2026’s top games by copies sold (so far)
We dig into our estimates for H1 2026’s top games across Steam, Xbox, and PlayStation. Spoiler: the #1 game came out three weeks ago, but there’s more to it… Also, Sony is done with dis
Who am I kidding? You already know Meccha Chameleon is number one.
The latest friendslop success takes #1, on one platform
Meccha Chameleon, the latest in a long line of friendslop hits, launched three weeks ago to enormous viral success and is already approaching 13M copies sold. Despite being Steam-only, it’s still 2026’s top game by copies sold across Steam, Xbox, and PlayStation combined.
The catch is that copies don’t equal cash. Meccha Chameleon’s $58M-plus in gross revenue makes it the #18 game by Steam revenue this year, because of its $5 launch price (nudged to $6 as it went viral, a smart, quiet bit of price optimisation while demand was peaking).
Meccha Chameleon is an riff on Prop Hunt, but instead of morphing into inanimate objects, hiding players become living canvases, using neat MS Paint-style tools to camo themselves against the environment. I’m not the artistic type (one letter off…), but my partner has been obsessed with it, and it’s been a joy to watch, which is the point.
Like most friendslop breakouts, Meccha Chameleon is enormously watchable, and the trivial price makes the impulse buy essentially irresistible. The devs also made sure the first-time experience was instantly legible and frictionless, which matters more than almost anything else for a game that lives or dies on shareable clips.
As our CEO argued in his viral LinkedIn post last week, the past two years mark a genuine structural shift in low-fi social game design, with independent studios pioneering the category now known as friendslop. The comedic potential of failure is doing a lot of the lifting in why these games spread, they’re funny to lose; funnier to watch someone else lose
Where I’d push back on the popular narrative is the “built in two months by two guys in Japan” framing that’s doing the rounds. It’s technically true, Lemorion_1224 on primary dev duties and Haganeiro, but it undersells how the game actually happened, and the real story is more instructive.
Meccha Chameleon’s devs prototyped the concept inside Fortnite’s UEFN, effectively using it as a free testbed, then brought the idea to Steam built on a foundation of reused assets from their earlier games, chiefly Penguin Hotel 1 and 2 and Link Penguins.
The two-month build sat on top of years of accumulated tooling, assets, and hard-won lessons. So yeah, the takeaway here isn’t “go make a friendslop game.” It’s play to your strengths, iterate, throw out the fluff, build smartly on what you already have, with a core mechanic that genuinely works.
It sounds reductive, but it’s a microcosm of the whole industry. If FromSoftware had packed it in after King’s Field, there’s no Elden Ring. If Naughty Dog had stopped after Uncharted 1, no Uncharted 4. If Larian had given up after Divinity: Original Sin, no Baldur’s Gate 3. There’s no Arc Raiders without The Finals – you get the idea.
Institutional knowledge compounds, and it’s that compounding that some of the Western industry is busy dismantling…
The rest of the top five = familiar faces
Nobody had heard of Meccha Chameleon last month, but the rest of the list is what you’d expect, and it’s bangers galore:
FC 26 has scored over 9.1M copies this year across PlayStation, Steam, and Xbox. As we covered last week, it’s had a lift from World Cup fever, discounts, subscription additions, and dedicated tournament modes. Over half of 2026’s copies came via PlayStation, and around 19% of those US sales, up from 12% in 2025. Football fandom finally looks to be hitting fever pitch (ayy) in the States, so FC 27’s launch later this year should post the franchise’s best-ever US numbers, one to watch.
Resident Evil Requiem keeps rolling, at 7.6M copies sold across the three, split roughly 46% PS5, 45% Steam, and 9% Xbox. It’s about to cross half a billion in gross revenue across the three, with around $250M on PS5, $200M on Steam (that lower per-copy take reflecting its big share of buyers in cheaper-priced regions), and almost $50M on Xbox. It shifted nearly 400K copies last month alone ($20M). Resi is another one that keeps on selling. And it’ll continue to do so with discounts, becoming another part of Capcom’s formidable catalogue revenue for years to come.
Forza Horizon 6 just misses a podium spot, with 7.4M sold, 4M on Xbox (console, Windows, and Game Pass players who bought the $59.99 Premium Upgrade Bundle) and 3.4M on Steam. It added another 1.4M across the two last months, so it’s well on track (ayy) to hit 10M this quarter. The planned PS5 port should easily push the yearly total past 15M, given how well Forza Horizon 5 did on PS5 (6.2M in 14 months, but the novelty factor might’ve worn off a bit). Outside CoD and Minecraft, Forza Horizon is now comfortably Xbox’s biggest IP, I reckon.
ARC Raiders has slipped out of the core-gamer conversation but keeps shifting copies at a nice clip, another 7.4M this year. A little under half of those came in January, still riding the launch wave. Monthly sales have expectedly cooled a bit (around 250K last month). MAUs are also down from January’s 10.7M peak to 3.7M, but that settling is what a healthy live-service game looks like nine months post-launch (what is time!?). ARC Raiders has done the hard thing, converting a viral launch into a durable, seasonal-update evergreen with a MAU base most publishers would envy.
Slay the Spire 2 continues to slay
Lastly, Slay the Spire 2 has slayed 7M copies this year in early access on one platform, generating $140M. Despite a $25 US price, its biggest market by players is actually China (35% of players versus 31% in the US), which becomes relevant in a bit.
Slay the Spire 2’s sales curve is heavily front-loaded, with 5.3M of its copies selling in March, launch month. So it’s added roughly 1.7M since (including 270K last month). Slay the Spire 2 is in early access, so there haven’t been any discounts yet, and it’s sitting on 2M wishlists.
When the 1.0 release lands and those wishlists start converting, plus the inevitable PlayStation, Switch, and Xbox versions come in, I can see this comfortably clearing 15M. You love to see it.
We’ve mentioned it before, but it’s worth mentioning again. Slay the Spire 2 only has 60% positive user reviews, which looks grim AF. But take the Chinese-language reviews out, and the total is north of 90% positive.
Most forums and Discord are both blocked in China, so for a game with an unusually large Chinese player base, Steam reviews have become the main way players signal feedback to the devs. They’ve been weaponised to protest a series of early-access balance changes (most notably a contentious boss and card nerfs Mega Crit has since partly walked back), plus a later, unrelated review wave that Steam itself flagged as off-topic.
We broke this down further in a recent client-exclusive newsletter (excerpt in the second half of this free newsletter).
BIG READ: PlayStation is ditching discs, and the writing’s been on the wall for ages
Sony has just announced that, from January 2028, it’ll stop producing physical discs for all new games releasing on PlayStation consoles. After that date, new games will be sold on the PlayStation Store and at retailers “in digital formats only.”
Games released before then are unaffected, so this autumn’s Wolverine, and whatever else ships on disc through 2027, will still exist as a disc you can hold.
The writing is on the wall, though. And I’ve been banging on about this for a while. The most valuable console platform in the West has set a date for the end of the disc, and the rest of the industry now has a deadline. And a lot of folks will follow suit.
This didn’t come out of nowhere. Just last week Rockstar confirmed that GTA 6 would ship with no disc, just a digital version and a code in a box at retail. We argued that the biggest game in the world going disc-less was less a one-off and more a starting gun.
Seven days later, Sony fired it. Not a coincidence…
What it means for PlayStation: control, and the freedom to hold a price
This is all about control. Everything Sony gains from killing the disc flows from the fact that a disc is a unit of value the platform holder stops earning from the moment it’s first sold. A disc can be resold or rented a hundred times, and Sony sees revenue from exactly one of those transactions.
Every resale and rental is value flowing to players and retailers instead of to the platform. Without discs, that converts into a fresh full-price digital sale or it doesn’t happen at all, and both outcomes obviously suit Sony better than a thriving second-hand market.
As we mentioned last week in our GTA FAQs, physical pricing is elastic and beholden to supply and demand, which is why pre-owned discs routinely undercut the digital storefronts. As long as cheap second-hand copies exist on shelves and on eBay, they set a price floor Sony can’t control, and they hand every player a permanent “just wait and buy it used” option.
Sony owns the entire price curve when things are all digital, like how high a game launches, how long it holds that price, and how much and when it ever discounts. Now that the base price of massive-IP games is $80, that control is worth a bloody fortune. Publishers will want to maximise that control too, which flows back to PlayStation’s cut.
I’ve been looking at a lot of the reactions online, and the throughline is in the community since the announcement is some version of “so much for games ever going on sale again.” That instinct is correct.
Sony said it itself in its recent Q&A for its games segment:
Most of the value of our ecosystem is driven by third-party publishers, who benefit from our large install base, strong community engagement, and monetization tools. This supports a shift toward a true digital platform business.’’
This move is all about profitability and control for PlayStation, at the expense of consumer choice. But developers do have something to gain, too.
Silver lining: Developers have one fewer thing to worry about
Before you can press a disc, you need a gold master that clears first-party certification, which has to happen about three months before the ship date. On paper, that means a finished, cert-ready build of a game a quarter of a year before anyone’s meant to play it.
The reality is that already-stressed devs throw together a rough, held-together-with-tape build whose job is to survive cert, get it stamped, and then actually ship the game via a mandatory day-one patch.
This is how it’s often done in AAA, but assembling those builds pulls the team’s attention onto cert box-ticking tasks that should come after the core development, like controller-disconnect handling, storefront compliance, edge-case plumbing, and all that.
Polish can be the difference between a clean release and a rocky one, so technically a digital-only title can punt the “final” build much closer to launch.
For a studio up against the wall (read: all of them…) that flexibility could mean the world. So that’s one silver lining. But…
The hammer blow for games retail
The pre-owned market was one of rusty engines keeping specialist retailers alive. The margins on new physical games are so thin for retailers, but used games are where the real money was. I used to work in GAME in the UK between 2006 and 2013, and we always had targets from head office for selling a certain share of used games.
That engine has been sputtering for a while. GAME has already stopped accepting trade-ins, and CEX is basically gone.
Why pre-order a “physical” copy from Amazon or GameStop when what arrives is a slip of cardboard with a download code, no better than buying it on the PlayStation Store, and often slower?
A code-in-box has none of the things that made physical worth choosing: no resale value, no lending, less collectability. The physical channel has no reason to exist.
Is this the nail in the coffin for physical games?
For new PlayStation games, effectively yes. Xbox is already further down this road, and Nintendo is the last major holdout, though even Nintendo is nudging hard toward digital (cheaper digital pricing, and the Digital Game Card as a soft bridge). With Sony now committed to a date, the pressure on the remaining two to justify the cost and complexity of a disc pipeline only grows.
The broader context made this feel inevitable. Console has been drifting digital for fifteen years, pushed by multi-game subscriptions, the dominance of free-to-play, digital-only perks like pre-loading and early access, and disc-less hardware, the expensive PS5 Pro shipped without a drive at all.
One interesting irony is that vinyl, film, and print are all enjoying an analogue revival right now. Games, a younger medium, are sprinting the other way, because unlike a record label, a platform holder owns the storefront and captures far more by closing the disc than by keeping it.
Knock-on effects worth flagging
Preservation and ownership are going to take a pounding. A disc-less library is a licensed library, playable at the platform’s discretion. So the consumer doesn’t own the collection they supposedly control.
Collector’s editions, already hollowing out, have become pure merchandise with a code attached or advanced-access upsells. And the used market’s disappearance removes the one mechanism that let cash-strapped players recoup costs by trading in, which bites hardest precisely when household budgets are tightest.
This was how I had so many new games as a kiddo. I was constantly trading in the previous game I bought (cheers, Electronics Boutique’s 10-day no-questions-asked trade-in policy).
Setting the disc cutoff at January 2028 all but confirms the next PlayStation isn’t arriving before then, too.
Did GTA 6 fire the starting gun?
We can trace this back further than GTA, as we’ve covered above, but GTA has emboldened Sony here, which is a chain reaction that will further embolden others. Sony also knew exactly what it was doing by waiting a week.
GTA 6 going disc-less was some very effective coverage for Sony – as are the imminent Xbox layoffs. These negative PR beats come in waves, as the attention economy is finite and moves quickly. There’s a reason we had so much bad news on the day GTA 6 pre-orders were lifted last week.
In the end, though, the discless 2028 decision was never about consumer preference. It’s clearly controlling price, availability, and the player relationship.
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"The reality is that already-stressed devs throw together a rough, held-together-with-tape build whose job is to survive cert, get it stamped, and then actually ship the game via a mandatory day-one patch."
Explains a lot!
Makes the Battlefield 6 launch even more impressive but also explains why some game mechanics and features have received or are receiving major updates post launch.