While periodic discounts from $40 to $20 provide temporary sales spikes, the impact of these price drops is diminishing. With sales figures beginning to plateau, a more aggressive $15 price point may be necessary to capture the remaining price-sensitive audience.

DOOM: The Dark Ages has reached 567K units on PlayStation 5 since its day-and-date launch last year, generating $39M in revenue. While these figures are decent, the primary audience remains on PC, where copies on Steam are approaching 1M.

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle has moved 537K units on PlayStation 5, generating $37M in revenue roughly one year after its launch. Released on Sony’s hardware just four months after its Xbox debut, the title has already outsold its Steam counterpart.

This performance indicates a strong product-market fit for the PlayStation audience, which traditionally indexes higher for prestige, single-player adventure titles. Engagement data supports this: 40% of PS5 players have exceeded 20 hours of playtime, compared to 35% on Steam and just 20% on Xbox.

The lower engagement on Xbox is a clear byproduct of the Game Pass effect, where low-barrier access often leads to higher churn.

Ninjas, planes, and real-time strategy

Meanwhile, Ninja Gaiden 4 and Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 have both surpassed 250K units on PS5, with each title nearing $20M in PS5 gross revenue, while Starfield sales have continued to trickle in after its tepid PS5 launch a couple of weeks back, now passing 200K.

Two real-time-strategy ports, Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition (173K units, $6.5M) and Age of Mythology: Retold (123K units, $3.5M), show a niche demand for the RTS genre on PlayStation. For context, Sid Meier’s Civilization VII has reached 200K units on the same hardware.

Taken together, the pattern across all these games is market fit, not uniform success or failure. PlayStation gamers flock to some of these games and avoid others. Microsoft’s spreadsheet already knows which is which.

On that open letter

These numbers also tell a clearer story than the “We Are Xbox” manifesto from Sharma and Booty. Plenty of Xbox games have a demonstrated audience on Sony’s platform. While it differs by game, the PlayStation audience is engaged, spending, and in some cases, a better fit than the Xbox and Steam counterparts.

This makes the vague language around exclusivity in the Sharma/Booty letter harder to read as uncertainty. It may simply be deliberate ambiguity while the company’s strategy shifts.

In other words, the open letter from Sharma and Booty is corporate rebranding designed to soothe a fractured base. ‘’Reducing’’ Game Pass prices to a higher price than the pre-CoD price while preaching about affordability is a tough circle to square.

Recolouring a logo and renaming Microsoft Gaming back to something everyone already called it (Xbox) is low-cost signalling. While Xbox is successfully pacifying a restless core audience with nostalgia, the actual business model is still shifting under fans’ feet.

Talk is cheap, and leadership has yet to align its spending with its rhetoric. It might eventually, and strategic shifts are inevitable, but as noted in previous newsletters, this feels like a temporary appeasement strategy for the Xbox core. Optics.

The long game is likely still a migration of the base toward Windows via Project Helix, consolidating console and PC efforts to chase that ever-fleeting DAU north star, alongside mobile and cloud efforts.

If your north star is daily active players, pricing structures that price out casual/lapsed players work against that metric directly – as does exclusivity that blocks over 132M active players.

Expect more tactical tweaks to exclusivity in the short term. Some titles will likely remain Xbox-first or Xbox-only, but if the data is any guide, they’ll be the ones a sliver of the PlayStation audience would have bought anyway. Many of these games have sold fewer than 300K on a 132M-player platform. Very few people are losing sleep over that exclusivity call.

That said, there is a messier possibility – and arguably the more damning one: that Xbox leadership genuinely doesn’t know, and this letter represents real strategic uncertainty dressed in confident language.

As a fan of games, Xbox, and competition, I sincerely hope Xbox manages to turn the tide of its challenging few years. They’re saying a lot of the right things right now. Time will tell if they put words into action.

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The last word

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[Alinea Analytics boasts the most accurate PC and console estimates in the business. Game makers use our platform to understand their audience, keep an eye on the competition, monitor sales trends, and spot new opportunities. We equip game studios and financial institutions with accurate data and the confidence to make smarter, data-driven decisions. Want to talk about all things games market data? We’d love to chat!]

Yet Windrose (formerly Crosswind), an early-access game in a new franchise from a new studio, has sold more copies on Steam than both of these combined.

Small team, big launch

Windrose was made by Kraken Express a 60-person-ish team out of Uzbekistan, which is landlocked, ironically. Since Windrose’s early-access launch on April 14, it’s generated about $30M in gross revenue.

With an RRP of $30 and a tactical $27 introductory price, Windrose managed to achieve what many AAA attempts have failed to do. It’s nailed the beginnings of an engaged community in a crowded market.

Windrose’s early daily player numbers show promise, too. Peaking at 527K on its first Sunday, it’s maintained a floor of 450K DAUs throughout the week. While the proof will be in the end game, things are looking good so far.

And despite Windrose being on the market for just 10 days, a third of its 1.3M players have already played more than 20 hours. About 6% have played for more than 50.

Our crossover data also paints a picture, as well:

• 60% of Windrose players have played Valheim.

• 56% have played The Forest.

• 50% played ARK: Survival Evolved.

• 48% played Palworld.

• 46% played Sons of the Forest.

Many Windrose players have poured dozens, hundreds, and even thousands of hours into these other survival games. This is a very valuable cohort of genre superfans that’s vital to capture at launch.

The group values mechanical depth over cinematic polish, and loves loops with meaningful progression. Windrose, borrowing plenty of stuff from Valheim like rested buff and building mechanics, had instant mechanical familiarity.

Launch-aligned, Windrose is faring better on Steam than many other recent survival game releases – including those in huge franchises. It was pretty simple to check this in the Alinea platform. Took a couple of seconds:

In other words, Windrose is the best Steam survival debut since Palworld’s historic 2024 launch. At 1.3M players 9 days in, Windrose is currently selling:

• 2.6x faster than RuneScape: Dragonwilds, despite the brand power of RuneScape.

• 2.3x faster than StarRupture, another smaller survival game from Polish dev Creepy Jar. It also found success earlier this year after entering early access.

• 2.1x faster than Grounded 2, which has the backing of Microsoft and a built-in audience of survival fans. Although, this one is on Game Pass to be fair.

• 1.2x faster than Dune: Awakening, which was based on a huge IP and made by the Conan Exiles team at Funcom.

For reference, Palworld had sold about 12M on day 9, though. That thing really was a phenomenon.

Looking back at Windrose’s player crossover data, the pirate-theme overlap is easy to see as well, as about 40% of Windrose players have played the more PvP-heavy Sea of Thieves. And 9% even played the niche 2018 title ATLAS. I’d never heard of it either.

Windrose has successfully captured the audience that wants the Sea of Thieves aesthetic but with less PvP and more tangible, persistent progression of a survival game.

Its moreish loop is clearly colonising the time of some of Steam’s most dedicated cohorts, too. And this wasn’t by accident. A confident, well-crafted marketing effort also poised Windrose for success.

How Windrose plotted its course to success

Before getting into the marketing, I just want to say: quality is the main reason for Windrose’s success. I was playing until far-too-late-o’clock last night and fell in love with its core loop and souls-like combat pretty quickly. The parry mechanics is fun as hell, too.

Windrose also looks really pretty. You wouldn’t think the team was so small. They’ve really achieved a lot, managing to carve through the noise and target its highest-value community very well on a shoestring budget. This echoed out into Reddit discussions, bigger publications covering it, and Windrose hitting the core gamer zeitgeist.

Windrose’s commercial success so far was not a product of a sudden marketing blitz but a meticulously managed ten-month lead-up. Kraken knew they had a … crackin’ product-market fit and made a plan to make sure their core audience knew it.

Back when Windrose was known as Crosswind, the devs targeted micro-influencers, prioritising credible niches over raw reach. Kraken Express targeted mid-level survival and MMO specialists like GameEdged, Waydot, and Kage848 during the alpha phase in July 2025.

Every creator who bit the bullet and tried the game bloody loved it, as Kraken knew they would.

Another thing that Kraken knew is that the expertise and passion of niche creators is far more effective at building a foundation of buy-ready fans than broad-spectrum mainstream advertising.

If done right, the game will eventually find the zeitgeist anyway.

Kraken leaned on the grassroots momentum by partnering with 10 creators for alpha giveaways on July 10, including streamers in the Sea of Thieves space like HitboTC and Captain Falcore

These micro-influencers acted as the primary filter for quality. The developers knew their game rocked, marketed directly to smaller creators with a little sway in the survival genre, then the positive reception served as the necessary proof of concept that eventually forced mainstream gaming press to take notice.

You can plainly see the impact of the marketing campaign in our wishlist data:

So by the time Crosswind became Windrose back in November 2025, the game had already built a name for itself.

The true inflection point for the campaign arrived in February 2026 with the launch of the Windrose Steam Next Fest demo. That month, Windrose added staggering 474K new wishlists (351K during Steam Next Fest alone).

But more importantly, the quality of the demo drove an exceptional conversion rate of 11.3% in the first week. That’s far higher than the usual 5-7% we see for these kinds of games.

The demo gave players access to a big 6-ish hour chunk of the game, letting experienced survival fans really get to grips with the well-designed mechanics. Clearly, many liked what they played, de-risking the early purchase.

Quality demos and community-specific events brought in more converting wishlisters than the bigger generalist events, but all contributed.

Players are happy, especially for an early access title

Our review analysis reveals that Windrose is currently winning the war but losing a couple of skirmishes. The naval combat is almost universally praised, often cited as a more engaging alternative to recent AAA attempts like Skull and Bones.

However, there are some growing pains in the first hour has been grating for many players. Specifically, basic enemies like wild boars and dodos were one-shotting unbuffed players.

But once players push past the first five hours and understand the buff-based survival mechanics, their satisfaction sky-rocket. And as play time goes up, so does the positivity:

From an optimisation standpoint, Windrose is punching above its weight for an Early Access title. To that end, positive reviews frequently cite the visual quality and smooth performance on mid-range hardware. While there is high CPU usage causing drops in populated jungles, the GPU optimisation is excellent.

However, the co-op experience is currently the game’s Achilles’ heel. Our sentiment data shows significant stability issues. Frequent disconnections, infinite loading screens, and host/join errors are frustrating the social cohort of the survival audience.

Considering that 8-player co-op is a marquee feature, these stability hurdles likely killed a bit of early momentum. Still, when Windrose is up and running, its performance and optimisation put some AAA games to shame.

Windrose – like Pragmata and Resident Evil Requiem – is another title that respects the player’s time. Fast travel is very forgiving and there are more solo options, so the game allows for the kind of flexibility and base building that Millennials, now a primary spending block on Steam for these kinds of games, demand.

‘‘[Windrose] more about exploration, adventure, treasure hunting and having a good time with your friends,’’ said the developer. ‘‘As opposed to power struggle, PvP, intense live service schedule and massively multiplayer experience.’’

The low price was also appreciated. By going way below the $40 AA ceiling, Kraken sorted out the usual ‘’Should I wait for a sale?” friction, creating the Day 1 velocity you see in the data.

Kraken Express successfully avoided the spray-and-pray marketing approach that traditional publishers sometimes lean on, instead focusing on the high-trust micro-influencer nodes of the survival community.

Kraken Express has built a $30M revenue fortress in less than a fortnight. Windrose is also a genuine contender for the 2026 evergreen category.

If the team can stabilise the 8-player co-op infrastructure, improve parts of the first-time experience ahead of 1.0, and keep the meaningful content coming, we’re in for another genre mainstay here. And it’s another case for PvE being more viable than PvE when it comes to live games.

Based on what I’ve played so far, Windrose is shaping up to be everything Ubisoft’s ill-fated Skull and Bones could have been.

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The last word

Reply to this email – or reach out here – if you have any feedback for the newsletter – or want to request a game for us to cover.

[Alinea Analytics boasts the most accurate PC and console estimates in the business. Game makers use our platform to understand their audience, keep an eye on the competition, monitor sales trends, and spot new opportunities. We equip game studios and financial institutions with accurate data and the confidence to make smarter, data-driven decisions. Want to talk about all things games market data? We’d love to chat!]

Steam is now firmly at the heart of Capcom’s strategy, with the shift from a console-first developer to a platform-agnostic IP powerhouse plain to see and well-documented at this point. Our estimates show that Capcom’s software portfolio has already grossed about $389M on Steam this year so far.

Of that, Capcom has pocketed a net revenue of $309M.

To get to this number, we factored in Steam’s tiered revenue cuts for every game Capcom has released on Steam – 30% on the first $10M of lifetime revenue for each game, 25% between $10M and $50M, and 20% for everything beyond that.

We of course also took regional pricing and discounting into consideration, as our estimates always do.

The Requiem effect and the power of the back catalogue

As you’d expect, launch-heavy revenues have made Resident Evil Requiem the clear heavyweight in Capcom’s performance this year so far. Requiem accounts for 45% ($174M) of Capcom’s total Steam revenue for 2026 so far.

Despite an article I saw online last week implying the downfall of AAA, Requiem is 2026’s top-selling game by copies sold across Steam, PlayStation, and Xbox so far. It’s well on its way to 7M sold across those platforms.

Requiem’s trajectory on Steam has been especially remarkable, already passing the lifetime Steam revenue of 2023’s Resident Evil 4 remake and is even on track to overtake the Resident Evil 2 remake on Steam by the end of this month.

Requiem recently passed 3M copies sold on Steam alone:

Looking only at the new hits misses the broader picture of Capcom’s dominance. It also misses a major reason for their expansion into PC over the last decade: Capcom has become a legacy catalogue beast on Steam.

A massive 29% ($113M) of Capcom’s 2026 revenues come from older Resident Evil titles (ones that came out a year ago or more). Capcom has mastered the art of the seasonal sale here.

Periodic discounts on legacy titles have become a reliable revenue driver on Steam – for Resident Evil, Monster Hunter, and even more niche ports like Dino Crisis.

Capcom often combines these with subscription inclusions on console –  to keep the audience engaged (and spending) for story re-plays in the months leading up to a major Resi game.

Pragmata: Cashing in goodwill, smart marketing, and delivering on quality

Capcom is currently cashing in on close to a decade of accumulated player trust. The publisher’s Metacritic speaks for itself, as does its financial performance.

That goodwill was clear to see with the launch of Pragmata, which launched on April 17 for $60. It’s a completely new IP that lacked preexisting brand recognition beyond Capcom’s seal of quality. A banging demo helped, of course.

Capcom recently confirmed that Pragmata sold 1M in two days. It usually reports sold in (including unsold copies to retailers, usually a huge amount as retail is bigger in Japan).

1M is a great result for any new game. It’s a bloody staggering result for a new IP in a stony AAA market that’s largely allergic to creative risk right now.

Similar to Elden Ring Nightreign last year, Pragmata was also a sort of training project to help younger staff internally and new graduates gain experience working on a major title.

As for our estimates, which are sold through (excluding unsold retail copies), Pragmata has sold through 574K copies on Steam, which translates to almost $30M in gross revenue given the $60 price point and regional pricing.

Meanwhile, Pragmata is nearing 300K on PS5 and is sitting under 100K on Xbox. This means the Steam version is currently outperforming both consoles combined.

Most of Pragmata’s early buyers have played other Capcom titles

Our player crossover data across platforms shows the sheer concentration of the Capcom faithful in Pragmata’s early buyers. For a new IP, the cold-start problem is a hurdle in an already too-loud attention economy. Capcom managed to get around this thanks to its run of pure quality.

It earned the trust of a very important cohort: high-spending gamers who are primed to buy new games. In short, Millennials. According to our estimates, 58.4% of Pragmata’s PlayStation players also played Resident Evil Requiem.

On Steam, that crossover remains high at 42.9%. Around 42% of Pragmata players have also already spent significant time in last year’s Monster Hunter Wilds. So it’s pretty clear that core gamers are treating Pragmata one as a must-play entry in the broader Capcom canon, regardless of its new IP status.

Word of mouth from the podcast circuit and among players is snowballing nicely. Demo success, nostalgia and a more digestible campaign

Some other things that impacted Pragmata’s success:

• Launching at a $60/£50  price point lowered the barrier to entry compared to the new $70 standard for AAA titles – including Capcom’s own Resident Evil Requiem this year.

• The decision to release a playable demo back in December was pivotal in winning players over on this weird concept.

• Alinea wishlist data confirms this: Steam wishlists spiked by nearly 500K in December 2025, coinciding directly with that demo drop.

• Wishlisters from the December-to-January window demo period converted at a healthy rate, with huge momentum in the early months of 2026.

• January wishlisters converted at 5.44%, and March – just before launch – saw a 3.74% conversion rate.

The demo was an inflection point for the marketing and consumer acceptance of Pragmata, which helped drive the entire final marketing push. Word of mouth spread fast among the target audience.

One for the Xbox 360 Millennials

Pragmata has been a hit among us ageing Millennial gamers who grew up with more digestible linear action games like these during the Xbox 360 and PS3 era. With a roughly 12-hour campaign, Pragmata feels like a spiritual successor to the Xbox 360 and PS3 era of third-person action games.

It gives a quality, focused, high-intensity experience that respects the player’s time. I’m currently playing, and the nostalgia is hitting me – a sentiment echoed across creators and the games the media. Our Steam review data in our platform shows that plenty of other players agree.

Across the 18K Steam reviews we cover in our platform,  Pragmata’s linear design and manageable length were among the top 10 most common positives. Many Steam reviewers specifically mentioned that they appreciated a 10-15 hour campaign without bloat or filler.

Our sentiment analysis also supports this, with sentiment actually improving with playtime. Users with 10 to 25 hours of play have a near-perfect 98% positive score, another signal that the shorter complete time is just fine for the folks who played through.

Delivering quality, authentic, unique experiences will always trump trend chasing

Capcom’s global footprint is currently one of the most balanced in the industry. Looking at the geographical split for Pragmata, it is clear that the publisher has successfully decoupled its brand from being a regional specialist.

On PS5, the US leads with 30% of the audience, but Japan is of course a powerhouse at 17%, as you’d expect.

Meanwhile, China accounts for a massive 23% of the Steam audience. Capcom has shown that adhering to quality – not chasing trends –and sticking to the vision is one art of appealing to diverse markets simultaneously with a new IP.

We saw another Japanese publishers, Square Enix, attempt a similar global pivot with a more Western-facing approach – and without as much built-up goodwill, candidly.

Square Enix tried to capture the global zeitgeist by leaning into Game of Thrones-as-hell dark-fantasy tropes with Final Fantasy XVI, and chasing modern open-world and cheesy Western dialogue with Forspoken.

The results were mixed, as the quality wasn’t there, and core gamers – the highest spending, most engaged audience – saw right through it. Pragmata has already sold more copies than Forspoken. And Expedition 33 has sold more copies than Final Fantasy XVI.

With Expedition 33 last year, Sandfall Games arguably delivered on what gamers wanted from Square all along. The audience for that kind of game existed and was spending. Square just didn’t make the game they wanted.

Capcom’s strategy was different: double down on what your core fans want, and the broader audience follows (via another platform, Steam).

• Capcom largely hasn’t chased trends or westernised their game design to the point of losing their identity.

• Capcom’s designers have taken cues from other schools of design, sure, but the core DNA has always been very Capcom.

• They’ve doubled down on what their core fans want – polished mechanics, great visuals, and at times goofiness.

At this point, the Capcom logo has matured into a seal of approval and a marketing tool for the publisher.

Capcom has effectively proved that when quality is high enough, you never need to pivot your creative vision to suit a specific regional market. You just build great games and make them available everywhere.

For modern Capcom, quality is the only trend worth chasing. And it turns out that’s a pretty fruitful trend to chase.

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[Alinea Analytics boasts the most accurate PC and console estimates in the business. Game makers use our platform to understand their audience, keep an eye on the competition, monitor sales trends, and spot new opportunities. We equip game studios and financial institutions with accurate data and the confidence to make smarter, data-driven decisions. Want to talk about all things games market data? We’d love to chat!]

• It’s set in Japan, which fans have been begging for since the Xbox 360 days.

• The gap between Forza Horizon 5 and 6 is the longest in the subseries’ history, so pent-up demand is through the sunroof.

• Horizon 6 is also the first title in the franchise developed exclusively for the Xbox Series generation of consoles, letting the team squeeze even more juice out of the Forza Tech engine

• The Forza Horizon brand is larger and more relevant than it’s ever been – and across more platforms and regions.

If Playground Games sticks the landing, we’re looking at a new bar for the racing genre (not including Mario Kart...) Based on the glowing previews and the pre-launch estimates in our platform, Playground is well on its way to that podium spot.

Forza Horizon 6’s pre-launch Steam surge: 500K and counting

Our estimates show that Forza Horizon 6 has already raced past 500K copies on Steam over a month before launch.

Taking regional pricing and different editions into consideration, Forza Horizon 6 is nearing $30M on Steam. It’s already the best-selling Forza title on Steam pre-launch, with a whole month to go.

Based on comparisons to other known quantities and major sequels, pre-sales this high point to Horizon 6 clearing 2M units on Steam within its first 24 hours.

Horizon 6 still has another four weeks of marketing momentum to capitalise on. And based on how receptive buyers and prospects have been to the marketing so far, we expect the hype and number to continue ticking up.

Forza Horizon 6 marketing is converting to copies sold on Steam

Horizon 6’s Steam daily copies-sold delta spiked significantly following the map reveal, the preview media embargo lifting, and the initial drive gameplay on April 8.

This inertia continued through to its biggest spike, when Playground announced the achievement list on April 13. The reveal went down well with the community. For one, it ditches the frustrating Eliminator battle royale requirements from the last game.

Players were also chuffed that the path to 100% completion seems more solo-friendly, less reliant on unpredictable online matches, and with a big emphasis on exploration.

Beyond that, the list had fans hyped for the return of Wristbands and the introduction of Japan-specific content. Forza Horizon 6 sold 22K Steam copies on April 13 alone – the highest since the 50K buyers on the day it became purchasable.

We’re seeing a remarkably similar pattern in our wishlist data, with 90K new wishlists added on the day of the achievement drop. Currently, Forza Horizon 6 has amassed over 3.3M wishlists on Steam alone.

The crown jewel of the non-M&A Xbox portfolio

When the main demographic of this newsletter thinks of Xbox’s biggest internally made franchises, Halo and Gears are usually some of the first to come to mind.

But we old. Via all those major Microsoft acquisitions, games like Minecraft and Call of Duty easily eclipse those in terms of raw numbers. As will the next Elder Scrolls.

But when looking at Xbox’s internally nurtured IP, the ones Microsoft didn’t scoop up via M&A, Forza Horizon is the true crown jewel – and across platforms.

The previous edition, 2021’s Forza Horizon 5, is closing in on 54M players overall. Our data shows a distinct split in how these players access the game:

• Over 74% of these players come from the Xbox ecosystem, mostly driven by its day-one inclusion in Game Pass.

• About 15% of the player base comes from Steam, representing the premium PC buyer – as well as discount buyers over time.

• 11% comes from the PS5 port, which only launched a year ago.

The success of the PS5 port, despite releasing 3.5 years after the original launch, is a huge data point here, and one that is probably a hot topic of discussion in Xbox’s war room.

Forza Horizon 5 has actually made more money via base copies on PS5 than Steam despite selling fewer copies. The average revenue per user (ARPU) is higher on PS5, due to regional pricing, and a higher share of the PS5 audience in high-price mature markets (relative to Steam).

New setting, new markets, and a bigger fandom

The US remains Forza’s biggest country across platforms. But changing market dynamics since the launch of Forza Horizon 5 have given its imminent sequel a much bigger launch total addressable market at launch.

China is currently the older Forza Horizon 5’s #2 country by Steam players, sitting only slightly behind the US. China has a massive appetite for Japanese car culture, and with China’s Steam community growing exponentially over the last five years, Forza Horizon 6 is on track to do gangbusters in the Chinese market.

China is currently Horizon 6’s #2 market by wishlisters. Currently, about 6% of Steam wishlists are coming from Japan, which is a figure far higher than any previous entry in the series. While PC gaming has grown rapidly in Japan since the pandemic, the real prize for racing games in that market remains the console space.

Obviously, the Japanese setting is a massive deal for gamers and racing fans in Japan itself (I know I was chuffed when they did Britain). Another wrinkle is that Japanese Domestic Market (JDM) car culture is bloody massive globally. Fans have been dying for this setting for over a decade.

As Xbox is essentially a non-factor in the Japanese hardware market, and with no Switch 2 version currently announced, the PS5 edition of Forza Horizon 6 is the only viable path to monetise the Japanese console audience. This is a game set in their market, after all.

And as shown by some commendable previous attempts, Xbox hasn’t really been able to move the needle in Japan, hardware-wise.

Anyway, unlike the 3.5-year delay we saw with the Forza Horizon 5 port, Xbox has said the sequel will arrive on PS5 later this year.

On Xbox and console exclusives

This shift in strategy has massive implications for the day-one conversation. If PlayStation players know a port is coming within the same calendar year, the FOMO is far more effective. For Japanese players, this will be the first time a flagship Forza title feels truly accessible on their platform of choice.

While the novelty of Horizon 5 landing on PS5 just last year might have a small impact on launch conversion, the combination of the Japan setting, the proximity to the primary marketing cycle, and the sheer number of casual gamers on PlayStation means the PS5 version of Forza Horizon 6 will be pivotal.

Xbox is having some fierce conversations about exclusivity right now, as per recent comments from reporter and Xbox insider Jez Corden. The question for Xbox’s new leadership is whether to fully embrace a platform-agnostic future or return to exclusivity. It’s a tough question with no easy answer.

To me, Xbox is clearly in the middle of a transition away from console and to PC. It’s a managed migration. Its next console is a half-step towards PC, an offramp for Xbox’s console fans and their libraries.

As Phil Spencer said in the past, Xbox lost the wrong generation. Game Pass was an attempt to turn the tide there, and it didn’t work. So PC

And it’s nigh impossible to go back and win on console. PlayStation’s inertia is just too strong at this point. Xbox’s future is on PC. Now it’s about managing expectations, keeping profitability up, and moving its core base to PC with it.

It won’t want to stifle too many cash cows on the way.

So one way forward is for Xbox to treat a selection of titles as multiplatform. I’d choose Call of Duty, Minecraft, Forza, and Elder Scrolls as a multiplatform big four. These titles would live on every screen possible – including PS5 – to maximise revenues during the initial hype cycle and keep the books looking good for Microsoft.

Keeping more niche or hardcore franchises off PlayStation in the lead-up to Xbox’s console/PC hybrid will help Microsoft keep its high-spending obsessives while transitioning the broader ecosystem toward PC and cloud.

While there is plenty of chatter about Xbox going fully exclusive again, especially amid recent comments from Sharma and rumours of PlayStation retreating from PC, I don’t see it happening.

Shifting back to an all-exclusive model would impact profit at a time when Microsoft is bleeding money via generative AI, after all. When the going gets tough, the console war will be the least of Xbox’s problems. It’ll be an ATM in the AI war instead.

As for Forza Horizon 6, with the PS5 port later this year, Microsoft is choosing to liquidate its exclusivity for immediate, high-velocity cash flow.

Forza Horizon 6 launch sales performance on Steam and Xbox at launch will be a huge signal for Sharma and her strategists, as well the PS5 port later this year.

If the indicators are all positive, and I believe they will be, they will show that for the modern Xbox, ‘‘winning’’ is about capturing the highest possible share of the global gaming wallet regardless of the silicon it runs on.

That’s the end game here I reckon.

Either way, Forza Horizon 6 is going to be massive for Xbox at a critical time and following an off-year for Call of Duty. We’ll be covering the full launch on Steam and Xbox next month here on the free Substack.

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[Alinea Analytics boasts the most accurate PC and console estimates in the business. Game makers use our platform to understand their audience, keep an eye on the competition, monitor sales trends, and spot new opportunities. We equip game studios and financial institutions with accurate data and the confidence to make smarter, data-driven decisions. Want to talk about all things games market data? We’d love to chat!]

It’s also a signal that a 2.5-year delay for these ports to PS5 can seriously limit sales versus going multiplatform at launch (or even six months after). Forza is an outlier there, for reasons we discussed back in January.

There’s a lot to unpack here, so let’s look at some more Alinea estimates.

Starfield’s $200M Steam shadow hints at what could have been on PlayStation

To put the PS5 launch in perspective, Starfield came to PS5 alongside its most substantial update yet, one that finally allows players to fly between planets manually.

This Free Lanes update was more about revitalising the legacy audience and addressing a huge criticism, though. And Bethesda has succeeded there:

Since Starfield’s PS5 launch and the Free Lanes update on April 7, the Steam version of Starfield also sold an additional 55K copies ($2.3M revenue) at the same $50 price point. This pushed Starfield’s total Steam revenue past the $200M milestone.

Starfield had already moved 3.7M copies on Steam before the PS5 port dropped. And even the Xbox version sold over 1M despite Game Pass cannibalising sales. The Venn diagram of Starfield prospects on Xbox and those subscribed to Game Pass is almost a big fat circle.

Steam had that urgency at launch, though. While Starfield was available on PC via Game Pass, PC gamers would rather pay for their games on Steam than via a subscription outside the Steam ecosystem.

The point remains: Starfield curiosity and FOMO have mostly fizzled out for most PS5 players 2.5 years later after the initial launch, especially as much of the sentiment around Starfield over that time has been mixed/negative (more on that later).

But the Bethesda name is having some pull. Let’s have a look at how well Starfield has sold to some other Xbox-made games released on PS5 in the past six months (minus CoD):

As you can see, Starfield sits somewhere in the middle here, for now. While the cumulative totals for titles like Ninja Gaiden 4 and Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 are higher than Starfield’s 140K copies, the launch-aligned trajectory is a different story.

In the last six months of Xbox-to-PlayStation ports, Starfield has actually sold the fastest. When we launch-align the data, Starfield’s closest competitor was day-one PS5 launch Ninja Gaiden 4 with almost 100K six days after launch versus Starfield’s 140K.

The delta’s even bigger when we look at The Outer Worlds 2 and Flight Simulator, which stood at 63K and 77K, respectively, at the same stage in their release cycles.

Based on the trajectory of these numbers (and imminent discounts), Starfield will undoubtedly overtake these and keep ticking along over time, sales-wise.

Looking back further than six months, though, other titles from the Xbox portfolio are finding even higher audiences on PlayStation.

A sneak peek at some better performances from Xbox games on PlayStation

We’re currently finalising a comprehensive look at the performance of every Xbox-published game on PlayStation, which we’ll be sharing in the coming weeks. Until then, here’s a peek at a few data points:

• Forza Horizon 5 has reached a staggering 5.7M copies sold on PS5, generating upwards of $320M in gross revenue. This is a phenomenal performance for a legacy port, setting a massive precedent for the future of the Forza franchise. Looking ahead, I can only wonder how much higher the ceiling would’ve been for Forza Horizon 6 if it were coming to PS5 on day one.

• Gears of War: Reloaded has now chainsawed its way through the 1M-copies-sold mark across all platforms. A telling data point is that PS5 accounts for over 70% of that. I have a theory that the remaster was a Trojan horse to prime the PS5 install base for the franchise’s mechanics and lore ahead of Gears of War: E-Day, when that game makes its inevitable multiplatform debut.

• Indiana Jones and the Great Circle’s PS5 version, which came five months after the Steam and Xbox version, has now outsold the Steam version and is on par with Xbox (in terms of copies sold). About 4M players accessed Indy on Xbox, including many who would have bought the game, though. That makes the total addressable market for premium-game buyers a lot lower on Xbox. Also, a banging single-player adventure like this one is a fit for PlayStation’s many prestige game fans. Just as PlayStation’s Helldivers 2 has been a huge hit among the Xbox audience.

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Back to Starfield.

What kind of PS5 players are playing Starfield?

Our player crossover data for Starfield players on PS5 tells us a lot about Starfield’s early buyers on PS5:

• The Bethesda pedigree was a major driver, with a massive 81% of the new PS5 audience having previously played Fallout 4, while 66% had logged time in Skyrim’s PS4 edition. It’s worth noting that these games are both available on PlayStation Plus’ game catalogue.

• Even more telling here is that 44% of these players had already picked up last year’s Oblivion Remastered, showing a high-intent core fanbase that follows Bethesda’s IP. They also overindex for a lot of these kinds of games, including The Outer Wilds 2 at 17% and even the more niche Atomfall at about 11%.

• 58% overlap with No Man’s Sky shows that space-faring enthusiasts jumped straight to Starfield. No surprises there. But I’m sure marketing the Free Lanes update, which finally lets Starfield players freely cruise around solar systems, has boosted interest among PlayStation’s No Man’s Sky fans.

• We also see a distinct cohort of premium game buyers. Roughly 30% of Starfield’s PS5 users also own Crimson Desert and Resident Evil Village. This segment of the market isn’t necessarily loyal to a specific genre, but rather to the cultural zeitgeist, buying into whatever major AAA event is currently dominating the platform conversation. I’m part of that group (and my wallet is, sadly).

Our estimates also show that Japanese players showed up for the PS5 release. Around 8% of the PS5 audience is based in Japan, which is higher than usual. While Japan has been moving more into PC gaming in general, just 2% of Starfield’s Steam audience is based there.

For the console audience in Japan, meanwhile, the PS5 launch was their true first viable rodeo with the game. Starfield is yet to make an appearance on the Switch 2. And let’s be honest: Xbox is basically non-existent footprint in Japan, despite some decent efforts over the years on Xbox’s part.

Pete Hines was right about Game Pass’ effect on Starfield, but we can’t ignore player reception

We’ve got to talk about Game Pass before we finish. About 8M people have accessed Starfield via Microsoft’s subscription service.

While Microsoft touted Starfield as a record-breaker for day-one sub additions at the time, the long-term commercial math didn’t really work out for early-2026 Xbox. Former Bethesda marketing VP Pete Hines hinted at this tension last year:

‘’I’m involved enough to know I saw what I considered to be some short-sighted decision-making several years ago, and it seems to be bearing out the way I said. Subscriptions have become the new four-letter word, right?, he said.

He was onto something, financially anyway.

All in, Starfield has cleared over $300M in revenue across all platforms. That’s hugely successful in a vacuum (ayy). But – as I mentioned at the top of the article – in the context of a Bethesda budget and a decade-long development cycle, Starfield has likely barely broken even.

Xbox has been gunning for profitability lately. This is at odds with Game Pass’ stagnating subscriber numbers and the subscription model cannibalising premium sales on Xbox consoles.

Honestly, part of Starfield’s lower-than-expected performance is because it did more of the same, had empty exploration, and didn’t really build on the schools of design brought in by Breath of the Wild and Elden Ring and even other spacefaring games. Players loved these games.

Meanwhile, Steam sentiment analysis of 2,000 Starfield reviews shows that players found many core elements of the game dated and frustrating at launch:

I actually enjoyed my time with Starfield. It delivered another good Bethesda game. That was enough for me, and it might have cut it 10 years ago, but many players have moved on.

On that note, our data suggests Crimson Desert, which builds on some of the more experimental things Breath of the Wild did, is on track to overtake Starfield’s total lifetime copies sold by the end of the year.

Ironically, this wouldn’t be true if Starfield had launched day-and-date on PS5 and had not been on Game Pass on Xbox and PC.

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[Alinea Analytics boasts the most accurate PC and console estimates in the business. Game makers use our platform to understand their audience, keep an eye on the competition, monitor sales trends, and spot new opportunities. We equip game studios and financial institutions with accurate data and the confidence to make smarter, data-driven decisions. Want to talk about all things games market data? We’d love to chat!]

Between March 3 and April 6, PS+ subscribers could claim PGA Tour 2K25, Slime Rancher 2, Monster Hunter Rise, and Elder Scrolls Online: Gold Road Collection.

Let’s see how many players used their PS+ subscriptions to access these games for the first time.

PGA Tour 2K25 nearly triples its PlayStation audience via PS+

PGA Tour 2K25 took the top spot out of the four, bringing in 914K new players via its PS+. PGA Tour 2K25 had a pre-existing base of roughly 500K on PS5, so PS+ nearly tripled its footprint on the platform.

Our estimates show that native-English-speaking territories accounted for 70% of PGA’s PS+ influx, with the US (44%) and the UK (13%) being the top two countries. This distribution mostly mirrors the organic retail performance.

Meanwhile, Slime Rancher 2 took #2 out of March 2026’s PS+ monthly games, pulling in nearly 750K new players. While it might seem surprising to see a niche indie outperforming a heavyweight like Monster Hunter, there’s an explanation.

Slime Rancher 2 had only sold roughly 173K units on PlayStation before its addition as a monthly PS+ game. With such a massive pool of untapped players, Slime Rancher 2 had much more room to grow compared to the saturated market of established AAA hits.

The majority of players stopped playing before reaching the one-hour mark, however – a trend that holds for many of the more niche games of previous months. Low barrier to entry, low barrier to exit, and all that.

Our data shows that 60% of the new players never touched the original Slime Rancher. So even if a large chunk of that audience hasn’t pushed past the first hour yet, the PS+ addition has added some brand awareness.

Why the bigger franchises got the fewest players

Monster Hunter Rise at #3 (397K new players via PS+) is a great example of why context matters in subscription data like this. On first glance, you’d expect a Monster Hunter to take the top spot and easily crack a million. The thing is, though, the addressable audience on PlayStation had already been thinned out.

Before its Essential debut, Rise had already sold over 1M units across PS4 and PS5, so that’s one factor. Another, bigger reason is that Rise was previously available via PS+ Extra’s game catalogue for a full year, between June 2024 and June 2025.

That means some of the player interest was exhausted during that initial twelve-month window, despite it via a higher PS+ tier.

As you can see in the Alinea platform screenshot below, we’ve made it easy to track overlapping availability windows, so it’s simple to understand why a massive IP like Monster Hunter pulled in less:

Exporting this data from the platform, we can see that:

• When Monster Hunter Rise first hit PS+ Extra in June 2024, it saw an immediate spike of 304K new players in its first week alone.

• Over its year-long stint on Extra, Monster Hunter Rise successfully netted 1.3M new players via the subscription. That was a massive amount of subscription-first demand already fulfilled.

• By the time March 2026 rolled around, the addressable audience of PS-subbed players was lower. The first-week spike for its lower-tier Essential debut was 115K players – a healthy number, but less than half of the engagement seen during its initial 2024 entry.

• Most of the “easy” subscription conversions happened back in 2024, even at the higher tier. This Essential addition was effectively capturing the remaining stragglers – and some newer subscribers – at the lower tier.

F2P games can also boost players via PS+, but converting them to paying customers is another question

Elder Scrolls Online (ESO): Gold Road Collection added 287K new players to the ecosystem via PS+. Again, while that number might seem modest compared to PGA and Slime Rancher 2, ESO is a tough comparison as a legacy live-service title with a history on PlayStation.

Almost 5M PlayStation players had already engaged with ESO before its addition. As it’s a free-to-play MMO, adding 287K new players is pretty significant. These players technically could have accessed ESO for free earlier.

This suggests that putting free-to-play games on subscriptions can offer some curated visibility and permanence for games like this. Although, having ‘’Elder Scrolls’’ in the title certainly helps…

Of course, there is a clear strategic limit to this offering. While Elder Scrolls Online: Gold Road Collection is comprehensive, bundling the core game with all major previous expansion, it doesn’t include content from 2025 and beyond.

ESO is theoretically giving players a massive, high-value foundation to lower the barrier to entry, specifically to drive them toward the battle pass and other in-game purchases.

Historically, most players do bounce off in the first couple of hours via subscriptions, but it’s difficult to deny that ESO’s PS+ addition has boosted the game’s ecosystem on PlayStation. Just look at our DAU estimates on PlayStation. The blue dashed line is when ESO was added:

In the end, a game’s performance as a PS+ monthly game depends on a range of factors, including release date, previous service availability, pre-existing sales, and regional appeal.

Before we finish, we just wanted to highlight that PS+ monthly games also have the added quirk of players being able to claim in the window, then download later. A lot of players do this.

Back in February, we posted some estimates about January’s PS+ monthly games, and we’ve got some updated data. As of yesterday:

• Need for Speed Unbound added 1.8M new players via its PS Essential addition, and about 270K of these (15%) downloaded the game outside of the claim window.

• Epic Mickey Rebrushed added 1.5M (17% after the claim window) and Core Keeper added 581K (15% after the window).

• Subscribers, then, really seem to value the claim now, play later added value.

I know I do during busier times.

Cool links and other stuff

• Our friends at Aream & Co. have released their Q1 2026 Video Game Update, including PC and console data and insights from us. As always, it’s a pleasure to work with Aream. The report is awesome and well worth a read. You can download it here.

• Some of our Marathon analysis has continued to make the rounds, including in IGN and Forbes

• We’re offering a free trial of our platform for games companies. Send us a message here, or reply to this email, and we’ll set you up.

The last word

Reply to this email – or reach out here – if you have any feedback for the newsletter – or want to request a game for us to cover.

[Alinea Analytics boasts the most accurate PC and console estimates in the business. Game makers use our platform to understand their audience, keep an eye on the competition, monitor sales trends, and spot new opportunities. We equip game studios and financial institutions with accurate data and the confidence to make smarter, data-driven decisions. Want to talk about all things games market data? We’d love to chat!]

Like on PlayStation, Resident Evil and Crimson Desert make a showing on Steam as well, but so do indies, early access, and a Resi game you probably weren’t expecting.

Let’s have a gander.

Slay the Spire 2’s monumental early-access Steam launch continues to impress

Mega Crit’s Slay the Spire 2 moved a nuts 5.3M copies in March for its early-access debut. To date, it has generated $108 million on Steam alone. All this is to say that Slay the Spire 2 easily takes Steam’s #1 copies sold spot for March:

Over a third of Slay the Spire 2’s current player base is based in China, which has been true since launch. Regional pricing is a huge factor here. The lower Steam cost in China means that while StS2’s Chinese volume is massive, the average revenue per user (ARPU) is lower than a Western-only analysis might suggest.

That said, Slay the Spire 2’s dominance in China is having some adverse effects on user reviews. Our Steam review sentiment data shows that Chinese gamers in particular were unhappy with certain balance changes made during early access.

We’ve added more granular Steam review data to our platform, including splits by language and playtime. Across the board, we’ve observed that gamers in China are significantly more likely to use Steam reviews as a primary forum for feedback, and they’re way more negative, generally speaking:

• Because of the Great Firewall and regional internet restrictions, many Chinese players lack access to international community hubs like X, Reddit, or official Discord servers.

• As Steam is something of a grey area in China, Chinese players have become accustomed to making their views heard globally via Steam user reviews.

• For early access games, which actively encourage community feedback, this is doubly true. And Slay the Spire 2 is certainly no exception.

In our platform (get a free trial!), we looked at our language-specific data for over 100K Slay the Spire 2 Steam reviews. While the game maintains a respectable 79% positive user score overall, that average is being heavily pulled down by the Simplified Chinese segment:

As you can see:

• Most language groups score Slay the Spire 2 at 90% positive or higher. This holds for English-speaking players, who represent the second-largest demographic at 41.2% of the user base. They’re over 95% positive.

• But reviewers playing in Simplified Chinese, the #1 language group accounting for 44.5% of all players, currently sit at only 60% positive.

• When we take Traditional Chinese out of the equation, the positive review score jumps from 79% to 94%.

This underlines just how much of a juggling act community management can be – especially when a game is popular across different demographics, often with different needs, wants, and sentiments.

Speaking of awesome community management…

Crimson Desert: Community management done right

Our estimates show that Crimson Desert sold nearly 2M copies on Steam last month. As per official publisher announcements, Crimson has now sold through over 4M copies across platforms. And it did so in under two weeks. You love to see it, but Crimson Desert had far from a smooth landing.

The initial launch was a bit of a mixed bag, with many critics simply not getting Crimson Desert. Many players found the rough first-time user experience frustrating.

I played Crimson Desert at launch – a lot of it, truth be told – and while I was in camp ‘’this game is rad’’, there’s a clear lack of tutorialisation and plenty of mechanical friction.

I can see why this put off a lot of folks. The controls were complex at launch, with basic actions requiring multi-button combinations. Luckily, this has largely been fixed.

Crimson Desert’s early friction was always worth pushing through, anyway. Our playtime-indexed data shows just a 31% positive user score for players with less than one hour of game time, signalling that Crimson Desert was its own greatest enemy during the first sixty minutes or less.

But as you can see, for players who persisted through those early hours, the narrative shifts dramatically, and the game has been fantastic:

• Crimson Desert’s positive user score jumps to 64% for the 1-5h group, already a massive increase from the 31% for sub-1h players.

• Positivity jumps further to 82% at the 10-hour mark and hits a peak of 93% forthe hardcore cohort logging 25h+.

• This suggests that while the mechanical friction is real, it is eventually overshadowed by the fantastic sandbox adventure that Pearl Abyss has crafted.

The market reward for this responsiveness has been .. a thing. While the early reception led to a stock dip and many folks questioning the game’s market viability, Crimson Desert has stuck the landing and proven naysayers and fickle traders wrong.

While the stock market is typically a bollocks barometer for sentiment, Crimson Desert’s stock has now stabilised, and positive Crimson Desert word of mouth has continued spread. The game’s community management has been frankly incredible so far. The marketing, PR, and community folks have smashed it.

This is worth commending, as Crimson Desert’s polarising start could have easily spiralled into a longer-term commercial and PR failure – if not for the studio’s agile community management.

In the critical day after the Crimson Desert’s March 19 release, Pearl Abyss avoided the common pitfall of corporate silence during rough times.

Instead of staying tight-lipped, Pearl Abyss sent out a direct apology for the controls. This immediate acknowledgement was a pressure valve for the community’s frustration, also signalling to prospective buyers that the launch-day friction was a technical oversight rather than a fundamental design choice.

Words are cheap. Luckily, Pearl Abyss, though, followed through just days later with the release of Patch 1.01.00 on March 28. This update fundamentally changed key aspects of the player experience, addressing the clunky keyboard and mouse selection and the much-maligned stamina costs for aerial traversal.

The devs shipped these changes within a week and communicated them perfectly. Positive word of mouth for Crimson Desert has been incredible, converting many of these “Wait for Patches” sceptics into active players, as shown in our estimates.

Given the stellar community management surrounding Crimson Desert, the team’s agility in hearing the community and shipping fixes, and the tenacity of the player base, this title is clearly moving beyond its launch phase confidently.

Crimson Desert is now firmly established as a permanent IP and will go down as one of 2026’s defining success stories when all is said and done. It’s also a lesson for the stock market and certain aspects of the internet: critics are awesome and necessary for our industry, but it’s players – and communities – that matter most.

Hell yeah.

Zombies galore: China resurrects a friendslop title, while Resident Evil rounds off the ranking

As for the rest of the Steam’s March copies sold ranking:

• Climber Animals Together took #3 with 1.2M copies sold in March. After a relatively quiet debut in 2024, Climber Animals exploded in early 2026 following a successful self-release strategy in China. So-called friendslop games often land on short-video-streaming platforms, then they blow up. And the same goes in China on platforms like Douyu or Bilibili, Even after the fact. Still, despite being #3 on the copies sold list, Climber Animals generated under $6M in March revenue due to its ultra-low price point. The next game on our list – a premium title – generated over 10x that revenue with nearly identical unit volume.

• Resident Evil Requiem also moved 1.2M on Steam last month, but the financial outcome was a massive $70M. This brings Requiem’s Steam total to 2.9M copies, technically edging out the PS5’s 2.8 million. Yet, as we highlighted in our PlayStation report, the PS5 version has generated more – now at $201M in versus Steam’s $168 million. This is due to regional pricing and the tier-1-market concentration of the console audience. However, the next game – also a Resi one – highlights a longer-term benefit of Capcom’s Steam-first strategy.

• Resident Evil 3’s 2020 remake nearly one million copies on Steam in March. Sure, a bit of this is the halo effect from players Requiem, but the real driver was a massive 90% Steam discount that dropped RE3’s price to $3.99 on March 19. Capcom sold 95% of its March volume during this 11-day window, generating a respectable $8 million in passive back-catalogue revenue. This is another reason for Capcom’s PC-first mindset: the Steam audience is far more receptive to deep, aggressive discounting than other platforms

Food for thought: While console players often wait for subscription services like PS Plus or Game Pass to satiate their backlog needs, Steam users are primed for the impulse buy during smart discount windows. Publishers know this.

Third parties like Capcom are now masters of managing these deep-sale cycles, making sure legacy titles continue to act as revenue generators years after the initial release. While this is true on console as well, these kinds of discounts have far more impact on Steam – partially due to the higher share of players from price-sensitive markets.

The March data across Steam and PlayStation shows that the death of consoles narrative is overblown. Steam acts as a high-volume engine for global reach and deep-sale liquidations, but PlayStation is still a fortress for the $70 premium standard.

These platforms co-exist as different tiers of the same funnel. So, successful publishers in 2026 are not choosing one over the other. Companies like Capcom and Pearl Abyss are using the strength of different platforms to usher in massive launches.

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Reply to this email – or reach out here – if you have any feedback for the newsletter – or want to request a game for us to cover.

[Alinea Analytics boasts the most accurate PC and console estimates in the business. Game makers use our platform to understand their audience, keep an eye on the competition, monitor sales trends, and spot new opportunities. We equip game studios and financial institutions with accurate data and the confidence to make smarter, data-driven decisions. Want to talk about all things games market data? We’d love to chat!]

Resident Evil Requiem continues its huge success with $200M on PS5

Capcom’s latest horror bounced off its fantastic launch, clearing 2.8M copies sold on PS5, with a massive 1.9M in March alone. Overall, Resident Evil Requiem has now generated $200M on PS5 alone.

At launch, Requiem had sold through far more copies on Steam than on other platforms. While the number of copies sold on Steam remains higher than on PS5, Requiem has actually made more money on PlayStation.

Resident Evil Requiem has generated over $200M in gross revenue on PS5, significantly outperforming Steam’s $167M.

This difference is due to regional pricing and the different geographical distribution of Steam’s audience. Resident Evil Requiem costs $70 in the U.S., but the equivalent of $46.87 in India and $50.41 in China.

In other words, more of the PlayStation copies were sold in tier-1 markets where the $70+ price point is standard, whereas Steam’s globalised nature often drags down revenue per user there (for different price points).

Finally on RE9, the digital transition is growing for the IP on console, with roughly 75% of PlayStation sales coming via the PS Store (yes, our estimates cover that!), allowing Capcom to capture higher margins by bypassing the physical retail tax.

EA FC 26: Building the World Cup moat

EA’s footie juggernaut continues to dominate the annual sports-game cycle, with another 1.3M sold on PlayStation last month. EA FC 26 maintains a staggering 5M DAUs globally across PlayStation, Xbox, and PC, but the platform preference is clear: PlayStation accounts for 80% of that daily engagement.

And the volume is crazy, as FC 26 now boasts 25M players across PlayStation, Xbox and Steam, with 70% of that via PlayStation. Also, over 2.5M players are on PS4, if you’re wondering why EA keeps releasing last-generation editions. The sheer volume of FC sales means it’s worth keeping FC on last generation but not Madden and F1.

In the final week of March, EA executed its deepest FC26 discount to date (-70% to $20.99), which is ongoing. While this follows FC25’s pricing strategy beat for beat so far, there’s another added benefit here. It spikes the player base ahead of the 2026 FIFA World Cup.

If I were EA, I’d be more aggressive with discounts ahead of the tournament. Starting to pump in those top-of-funnel players will make the in-game ecosystem (read: player wallets) ready for the FC surge during the summer tournament, which will be watched by half of the damn world population.

Some food for thought: amid Xbox’s woes and Nintendo lowering its Switch 2 forecasts, I’ve heard the typical doom and gloom around the death of consoles. Sports games like FC and NBA2K sell best on console, sell gangbusters there, and have barely made a dent on Steam.

The console-first nature of sports games also makes them a factor in Xbox’s next machine (and one of the reasons to keep the console side for now as Xbox transitions its players to PC).

Two new games and a classic round off March’s PlayStation top 5

As for the rest of the ranking:

• Crimson Desert has silenced sceptics (and the stock market…), who feared a rocky critical reception would hinder potential among consumers in the long term. Crimson has already made over $200M across platforms, including almost $75M via PS5, proving that there is a massive appetite for high-fidelity, single-player-focused sandboxes. On PS5, Crimson has carved out a specific demographic of enthusiasts that less global market data misses (but we don’t). Our estimates show that 38% of PS5 Crimson Desert players have also played Dragon’s Dogma 2. This is significantly higher than the overlap with more mainstream titles like Assassin’s Creed: Shadows or Expedition 33. Weird and wonderful RPG fans, let’s go.

  

• Minecraft sold another 830K copies on PlayStation last month. Business as usual. With well over 300M sold across platforms, Minecraft is the best-selling game in history and one of the most resilient entertainment properties on the planet. Every month, a new cohort of children reaches Minecraft age, ensuring a constant volume of new sales regardless of the wider market’s health. Like sports games, Minecraft – while also on mobile – also serves as a gateway drug for wallets opening on the PlayStation ecosystem.

• MLB The Show 26 sold roughly 400K units on PS5 since its March 12 launch, generating $30M in gross revenue. While these are respectable numbers for a launch month, they highlight the vast difference between regional and global sports IP. EA FC 26, a game that has been on shelves for over half a year, generated more revenue on PlayStation in the last two weeks of March from unit sales alone than MLB did in its entire launch window. And that’s not even including the huge revenue generated via FC’s Ultimate Team mode.

The disparity here is driven by geography. While MLB’s player base is almost exclusively North American, with 96% of players located there and 92% in the US alone.

Meanwhile, FC captures a more global distribution, allowing high-volume sales long after the initial launch hype has faded. That said, MLB remains a cornerstone for part of Sony’s American business.

And that’s the PlayStation top 5 done! Stay tuned for the March Steam data in the free newsletter this Friday. Hit the button below to get that in your inbox as soon as it’s ready.

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Cool links and other stuff

It’s been a busy couple of weeks for Alinea press coverage:

• We chatted to IGN this week about some controversial Nintendo price changes for upcoming Switch 2 games.

• We also spoke to GameSpot about Switch 2 hardware and Nintendo’s potential plans there.

• We were also quoted talking about Nintendo in Fast Company. What can we say: Everybody wanted to hear about Nintendo this past week!

• Our Marathon estimates were picked up across the internet, including on Eurogamer, VGC, TWIV, GamesBeat, Forbes, and others.

It’s always nice to see our estimates – and coverage of them – hitting the zeitgeist and sparking discussion across the industry.

Want to get your hands on our data for yourself – for free?

We’re offering a free trial of our platform for games companies.

Send us a message here, or reply to this email, and we’ll set you up.

The last word

Reply to this email – or reach out here – if you have any feedback for the newsletter – or want to request a game for us to cover.

[Alinea Analytics boasts the most accurate PC and console estimates in the business. Game makers use our platform to understand their audience, keep an eye on the competition, monitor sales trends, and spot new opportunities. We equip game studios and financial institutions with accurate data and the confidence to make smarter, data-driven decisions. Want to talk about all things games market data? We’d love to chat!]

The Death Stranding 2 port has boosted the game’s lifecycle, with the Steam version selling 425K copies in its first week. Adding this to the 1.6M copies sold on PS5, the game’s total volume now sits at over 2M.

This means the Steam version of Death Stranding 2 already accounts for 21% of copies. In terms of revenue, Death Stranding 2 has generated over $110M on PS5 and $32.6M on Steam. With Epic included, it’s safe to say Death Stranding 2 has now passed $150M.

Steam can clearly be a timely second act for Sony’s more hardcore, auteur-led projects. Sony is reportedly pulling back from PC single-player releases, adding some tension to Sony’s choice of safeguarding its value proposition (sick single-player exclusives).

I think keeping exclusivity for big tentpole franchises from first-party studios – your Naughty Dog, Suckerpunch, and Insomniac titles – makes sense. But second-party games, the likes of Death Stranding 2 and Stellar Blade, should have different terms.

More on that later.

Death Stranding 2’s Steam release boosted copies sold on PS5

One of the more fascinating data points from Death Stranding 2’s PC launch is the halo effect it triggered back on the PS5. While the Steam version was climbing the charts, Death Stranding 2 saw a massive, secondary spike in console sales. This suggests the port worked as a re-marketing tool for DS2 across the board.

We’ve got to bring up that the PS5 version was discounted to $49.69 to coincide with the PC release, so there are other factors at play. Still, the sheer scale of the PS5 sales jump during the Steam launch indicates that the discount was only part of the story.

To understand the magnitude of this shift, we only have to look at previous discount periods:

As you can see:

• When Sony first dropped DS2’s PS5 price by 29% back in November, daily PS5 copies sold peaked at around a little over 5K.

• A second PS5 discount period in late December saw a similar peak, but when the same discount window opened alongside the Steam release on March 19, the results were on a completely different level.

• During the discount that coincided with the Steam launch, daily PS5 daily copies sold immediately rocketed to 12.5K copies and peaked the following day at 12.8K.

• That’s over double the volume of previous identical price drops, suggesting that the PC launch served was a significant force multiplier for the discount.

This spike was likely fueled by the fresh round of technical analysis and critical re-evaluations that naturally accompany a high-profile PC port. When YouTubers and outlets like Digital Foundry showcase the game’s cutting-edge visuals – or creators dive back in for a definitive-version playthrough, it’s basically a renewed cultural moment that captures console owners who were previously on the fence.

The data proves that a PC port is a way to reach a new audience and a strategic tool to re-energise the original platform’s sales curve by putting the game back at the centre of the industry conversation.

This is also something we observed for Stellar Blade, whose Steam port also helped boost copies sold for the PS5 version.

Added revenues and the halo effect are important, but the halo effect works best if everybody loves the port. That’s what’s happened with the Steam version, as shown by the Steam review data in our platform.

PC players are loving Death Stranding 2, even in the harder-to-please Chinese market

Players are getting sucked into Death Stranding 2 on PC. In a week, it has an average playtime of 18 hours. Over a third of the player base on Steam has already played for 20 hours or more, and almost 5% has played for over 50 hours. Fair play.

Death Stranding 2 has especially been a hit on Steam in China, which accounts for almost half of the game’s Steam players. This highlights a strategic advantage Sony would otherwise forfeit by skipping PC; it’s a direct pipeline to a massive, high-intent Chinese audience that’s increasingly influential in a game’s total lifecycle.

Anyway, reviews have also been great for Death Stranding 2 on Steam (96% positive). We’ve just added a new reviews section to the Steam section of our platform, which you can see below in our Death Stranding 2 game page:

We’ve been poring through review data for hundreds of games, as we’ve just added qualitative semantic insights for reviews in our platform (more on that in a sec). And compared to other new games, Death Stranding 2 on Steam has reviewed remarkably consistently across languages.

This is quite the achievement, especially for the Chinese market, as gamers in China are notoriously vocal in reviews and often serve as a rigorous litmus test for non-domestic titles.

Our playtime-indexed sentiment shows that the game’s positive user score actually climbs as players invest more hours into the experience, but the penetration of positive reviews is way higher than usual.

• While the sub-one-hour crowd sits at a 90% rating, likely reflecting early technical friction and the learning wall of the game’s loop. It’s a fantastic game – my #6 favourite of last year – but it’s pretty weird and convoluted at first. Probably had a few folks trying it out, then refunding.

• Positive review scores stabilise at 96% for those who cross the ten-hour mark.

• For the hardcore audience logging 25 to 50 hours, the satisfaction rate hits 97%, proving that once the game’s loop and whacky story unfold and take hold, the game grips players.

Here’s some of the new semantic-analysis data in our platform:

Across the board, the game is being celebrated for its exceptional optimisation and visual fidelity. Many players are reporting stable 60 FPS performance even on mid-range hardware, a testament to Nixxes’ nice work on the PC port.

On the gameplay side, DS2’s improvements to the core loop have successfully addressed the primary complaints aimed at the original 2019 release.

Still, this polish is being marred for a vocal minority by significant technical hurdles. Reports of save-system failures requiring manual Windows security adjustments and random crashes during cutscenes have led to a wait-for-patches recommendation from some.

The regional breakdown of these reviews offers an even more nuanced view of the game’s global reception. English-speaking players are primarily focused on the game as a graphical benchmark, frequently citing its photorealistic environments as the best in the industry.

In contrast, the Kojima magic in China appears to be driven by a different set of priorities. Chinese reviewers have been far more vocal about the mechanical refinements of the sequel, showing an enthusiastic focus on the expanded combat options.

While Western players analyse the lighting, the Chinese community is praising the balance of the gameplay loop. This is not to say they are less critical; interestingly, Chinese players are actually more likely to critique the narrative execution and pacing than their Western counterparts.

Where does this leave PlayStation games on Steam?

The quicker rollout of Death Stranding 2 and Stellar Blade on Steam suggests Sony is running a live A/B test on the long-term ROI of the PC ecosystem.

Using second-party titles as the tests, PlayStation can measure exactly how much platform decay occurs when a high-profile exclusive moves to PC in under a year, without risking the crown jewels of its first-party stable.

One outcome I could see happening – and what I’d do –is that Sony tiers its releases in the following way:

• Core first-party single-player IP, the tentpole titles from Naughty Dog or Santa Monica Studios, remain gated as console exclusives to maintain hardware pull and protect the box’s value proposition for the enthusiast crowd. This becomes even more critical as Sony prepares to launch its next generation of consoles and handhelds, where a distinct reason to own the hardware is the primary sales driver.

• Live-service games will still launch multiplatform to maximise network effects and player liquidity. Live-ops costs are nuts and require a critical mass that a single console ecosystem can’t provide.

• Second-party partnerships like Kojima and Shift Up offer a strategic middle ground. These allow Sony to capture the PC surge and build organic relationships with these studios before moving toward a formal acquisition, effectively using Steam as a proving ground for an IP’s global reach. Organic acquisitions like this (Insomniac) have worked better in the past for PlayStation than inorganic ones (like Bungie).

I also suspect the original play for PlayStation involved the development of a proprietary PC launcher to reclaim the 30% margin currently lost to Valve. While the initial friction surrounding mandatory account linking for Helldivers 2 created a PR hurdle, I reckon it was the first step in a broader attempt to centralise the PlayStation ecosystem across hardware boundaries (and away from third parties like Valve).

If Sony can successfully migrate this audience to its own storefront, the economics of their PC business change fundamentally.

As market dynamics shift toward a more platform-agnostic future, Sony has to decide if it wants to remain a premier storefront or a premier publisher. If the results from Death Stranding 2 are any indication, the most profitable path lies in being both.

Sony can essentially have its cake and eat it here, provided it can manage the optics of its console exclusivity while treating Steam as a high-conversion top-of-funnel for the second-party side.

Shifting gears a bit…

Why a global perspective and regional pricing are vital for accurate forecasting: Using Slay the Spire 2’s 5M sold as an example

During my daily news binge the other morning, I read a Slay the Spire 2 take suggesting that Mega Crit’s three million copies sold milestone implies gross revenues of roughly $75 million based on a $25 price point.

While that makes for a clean headline, those kinds of assumptions ignore two major, interconnected realities of the Steam ecosystem: regional pricing and the dominance of the Chinese market.

This is vital, because:

• Slay the Spire 2 – as most of us know, like many games– uses regional pricing, meaning the game does not cost $25 in every territory.

• China is currently the title’s top market, accounting for over a third of the total player base, yet the game retails there for the equivalent of only $12.75.

• Many Chinese players access Steam via VPNs through storefronts in Hong Kong, where the game costs $19.02, or Japan, where it sits at $17.69, to bypass the Great Firewall.

When Slay the Spire 2 hit that 3M mark, our data estimates indicate it had actually generated gross revenues of $60 million, significantly lower than the $75M.

Factoring in these geographic nuances is vital for accurate estimates and sound decision-making. Relying on a West-only lens will consistently lead to inflated expectations and flawed market analysis.

On that note, our latest estimates show that Slay the Spire 2 recently crossed 5M sold. This puts its total gross revenue at roughly $100 million, notably shy of the $125M figure that napkin math might suggest.

At Alinea Analytics, we prioritise a global view and factor regional pricing into every model to ensure our partners are working with reality, not just averages.

If you’d like a free trial of our platform – and benchmark our data for yourself – reach out here.

The last word

Reply to this email – or reach out here – if you have any feedback for the newsletter – or want to request a game for us to cover.

[Alinea Analytics boasts the most accurate PC and console estimates in the business. Game makers use our platform to understand their audience, keep an eye on the competition, monitor sales trends, and spot new opportunities. We equip game studios and financial institutions with accurate data and the confidence to make smarter, data-driven decisions. Want to talk about all things games market data? We’d love to chat!]

Looking at the split between Steam, PS5, and Xbox, Steam is clearly the main platform for Marathon, accounting for a little under 70% of the audience (800K copies sold). Meanwhile, PS5 takes about 19% (217K) and Xbox (including console, PC, and cloud) accounts for a bit over 11% or 133K.

Marathon is technically a first-party Sony title, so seeing the home console struggle to break 20% of the volume is a notable data point for the ongoing platform-agnostic debate. PlayStation Studios online games will almost certainly continue being multiplatform (despite Sony reportedly pulling back on PC releases).

As for Marathon, the consensus among hardcore players who pushed through the awkward onboarding phase – myself included – is that it’s fantastic. The gunplay, aesthetic, and presentation are among the best in the shooter genre.

A great game doesn’t always equal an immediate hit, though, as shown by our estimates. Things are looking lukewarm right now. But this might be one of those marathon-not-a-sprint situations. Had to, didn’t I?

Why wasn’t Marathon a hit on the same level as Arc Raiders?

One topic that came up in a lot of conversations at GDC this year was why Marathon hasn’t hit the same stratosphere as Arc Raiders. On paper, they’re both extraction shooters, and Marathon has the Bungie pedigree – the house that built the gold standard for gunplay in Halo and Destiny.

Marathon’s neon-futuristic aesthetic also distinguishes itself from the gritty realism of Tarkov or the post-apocalyptic hope of ARC Raiders. But vibes can only get you so far for first impressions if the onboarding feels like a brick wall.

Marathon is a sweaty PvP-focused experience with a first-time user experience and UI that I can only describe as dreadful. Players are dropped into a complex ecosystem where the UI, though visually striking, is functionally uninformative, forcing users to manually hover over nondescript, identical icons just to identify basic gear or weapon mods.

This lack of clarity is compounded by punishing mechanics like a severe heat gauge for movement and a scarcity of vital resources, all without a clear tutorial or a low-stakes mode to learn the ropes. Most people – even top streamers and veteran shooter players – have no idea what’s going on in Marathon at first.

Arc is on the complete other end of the spectrum. As we covered here and here, Arc Raiders offers a more collaborative, approachable loop where players often work together toward shared goals. And the objectives are instantly clear. To many players, this contrast only emphasised Marathon’s issues, especially during the testing period.

Players understand the Arc Raiders loop within 30 minutes, while Marathon acts as a massive filter, chewing up newcomers and spitting them out before they can experience the depth of Bungie’s signature gunplay.

What I’m getting at here is that the poor first-time user experience of Marathon’s Server Slam likely stifled launch sales, while the opposite was true for Arc. Let’s look at the pre-launch copies sold for each game during their respective Server Slams (launch-aligned) :

Looking at the trajectory:

• Arc Raiders saw a massive 80% jump in copies sold during its three-day Server Slam (day -13 to -11). Players jumped in, realised the water was fine, and immediately opened their wallets.

• Marathon, meanwhile, saw a 49% increase in the four days following its Slam (Day -7 to -3).

• At the time of each game’s respective launch, Arc Raiders had nearly double the Steam footprint of Marathon – and word of mouth only continued to grow.

Bungie could have had more time to fix the onboarding process had the beta happened earlier. But Marathon launched three days after the beta finished. These factors limited the launch sales quite a bit, I reckon.

Marathon has found a niche audience, though

Despite the friction-heavy start, the data suggests that those who survived Marathon’s onboarding are loving life. We’ve been tracking cross-platform DAUs, and while there’s the expected post-launch leakage, many players are sticking with it.

After peaking at 478K total DAUs on its first Saturday, Marathon has settled into a respectable rhythm, holding 345K DAUs as of yesterday and averaging 380K DAUs across the weekend.

Steam continues to do the heavy lifting here, consistently accounting for the lion’s share of the daily players. Players have been putting in the hours, too:

• On Steam, Marathon’s average playtime has climbed to 27.8 hours, significantly outpacing the console averages on PS5 (16.5h) and Xbox (17.3h).

• Even more telling than the averages: 22% of the Steam audience has surged past the 50-hour mark, and nearly 7% have already logged over 100 hours.

• This data suggests that once the Bungie magic clicks, it hooks players deeper than the average extraction shooter.

There’s also started to be a shift in the game’s discourse. Marathon launched as one of those games that’s cool to hate. But as Marathon’s 100-hour club grows, we’re seeing conversations around its mechanical merit outweigh the negativity.

Several high-profile creators, who were initially vocal critics, have spent the last week coming around on the mechanical depth of the endgame. It’s a subtle but positive signal; the hate train is losing steam, and a new narrative about the game is emerging.

Bungie faithfuls unite

Another interesting metric in Marathon’s first few weeks is who, exactly, is playing. Bungie leans heavily on its prestige as the “makers of Halo and Destiny,” in its marketing, and that message has clearly hit the mark.

On Steam, the gravity (hammer) of Bungie’s previous work is unavoidable. A staggering 78.2% of Marathon players also played Destiny 2. The trend carries across other platforms, with 74.2% of PS5 players and 82.7% of Xbox players also having played Destiny 2. The Halo legacy lives on, it seems. More on that in a bit.

While Destiny 2 went free to play, these numbers still represent a high-intent migration of a fanbase that trusts Bungie’s specific brand of kinetic gunplay and cryptic world-building.

The Xbox data adds another layer of legacy. About 85.7% of Marathon players on Xbox have played Halo Infinite, while over half of the Steam audience has spent time in Halo Infinite and 36.1% in the Master Chief Collection (a paid collection of the old Bungie-made legacy games).

Interestingly, we see a 55.9% overlap with ARC Raiders on Steam. Overlap is even higher there on PlayStation (60.5%) and Xbox (66.5%). And there’s also significant crossover with Helldivers 2 on all platforms, too.

Bungie has found some of its fans with Marathon, and the challenge now is keeping this engaged in a high-stakes PvP environment when they’ve spent the last decade primarily enjoying the power fantasies of PvE.

On that note…

Go the full 26 miles? Or cut and run?

Time for some could’ve, should’ve, would’ve. These things would have improved Marathon’s performance at launch:

• A more robust onboarding process, perhaps in the form of a short single-player/PvE campaign. We know Bungie fans love this stuff.

• A traditional arena-based mode akin to Destiny’s Crucible could have been a bridge for the cautious players who’d have been otherwise deterred by the Server Slam. It’s also a great palate cleanser after getting merked.

• Introducing a dedicated PvE environment would have similarly diversified the conversation and lowered the barrier for the Bungie faithful who found the pure PvP extraction loop too abrasive. PvE is safer than PvP these days.

There’s an argument that a thin PvE mode would have just felt like a budget Destiny, potentially hurting the brand more. But given how dire the FTUE is, I think it would have been a net positive. Any kind of tutorialised loop that demystifies the stakes, really.

While there is merit in a studio sticking firmly to a singular creative vision, and going all in on the hardcore extraction loop. Less forgiving is the technical reality is that the user interface and first-time user experience (FTUE) were not at a commercial standard for launch.

In a landscape where player time is oversaturated and the most contested currency, a flawed FTUE is a critical failure point. But it’s not all doom and gloom, as Marathon has an incredible, unique gameplay loop, suggesting that financial success is still attainable if Bungie can pivot effectively.

Bungie and PlayStation now face a difficult strategic crossroads, though – one within a challenging games market.

They could:

• Double down on Marathon with a long-term Rainbow Six Siege- or No Man’s Sky-style recovery plan, which is something I heard Last Stand Media’s Chris Maldonado mention last week. While this could be a sunk-cost fallacy in action, it could eventually yield the audience the game’s mechanical depth deserves.

• Shift focus toward the inevitable Destiny 3 or another project, mitigating the escalating opportunity cost and cutting their losses, so to speak.

• Doing both is an expensive proposition, given the high overhead and burn rate of operating out of Bellevue, Washington. With Sony recently demonstrating a lower threshold for underperforming studios and projects, the margin for error has vanished.

Whatever happens, the next six months will determine whether Marathon becomes a cornerstone of Sony’s live-service portfolio or a cautionary tale of vision exceeding accessibility.

I’m hoping it’s the former, because Marathon rocks. As always, hit subscribe to get updates on Marathon and other relevant games.

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Slay the Spire 2, the sequel to one of the most iconic deck-builders ever, launched in early access for $25 on Steam on March 5. Our estimates show that in two weeks, the roguelike has sold 4.6M copies on Steam, generating over $92M:

While there’s been a good amount of buzz around Slay the Spire 2, I feel like its early-access success has been understated. To put the $92M into perspective, Slay the Spire 2’s Steam revenue has already passed Steam lifetime earnings for two of the most anticipated indie titles of the last two years:

• Slay the Spire 2 has already generated 10% more revenue on Steam than Silksong’s $83M

• It’s also eclipsed the total Steam earnings of Hades II ($82M) since that title entered Early Access in May 2024.

• This means Slay the Spire 2 has had one of the best indie Steam releases of all time, and certainly the best since Palworld.

Both Palworld and Slay the Spire 2 have something in common that helped them achieve these highs: they’re huge in China. Chinese players account for over a quarter of Palworld’s Steam audience and over a third of Slay the Spire 2’s

China was also pivotal for the original Slay the Spire. As per Anthony Giovannetti, Mega Crit’s co-founder and designer, China – via a Chinese a streamer – was one of the reasons the original game blew up.

China’s growing importance on Steam is something we’ve highlighted before, including last month with Nioh 3. Even indies without Chinese localisation, like Mewgenics, are finding China among their top Steam markets.

Inertia and built-up hype: Slay the Spire 2’s success was no surprise

We all knew this one was going to be a hit.

For a bit of context, the original Slay the Spire has sold well over 10M copies on console and PC, and it’s one of the most iconic indies of all time (and one of my personal favourites).

Slay the Spire is iconic for its balanced mix of roguelike unpredictability and deep, strategic deck-building. It also has the gnarliest just-one-more-run loop I’ve ever seen. It rewards skill, experimentation, and constant adaptation, and has led to many 3 a.m. nights for me, and many difficult subsequent workdays…

Mega Crit knows how obsessed we are in the community and has been drip-feeding cards and mechanics for two years via the Neowsletter, while also spotlighting community members, fostering a hungry, high-intent audience.

By the time March 5 rolled around, just under two million people had Slay the Spire 2 on their Steam wishlists, as per Alinea estimates. What I wasn’t expecting, though, was the wishlist-to-buyer conversion. It’s been off the charts for Slay the Spire 2.

Typically, a successful launch might see a 7% conversion rate in the first week – 10% if you’re lucky. But Slay the Spire 2 smashed that. Of the total wishlists since January 2025, 31% converted to buyers within a week, climbing to 34% by the two-week mark.

You can see how many wishlisters from each month converted a week after launch (‘’7D’’) and within 30 days of launch (as of March 19) below:

The standout cohort here is February, when Mega Crit announced Slay the Spire 2’s release date. Of the 161K Steam users who wishlisted that month, nearly half converted into buyers.

While Slay the Spire 2 has been available for wishlisting since 2024, the campaign hit its stride during the February 2026 window. Mega Crit moved into high gear, more aggressively promoting links across Twitter, other socials, and directly in the newsletter.

As always, putting those calls-to-action front and centre captured a high-intent segment right when their excitement was peaking. Very Silent-coded, but business as usual for indies.

Still, Slay the Spire 2’s conversion figures show that quality trumps quantity during a time when wishlist bloating is becoming a reality. There weren’t any artificial get-wishlists-quick schemes here.

Players are hooked on Slay the Spire 2

Slay the Spire 2’s Steam DAUs grew steadily throughout the launch week as word-of-mouth spread, eventually peaking at 2.2M over the weekend of March 14-15.

The depth of play so far has also been impressive:

• Of the 4.6M Slay the Spire 2 players on Steam, over half have already crossed the 20-hour mark.

• Meanwhile, about 14% have played more than 50 hours, and a dedicated 1% – the real Ironclad among us – have logged 100 hours or more. In two weeks!

• The moreish gameplay loop, as well as the co-op mode (more on that later), is clearly working as intended.

But how are the user reviews looking?

Players are also having a blast (mostly)

Slay the Spire’s review data remains overwhelmingly positive, with a 94% positive reviewers who bought the game. Yet, looking at the language-specific breakdown reveals some regional nuances.

Reviews in Simplified Chinese carry a lower average of 87% (despite Chinese players being the top group by player numbers):

In our experience, more negative reviews in Chinese are common. On Steam, some Chinese players use reviews as a means to reach Western devs, as players in China have less access to other international social platforms.

Chinese gamers also tend to be more critical or vocal in the review section to ensure their feedback (often on localisation, value, and bugs) is taken on board. Even with this slight dip, 87% positive in China is a good sign.

One minor critique surfacing in the early negative reviews – including in the Chinese ones – is that Slay the Spire 2 feels is too iterative. There are many mechanical echoes of the first game, sure, but when the predecessor is a genre-defining masterpiece, that feels more like high praise than a drawback.

I digress.

Slay the Spire 2’s co-op has been a hit so far

Anyway, the most significant new thing in Slay the Spire 2 – and a massive driver of the current hype – is the co-op mode. While there were some cool co-op mods for the first game, this is the first time Mega Crit has officially added the mode.

The timing couldn’t be better. We’ve been vocal in our coverage of co-op’s popularity on Steam, and Slay the Spire 2 has hit the ground running with a mode that feels integrated rather than tacked on.

It successfully moves away from the solitary feel of the original, allowing 2-4 players to navigate a shared map and sync their strategies.

I was extremely sceptical about this mode initially, fearing that Mega Crit was jumping on a trend that was very contrary to the balanced, solitary experience I loved in Slay the Spire 1.

I ate my words almost instantly:

• The tactical depth in Slay the Spire 2’s co-op is impressive. Enemies scale their health and launch coordinated attacks on the entire party, forcing teams to communicate constantly to balance offense and mitigation.

• Features like Mending (healing a teammate at a campfire) and multiplayer-exclusive card synergies transform the experience into a genuine team RPG that adds a fresh, shareable layer to a fantastic game.

• Mega Crit has really strived to make this mode feel organic and not tacked on, thanks to light but appreciated touches like a map-drawing tool for route planning (and rude doodles…) and a Rock-Paper-Scissors system to settle disputes over reward choices.

In the process, Mega Crit has also managed to bake some extra virality in. High-profile creators have jumped on squad runs immediately, which has helped Slay the Spire 2’s word of mouth and reached non-franchise fans. Our data shows that 39% of Slay the Spire 2 players on Steam never played the original on Steam.

It seems that there’s no sophomore slump for Slay the Spire. Mega Crit so far delivered on an experience that fans love. But Slay the Spire 2 is still in early access, and there’s a lot more to come.

The eventual 1.0 launch will trigger a secondary influx of wait-and-see players, while the inevitable expansion to the console and mobile markets will provide the multi-year tail necessary to cement Slay the Spire 2 as a permanent fixture for our market.

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Developed over seven years by Pearl Abyss, the makers of MMO Black Desert, Crimson Desert has evolved from an MMO prequel into a massive, standalone open-world action game. It’s coming to PC, PS5, and Xbox on March 17 for $70.

Set in the war-torn continent of Pywel (nice, Welsh-sounding name😎), Crimson Desert’s gameplay blends high-fidelity combat with deep environmental interaction. There’s so much choice, and the sense of discovery is massive.

One minute you’re flying on dragon back, the next you’re fishing, or piloting a mech. It’s a whole lot of game, and it throws mechanics at the player thick and fast.

The traversal is smooth, and you can tackle challenges in an absurd number of ways, thanks to the game’s robust toolbox made possible by its proprietary engine. It’s definitely taking more than a few cues from Breath of the Wild.

Hype is through the roof, so – if Pearl Abyss can stick the landing – we might just have got 2026’s first big new IP.

Crimson Desert has already generated over $20M on Steam

With the release date approaching, player interest is already converting into early sales. As of yesterday, Crimson Desert was approaching 400K pre-launch copies sold on Steam, representing gross revenues of $20M+.

Notably, over 10% of those sales occurred in a single 24-hour window yesterday, generating $2.6 million in revenue as the marketing campaign reached its peak. This game could really blow up, if it sticks the landing.

Players are very curious. Pearl Abyss announced that Crimson Desert reached 3M wishlists last week. Our estimates show that around 2.2M of those come from Steam. It’s worth noting that for a successful $70 AAA game, wishlist-to-buyer conversion is typically pretty low, 6-7% a week after launch.

Community building done right

As you can see in the Alinea Analytics platform screenshot (get your free trial!) below, Crimson Desert has netted over 1M new Steam wishlists since the beginning of February, and a whopping 680K this month:

Hype really started to escalate in the past few months, thanks to extensive community building and well-timed announcements. In general, the marketing – including the gameplay reveal and the recent features deep dives – has been great.

But where Pearl Abyss has really hit it out of the park is in quelling vocal online crowds, actively listening to the community, and responding with what gamers really want to hear.

It feels authentic. PR and Marketing Director Will Powers has been the primary face of this effort, adopting a unusually direct communication style. Candidly, it’s refreshing amid the sea of PR drivel we usually get. Authenticity wins.

Here are a few examples that have stood out to me:

• Genre transparency and managing expectations: To avoid confusion, the devs have repeatedly clarified that Crimson Desert is an action-adventure game, not a traditional RPG. They’ve also vocally avoided overhyping the game, encouraging a grounded perspective. By explicitly stating Crimson lacks features like character creators, branching dialogue, or traditional levelling systems, they’re setting expectations to avoid a Cyberpunk-like launch situation.

• Detailed specs, with great optimisation: On March 10, Pearl Abyss announced the PC and console specs, following concerns about how the game will run on consoles and mid-spec machines. It seems well optimised and even runs on 10-year-old 1060 GPUs.

• Showing off the console footage: On March 12, after the community’s continued concerns over a lack of console footage, the team responded by providing unrestricted access to Digital Foundry to showcase the game running on PS5 Pro. DF’s glowing preview helped quell naysayers. Taking things further, Pearl Abyss partnered with PlayStation Japan to show off the base PS5 version.

• No microtransactions at launch: Given Pearl Abyss’ MMO past, many gamers were worried about Crimson Desert’s monetisation. On the Dropped Frames March 12 podcast, Pearl Abyss marketing director Will Powers said, “I can say that definitively: there is not a cosmetic cash shop. This is made to be a premium experience that you buy and you enjoy the world, and not something for microtransactions … This is a premium experience. That is the transaction. Full stop.”

Pearl Abyss is definitely saying – and doing – all the right things so far, so Crimson Desert is currently tracking very well – even against some stiff competition.

Pre-launch Steam metrics: Crimson Desert is tracking above Expedition 33 and KCD2

Last year, new IP Expedition 33 (7.5M sold now, 57% via Steam, as per our estimates) won game of the year, while sprawling open-world RPG Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 (5.2M, 69% via Steam) also reached new heights.

Crimson Desert is tracking even better than these Steam-first 2025 big hitters, when we look at launch-aligned data three days before release:

At the three-day pre-launch mark, Crimson Desert’s $20.3M on Steam means it’s outperforming Kingdom Come: Deliverance II by nearly 4x ($5.2M) and Expedition 33 by nearly 10x ($2.4M) at the same point in their respective lifecycles.

That said, it’s worth looking at the longer post-launch tail of revenues to get the full picture:

The longer-term data for Expedition 33 and KCD2 shows that a strong start is only the foundation. Both enjoyed sustained revenue growth – reaching $95.5M and $101.3M on Steam respectively by day 120. And it’s because they delivered fantastic, well-reviewed experiences that fueled long-term word-of-mouth.

For Crimson Desert, the initial hype has ticked all the right pre-launch boxes, but now Pearl Abyss has to put its money where its mouth is. If the quality of Pywel’s open world and its sandbox doesn’t live up to the promising trailers and previews, that momentum will be cut short before it can reach the long-tail success seen by KCD2 and Expedition 33.

Some things in Pearl Abyss’ favour:

• The sheer variety of gameplay mechanics and emergent possibilities makes it fantastic streamer bait. I’m expecting clips on TikTok galore.

• Pearl Abyss has a massive built-in audience from the Black Desert ecosystem, providing a safety net of loyal players that new IP rarely enjoys.

• The localisation strategy is sound. Offering full voiceovers in English, Korean, and Simplified Chinese was smart and will resonate in Asia. We saw this strategy act as a major catalyst for Stellar Blade’s success on Steam.

But Pearl Abyss is missing regional pricing. While the U.S. and China lead the wishlist rankings, Brazil and Russia appearing in the top five suggests a missed opportunity.

Pearl Abyss’ decision to stick to a flat global price risks locking out emerging markets where the equivalent local cost becomes a barrier to entry – a stark contrast to Stellar Blade, which used regional pricing to dominate the Chinese market.

The $70 price tag may also act as a temporary barrier to mass adoption for more cautious players, though strategic discounts down the line will eventually help convert that claim-and-wait audience we often bang on about over at Alinea HQ.

The initial hours are also quite overwhelming in terms of introducing the player to new features, so the first-time user experience might put some folks off. But then again: Elden Ring has sold close to bloody 40M copies.

Ultimately, Crimson Desert’s final ceiling hinges entirely on its execution. The community management and marketing have been sublime, and all pre-launch signals are pointing toward a historic debut.

Assuming they don’t drop the ball, I reckon we’re looking at Steam’s second new 2026 $150M+ powerhouse. Unless the game doesn’t live up to its lofty promises, of course. We’ll be covering its launch metrics (console and Steam) in next week’s newsletter, so hit subscribe below to get that in your inbox as soon as it’s ready.

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Before we move on to Xbox, and because a few people have asked, Resident Evil Requiem has now generated over $500M across all platforms, with $225M via Steam. Across Steam, Xbox, and PlayStation, Requiem has sold 5.7M copies, as per our estimates.

On Xbox’s Project Helix

I had a blast at GDC this year! Between countless meetings, hosting panels, and running into old friends – and making new ones – in hotel lobbies, I managed to pop over to learn about Xbox’s new ‘’console’’.

As we said to GameSpot earlier this week, Project Helix is the final step in Xbox’s move away from consoles. While it does play Xbox console games, the intention to nudge fans to PC is clear. But it’s not going to be easy.

RAMageddon is real. The GDC stuff touted a custom AMD SoC and a leap in ray tracing, but the market reality is harsh. The generative AI bubble has also blown up the demand for memory, sending component prices skyrocketing. The PS5 Pro already pushed the ceiling of premium hardware pricing – and even the Series X is $650 – so I see Helix coming in at $850 at least.

Historically, Xbox might have eaten that cost to gain market share, but current leadership is hyper-focused on AI, efficiency, and margins. Like most of the tech space, they’ve moved away from the growth-at-all-costs pandemic mindset. My feeling is that if Helix is the bridge to a PC first future, Microsoft will expect consumers to pay a PC-style premium for it.

The market positioning for Helix is muddled. Microsoft is moving directly into Valve’s space here. Project Helix is a direct competitor to the Steam Deck and Steam Machine. Friction is a huge hurdle here for Xbox. SteamOS is elegant and feels like a console, whereas the Windows experience is more clunky. That could change with the imminent Xbox mode on PC, but I’ve not been terribly impressed with my experience on the Xbox ROG Ally X.

Meanwhile, PlayStation seems to be going the other route: doubling down on its walled garden. While Sony will ship live-service titles on PC to find scale, they’re reportedly pulling back their core prestige games to keep them as hardware sellers.

If PlayStation continues to pull back its prestige titles into a walled garden to protect their hardware, they are essentially betting that their IP is more valuable than the reach of the PC market. Given the diminishing returns on PS-made-game sales on PC, that might end up being a smart bet in the wake of the Steam Machine and what Xbox is up to here.

I don’t blame Xbox for its different trajectory, though. Project Helix is a pivot born from the fact that the Game Pass dream has hit a ceiling, which itself was born from damage control from the disastrous Xbox One launch. Also, during the pandemic, the industry overextended and saw risky acquisitions based on the idea that gaming would see eternal double-digit growth.

In 2026, the attention economy is saturated, and the subscription model does not scale in gaming the same way it does in music or film. A user can listen to hundreds of songs a month on Spotify, but they only have time to play a few major games.

Despite Xbox clearly losing mindshare to its competitors in recent years, Xbox still has tens of millions of loyalists with massive digital libraries. Instead of letting them abandon ship to a PC or a Steam Machine when they outgrow the console cycle, Helix allows them to jump ship to a Microsoft-sanctioned hybrid.

It is a way – a lifeboat to keep my awful seafaring metaphor going – to transition their biggest spenders into a PC first ecosystem without losing their library via Play Anywhere. In other words, it’s the final evolution of the strategy started with the Xbox One.

With Helix, Xbox is hoping to capture the flexibility of the PC market while maintaining the plug-and-play loyalty of the console crowd. With a high price tag and the lingering RAMageddon impact, the success of Helix hinges entirely on whether Xbox Mode on Windows is actually a seamless experience or just another layer of Windows bloatware.

If it can’t make this work, Helix risks alienating Xbox’s most loyal fans and leaving them with an overpriced hybrid that lacks the elegance of a Steam Machine or the prestige of a PlayStation. Marketing will also be very important. Hopefully their stepping away from the ‘’This Is an Xbox’’ campaign is a sign that there are brighter things to come there.

Healthy competition leads to innovation. If Project Helix succeeds, it could put more pressure on Valve’s monopoly on PC. Likewise, the industry suffers when Sony and Nintendo are allowed to rest on their laurels without a credible threat to their hardware paradigms.

A successful, high-end hybrid from Microsoft would be a positive thing for the market, I reckon.

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It’s a nostalgia free-for-all, and a bloody fantastic game. Literally and figuratively. But the new Resident Evil also underlines an important shift for Capcom.

Requiem is emblematic of Resi’s successful transition from a beloved legacy Japanese console IP into a global PC powerhouse while also catering to fans of old.

As Resident Evil Requiem celebrates the franchise’s 30th anniversary, our Steam, PS5, and Xbox estimates from its first six days confirm the shift in where the audience actually lives (resides?)

Our estimates show that as of March 4, just six days post-launch, Requiem had sold through 4.3M+ copies across Steam, PlayStation, and Xbox.

Capcom recently announced 5M units typically “sold-in” (shipped to retailers), so our “sold-through” estimates focus only on the sales to consumers – and don’t include Switch or Epic.

Still, Steam’s performance can’t be understated:

• Requiem has generated gross revenues of over $340M across all platforms in under a week, and Steam accounts for almost $200M.

• Valve’s platform also accounts for 2.3M Requiem copies sold, or 53.1% of the playerbase across Steam, Xbox, and PC (console and Windows).

• This dwarfs even the PS5 (1.7M/39.5%) sell-through, and leaves Xbox in a distant third (300K/7.4%).

• Capcom’s PC-first dream is now a reality, and for a franchise that was once the spiritual ward of PlayStation.

Capcom’s management has been aiming to do this for half a decade now and has been telegraphing this for months. In its FY25 Q3 earnings, Capcom confirmed that PC already accounts for 55% of its total unit sales across the back catalogue.

Japanese third-party publishers have been more anchored to physical media due to domestic retail inertia, Now, Capcom’s strategic pivot toward a digital-first model is yielding some hefty structural advantages.

Spreading the t-virus to new markets

Capcom’s PC expansion is also growing its footprint in more challenging territories, most notably China. Our estimates show that China is Resident Evil Requiem’s #2 market on Steam, accounting for 16% of the total player base there.

In China, console hardware penetration has historically been stifled by regulatory hurdles and cultural barriers, but the open grey-market nature of PC makes it more accessible:

• Resident Evil has long landed with China’s gamers, but Requiem has been its most visible and successful debut there.

• Peak concurrent users (CCUs) for the Steam version of Requiem begin their ascent around 14:00 UTC, aligning with China’s evening prime time.

• This suggests that the record-breaking 344K Steam CCU was driven as much by Shanghai as San Fran.

Even on PS5, China ranks as Requiem’s #3 market (7%), sitting neck-and-neck with the Japanese domestic market (7%). Speaking of Japan, and despite the global shift toward PC, Requiem still did well on the Famitsu software charts in its debut week, moving 155,373 units on PS5 and 38,793 units on Switch 2.

Whether people want to play physically or digitally, console or PC, big screen or portably (the Steam Deck version’s decent, by the way), Capcom has catered to everybody with Requiem’s distribution.

And that flexibility extends to the game design, too.

10 hours with endless replayability: A sweetspot for Resi’s audience

In an era of 50-hour open-world slogs, Requiem succeeds in its leanness. The main story took me about 10 hours to get through on the default difficulty. This is music to the ears of folks with kiddos and busy lifestyles, which make up a chunk of the IP’s ageing core demographic.

The result is easy to see: people are seeing the game through. I just aggregated trophy and achievement data across Steam, PlayStation, and Xbox; in under a week, Requiem’s average completion rate (on Casual mode or above) is over 40%.

While most $70 games see a massive drop-off at the midpoint, even among early adoptors, Requiem’s playtime distribution shows a pretty chunky tail of engagement. That closure makes the next instalment a more likely purchase.

Even after just six days on the market, our engagement data shows a peak between 10 and 15 hours (22.2%), precisely where players are finishing their first run and beginning the endgame.

Even more impressive is that over a fifth of the total player base has logged over 20 hours. This hardcore cohort (hardcohort? Sorry...) are already on their next playthroughs, speedrunning, or – in my case – getting rinsed in Insanity mode.

Speed runs, hardcore runs, and knife-only challenges – Resident Evil has always been about that repeatable loop. I’m glad Capcom didn’t take a cue from Umbrella and change that core DNA too much.

Capcom is letting players play their way, even down to different camera perspectives per character.

Fair play to Capcom

In an industry currently defined by layoffs, cancelled projects, and live-service disasters, Capcom’s trajectory is a beacon of competence (although it definitely tried to get a Resident Evil online thing for a while…)

Focusing too heavily on PvP was its downfall there. A PvE Resident Evil, though, that could work. Resident Evil 5’s inevitable remake is fertile ground for this, so I reckon it’s coming.

Capcom has already righted the horrors of Resident Evil 6 by successfully recreating the action-horror back-and-fourth with Requiem.

Maybe it can do the same for its co-op and live-service mistakes by making good on co-op with Resident Evil 5. A co-op Mercenaries mode could really work, maybe with some roguelite elements thrown in. Just sayin’.

As we dived into in our first client-exclusive The Playbook newsletter, co-op is hot right now. And horror is driving plenty of those revenues on Steam:

But in the end, Requiem proves that if you respect the player’s time, deliver consistent high quality, and fans on their platform of their choice, the audience is willing to show up.

And in higher numbers than ever before at this point in the lifecycle:

Capcom has successfully navigated its transition to a digital-first, PC-led future without sacrificing the high production values or the franchise’s core identity.

It’s refreshing to see Capcom’s flexibility and steadfast commitment to its core paying off. They’ve prioritised brand equity over fleeting industry trends, and in the process, they’ve expanded their user base in a way that feels incredibly organic.

Dino Crisis, you’re up?

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Let’s take a look at the games that got the most wishlists during the event.

Windrose rose to the top

Co-op pirate survival game Windrose took the #1 spot, securing 351K new wishlists during the week-long event. This brings Windrose’s total count to over 1.3M, so Next Fest – and related promotions – account for about a quarter of wishlisters.

Around 11.7% of Windrose’s total wishlisters played the demo, which was the third-most-played during the event.

Windrose has been building this momentum for nearly a year. The Uzbekistan-based developer, Windrose Crew, has been disciplined in its community management, growing a Discord server of 40K members through ongoing developer interaction and alpha playtests.

Windrose was also highlighted at the PC Gaming Show: Most Wanted back in December, and that long-lead hype clearly reached a boiling point this week.

Our data shows that around half of Windrose’s wishlisters previously played The Forest or Valheim. It’s tapping into that specific co-op survival-crafting hunger, but swapping the typical forest or fantasy setting for deep naval exploration and – surprisingly – soulslike combat.

It works really well.

Despite the small team size, Windrose looks stunning on high-end machines, too. Focusing on a PvE experience that scales for both solo and group play, Windrose Crew has so far done a nice job of turning the ship away from the sweatiness that can cause friction in this type of game (looking at you, Sea of Thieves).

That said, over a third of Windrose’s wishliters have played Sea of Thieves previously. Given the positive reaction to the demo, I’m expecting plenty of Sea of Thieves regulars to – sorry in advance – jump ship when Windrose launches proper.

Marathon also got plenty of engagement, but underlined some early-game challenges

Bungie’s Marathon secured the #2 spot for new wishlisters this Next Fest, adding 213K new wishlists and bringing its total to about 1.2M. A high 29.8% of those wishlisters played the Server Slam, the second-highest ratio in our top five.

I was very curious about this one, so I spent a good chunk of the weekend playing Marathon (also, Resident Evil; more on that on Thursday). I’m happy to report that mechanically, Marathon is sublime.

Plenty of others were also curious about Bungie’s next endeavour, as Marathon’s Server Slam was Next Fest’s most-played demo. But curiosity doesn’t always equal retention. The concurrent user (CCU) data from the recent Server Slam, while not the be-all-end-all, had a sobering contrast to the ARC Raiders playtest from last October.

While ARC Raiders managed to retain most of its audience throughout its testing period, Marathon’s CCU peaked at the very start of the test (141K) and then entered a steady decline, with a particularly steep drop-off on day two.

This quicker decline points directly to some friction I saw firsthand in my time with Marathon: the first-time user experience (FTUE) isn’t great. While Bungie’s gunplay remains best-in-class – feeling like a snappy, refined evolution of Destiny – the transition from the polished tutorial to the actual extraction loop is jarring.

A messy UI combined with the punishingly quick time-to-kill (TTK) only makes things worse, and many players are being sent back to the lobby by AI before they even encounter another human.

Marathon will likely do well due to Bungie’s pedigree and the fantastic mechanics. But for those outside that group, first impressions matter.

While ARC Raiders succeeded by leaning into co-op and social glue, Marathon feels more weighted toward a hardcore PvP environment in its current state. Once I moved past those confusing first hours and internalised Marathon’s loop, it became clear that Bungie has a unique, fantastic game on their hands. Like, generational.

But in today’s oversaturated attention economy, a rocky start is a massive risk. In the world of Steam’s two-hour refund window, a player who feels cheated out of their gear in the first 60 minutes could be a lost player and lost (future) revenue.

Our data suggests Bungie is mostly preaching to the converted:

• 74% of those who played the Marathon Server Slam previously played Destiny 2.

• There’s less overlap with the current market leader than you might expect: only 48% of Marathon testers had played ARC Raiders.

• These are slightly different audiences, but the sales velocity could be an early signal that Marathon’s onboarding needs some work.

• As of March 2, three days before launch, Marathon had sold just under 250K copies on Steam, as per our estimates. For context, ARC Raiders had sold roughly 550K copies (2.4x more) at the same pre-launch period.

Bungie has the “die-hard” base locked in(🙋), and the studio’s history means plenty will play this one on console. But if Bungie wants to maximise its success here and capture the wider market, it needs to take a leaf from Arc Raiders’ playbook and bridge the gap between stellar presentation and high-friction onboarding.

Gnomes, vampires, and cowboys round things out

As for the rest of the top 5:

• Burglin’ Gnomes, a 1-6 player co-op heist game, managed to amass 144K more wishlsiters during Next Fest, bringing its total close to 700K. Nearly half of its total wishlisters played its Next Fest demo, which is the highest engagement ratio in our top five by a wide margin. It suggests that the game’s core hook is incredibly effective at moving players from vague interest to active testing, likely driven by the viral potential of its physics-based mischief. It was the #2 most played demo of the event, second only to Marathon. Another win for friendslop, it seems. One to watch for sure!

• Vampire Crawlers, from the makers of Vampire Survivors, added 130K wishlists during Next Fest, representing a massive 43.2% of its total wishlist pool. Around 20% of overall wishlisters played the demo. Around 84% of Vampire Crawlers wishlisters previously played Vampire Survivors, so the IP is pulling its weight in terms of discoverability. Crawlers’ hook lies in its combo-multiplier deckbuilding, where breaking the game is part of the game, but there’s a dungeon-crawler overlap to it all. Like Survivors, it’s less of a traditional RPG and more like a high-speed puzzle that’s great for short attention spans and long, moreish play sessions.

• Far Far West secured 101K new wishlists during the week. This push brings its total to over 536K. I also gave this one a shot, and it reminds me of an FPS version of Helldivers 2 in a Western world – in a good way. There’s a lot of Deep Rock Galactic DNA in there, too. Around 19% of Far Far West’s wishlisters played the demo. It seems to be successfully carving out its own space among some much larger established IP. It’s a nice, accessible PvE-focused alternative to the more punishing extraction shooters out there.

However, it’s important to remember that wishlists are just the beginning, and – as we discussed last week – they’re becoming something of a vanity metric. Most games that net wishlists during Next Fest months convert less than 10% into buyers a month after launch.

We’ve focused today on bigger games that already had momentum. So before finishing, I also wanted to spotlight a couple of cool indies that didn’t get over 10K wishlists during the event, but I still had plenty of fun with:

• Saint Slayer from Lilymo Games is awesome. It’s a throwback to the older Castlevania games (the action ones, pre-Symphony of the Night). So it’s great for retro-game fans. Warning, though: the synth-gothic music is very catchy. That’s coming out on April 20 on a bunch of platforms.

• Airframe Ultra from Akupura Games, which is a love letter to 90s high-speed futuristic racing like Wipeout but with brutal, crunchy vehicular combat. It’s blisteringly fast and frantic, and the nostalgic PS1-era low-fi aesthetic really does it for me.

Lots of nostalgia. God, I’m old now, aren’t I?

Meet Alinea at GDC

Tobias and I are heading to GDC, and our calendars are almost full! If you’re going to the event and want to chat to us about all things games data, reply to this email, and we’ll see what we can do.

One more week to go!

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The last word

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[Alinea Analytics boasts the most accurate PC and console estimates in the business. Game makers use our platform to understand their audience, keep an eye on the competition, monitor sales trends, and spot new opportunities. We equip game studios and financial institutions with accurate data and the confidence to make smarter, data-driven decisions. Want to talk about all things games market data? We’d love to chat!]

We’ll be looking at our estimates for four very different games:

• REANIMAL (launched on February 19), a horror adventure game with co-op, which has made $10M+ on Steam via 300K sold.

• YAPYAP (February 3), a PvP game with voice-controlled spells, which has made almost $6M via 800K sold.

• Car Service Together (Feb 4), a 1-4 player car-mechanic sim, which has made $1.6M via 100K+ copies.

• The Midnight Walkers (Jan 29), an extraction shooter with zombies, which has sold fewer than 50K copies and generated less than $500K.

The data includes October 2025 wishlist numbers for each game, how many of these wishlisters played the respective Steam Next Fest demo, and – ultimately – how many of the October 2025 wishlisters have converted to buyers so far.

How many October 2025 REANIMAL Steam wishlisters converted to buyers?

REANIMAL is the most fascinating case study here due to the legacy of developer Tarsier, the $40 price – the highest in the group – and its use of a friend pass (allowing a friend to access a copy of the game for ‘’free’’).

Despite having the largest October 2025 wishlist pool of the four games (408K), REANIMAL saw the lowest demo participation at 16.7%. This makes sense, as REANIMAL was a known game with a bigger marketing push beyond Steam Next Fest (relative to the other games), including press coverage and video previews.

A week after its February 19 launch, REANIMAL managed to convert around 2.7% (11K) of its October 2025 wishlisters to buyers.

You can see above that this percentage is lower than YAPYAP’s. Yet, the number of converted players is roughly the same, and the $40 price point (versus YAPYAP’s $8) means more revenue overall – even considering the friend pass.

The core fans were willing to pay a premium for the Tarsier-developed experience, regardless of the demo’s reach. Some fans likely even avoided playing the demo, already sold on Tarsier’s track record with the first two Little Nightmares games.

YAPYAP and Car Service Together found some success, while The Midnight Walkers struggled

As for the rest of the list:

• YAPYAP’s $8 entry point helped it capitalise on its high demo engagement. An impressive 29.5% of its 294K wishlisters in October had previously tried the demo. So there’s a strong “try-before-you-buy” foundation. YAPYAP was also the #3 most-played demo of the October event. Of the October 2025 wishlisters, 3.3% bought YAPYAP a week after launch, rising to 5.5% as of yesterday (23 days after launch). At under $10, the barrier to entry is minimal for a player who already enjoyed the demo, effectively turning a “maybe” into a “yes” without much hesitation.

• Car Service Together remains the standout performer, relatively speaking. YAPYAP shows the power of a low-friction price point and memeable mechanics, but Car Service Together shows the power of niche. It had the highest conversion of demo players to wishlisters in October 2025 (37.5%) and the higherst conversion from October wishlisters to week-one buyers (3.8%). Players of this niche genre were clearly convinced by the unique gameplay loop, making the $18 price point feel like a fair trade for the fun they already experienced in October.

• The Midnight Walkers struggled to find its footing with a $16 price point and a January 29th launch. It saw a weaker conversion rate of only 1.3% from its 87K October wishlisters, with just 1.6% converting almost a month after launch. Around 16.9% of the October wishlisters played the demo, and it was the #7 most played demo of the event overall, suggesting that the demo failed to impress enough to justify wishlists and – indeed -- purchases.

The Midnight Walkers’ struggle is a cautionary tale and underlines a bit of a discovery paradox. In more competitive and buzzy genres, a demo can actually work against you if it reveals a lack of polish or depth compared to the competition – especially when those giants are running playtests in the same window. I’m looking at you, Arc Raiders.

The low conversion rates also highlight another VERY important thing about wishlists…

Quality over quantity

Many folks still talk about wishlist volume as the North Star of Steam marketing. While it is still important (players get notified when their wishlisted game is released or discounted), wishlist quality is the metric that contributes to keeping the lights on.

As Steam continues to mature and the Coming Soon section becomes more crowded, the gap between wishlist numbers and actual revenue is widening.

I’ll put it bluntly: Wishlists are rapidly entering vanity-metric territory. We’ve reached a point where the “Wishlist Now!” call-to-action is so ubiquitous that it’s becoming background noise.

All this reminds me of the early days of digital marketing, when teams would high-five over millions of page views and impressions while customers weren’t actually buying anything.

Steam is no different. If you have 200K growth-hacked wishlists but a 1% conversion rate, you’ve got window shoppers not buyers.

The gamified wishlist trend is making things harder. In 2025, we saw a surge in studios running milestone campaigns – offering cosmetics or goodies if the community hits 50K, 100k wishlists, or whatever. It’s something our CEO, Rickard Linder, quite rightly underlined in our 2025 report.

A wishlist earned because a player played a game, and enjoyed what they played, carries way more buy intent than a wishlist from a vibes-only CGI trailer in a showcase.

The takeaway is to stop putting so much emphasis on counting wishlists and start measuring commitment. The former builds hype, but only the latter builds a community that intends to buy your game.

This means that actually looking at wishlist conversion data – looking at who’s converting, when, and why – is vital. Luckily, we have that data in our platform, so you if you’d like a free trial to see how it works, get in touch.

And if you’re an indie, you can always DM me on LinkedIn. Always happy to help there.

Speaking of wishlists (shite segue, I know), one of Steam’s top 5 games by wishlists, Resident Evil Requiem, is out TOMORROW. And Steam Next Fest is happening. AND Marathon is having a playtest.

It’s going to be a busy weekend for me as a gamer (let’s goooo!), and next week is going to be an awesome one for Alinea Insight newsletter subscribers, as we’ll be covering it all.

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The last word

Reply to this email – or reach out here – if you have any feedback for the newsletter – or want to request a game for us to cover.

[Alinea Analytics boasts the most accurate PC and console estimates in the business. Game makers use our platform to understand their audience, keep an eye on the competition, monitor sales trends, and spot new opportunities. We equip game studios and financial institutions with accurate data and the confidence to make smarter, data-driven decisions. Want to talk about all things games market data? We’d love to chat!]