5 Video Game Things I Learned | 2026 July 11 - July 17
A lot more positive reporting this week after the devastation of last week. There are some news stories covering video game sales and Bethesda’s trajectory with Fallout 5 and The Elder Scrolls VI. I also explore some things happening in my personal gaming life, though. I’ve started playing Discounty and have some takes regarding their DLC strategy. I also got to play The Incident at Galley House, and, spoiler alert, it’s fantastic.
Discounty DLC Advertising
I was pleasantly surprised this week after finally getting around to trying the Discounty demo. The gameplay was right up my alley. I really like management/simulation games where you can run your own shop. Right after playing the demo, I decided to purchase it (just a few days late following the Steam Summer Sale too). I noticed that there was a supporter pack, and the Steam page for the supporter pack DLC simply states, “Discounty is our first game, and we’d like to make many more! If you enjoyed the game, you can support us by purchasing this pack.“
I love this approach to indie game development. I know I’m well late on the Discounty craze, but it’s just always so refreshing to see this kind of DLC. I genuinely think indie developers work just a little too hard. On one hand, game development is difficult, and I’m not trying to imply that it’s easy. However, I think a lot of gamers, even with the current state of the economy in the western world, are very willing to open up their wallets and pay a little extra money to support a studio that has put out a game they enjoy. You better believe I purchased the supporter pack for an extra $4.99. I’m not always in the mood or financial situation to voluntarily pay more for my games, but I always want to find ways to support developers.
If you like store management games or even just cozy games that feel like Stardew Valley, please check out Discounty on Steam, and consider purchasing the supporter pack.
Bethesda Focuses on Fallout and Elder Scrolls
It’s hard to get away from XBOX-related stuff after last week’s disastrous XBOX Reset. Following the mass layoffs that hit ZeniMax and Bethesda very hard, Todd Howard is talking to reporters, informing the public on the future of Bethesda. To me, it’s a lot of information that was largely expected based on last week’s reporting, but now there are things that are confirmed, having come straight from the horse’s mouth.
The first big one is the development of Fallout 5, a game that fans have been clamoring for ever since the success of Fallout 4 (see below). When Fallout 76 came out, it fell pretty flat in the eyes of gamers who wanted another open-world adventure but didn’t want the MMO vibe. Now, Fallout 5 is supposedly in pre-production. However, when will we see it? I believe it won’t be for quite a long time. It’s being developed simultaneously with The Elder Scrolls VI, something fans have rightly criticized Bethesda for due to their announcement in 2018 being followed by relative silence ever since. Todd Howard has since expressed regret in the handling of that announcement. I believe it’s pretty clear that Elder Scrolls VI will be the focus of the studio going forward until it launches. That means Fallout 5, being even earlier in its development cycle and likely being the lower priority, will sit on the sidelines for a long time. Maybe until 2035. Maybe until 2040. It’s crazy to think that those aren’t even particularly unrealistic expectations given Bethesda’s current pace of development and recent reduction in development staff.
Howard also confirmed the Fallout project at Obsidian Entertainment that reporters picked up on last week. The details are sparse about it, of course. I’m very interested in the story behind the story on this one. With multiple Obsidian games being canceled and the studio shifting to this Fallout project, it’s not unrealistic to think that Tim Cain could find his way back to working on the Fallout franchise after being disconnected from it for nearly 30 years. For those who don’t know, Tim Cain was the original director on Fallout back in the ‘90s. He was put on Fallout 2, but he did not want to make another Fallout game at the time. That combined with disagreements with management on bonus payouts for the first game led to his departure. Tim Cain eventually found his way onto the staff at Obsidian in 2011, not too long after Obsidian released Fallout: New Vegas. Cain has been there since. Bethesda now owns the rights to Fallout, Obsidian employs Cain, and both of them are presently owned by XBOX. Cain has previously said that fans won’t be able to guess what project he’s on. However, now we have to ask if that project was one of the ones canceled behind the scenes. If so, Cain could be back in the fold of Fallout.
Finally, there’s now talk of a TV show based on the base-management game Fallout Shelter. Howard simply stated that “An unscripted Fallout Shelter television project is also in the works with our partners at Amazon Studios and Kilter Films.“ Naturally, I’m fascinated by the “unscripted” part. To me, this points toward a reality show. While I don’t quite know if that’ll be up my alley, I do think it’s fascinating as a show idea to have a bunch of people in a Fallout scenario.
Ultimately, this has a lot of parody with what we heard from last week with a few more bits of details. Last week, we heard that XBOX was shifting toward their big IPs, and The Elder Scrolls and Fallout were specifically named in reports. Is this surprising? No. But it’s interesting and sets the roadmap for Bethesda a little more clearly.
Fallout 4’s 35 Million Sales
In addition to the above, Todd Howard confirmed this week that Fallout 4 has sold over 35 million copies over its lifetime. For context, this puts it on par with other mega hits like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and surpasses games like Super Mario Odyssey, Borderlands 2, Monster Hunter: World, and Elden Ring. In all, this puts Fallout 4 as the 28th best-selling game of all time if you include Tetris as the best-selling game ever (sources are split on this. I sense potential for another blog post).
Since this is a short but significant entry in this week’s post, I’m going to take some extra space to discuss video game sales reporting. I’ve grown up in the digital games landscape. Not much of my time as an avid gamer was spent in a world where retail sales overtook digital sales. Due to that, I’ve always lived in a world where there’s no good way to get sales data for video games outside of waiting for publishers and developers to reveal the numbers themselves. I severely dislike this landscape. I love stalking the list of best-selling games to see what the high flying numbers are. While I can still get a good idea, the reality is that for all we know, 90% of the list could be inaccurate because companies aren’t sharing their sales data.
For example, using the Internet Archive, we can see that Fallout 4 wasn’t even on the top-50 list just a couple of weeks ago. Now, it’s not just on the list; it’s nearly in the top half of the list. It obviously didn’t shoot up the list in two weeks time because everybody just suddenly had to have Fallout 4. Bethesda held onto their sales information for a long time. So for a long time, the list has been wrong because Bethesda held the information back. I want a world where this information is more public, and not just because I find it interesting.
In a lot of ways, I believe it’s against the philosophy of a free market to hold this information back. Now, am I going to die on that hill? Probably not. There’s a strong argument that a truly free market is one in which companies can decide whether or not they’re going to hold their sales data back. However, I believe a free market is one that is meant to encourage competition. Competition is at the beating heart of western capitalism. However, companies want in every way possible to reduce competition so that they can do as they please, stomping on the consumer along the way. That’s what this feels like. Things would be a lot more competitive if anybody and everybody had regular access to game sales the way we do movie box office numbers. On one hand, would this have put Bethesda in a more compromising position? Yes because their competitors have more information to use against them. On the other hand, Bethesda is also getting this advantage because they have Capcom’s numbers, FromSoftware’s numbers, etc. Bring me more data! I’m sick of feeling incomplete when looking at the best-selling games of all time! This is history! I want to see the truth of it!
Steam Sales Sore
I feel like a small story went under the radar this week that really puts the video game industry in perspective. According to Alinea Analytics, Steam brought in $11.1 billion in revenue during the first half of 2026. Just… wow… And to think that PC gaming is still the smallest section of the industry, behind consoles (although only barely) and mobile. This is the highest half-year revenue Steam has had on record. The most interesting part about it is that Alinea attributes this to sales of old games, not improved sales of new releases.
In a lot of ways, this makes sense. Every year is a record-breaking year for Steam in terms of total games released, and 2026 will end up no different. As the number of games balloons, they remain for sale theoretically indefinitely moving into future years, presumably with a relatively small fraction of games getting delisted every year. So at all times, the very, very large majority of Steam games are “old” games. In the case of the first half of this year, I believe one driving force is that the amazing games from last year’s historic slate of releases are now going on steeper sales with some of them turning a year old. For example, the seemingly undisputed best game of 2025, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, hit its all-time lowest price in November 2025 at $39.99. Since then, it’s already hit that lowest price on five separate occasions throughout 2026. There are similar stories for blockbuster hits like Blue Prince and Kingdom Come Deliverance II. Alinea claims that roughly 79% of Steam’s revenue is from “back catalogue revenue,” a jump from the previous 71%.
Another particularly interesting aspect of this is the growth over time. Alinea estimates that Steam’s first-half 2026 revenue surpasses the entire year of revenue for Steam in 2020. While 2020 was over half a decade ago, 2020 was an estimate-defying time when gaming received bigger surges than had ever been seen before, or at least than had been seen in the 21st century. As Steam continues to grow and consoles continue to get more expensive, I envision a large shift where PC gaming takes over console gaming in percent of the industry’s revenue potentially by the end of this year and almost certainly by the end of 2027.
The Incident at Galley House Is Awesome
The Incident at Galley House released this week, and about 36 hours after starting it, I finished it. The game in total takes somewhere around 7-10 hours to complete (largely depending on your aptitude for puzzles and your desire to see all of the scenes). I had nothing short of a great time playing. I’ve fallen in love with games in the vein of Return of the Obra Dinn; that is, puzzle games that gradually alert you of correct progress in discovering a mystery. Obra Dinn was a fantastic and unique experience all around. I didn’t play another game like it until The Roottrees are Dead remake released in early 2025 and was one of my favorite games of the year in a year full of standouts. Now, The Incident at Galley House joins those two in this relatively young subgenre that is difficult to pull off.
Similar to The Roottrees are Dead and developed by the same studio, The Incident of Galley House is sort of a remaster of an itch.io game called Type Help. The game focuses on a machine that is able to reach into the past and replay the audio (and partial visual) of death events and the events that happened around them. The whole thing is wrapped in a mystery that is beautifully woven together with carefully laid clues that often feel obvious when they present themselves but still manage to not feel out of place or unusual in the story of the game. There’s a well-written and well-acted cast of characters with a wide range of personalities. Each character is fun to explore, and the way the mystery unfurls itself through them is expert, in my opinion.
I struggle to decide if I liked this game better than The Roottrees are Dead. On one hand, The Incident at Galley House takes on more of a thriller feel that I don’t love. I enjoyed the more distant detective angle of The Roottrees are Dead. However, I do believe the mechanics and narrative of The Incident at Galley House reign supreme, keeping me guessing and having “aha!” moments all the way until the end credits. Ultimately, I’ll have to decide my favorite eventually. I’ll probably do so after letting The Incident at Galley House sit with me for a while longer. In the meantime, there’s no doubt in my mind that this is my favorite game that I’ve played that released in 2026. Granted, I’ve only played four so far, and there are a ton of great games still slated to release in the coming months. I still don’t say that lightly, though.