People Can’t Stop Playing These Games

We talk about 2026's debuts that got played a lot by the average player on Steam, a survey into AI use at bigger game studios, Sony fighting back against the PlayStation console jailbreaks, and how often the average player actually buys games - might be less than you think!

Join Simon Carless & Chris Plante in the latest GameDiscoverCo Show as they look at these questions and more. Mentioned in this episode:

We pulled an updated list of biggest median playtime Steam games in 2026 with >100k players from GDCo Pro & besides desktop idlers taking the top spots, Slay The Spire 2 is still a monster (52 hours, ~8m players!), w/newer entries including the latest NBA 2K & EA Sports FCs, plus Forza 6 and (impressively!) Wardogs. https://www.linkedin.com/posts/simoncarless_what-are-the-most-played-games-on-steam-released-share-7519043218915622912-qSUJ/

The consulting firm Vivrato have been surveying game execs about their firms’ usage of AI, noting: “94% use AI in at least one of nine production stages, but 52% rate how deeply it is built into their full production pipeline at three or lower out of 10.” (This ‘wider but shallow’ integration makes sense - there’s some posturing going on.) https://gamesbeat.com/adam-boyes-vivrato-issues-report-based-on-101-game-leaders-views-on-ai-in-gaming-exclusive/

Just as the ‘jailbreaking’ of PlayStation 5 consoles was getting concerning - someone’s even coded an interface for playing Steam games on PS5 via Linux emulation - Sony has changed it so you have to update to the latest 14.10 OS to play PS5 games online & use network features. (Yes, GTA 6 requires 14.10.) https://www.notebookcheck.net/Sony-blocks-PS5-console-jailbreak-from-PSN-requiring-firmware-update-14-10.1424308.0.html

Circana’s survey of ‘normal’ U.S. video game consumers says “41% of US video game players buy at least 1 new game quarterly, compared to 36% a year ago.” But reminder - only 5% of these folks say they buy a game >once a month, and 13% around once a month. (Compared to 29% who buy less than once per year.) https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:bhqrrxt7yyfpwguioa7rwa7x/post/3mxtqzbgmjk2a

Also discussed: last week and this week's new Steam releases, what's new or upcoming for GameDiscoverCo Plus & Pro data users since last time, and Chris' surprise question of the week for Simon.