Friday, April 3

March’s top new PC/console games; Steam’s wishlist email changes


[The GameDiscoverCo game discovery newsletter is written by ‘how people find your game’ expert & company founder Simon Carless, and is a regular look at how people discover and buy video games in the 2020s.]

Wow, there’s certainly a lot going out there in Discoveryland. And this leads to a special joint-lead newsletter, since we have monthly data and some timely Steam wishlist-related notification reporting changes to impart. So let’s get to it…

Before we start, did you see GDCo’s ‘special’ April 1st drop of our Insights Lab (silly), including real-life metrics like The Rage Index (“Steam tags sized by total negative reviews generated”), and The Abandonment Leaderboard (“most copies sold with a median playtime under 2 hours”)? Hey, GameDeveloper.com wrote a cute piece on it…

[FREE DEMO OF GDCo PRO? You too can get a gratis demo of our GameDiscoverCo Pro company-wide ‘Steam deep dive’ & console data by contacting us today – >90 orgs have it. Or, signing up to GDCo Plus gets the rest of this newsletter and Discord access, plus more.]

Let’s start out with a whole bunch of game platform and discovery news, as follows:

Just as we did for Feb. 2026 and for Jan. 2026, we’re trying to keep you all up-to-date with what new games are actually selling on Steam (and console), according to GameDiscoverCo Pro data. And above are the top new releases for March 2026, newly incorporating a basic unit estimate for games played on Steam, but sold off Steam*.

(*We’re discovering some newer AAA-y titles have a surprisingly large off-Steam review percentage: Death Stranding 2 has 43% of all its reviews from off-Steam keys (!) We’re in the process of better integrating this into unit estimates, and will do an article about that shortly.)

Anyhow, the big winner for new Steam games by units in March 2026 was roguelike deckbuilder sequel Slay The Spire 2, at >5m copies sold. As we noted post-release: “The original has 10m players with 26 hrs median, 74 hrs average played, and the sequel has co-op. Game over?”

Also faring well was open-world ARPG Crimson Desert – 2.2m on Steam and >3m including PlayStation and Xbox SKUs, awaited extraction shooter Marathon (which did 920k units on Steam, but less well on console), and Death Stranding 2, which added >400k copies on Steam, and ~2.5m sold including the original PlayStation SKU.

On the more indie side, inexpensive lottery scratcher idle game Scritchy Scratchy zoomed past 500k units, character-festooned remake Poker Night At The Inventory frontloaded its way to >300k, and 100 v. 100 indie shooter Over The Top: WWI – as featured in a recent newsletter – also made the Top 10.

Revenue-wise, you may not be surprised to see Slay The Spire 2 (which is $25) at the top of the ‘new releases on Steam’ revenue charts, with >$110m gross. But Crimson Desert, at $70 (less in some territories!) got close to it, topping $100m on Steam.

Otherwise, it’s lots of the games you might expect, with only Marathon, Death Stranding 2 & the Monster Hunter Stories RPG spinoff exceeding $10m, and $20-$25 indies (Esoteric Ebb, Retro Rewind) sneaking in at the bottom, with >$3m gross.

It’s also worth contextualizing those new releases alongside the other top-grossing games of the month. Slay The Spire 2 & Crimson Desert slot in at #2 and #3, behind only continual F2P top-grosser Counter-Strike 2. And Apex Legends and PUBG Battlegrounds continue to make the Top 10.

Notable for its continuing success from previous months as a premium title? Resident Evil Requiem, which launched on Feb. 26th, added another $59m gross, for a total of ~2.5m and $134m gross (and >3m including off-platform purchases!) on Steam alone. We have it at >7m units and >$400 million gross, multi-platform – not bad, huh?

Finally, here’s a quick look at the top new PlayStation and Xbox releases in March 2026. Crimson Desert (>900k on PlayStation, <300k on Xbox) made the biggest splash, but baseball game MLB The Show 26 – which doesn’t even have a PC version. – still had a strong showing, topping 1m units, 93% of them (!) in the U.S.

Wrestling game WWE 2K26 also made it to 600k across all platforms, with more than 350k units of that on PlayStation, and with strong Middle East interest on PlayStation (around 15% of the players – we’re guessing WWE is huge there?)

Otherwise, Marathon didn’t do as well on console as some were expecting, with ‘only’ 400k of its 1.3m LTD units on PlayStation and Xbox. Why? This ‘deeper extraction shooter’ gambit plays well in North America (61% of Marathon’s PlayStation players), but less in territories like China, Brazil and the Middle East – which account for as much as 35% of Res Evil Requiem PS5’s sales, but only 4.5% of Marathon’s.

Finally, we didn’t graph our Switch eShop estimates, but we know Pokémon Pokopia sold 2.2m units in the first 4 days. And it’s the runaway new seller in March. Blue Prince approached 50k eShop units with its Switch 2 debut, and Monster Hunter Stories 3, Scott Pilgrim EX and MLB The Show 26 all managed in the low tens of thousands. (It’s a LONG gap up to Pokopia, tho…)

An example of the kind of email somebody with thousands of wishlisted Steam games gets! (Some mass discount emails, lots of individual game launches.)

Those who publish on Steam know that wishlist notification emails (and related Steam app notifications!) can be a lifeblood for players knowing your game is out – and/or discounted. So Valve’s announcement that they’re changing the wishlist notification stats needs a little analysis.

Our hypothesis of how this came about was: the 2026 Steam Spring Sale notifications appear to have been delayed or not triggered properly. (At least, they didn’t go out promptly on March 19th.) We think this led Steam to look into the system more generally, realizing the current wishlist notification stats weren’t the most descriptive.

As a result, they decided to change those stats, which live at the bottom of https://partner.steampowered.com/app/wishlist/XXXXXX/ – where XXXXXX is your game’s Steam AppID. Here’s an example for a real-life game:

So, what’s changing here? As Steam explains: “Previously, the number reported on the Wishlist Notifications page on the Steamworks Financials site was the number of accounts processed. This wasn’t quite the same as the number of notifications actually sent. There are a few reasons why we might process an account but not notify:

  • The customer has opted out emails for discounts on wishlist items.

  • The account has been disabled.

  • The customer has over 25 items on their wishlist on discount, which is the maximum number of items we’ll include in an email.

With these changes, the number of notifications reported for a game will only include cases where the email was actually sent and the game was included in the email. The conditions around when we send an email to a customer have not changed, this is just a change to reporting.”

In other words, you shouldn’t have ever expected 175,000 people to get emails every time your game with 175k wishlists was on sale. (Our Steam Fan Snapshot data set of 10k players has a median of 87 games wishlisted, for example, way over the 25 limit.) But the notifications interface made it look a bit like that was happening….

What’s interesting about this change? Well, it may now be possible to understand if there’s ‘better’ times to discount where your game appears more often in actual emails, since you’ll see the real count here, vs. the ‘we’ve cycled through the process’ count. You may not know if it’s a big (headline!) or smaller (body!) mention, but it’ll be a real #.

Also worth noting: the email system seems to pick a subset of the games, so as to not overwhelm. (It won’t always go for the maximum 25 if a player has 25 games on sale, and there’s also cooldowns.) And don’t worry, your Early Access and 1.0 launches get a guaranteed standalone email, and always have (excepting the very occasional flub.)



Source link

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *