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Wardogs has reached 2.2M copies sold on Steam alone, outpacing Arc Raiders (1.7M on Steam, launch aligned) and Helldivers 2 (1M) - @alineaanalytics estimates. These games kept their momentum for quite some time, and Wardogs still has a way to go, but still. Wardogs has also generated over $70M, already the #7 new 2026 Steam game by revenue. It’s also generated more revenue than Marathon has generated across ALL PLATFORMS to date. It’s another reminder that, when it comes to live-service games, community trumps budget and pedigree. This is an outstanding performance for a studio launching a shooter in 2026, especially given that Bulkhead was facing financial turmoil not even a year ago. I bet Team17 are chuffed they picked this one up. Wardogs hits the modern pricing sweet spot, sitting below the friction point of a $70 AAA release while capturing that chunky volume of players priced out of premium titles. Seven days in, and Wardogs has converted 11% of its wishlisters into buyers. About 57% of those wishlists were added in the last month, with roughly 15% from one-to-three months ago and another 15% from three-to-six months ago. Wardogs, like Arc Raiders, had a late, hot hype cycle, not a slow burn. And as we know, fresh wishlists convert far better than stale ones. Older wishlists suffer from intent decay, more likely to turn into passive bookmarks. As for what's next, Wardogs isn’t hitting console until 2028, so the first question is retention. DAUs are still climbing (peaking at 1.6M yesterday) and the team is hard at work fixing the launch issues, but PvP live-service is a zero-sum fight for attention. Call of Duty is around the corner, and GTA not far behind that (not on Steam, but still). So Wardogs‘ growth story is far from over. It’s got some maintenance hills to climb and a strong roadmap to deliver on before it can dream of reaching the heights of, say, an Arc Raiders. But make no mistake: even if it never sold another copy, Wardogs is already a huge success. It’s a $40 shooter aimed at a slightly unfashionable audience that stuck to its guns and turned out bloody great. You can’t really replicate what Bulkhead pulled off here, but they knew exactly who the game was for, priced it fairly, built the community before launch (and actually talked to them), cut the PR nonsense, were authentic (to a fault at times), and made something cool. You can’t really replicate what Bulkhead pulled off here, but they knew exactly who the game was for, priced it fairly, built the community before launch (and actually talked to them), cut the PR nonsense, were authentic (to a fault at times), and made something cool. And the community focus is continuing. Bulkhead is actively pushing incremental updates and patch notes focused heavily on reactive quality-of-life feedback. Excited to see where the team goes next. Fair play. Bigger write-up, including more wishlist conversion, review data, and player crossover, on today's free Substack.

gamescom 2026 was AWESOME. Here are the event's top games by new Steam wishlists between Aug 23 and 30 (@alineaanalytics estimates). The top spot wasn't a game at all. The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt’s upcoming expansion, Songs of the Past, nabbed #1 with 451K Steam wishlists by the end of the weekend. It debuted at Opening Night Live, and it’s the first Witcher 3 expansion in over a decade, landing next year after a full Witcher 3 remaster (free for existing owners!) arrives next month. The Witcher 3 has sold around 66M copies, and I’ll be one of those owners jumping back in to refresh myself on the core game (like there isn’t enough to play!), then play the expansion next year. This is all part of CDPR’s plan. The studio is clearly whetting everyone’s appetite for The Witcher 4 in 2028 via a classic bridge strategy. Releasing a free 4K remaster next month – followed by a proper expansion in 2027 – keeps IP top-of-mind across a huge gap between content (games-wise, anyway). It kind of echoes Capcom’s evergreen catalogue strategy. And outsourcing co-development to Fool’s Theory (a studio led by trusted Witcher 3 veterans) keeps CDPR’s internal headcount focused on The Witcher 4. Warlock: Dungeons & Dragons, published by Wizards of the Coast and developed by Invoke Studios (a team of ex-Far Cry, Watch Dogs, and Splinter Cell devs), took #2. It’s due to launch in 2027, and it looks brilliant so far. It’s a dark-fantasy open world with third-person spell-slinging. It’s a very Witcher-ish aesthetic. As you might expect, 48% of Warlock’s Steam wishlisters have played Baldur’s Gate 3, and 46% have played The Witcher 3. One to watch. For sure! Ananta took #3 with 302K new wishlists. It’s an open-world game that looks like GTA and Persona had a baby. It was published by NetEase, developed by Naked Rain, and got a trailer at Opening Night Live. I got hands-on at the show, and it wears its influences openly; there’s literal web-slinging (very Spider-Man) and a LOAD of mini-games (Like a Dragon). It’s free-to-play and out in January. For Ananta, Naked Rain is taking the free-to-play, cosmetics-only route. That’s certainly a choice for a single-player open-world game. Without gacha mechanics driving high ARPU, Ananta is betting purely on top-of-funnel reach and long-term retention. This puts pressure on skin appeal when there’s no multiplayer lobby to flex in (although, co-op is reportedly coming later). Then there’s Lego Skylines (273K wishlists between Aug 23 and 30), which does exactly what it says on the tin. It’s a cosy Lego twist on the city-builder genre, as shallow or as deep as you fancy (five min quick sesh or ten-hour no-lifer session; latter for me). There’s some family-friendly stuff in there like couch co-op, which is only really viable on console. Iceflake Studios, which Paradox acquired back in 2020 is developing this one. So Paradox is probably looking for a family-friendly onramp to its rad Cities: Skylines games. The overlap there is plain, with 33% of Lego Skylines wishlisters having played Cities: Skylines and 16% Skylines II. There’s no doubt plenty of parents here (and uncles, ahem) planning to indoctrinate the next gen of city-builders. I’ll definitely be playing with my youngest nephew. This one could be big and educational. I’m very curious to see more. Catch a data-packed write-up on the full list on the new free Substack (link is in my X bio).

The new Spidey movie has given a massive lift to Spider-Man 2 on PS5 and Steam (@alineaanalytics estimates) So far, Spider-Man 2 has sold another 316K copies since Brand New Day hit cinemas on 30 July, generating $11M+ across PS5 and Steam in under two weeks. About 20% of the film-window PS5 copies were physical, and another 274K players jumped in for the first time via PlayStation Plus. In total, Spidey 2 has slung its way past 18.2M copies sold (92%+ on PS5) and over $1.2 billion (!!!) since launching nearly three years ago. This past weekend it topped 1M daily active users for the first time since launch week, roughly 2.6x its pre-film daily engagement. While some smart discounts had an impact, hype around the movie did most of the work here, as shown by the pricing data in our platform (which you can overlay on copies-sold deltas!) On PS5, Spider-Man 2 had the same $29.39 sale price during a February promotion and during this film window. The Feb sale moved ~6.3K copies a day, but the new film window is moving ~15K a day at that identical price – 2.4x on average and peaking at 4.5x on the biggest day. Steam is similar. At a flat $40.19, the film is selling 2.3x what the same $40.19 discount did back in June. This is one of the clearest transmedia halo effects we've ever measured. And it’s still an untapped opportunity. Right now, these lifts happen mostly by accident. Brand New Day landed almost three years after the game. Imagine if a platform holder or publisher managed to align a major game and a major film. If only dev timelines and delays weren’t so hellish… Movie and especially game development cycles are notoriously unpredictable, and syncing two multi-year, multi-hundred-million-dollar productions to swing in together is a logistical nightmare. But for the handful of publishers making movies AND games in the same IP, surely one of these has to line up. I'd kill to see that impact. Also, go and watch Brand New Day! Best Spidey flick since Spider-Man 2.

Here's our PlayStation copies sold ranking for July (@alineaanalytics estimates). Beyond the CoD doing ports doing GANGBUSTERS, the thing that stands out is Halo's notably slow start on PlayStation, which ironically stings even more next to the success of two effort-light CoD ports. Halo sold 351K copies on PS5 in July and 452K on PlayStation to date (almost $28M). $60 was WAY too much for this one. And for comparison, Halo has sold through 212K on Steam and around 900K on Xbox (console and PC). One can’t help wondering what could have been if Halo had kept the trajectory it had around Halo 3 and Reach. A remake of the game that started it all landing this softly on a new platform makes me pretty bloody sad, as a Halo fan. You can catch a full analysis of the ranking on Substack (link is in my bio), but the gist is that July’s PS5 chart is all about nostalgia and the catalogue. A proven, beloved old game, dropped at the right moment and, just as importantly, at the RIGHT PRICE, can out-earn almost anything new and buy a bit of breathing room in the slate. CoD got it. Halo didn’t. Sixty dollars for what’s essentially a graphical touch-up of a 2001 game was always gonna be a roughsell, and players clearly weren’t having it. Despite this being a PlayStation chart, there’s ironically some important data and lessons for Xbox’s strategy here...

Palworld has sold over 30M copies, generating $700M! (@alineaanalytics estimates) Obviously, that makes Palworld one of the biggest new gaming IPs ever, and about 86% of the copies come via Steam. - On Steam, Palworld sold nearly 1.5M additional copies since its 1.0 launch ($25M in gross revenue). - On PlayStation, the game moved roughly 300K additional copies post-1.0 (about $7M in revenue). - On Xbox, copies since 1.0 reached a little under 70K copies (about $1M in revenue), cannibalised by the Game Pass inclusion. PlayStation and Xbox yield higher gross revenue per copy sold due to geographic distribution. Steam commands a much higher market share in territories like China, where regional pricing scales the base price down ($11 in China versus $21 in the US). The 1.0 launch also brought loads of players back into the fold, pushing daily active users (DAUs) to an average of 3.7M over last weekend. Monthly active users (MAUs) are currently pacing to cross 10M this month across PC and console, as well. To many players, Palworld satisfies the open-world monster-catching fantasy that 90s kids grew up wanting, while its survival systems add systemic depth. Our 1.0 sentiment analysis indicates that despite minor optimisation bugs, player response remains overwhelmingly positive. Steam reviewers frequently highlight how the loop of monster catching, base building, and resource automation creates a sticky progression structure that sustains engagement well past the 100-hour mark. This is reflected in our playtime distribution data: - 20% of Steam owners (roughly 5.2M players) have logged over 100 hours in Palworld, while 0.7% (nearly 200K users) have logged over 500 hours. - The playtime curve on PS5 closely mirrors Steam’s profile. Xbox, however, displays a fundamentally different engagement profile due to the “try-and-ditch” dynamics of Game Pass. - Nearly 50% of Xbox players dropped the game under the 5-hour mark (compared to 12% on Steam and 23% on PlayStation), and only 8% crossed 100 hours of playtime. Find more data and analysis on the free Alinea Substack (link's on my profile!)

Steam is having another record year for revenue (@alineaanalytics estimates) In the first half of 2026, games on Steam generated $11.1B in gross revenue, the platform’s highest-ever half-year. That’s up 14.5% on H1 2025, and up 8% even on the holiday-heavy H2 2025, which is remarkable given the back half of the year usually wins on seasonal sales and holiday buys. Zoom out over the last decade and things get really crazy. There’s obviously a visible dip as the market normalised after the pandemic sugar-high, but the long arc is relentlessly up, with seven half-years of growth. Some takeaways: - H1 2026 is 4.7x larger than H1 2017, so Steam has roughly quintupled its half-year revenue in ten years. - Steam’s full-year revenue has climbed from around $5.5B in 2017 to roughly $20B in 2025. - Steam did more in the first six months of 2026 than in all of 2020, a year when the entire world was locked indoors and buying games to cope, and nearly matched 2021. Another trend worth watching, though, is the one with chunky implications for anyone shipping a game, especially in AAA. There’s a shrinking share of revenue coming from new games (games releasing in a given year): - H1 2024: 29% of revenue came from 2024 releases. - H1 2025: 27% came from 2025 releases. - H1 2026: just 21% has come from 2026 releases In other words, back catalogue revenue has climbed from 71% to 79%. Obviously, release calendars matter here, but I’ve long covered the fact that publishers are getting savvier with their back catalogues (discounts, bundles, timed sales). And the sheer volume of releases keeps accumulating. Every new game increasingly competes not with this year’s rivals but with a decade of proven hits available at a fraction of the price. Adding fuel to the fire for AAA is the diminishing graphical returns (a 2021 game looks close enough to a 2026 one for most players) and the hardware crisis. So that pull toward the back catalogue only strengthens for these sorts of experiences. When a new release has to compete with a decade of discounted classics, the money pools at the very top (a handful of viral hits, beloved sequels, and big franchises). Meanwhile, the long tail launches into a market that already has more great games than anyone has time to play. While I’m a firm believer that truly great games will always find their audience, everyone is fighting the catalogue in one way or another. And that’s becoming a harder battle to win. Deep dive in the new free Substack (link in bio).

Sony has announced that, from January 2028, it’ll stop producing physical discs for all new games releasing on PlayStation consoles. 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. 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. This move is all about profitability and control for PlayStation, at the expense of consumer choice. But developers do have something to gain, too. 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. 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 for the shops. 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. 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, so it's the end for most dedicated games retailers. The nail in the coffin. Setting the disc cutoff at January 2028 all but confirms the next PlayStation isn't arriving before then, too, of course.

Why is GTA 6 shipping discless? The first, biggest and most obvious reason is killing the second-hand market. The whole value proposition of a physical disc, from the player’s side, is the pre-owned and rental markets: more control over your library, the ability to sell a game on or rent it cheaply. But more control for consumers means less control for the publisher. A disc can be resold or rented a hundred times, and Rockstar earns nothing after that first sale. So the entire second-hand and rental economy is value flowing to players and retailers instead of to Rockstar. The HORROR. /s A code-in-box can’t be resold or rented, which converts all of that into either a fresh full-price sale or no play at all, both of which suit Rockstar far better than a thriving used market. The bigger prize hiding inside that, though, is price control. Physical pricing is more elastic and far more beholden to supply and demand, which is why pre-owned discs routinely undercut PlayStation’s and Xbox’s digital stores. As long as cheap second-hand copies exist, they set a price floor Rockstar can’t control and they give every player a permanent “just wait and buy it used” option. Remove the disc and Rockstar and the platforms own the entire price curve, including how high they hold the price and how much (and when) they ever discount it. The second reason is Rockstar’s near-pathological secrecy. This is the most leak-averse studio in the industry by my count, and it won’t want physical copies “falling off the back of a truck” ahead of the street date, which, as we know, has always been a risk with discs. I suspect that’s part of the calculus here. And the code-in-box approach with scheduled pre-load handles it neatly: the actual game data only unlocks at launch via the servers, so even a leaked physical copy reveals nothing before release. The third, smallest reason is pre-orders and the funnel. Digital pre-orders capture full payment upfront (on PlayStation, you pay in full the moment you pre-order a digital game), which is better for Rockstar’s forecasting and cash flow. Anyway, I've been chatting to the press and clients all week about GTA 6, so I thought I'd share my thoughts in a big brain FAQ brain dump. You can catch that in the free @alineaanalytics newsletter on Substack (link's in my bio)

So GTA is indeed coming in at $80, with a $100 deluxe version, right in line with what I expected (and wrote about a year ago). I was quite vocal about how silly I thought the $100 base discourse was, and I’m glad I stuck to my guns on the $80. Of course, Rockstar COULD have charged $100+ for base GTA 6, the market would’ve borne it, but they didn’t, and that was the right choice. I originally thought the price would come in at about $70-$80, with the higher tiers doing the heavy lifting for superfans. This is exactly what Rockstar has done with the $100 edition. As I mentioned before, there's a few reasons this is smart. The real cash cow isn't the game itself really; it's GTA Online and its recurring revenue. Capping GTA 6's addressable audience at launch to squeeze the base price would have been penny-wise and pound-foolish. They’d have needlessly been limiting the top of the funnel that feeds the thing that actually prints money for a decade. And let's not forget there's a cost-of-living crisis. A $100 base-pricing floor would have exactly the players already feeling the squeeze. Rockstar's biggest challenge this time is one GTA hasn't really faced before: shifting players off GTA 5. A higher base price raises the switching cost, and that works directly against GTA 5-to-GTA 6 migration. Live service is mostly zero-sum in today's oversaturated attention economy, so GTA 6 isn't just up against other studios' games, it's up against TikTok, Netflix, and its own predecessor. The cohort a $100+ base price would actually deter isn't the whole GTA 5 base; plenty of those players are on old hardware and won't be buying a PS5 game at any price. It's specifically the players who do have the hardware but are watching their spending. That's the group you most want to convert, and the group a higher price punishes hardest. None of this means leaving money on the table, because the tiered model gives you best of both worlds. Rockstar could have comfortably charged $150+ for another higher-tier edition with a week of early access, but they didn’t do that. I love that for them. Gating access to earn a quick buck among us FOMO sufferers (I’ve been got there) has always felt a bit gross to me. Either way, the players with the disposable income to pay for the $100 edition will pay it, and that's the industry norm for AAA now anyway. Rockstar is sort of having it both ways, keeping the base accessible to protect the funnel, and you let the future whales – of which there’ll be many – fund the margin at the top. And to be clear, this is a company that can absolutely afford to think long-term. GTA is one of the top-grossing entertainment properties of all time, GTA 5 has sold 225 million copies and is still going, shifting hundreds of thousands a month more than twelve years on. Rockstar is a smart studio with an unusual amount of decision-making power for a developer under a publisher. So I think they made the right call to cap it at $80 base. Rockstar, Strauss Zelnick and co were always too smart to go above that.

Steam Next Fest hard truths... It's becoming less useful. There were over 4,300 demos this time by our count, so standing out is hard – and harder than it’s ever been. And the metric developers are chasing hardest, wishlists, are sliding into vanity-metric territory. A wishlist is not an indicator of launch sales. It never really was, but it’s getting more obvious. We looked at the top games from the June 2025 Next Fest and tracked how many of their wishlisters actually became buyers once the games launched (as per our estimates): - Dispatch, one of the better converters, turned about 25% of its June 2025 wishlisters into buyers within three months. It’s still sitting on the other 75%. - No, I’m Not a Human converted around 15% of its 189K wishlisters three months post-launch. - Jump Space managed about 10%. - Dead as Disco converted roughly 5% within 30 days (it came out last month) - Ball X Pit hit about 26% at 90 days, near the top of the range. - Pioner converted around 1%, sunk by heavy technical and optimisation problems at launch. So even the strong performers leave the large majority of their wishlists unconverted, and most of those people won’t buy until a heavy discount lands much later, if at all. Again, the lesson is the uncomfortable one, but one worth saying. Being a top Next Fest game undeniably helps visibility, but it’s the games that became the zeitgeist on the strength of their quality, and the marketing around them, that actually got bought. None of this is to take the wind out of the event’s sails. It’s always a highlight of my quarter (or my third, I guess?) But its discoverability problem is really a microcosm of gaming’s, and Steam’s, discoverability problem at large. Next Fest is becoming a tick-box exercise that only pays off for the absolute upper tier. For some devs, it might genuinely be smarter to drop a demo outside the event window and own your own spotlight rather than fight 4,300 others for the algorithm’s attention. We analysts often get obsessed with these kinda of events, but the impact is modest even for the biggest games, and minimal for anything outside the top 25 (hell, top 10). Some games will benefit. Most won’t. My advice would be to stop putting so much weight on wishlists and watch two things instead: demo playtime and demo-to-wishlist attachment rate. Both measure whether people who tried the game actually liked it enough to come back, which is a far better predictor of launch conversion than a wishlist count that mostly captures idle curiosity. More on Subtack (Link in bio!)

Astro Bot has sold 4.3M copies, generating around $250M for PlayStation (@alineaanalytics estimates). The budget is likely under $100M, including marketing, so that's A LOT of profit. But Astro could also be a Trojan horse for PlayStation to reach an audience it's mostly conceded to Nintendo, if Sony can stick the landing and nurture Astro right. Despite a somewhat slow start by first-party standards, Astro won Game of the Year at @geoffkeighley's @thegameawards (boosting sales considerably, see the spike at the end of December there) and has in the past year become a proper evergreen seller. As covered in the Alinea Substack yesterday, Astro has shifted over 600K copies this year alone as per our estimates (almost $33M) and is still selling 100K a month well over a year after launch. Every single month this year, Astro Bot's top crossover game is Astro's Playroom, the thing pre-installed on every PS5. So two things are happening: new PS5 owners are buying Astro Bot in droves, and that free pack-in is doing a banging job of turning them into buyers. Every month, the #2, #3, and #4 crossovers are, without fail, Fortnite, Roblox, and Minecraft. So beyond the PS-diehard buyers who propped up the launch, Astro's true, evergreen demographic has been kiddos and families. That demo has been a huge gap in PlayStation's first-party repertoire. RIP Sackboy. Now, Astro Bot is quietly turning into one of PlayStation's only successfulfamily-friendly brands in the modern era, and I reckon Sony's only getting started. I'd bet on a film or TV announcement before long, Astro-ified PlayStation characters and all. In yesterday's SEC filing, Sony said it plans to further expand its films and TV shows based on PlayStation game IP. I'd also put money on an Astro sequel sooner than you'd think, timed around the incoming PlayStation handheld, which I'd wager Playroom ends up on too (as covered, that funnel has worked wonders). Team Asobi works fast and lean: Astro Bot took about 60 people three years, as per @Chris_Dring at @thegamebusiness (subscribe!!!). We're coming up to two years since Astro launched. Astro is IDEAL for a handheld: it's pick-up-and-play, visually showcases the hardware, and demonstrates the DualSense features Sony loves to show off. It's basically Sony's Wii Sports. They almost have to do it. It's no Mario, sure, but PlayStation's been chasing the family crowd for ages with not much to show for it, a few decent swings aside. Astro's the first real crack in that door. If Sony keeps growing the brand, Astro's a perfect on-ramp into the rest of the PlayStation catalogue, which is exactly what LEGO Horizon Adventures was meant to be and, by our estimates, sadly clearly wasn't. Maybe Astro Bot ends up being what that game never managed. Sorry, Herman! If I were Sony, I'd lean on that momentum HARD in the handheld marketing. There's a real chance to breathe life back into Ratchet & Clank and other IP gathering dust, and an obvious fit for PS Plus while they're at it. Once the brand's had a bit more love, an Astro: Horizon or Astro: Uncharted could be a brilliant way to nudge players toward the bigger stuff once they're ready to move past platformers. Astro Bot and Astro's Playroom have already done the groundwork. So yeah, the pieces are all there: the brand, the funnel, the timing, a handheld that's crying out for a mascot. Sony just has to not fumble it.

Here's the Summer Game Fest titles that got the most new wishlists between June 2 and 8 (@alineaanalytics estimates). Resident Evil Veronica has already netted 522K Steam wishlists as of yesterday, the most of any game shown at SGF. Launch-aligned, our estimates show that Veronica is accumulating wishlists 1.5x faster than Requiem did. It’s early days, but that is a remarkable number for a deeper-cut Resi remake. Guild Wars 3 was #2, pulling in 435K. The MMO leans hard into traversal and faster, more action-oriented combat, and comes to console for the first time. Well-timed 20% discounts on GW2 expansions have seen some revenue gains for ArenaNet, too. 1666 Amsterdam from Panache Digital, the studio led by Assassin’s Creed co-creator Patrice Désilets, got 383K wishlisters. There’s a free prologue available, and it’s had a bit of a bumpy start. Of the prologue’s Steam reviews, just 61% are positive. The complaints cluster around expectations: players went in expecting action and found a narrative-led experience. Lords of the Fallen 2 took #4 with 182K Steam wishlists. CI Games confirmed the game – previously slated as an Epic Games Store exclusive – is now coming to Steam, and the numbers suggest that was the right call. Lords 2 looks like it plays rad and borrows a lot from Bloodborne – faster, more fluid, and very bloody. As a Soulslike obsessive, I wishlisted QUICKLY. Onimusha: Way of the Sword added 174K Steam wishlists in the past week, pushing its total past 1M (the page has been live since late 2024). A demo dropped after Friday’s PlayStation State of Play and has been played by around 300K people on Steam – but only 6% of Steam wishlisters have tried it, so there’s an untapped audience yet to be converted by hands-on play. Crossfire, the single-player, narrative-focused tactical shooter debut from That's No Moon, got 160K wishlists. It's built on Smilegate’s huge multiplayer IP and backed by a $100M investment. That’s No Moon has worked in deep secrecy since the early 2020s, pulling talent from Naughty Dog, Infinity Ward, and Bungie, and that pedigree shows in the third-person reveal’s cinematic pacing and combat. Tomb Raider: Legacy of Atlantis – a reimagining of the 1996 classic – got 137K new Steam wishlists, bringing its total well over 1M on Steam. Of those who wishlisted in June, 23% also wishlisted Resident Evil Veronica, 19% Control Resonant, and 14% Onimusha. That’s your serial-wishlister cohort in plain sight – people stacking lists during the event. Whether they convert is, as ever, the open question. HAEX (148K wishlists on Steam), a co-op survival shooter, got strong pull from the co-op horror and “friendslop” crowd. 43% its of wishlisters have played Phasmophobia, 42% R.E.P.O., and 41% Peak. That overlap cuts both ways: a receptive, well-defined audience, but perhaps also a saturated one? Those sub-$10 budget co-op games sell volume. Alongside quality, the biggest questions around HAEX are its price and virality potential. Gundam Rogue Orbit, a third-person mecha action game based on the iconic Japanese IP, got 143K Steam wishlisters. Details on Rogue Orbit are thin, but mech fans are curious. About 32% of wishlisters have played Titanfall 2, 26% Armored Core 6, and 20% last year’s Mecha Break. Saw Genesis, a 3-vs-1 asymmetric multiplayer horror game from Bloober, got 142K Steam wishlists. Unsurprisingly, nearly two-thirds of wishlisters have history in Dead by Daylight (21% of wishlisters played DbD this month!), 22% played 2017’s Friday the 13th: The Game, and 13% logged hours in 2024’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Asymmetrical-horror affinity and horror IP fandom are doing a lot of work here. GREAT SHOW by the way. This was easily the best one Keighley and co. have put on, so hats off to them. SGF 2026 showcase was well-paced, smartly presented, and packed with reveals. More SGF data and insights on the free Substack! Link's in my bio!

Lego Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight has sold 1.2M copies across PlayStation, Xbox, and Steam (@alineaanalytics estimates). As you’d expect, the crossover between Legacy of the Dark Knight and other Lego games is massive. On Steam: - 34% of Legacy of the Dark Knight players have also played Skywalker Saga. - Between 15% and 20% have played Lego Batman, Lego Batman 2, Lego Batman 3, Lego DC Super-Villains, and Lego Marvel Superheroes. - 31% of Steam players have also played Arkham Knight - The numbers are even higher on console, as per our estimates Also, the kids who play Legacy of the Dark Knight now are part of a funnel for Warner Bros – important for that maximising customer lifetime value stuff. The Arkham fans picking up Lego Batman are part of another funnel. Both feed the same long-term WB Games player development pipeline. In other words, I’d say another Arkham-like game is pretty much a dead cert. One take I’ve seen going around online is that the release timing was bad for this one. There’s some truth in that. Launching so close to Forza Horizon 6 in particular seems like a bit of a snafu, given that June was otherwise an open goal in the release calendar. But it's worth noting that Legacy of the Dark Knight is brand marketing as well as a game. It’s a transmedia product in part meant to support physical Lego set sales, and the children’s IP calendar this summer is genuinely crowded: - A new Fortnite season is kicking off on June 5. That alone might be a more serious competitive threat than Forza Horizon 6 was. Looking at our May MAU crossover on console, Fortnite is by far the top game that Legacy of the Dark Knight players also played. - Toy Story 5 hits cinemas on 19 June. - Minions & Monsters lands in July. - Paw Patrol: The Dino Movie arrives in August. Toy store shelves (both physical and digital) are about to get extremely competitive, and Lego needs runway in those spaces ahead of the summer holiday and the imminent holiday season. The release window also has to navigate the FIFA World Cup between 11 June and 19 July 2026, which absorbs household attention across exactly the audience Lego Batman is targeting. Squeezing into late May and early June gives the game runway against the cinema slate and the World Cup, without crashing into the Q4 holiday-quarter wall. As an aside, Lego sets specifically designed to tie into the game launched before the game to mark the 20th anniversary of the original Lego Batman theme. In a way, the game launch and the toy launch are the same commercial event, run on a different calendar from the rest of the industry’s release thinking. Taking all of the above together, the timing isn’t as big a misstep as it seems. It’s a transmedia decision that prioritises summer toy retail and back-to-school momentum over a clean release window relative to other games. So the launch-week comparison to Forza Horizon 6 is worth noting, but it’s not the be-all end-all. The attention war really is nuts... More on the free Substack. Link's on my profile.

Saros has sold 300K+ in its first two weeks, generating over $22M (@alineaanalytics estimates). Almost a third of those copies came during the early-access period, which suggests that Housemarque superfans (including myself!) are propping this one up. We have a big deep dive with a lot more Saros data on our free Substack (playtime, audience overlap etc.) Link's on my profile. 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). Launch-aligned, our estimates show that 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. 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. 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 I’ve been making for a while. 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. 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. More on the free Subsack.