What were May 2025's top (new) Steam releases?

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[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.]

That doohickey over there? That’s the wheel that controls the number of games released on PC and console. It’s been gradually spinning faster for the past few years, and.. oh. Oh no. It’s fallen off. We now get unconstrained game spray, forever? Great.

But before we deal with the game flood: our condolences to Playdate co-creator Cabel Sasser, whose blind rabbit Cowboy somehow knocked down and comprehensively nibbled a vintage Nintendo hanafuda card box. (The vengeful ghost of Hiroshi Yamauchi is now gunning for that bunny, right? We kid, we kid.)

[SUPPORT US HOW?Signing up to GameDiscoverCo Plus gets more from our second weekly newsletter, Discord access, data & lots more. And companies, get much more ‘Steam deep dive’ & console data access org-wide via GameDiscoverCo Pro, as 60+ have.]

Game discovery news: Stellar as Disco, prerelease

We’ve got things to do and people to see. So let’s give you news via the medium of ‘typing very fast’, shall we? Look:

• Looking at GameDiscoverCo's 'trending' unreleased Steam games by 7-day new follower velocity(above), from May 26th to June 2nd, ARPG Stellar Blade is at #1 again, and already has 325k paid Steam pre-orders, as multiplayer soccer game Rematch hits #2, thanks to a spectacular new 160k CCU beta test. (It’s cookin’.)

• Elsewhere, Dead As Disco (#6) is a music-timed beat 'em up with the ability to import any song - it’s much-YouTube-ed, ft. everything from Queen to Eminem! Also notable early Next Fest demos: Plague Inc. follow-up After Inc.: Revival (#8), co-op mega mashup Chained Backrooms (#9) & Bosslife Office Manager (#10).

• Epic’s State Of Unreal keynote had a whole buncha stuff, including AI-powered NPCs like Darth Vader for UEFN, new IP like Squid Game and Star Wars to be available for UEFN creators, a re-iteration of the ‘you keep 100% of $1m net’ deal for Epic Games Store devs, and a Witcher 4 Unreal Engine 5 tech demo. Phew!

• Steam just launched a ‘Summer showcase of summer showcases’ event page, goofing on whatever the ‘not-E3’ period is called nowadays, and including “Special Livestreams Each Day from June 3rd – 12th” with a whole bunch of showcase sale/event pages - SGF, PC Gaming Show, The Mix, IGN Live, Green Games, etc

• Turns out Survival Kids is an interesting Switch 2 tech demo/game experiment from Unity: the semi-obscure Konami IP “uses GameShare to enable co-op play, via one copy of the game, from one Switch 2 to two other nearby Switch systems.” So it’s streaming a whole extra copy of the game to those other systems. Discovery win?

• Some context on the recent Roblox player explosion: Offpath’s Tim Elliott notes a new weekend milestone, 21.2m CCU at peak (!), >double last year. But a lot of this is a spike tied to one-off events happening within Grow A Garden. So how about overall hours played? Up 42% year on year, according to Tim - also hella good.

• Windows Central is claiming: “Xbox's [internal] first-party handheld has been sidelined… Xbox's handheld ambitions continue unabated, but the focus is shifting towards improving Windows 11 for third-party handhelds - for now.” This fits with what we know about other projects, like: “Project Kennan… the codename of Microsoft's partner Xbox handheld with ASUS”, potentially due out in 2025.

• Moon Studios’ Thomas Mahler did a thought experiment on why selling 2m copies of a game isn’t enough in a worst-case scenario. The Reddit r/indiedev crew were confused, with Mahler pushing back: “Most gamers and even indie devs have absolutely no clue about how a budget works, how a studio is run.” (But what if the scale Mahler is talking about doesn’t make as much sense going forward, hm?)

• Here’s another plea to Valve to cut out the 30% cut for the smallest game devs: “When a government charges higher tax rates to the lowest earners, we call this regressive taxation. When a private company does it, we shrug and say ‘it is what it is.’” Also in there - GameDiscoverCo’s estimate of total Steam revenue in 2024 - $14.1 billion.

• What’s next in XR hardware? UploadVR has an interesting scoop: “Meta is prioritizing shipping an ultralight Horizon OS headset with a tethered compute puck in 2026… the the next candidate for a traditional form factor Quest most likely wouldn't ship until 2027.” Meta chasing the Apple Vision Pro form factor makes sense…

• Microlinks: Twitch announced improved mobile experience & easier monetization unlocks for creators in its TwitchCon keynote; The Witcher 3 is getting a big cross-platform UGC update via Mod.io; there are no Switch 2 press ‘reviews’ before Day 1 because ‘important features & updates’ are in a Day 1 patch.

What were May 2025’s top (new) Steam releases?

Those of you who are GameDiscoverCo Pro or Plus subscribers get newsletter updates on the hot new Steam games of the week. But we realized that the rest of you - the great unwashed masses (jk) - may not realize what’s hot & new on Steam, exactly.

So we are running these monthly Steam charts over on LinkedIn, based on GDCo data, and will be commenting on them in a bit more detail here. Above is the estimated revenue from the Top 10 newly released Steam games in May 2025. Notes:

• Co-op megafranchise spin-off Elden Ring Nightreign surged to #1 with $31m gross Steam revenue, despite only being available for three days. (This might even be an undercount!) Expect it to head over $100m over time on PC - and lots more on console.

• The other new hits of the month with >$10m in gross revenue? FPS sequel Doom: The Dark Ages(#2, $26.5m), cozy life sim reboot Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time(#3, big in Asia, $23.7m), and SnowRunner spiritual follow-up and co-op construction repair sim RoadCraft (#4, $12.6m.)

• There's also some notable indie (or indie-adjacent!) breakout hits further down the charts, including top-down cop sim The Precinct (#5, $6.6m), deckbuilder sequel Monster Train 2 (#7, $3.8m), ‘simulator’ Cash Cleaner Sim(#8, $2.8m), roguelike kingdom builder 9 Kings (#9, $2.2m), and drift racing game Japanese Drift Master(#10, $2.2m). What a diverse selection of genres...

There are also different ways to slice this data - such as by total copies sold, instead of revenue. This shifts some of the lower-priced games like 9 Kings up the charts, and adds a new title, the $10 ‘Diablo x Survivors’-like Tower Of Babel: Survivors Of Chaos:

It’s true that calendar months are - in some ways - a weird way to slice sales. (Yes, we’re looking at you, Julius Caesar.) If your game launches super-close to the end of the month, you won’t rank as high - but your first 30 days’ sales could still be stellar.

But doing a ‘rolling first 30 days’ chart is also messy (because where do you stop or start for reporting?) So we thought we’d do one extra chart - for Steam’s Top 10 performing games of May, period, to look for April chart spillovers. Here it is:

You may not be surprised to see Valve’s own games in the Top 3, with Counter-Strike 2 at #1 with $198m gross Steam revenue for the month, and DOTA 2 at #3 with $31.5m. (We wonder if we overdid CS2 revenue a bit. But boy, it’s popular…)

But there are some other trends in for third-party games of interest. Specifically:

• Breakout Western JRPG Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, which launched on April 24th and had ~$25m gross Steam revenue in April, added another $63m (#2) in May, to hit $88m on Steam. (It’s brought in another ~$50m on console, almost all PlayStation.) And the Oblivion remaster added $30m to its $105m haul in April…

• Older, but also notable: Helldivers 2 (#6) brought in another $28m in May 2025, thanks to a big in-game event and a 20% discount. It’s now at a whopping $406m gross on Steam - and $150m more on PlayStation, making it a $555m grosser (!) Wowzers.

• Towards the bottom of the Top 10, we also get monthly estimates for leading third-party F2P games on Steam, which include Apex Legends (#8, $24.3m) and Destiny 2 (#10, $19.6m, but timed to pre-orders for the Year Of Prophecy season launching later this year.)

So that gives you a good idea of what’s popular now. BTW, the majority of the publishers of top new releases in May use GameDiscoverCo Pro - and we’re gunning for all of them. (Level 5, we’ll be happy to meet with Professor Layton, since we presume he’s your analytics guy?) Onward…

How about the most-streamed games in May?

Look who’s back? It’s our buddies at livestream analytics platform Stream Hatchet, that’s who. They slid us along the Top 100 games in terms of total hours watched via big (non-China!) streaming platforms like Twitch & myriad other smaller platforms.

Once again, some of the continued domination by the biggest games here is eye-opening. So - here’s the full ‘Top 100’ for May 2025(Google doc), as annotated by GDCo. And besides all the ‘usual suspects’ crowding the Top 10, here’s what we have:

• Grand Theft Auto V jockeys up, thanks to GTA 6 hype: Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto V hit #1 in May with 174m hours watched, partly due to continued GTA RP hype, but also because the GTA VI release date announce got everyone excited for some grand thefting again. Possibly in an auto.

• Clair Obscur is at #11 (34.3m hours), reflecting strong Western and Asian reach: it didn’t make the Top 10 cos of its late April release, but StreamHatchet noted that “the most watched streamer for the game in its debut week [was] 풍월량 (Poong Wol-ryang) with 310K hours watched” on Naver’s CHZZK platform. Interesting!

• New entries? Elden Ring Nightreign & Doom: The Dark Ages lead: we were just talking about them above, and Nightreign (#23, 17.9m hours watched) and Dark Ages (#30, 13.5m hours) were the two highest-ranking new games in terms of new May 2025 releases by million hours watched.

Otherwise, there’s titles with Beta access only trending - ARC Raiders (#40) and Dune Awakening (#59) - and we do see ‘sudden Steam 1.0 breakout’ [Elder] Scrolls-like Tainted Grail: The Fall Of Avalon also chart at #78. (This game’s success is a real interesting story.)

The most surprising game in the Top 100? That’d be Merge Fellas (#49, 5.9m hours), which seems to be a mobile physics-y merge game with an Italian brainrot theme. Check out the gameplay videos - it’s some kind of cursed Suika Game mutant. Toodles!

[We’re GameDiscoverCo, an analysis firm based around one simple issue: how do players find, buy and enjoy your PC or console game? We run the newsletter you’re reading, and provide real-time data services for publishers, funds, and other smart game industry folks.]