Like most of this newsletter’s readers, and the rest of the Alinea team, I spent the weekend glued to Summer Game Fest. And what a weekend it was. It’s the first time in half a decade that I’ve had that old E3 feeling of excitement.
This was easily the best one Keighley and co. have put on, so hats off to them. SGF 2026 was well-paced, smartly presented, and packed with reveals.
The reception from gamers has been almost unanimously (and uncharacteristically) positive. And that excitement – as ever – has translated into a flood of Steam wishlists. Let’s take a look at the games that pulled in the most between 2 and 8 June.
Resident Evil Veronica took the top spot
Hot off the successful launches of Resident Evil Requiem and Pragmata, and having run the Resi 1-4 remake well dry, Capcom announced its next remake: Resident Evil Veronica, a similar reworking of 2000’s Resident Evil Code: Veronica.
Resident Evil Veronica has already pulled 522K Steam wishlists as of yesterday, the most of any game shown at SGF:
Resi and Capcom fans are wishlisting in droves. Of the 500K-plus Veronica Steam wishlisters:
~55% have played Resident Evil 2 Remake on Steam.
53% have played Resident Evil 4 Remake.
47% have played this year’s Resident Evil Requiem.
10% have played Pragmata.
As we covered the other month, Capcom has banked so much goodwill across a decade of Resi remakes and original hits that a remake of a spin-off – a revered one, truth be told – is making a splash as big as its biggest releases.
Launch-aligned, our estimates show that Veronica is accumulating wishlists 1.5x faster than Requiem did. It’s early days, but that is a remarkable number for what is, on paper, a deeper-cut remake.
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One very important thing to consider is that most wishlisters never buy at launch, wishlist counts are mostly measuring the players you can convert with discounts at a later date. For many players, a wishlist is a “watch and see” list, a way to track a game and wait for a discount.
Our Resident Evil Requiem data backs this up neatly, as it was revealed exactly a year ago at the last SGF. Of all the Requiem Steam wishlisters from June 2025, the month it was revealed at Summer Game Fest:
Only 7% had converted to buyers a week after launch.
8% after a month.
And 9% three months after.
The rest are still sitting on their lists, waiting for a price they like.
Guild Wars 3 piques player interest, while a smartly timed re-reveal hits a small snag
ArenaNet’s Guild Wars 3 was the #2 game by new wishlists between 2 and 8 June, pulling 435K. The MMO leans hard into traversal and faster, more action-oriented combat, and comes to console for the first time – both of which should help it stand out in a stagnant MMO meta (sorry, MMO fans…)
The series made its name by dropping the subscription model amid MMO-subscription fever, and the third instalment is no different. So free weekends and the like could be nice conversion hooks here.
In the announcement post, ArenaNet also discounted prior games, including 20% off all Guild Wars 2 DLC. Timing that with the reveal was shrewd: anyone who had wishlisted a DLC gets an automated email the moment it hits a 20%-plus discount, so a wave of on-the-fence wishlisters got nudged at peak hype.
The payoff was that the discounted Guild Wars 2 expansions generated over $110K on Steam over the weekend, a new peak since 2022. A lot more publishers sitting on dormant franchises should be doing exactly this, and many are.
The #3 game by new wishlists was dark-fantasy action title 1666 Amsterdam from Panache Digital, the studio led by Assassin’s Creed co-creator Patrice Désilets. After a rocky Ubisoft exit and some rights disputes, Désilets re-announced the project at SGF, and 383K players wishlisted it.
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As someone who’s lived in Amsterdam in the past (that time’s a bit … hazy), I thought 1666 Amsterdam looked the part, and I’m excited to jump in. There’s a free prologue available, and it’s had a bit of a bumpy start.
Still, of the prologue’s Steam reviews, just 61% are positive. The complaints cluster around expectation really: players went in expecting action and found a narrative-led experience. Only about 6% of wishlisters have played it, though, which might be a good thing.
The reveal landed, but the one slice of the game players can actually touch isn’t. Panache can easily turn the tide on that blip, though. We’ll be keeping an eye on this one!
Lords of the Fallen 2 and Onimusha hold their own
Soulslike Lords of the Fallen 2 took #4 with 182K Steam wishlists. CI Games confirmed the game – previously slated as an Epic Games Store exclusive – is now coming to Steam, and the numbers suggest that was the right call. Epic exclusivity tends to cap a single-player game’s reach. Alan Wake 2 is the usual cautionary tale, but Epic did part-fund that one, to be fair.
As we saw in the gameplay reveal a few months ago, Lords 2 looks like it plays rad and borrows a lot from Bloodborne – faster, more fluid, and very bloody. As a Soulslike obsessive, I wishlisted Lords 2 pretty quickly. And I’m in good company: of Lords 2’s 182K wishlisters, 60% have played Elden Ring, 42% Dark Souls 3, and 26% Lies of P.
Capcom shows up again, too. Onimusha: Way of the Sword added 174K Steam wishlists in the past week, pushing its total past 1M (the page has been live since late 2024). A demo dropped after Friday’s PlayStation State of Play and has been played by around 300K people on Steam – but only 6% of Steam wishlisters have tried it, so there’s an untapped audience yet to be converted by hands-on play.
I played Onimusha: Way of the Sword’s demo over on PlayStation, and so far, so good. If Capcom’s generational run extends here too, which looks like it might, the publisher will have had a frankly absurd 18 months. We’ll be covering all these releases here on the newsletter, so hit subscribe below to get those in your inbox.
New, licensed, and revived IP round out the list
That’s No Moon gave us a proper look at its debut game, Crossfire, a single-player, narrative-focused tactical shooter built on Smilegate’s huge multiplayer IP and backed by a $100M investment.
The appetite is clearly there for a tight, high-fidelity campaign in this franchise. It’s a sensible way to de-risk and open up an IP elsewhere with a polished premium experience aimed at older players with money to spend and no patience for endless live-service grinds.
That’s No Moon has worked in deep secrecy since the early 2020s, pulling talent from Naughty Dog, Infinity Ward, and Bungie, and that pedigree shows in the third-person reveal’s cinematic pacing and combat. Crossfire pulled 160K new wishlists, and the overlap data backs the single-player thesis:
30% of its wishlisters played Resident Evil Requiem (launched in Feb)
20% played Crimson Desert (launched in March)
15% are playing 007 First Light (launched TWO WEEKS ago)
So many of the players happy to fork out $70 for a new game are at least interested in Crossfire.
There’s history worth flagging here, though. Smilegate already tried a single-player Crossfire route with CrossfireX in 2022 – a free-to-play Xbox exclusive with paid Remedy-made campaigns. It was a bit of a disaster. It launched to largely negative reviews, and Smilegate shut the whole thing down on in May 2023.
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This time around, with That’s No Moon’s Crossfire, the campaign is the product, not a paid add-on bolted to a struggling free-to-play shell. And this time, it’s on the two platforms where gamers buy premium games most, Steam and PlayStation.
As for the rest of the top Steam wishlist-getters from the show:
Tomb Raider: Legacy of Atlantis – a reimagining of the 1996 classic – got 137K new Steam wishlists, bringing its total well over 1M on Steam. Of those who wishlisted in June (yes, we have that monthly data!), 23% also wishlisted Resident Evil Veronica, 19% Control Resonant, and 14% Onimusha. That’s your serial-wishlister cohort in plain sight – people stacking lists during the event. Whether they convert is, as ever, the open question.
HAEX (148K wishlists on Steam), a co-op survival shooter, got strong pull from the co-op horror and “friendslop” crowd. 43% its of wishlisters have played Phasmophobia, 42% R.E.P.O., and 41% Peak. That overlap cuts both ways: a receptive, well-defined audience, but perhaps also a saturated one? Those sub-$10 budget co-op games sell volume. Alongside quality, the biggest questions around HAEX are its price and virality potential.
Gundam Rogue Orbit, a third-person mecha action game based on the iconic Japanese IP, got 143K Steam wishlisters. Details on Rogue Orbit are thin, but mech fans are curious. About 32% of wishlisters have played Titanfall 2, 26% Armored Core 6, and 20% last year’s Mecha Break.
Saw Genesis, a 3-vs-1 asymmetric multiplayer horror game from Bloober, got 142K Steam wishlists. Unsurprisingly, nearly two-thirds of wishlisters have history in Dead by Daylight (21% of wishlisters played DbD this month!), 22% played 2017’s Friday the 13th: The Game, and 13% logged hours in 2024’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Asymmetrical-horror affinity and horror IP fandom are doing a lot of work here.
The thread running through SGF
Step back and one pattern dominates this list: known quantities win wishlists. Remakes, sequels, licensed IP, and revived franchises took almost every top slot. The two new-ish bets – Crossfire and 1666 Amsterdam – either lean on an existing IP or known creators, and 1666’s prologue reviews show how fragile even that can be.
Either way, SGF 2026 was a brilliant show – and its breadth shows just how vibrant the games ecosystem is. It’s a fantastic time to play games, and the back half of 2026 looks stacked. A little too stacked.
Too many quality games chasing the same finite player hours and wallets means even good games will underperform, and a crowded H2 2026 could see quality titles cannibalise each other.
But that’s a topic for another newsletter…
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