Research a market
What shipped into the genre, at what price, how each one landed, and where demand is still moving.
Marketing agents for game teams
PlayRecon is a marketing platform for the game industry, built around agents.
Publishers, studios and independent developers use it to research markets, plan marketing and launches, benchmark performance, and decide what to build, fund, publish or promote.
- The agents do the market research that is split today between marketing and analytics: they pick comparable games, rebuild launch timelines, and check prices and festivals.
- Questions that take weeks or months of someone’s calendar come back in minutes.
- Every recommendation carries its peer set, its sources and the date each fact was recorded.
Check a launch window, a price or a campaign against games that already tried it, before the money is spent.
Free to start: sign in with Google, GitHub or LinkedIn.
What is in PlayRecon
Tools grouped by the job they do.
Previews show Steam data as of Nov 3, 2026
Look up games and companies
BalatroPlaystack · $14.99Released Feb 20, 2024
- Reviews
- 167,462Overwhelmingly Positive
- Copies sold estimate
- 4.35M – 18.1M
- Gross revenue estimate
- $61.6M – $256M
- Game pages
Any Steam game: estimated copies and revenue, reviews, players, playtime, countries, chart ranks, curators and press, store-page changes.
- Explore games
Search released and announced games by tags, release date, reviews, price, publisher and followers.
- Studios & publishers
Every studio and publisher with its games one after another, what it is working on and how it launches: demos, fests, timing.
Watch the market
Top Sellers, worldwidevs. a day ago
- 1Phantom Blade Zero=
- 2Football Manager 27▲7
- 3Call of Duty®: Modern Warfare® 4▼1
- 4Counter-Strike 2▼1
- 6Dota 2▼1
- Top Sellers
The Steam Top Sellers chart worldwide and in 19 countries, with each game’s move.
- Wishlist risers and best-sellers
Games climbing in wishlists this week, and the best-sellers of each month.
- Steam fests and Next Fest live
Next Fest, sales and themed fests with their deadlines and lineups; during Next Fest, demos ranked by how many people play them.
Plan a release
Steam releases per week
Aug 3Nov 2 · week in progress
- Release calendar and density
What is coming out week by week, and how crowded each week is for your genre.
- Window Finder and seasonality
Candidate launch weeks compared by competing releases and how the genre sells across the year.
- Marketing beats
What demos, fests, trailers and discounts did to the games that ran them.
Choose a niche
Roguelike Deckbuilder
- Released, last 12 months
- 460
- Announced
- 1,243
- Median reviews
- 33
- Under 10 reviews
- 26%
20192026
- Niche analysisPart on Pro
Build a niche from tags: the chance of a hit, the risk of going unnoticed, what a typical paid game earns and how many releases arrive. Where to pivot and the tags of hits come with Pro.
- Tag Tree
Every Steam tag in groups, with the number of games for any period.
- Market trends
How genres and tags grow or shrink over the years.
Find a publisher
Open for pitches
- Hooded Horse117 games4,544 median reviews
- HypeTrain Digital103 games1,599 median reviews
- Kwalee88 games1,354 median reviews
- Publisher directory and finder
Publishers by genre, size, activity and whether they take submissions, and which of them fit your game.
- Pitch pipeline
A board for the publishers you are talking to, with notes and stages.
Follow your game and its rivals
DressmakerOct 4 – Nov 2
Peak players, 30 days43.3K → 21K
- Followers
- 31.7K → 48.6K
- Top Sellers place
- #6 → #34
- My game
Add your game by its Steam link or describe it, and the tools open set up for it.
- Watchlist
Your game and its competitors on one board: players, reviews, followers, wishlist rank, price and the latest changes.
- Alerts in Telegram
Telegram messages about watchlist events and wishlist risers, by rules you set.
In your AI assistant
The PlayRecon MCP server gives an AI assistant the same data as the site. Ask in plain words, and the assistant picks the tools, checks the cost and answers with dates.
- ChatGPT
- Claude
- Codex
- Cursor
- Connect by signing inChatGPT, Claude and other assistants that support sign-in open the PlayRecon sign-in and ask for your approval. Claude Code, Codex and Cursor can also use an access token from the MCP page.
- Read-only unless you allow changesA connection can read your watchlist, alerts and My game. Editing them needs your explicit permission, and you can disconnect at any time.
- Priced in compute unitsEach call costs compute units by the work it takes; a simple lookup is about 1 CU. The Free plan includes 1,000 CU a month.
Try asking“Which week in March 2027 is a good time to launch a roguelike deckbuilder on Steam?”
Research agent Private beta
For a question that needs more than one tool, the research agent plans the work, collects and checks the data and returns a case: the answer, the comparable games, the timeline, the sources and dates. A second agent reviews the method before the case reaches you.
Compare against real peers
A peer set with a stated reason for every game kept and every game dropped.
Plan marketing and the launch
A dated plan: beats, windows, price, the shelves and festivals worth chasing, each drawn from games that already ran that play.
Reconstruct a release or campaign
A timeline of what happened and what moved with it, with the obvious explanation tested against the others that also fit.
Question
“What did this launch do that the games standing next to it on the same shelf did not?”
What came back
The shelf did not decide it. What separates this launch is a year of demo campaign, a $9.99 price with a launch discount, and tag pages that moved before the charts did.
Evidence, as returned
- observed26 games shared the Popular Coming Soon shelf in the same window; 7 of them never reached the top sellers at allSteam store shelves · 2026-07-26
- observedPriced at $9.99 with a 10% launch discount ($8.99), which also puts it on the Specials shelfSteam store price · 2026-07-24
A recommendation you can check
The same call from the research agent, shown twice: on its own, and with the record behind it.
- Singleplayer demo
- 3 monthsMultiplayer demo
- 5 monthsNext Fest demo
- 3 monthsDate moved twice
- 32 daysFinal date announced
- 10 daysPublisher on the store page
- 2 daysRelease
Peak players after release
17.3K
23.8K
33.1K
37.6K
observed Steam news, store page changes and concurrent players
Recommendation on its own
“Launch at $9.99 and lean on a Next Fest demo.”
No comparable games, no timeline, no source, no date. Nothing in it can be checked.
observed Bigger dot, more players at peak. A higher shelf place did not mean a higher chart place.
The same call, with the record behind it
“What the record supports: a $9.99 price with a small launch discount, and the demo as the spine of the campaign rather than a Next Fest checkbox. It does not prove either one caused the result.”
- Peer set
- 26 games shared the same pre-release shelf in that window. 7 of them never reached the top sellers at all.Steam store shelves · 2026-07-26
- Timeline
- Singleplayer demo Jun 2025, multiplayer demo Sep 2025, updated demo for Next Fest Feb 2026, release Jul 2026.Steam news posts · 2026-02-23
- Counter-evidence
- Shelf position did not predict the outcome. Three games held that shelf at #1; one of them peaked at 1.8k concurrents. This one sat at #3 and peaked at 37.6k.Steam shelves and concurrent players · 2026-07-26
- What we will not say
- Copies sold. With this few comparable launches the estimate would be too wide to use. Game pages show copies and revenue as a range.stated in the case, not omitted from it
Observed, estimated and inference are labelled separately across PlayRecon, and they never get printed as each other. A price on a day in a region is observed. Copies sold are an estimate with a range. Why a game climbed is an argument, and it arrives with the competing readings still attached.
What sits underneath
Every tool, the assistant connection and the research agent read one record of the Steam market, updated every day.
200k+Steam games in the record
10Mmarket observations a day
100M+recommendation-graph records
41regions priced and ranked
Price history can be pieced together after the fact. Most of the rest cannot: what the page said, which shelf it sat on that morning, where it ranked in Brazil. Storefronts keep almost none of that, so it exists only because it was recorded on the day.
- SteamLive
- PlayStation StoreRecording
- XboxRecording
- Nintendo eShopRecording
- Epic Games StoreRecording
- GOGRecording
- App StoreRecording
- Google PlayRecording
On the other stores we record charts, prices and ratings. The tools are built for Steam; for the other stores, a game page shows where else the game is sold.
Who it is for
Three kinds of team, different jobs, one record underneath.
Scouting, screening and watching a slate of games.
What they use it for
- Scouting: wishlist risers, Next Fest demos ranked by players, and new announcements by tag.
- Screening a pitch: the niche it lands in, how comparable games did and what they likely earned.
- Watching a slate: the watchlist and Telegram alerts for every title and its rivals.
A question it answers
“Which demos in this genre gained the most players during Next Fest, and who publishes the games most like them?”
Where to look
Next Fest live for the ranking, the game pages for each demo, and Studios & publishers for who signs that kind of game.
Start with the question you have
Most tools open without an account. A free account adds a bigger watchlist, alerts, the publisher tools and 1,000 compute units a month for AI assistants. Paid plans raise the limits and add the deeper niche analysis.
The research agent is in private beta: we open it to a few teams at a time. Request access with a real question, such as the launch window you cannot settle or the genre you suspect is already crowded.
Questions? Write to hello@playrecon.com.