Steam's biggest genres have changed a ton since 2021

We talk about Valve's 30 year anniversary and the inexorable (?) rise of Steam as a platform, ruminate on Battle.net getting more third-party game additions with The Witcher 3: Wild Hunter - Remastered, examine a change to more personalized midweek deals on Steam, and discuss how hit PC game genres have changed since 2021, according to a GDCo analysis of tags for popular new games.

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

As Geoff Keighley reminds us, “Valve was founded 30 years ago today [on August 24th, 1996] by Gabe Newell and Mike Harrington.” Tom's Hardware  has more on the history, spanning Half-Life and sequels, the Source Engine, and - of course - a little PC gaming platform called Steam. (Congrats!) https://www.tomshardware.com/video-games/pc-gaming/valve-was-founded-30-years-ago-today-changed-pc-gaming-forever-with-half-life-then-steam

About that ‘Battle.net getting more third-party games’ rumor? Blizzard just announced a collab with CD Projekt to bring The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt — Remastered to the PC platform, as well as “gain access to a Geralt-themed skin in Diablo IV” if you buy it on there. (It’s like the ‘Fortnite skins’ move on EGS…) https://news.blizzard.com/en-us/article/24296229/cd-projekt-red-teams-up-with-blizzard-entertainment

Steam is testing personalization on normally curated Midweek Deals, which “are featured on the Steam homepage… from Monday at 10am Pacific until Thursday at 10am Pacific. There are up to six Midweek slots per week.” (If you’re logged in, you’ll see a wide selection of discounted games this week, largely different per account.)

How have hit PC genres changed since 2021? Look, the PC game market has changed significantly over the last 5 years. But how can we quantify that? At GameDiscoverCo, we have a lot of underlying data on this, so we thought we’d use ‘purified’ versions of Steam tag clouds to compare the market in 2021 to that of 2025: https://newsletter.gamediscover.co/i/212562145/how-have-hit-pc-genres-changed-since-2021

Also discussed: last week and this week's new Steam releases, and Chris' surprise question of the week for Simon.