Jonas Tyroller released a fun free browser plugin that hides the number of Steam reviews a game has and you have to guess between 6 options. Then it tells you if you got it wrong. 

Here is a link for you to download it yourself and install it on your Chrome browser.

Here is me playing it for 30 minutes:

I love this game because it is a great way to learn how Steam actually works without fooling yourself with emotions and the availability bias. People think “oh ya platformers and metroidvanias are popular because there is Celeste and Silksong out there!” 

NOPE! That is survivorship bias. Those genres have a couple big hits and a ton of underperformers that you have never ever heard of. And you get to face to face with all those other games you have never even heard of in genres you thought were big. 

I played for an hour and got 60% correct. 

In a recent game Jonas Tyroller got 36% correct. 

Bite me games played it and got around 52% correct

I think I got some lucky rolls so I am not sure I can keep at 60% for long. I will be playing again so we can see how my percentage changes over time. 

But here are my general tips to help you get better at this game and by extension picking the right project and making better games. 

The first thing you have to understand is that over 75% of Steam is bottom of the barrel, low performing. Look at this chart I sampled for 2024’s Steam games. Please internalize this chart. Every year-in-review article that says “OH MY GOD STEAM HAS 18,000 games. THAT’S TOO MANY!” just edit it mentally to see that only 22% are really competitive. Steam’s algorithms hide the rest of these.

With these percentages in mind I try to classify games into 4 basic categories. 

  1. Sub 50 reviews
  2. 500-999 reviews
  3. “Real Steam” (1,000 –  9,000) reviews
  4. MEGA SELLERS

When I play Review Guesser I am trying to classify in which of those 4 buckets a game falls. Here are the clues to look for 

Sub 50 Reviews

You can usually tell these at a gut level but the game is someone’s first attempt at making a game or a cohesive creative work in general. Here are the dead give aways

  1. Spelling errors, or weird punctuation and spacing
  2. Very very short “About this game”
  3. Trailers that don’t have sound FX
  4. Trailers that look like the developer just hit record, and then they started the game and played it for 2 minutes without editing at all (even editing out the menus)
  5. Capsules that have weird spacing between lines or the letters themselves (kerning or leading) 
  6. The capsule has ALL CAPS WORDS ALL SAME FONT. 
  7. Poor lighting in game
  8. Repeating textures in the environment where you can clearly see the seams
  9. All screenshots are in the same environment and you can see the same object multiple times across multiple screen shots
  10. There seems to be only 1 gameplay mode
  11. It is an “arcade” game
  12. The rooms are very strangely sized. Like very very big
  13. When a player kills an enemy it just disappears and a particle effect takes it’s place.
  14. The game is an asteroid clone
  15. Genre is totally unrecognizable. 

Free game warning: If you see a game that meets the above criteria but is FREE, then add about 28-50 reviews to it. Don’t pick the 0-10 review option. 

Many people have asked me why SFX are such an important thing in the trailer in determining whether a game is a poor seller. 

It isn’t that shoppers are looking at whether a game has sounds or not and making purchasing decisions. Instead, no SFX is a symptom that there is a lack of knowledge on how to excite someone, or make them interested in their work. It is the classic Van Halen “Brown M&M clause” where they could determine if the venue they were performing was paying attention and read their contract. If there were brown M&Ms it was a warning sign that something could go wrong. 

WATCH OUT THOUGH

This is Cruelty Squad. It is a good game. It has 18,000 reviews. It is a MEGA SELLER.

How do you distinguish between bad bad, sub 50 reviews and a deliberately anti-aesthic game going for a “vibe” like Cruelty Squad? 

This is important. If you see a “bad looking game” you need to determine if the game is made by someone with a professional art degree who is doing that as a commentary on the modern techno-state. Cruelty Squad is made by Ville Kallio who is a Finnish visual artist who also exhibits art at galleries and has a whole merch line. Ville has a deliberate practiced aesthetic (that I think looks really cool. I like it. He seems cool)

Clues for determining if the trash looking game is deliberately looking like outsider art or is just someone who is actually an outsider making their first game?

Scan the descriptions. Typically an artist will be an anti-capitalist organizer of an anarchist collective. Here is the dead give away in Cruelty Squad “Cruelty Squad is a tactical first person shooter set in the hardcore gig economy of corporate liquidations.” Boom, art degree of some sort. 

Also check the tags. Usually use the capitalism one ironically

Also look to see how the game’s developer is listed. Is it a co-op? Or a collective? There is usually some form of alternative organization behind the developer. 

Also just look at the art. Although it is deliberately trying to look anti-professional, glitch, or outsider, their art training can’t help but shine through and you can still see the care they put into the work. The work is still very readable despite being aggressively anti-aesthetic. The lighting is usually pretty good and everything can be seen. 

Also you can see the care they put into it. Look how the developer took extra time to add the border to this gif. It looks good! I love it.

Retro re-releases always underperform rarely more than 1000

51-999 Reviews

Classifying the games into this bucket is probably the hardest part of the game. There are actually two types of games that can end up in this bucket and it can be confusing.

Type #1: Good games in bad genres – this is heartbreaking but a lot of indie games are well made, heart-felt projects, but made in genres that just don’t sell well. These are games like 3D platformers that look so good but those genres just don’t sell well on Steam. 

Other signs you have these: good capsule, or nearly good

  1. The capsule text turned the “O” into something like a magnifying glass, the earth, an asteroid, or a cut puppy face. Some form of modifying the text
  2. The letters look individually placed such as rotated, overlapped, and it is very  
  3. Illustrated capsule
  4. Good trailer with a clear rising tension and well edited.

Advice:

Classify the game as 500-999 reviews if the game looks really really good, juicy, has tons of effects, beautiful character design but is any of these genres:

  1. 2D pixelart platformer (usually with very elaborate backgrounds)
  2. 3D platformers (usually starring a cat)
  3. Puzzle Games 
  4. Narrative heavy games where you wander a somber looking environment
  5. A really cool non-traditional art style but the game is in an unrecognizable genre.

Type #2: Games that look a little unprofessional but are in a very hot genre. These are games that look like someone’s first game but because the genre is so hot, the audience doesn’t care as much. “Looks unprofessional” is a very fine line. The game can’t look AWFUL. You are looking for graphics that look presentable and some care was put into it but doesn’t seem to have as much polish or “juice” that is ok. 

These are the genres where lower quality (but not bad) doesn’t matter.

  1. Idle games
  2. Horror 
  3. Simulation
  4. Auto-battler
  5. Open world survival craft (But you have to see there are tons of things to craft / explore)
  6. Deep Deep looking tower defense
  7. Roguelike that looks very very very deep with tons of variation of environment and items
  8. Colony Sims that look very very very deep like Clanfolk, or Dwarf fortress. 
  9. Top down dungeon crawlers that look very very deep. 

The best way to see if it is type #2, is look at how much depth the game has. If you see a lot of repeating images / environments it is probably a sub-50 review game. If it looks very deep and you see a complicated ui with a tech tree, it is probably a 500-999 review game. If it is VERY VERY VERY deep it is a 1000+ game. 

Secret Type #3: Retro-rerelease of B-tier PC games

Many legacy studios have been re-releasing their old PC games on Steam. These are games that came out in the 90s to early 2000s. 

Although the games may have been big hits or popularly reviewed at the time they don’t typically make a big impact on Steam. Studios usually don’t put as much marketing effort into them, or even try to get 7000 wishlists. They just dump them on Steam. 

Therefore their review counts are usually in the 200-ish range. Don’t let your nostalgia trick you. 

1000+ Reviews

This is my secret advantage in this game. Every year I compile a list of Steam’s 1000+ reviewed games so that I can get an understanding of where the market is. Basically if I recognize the game I usually classify it here. 

This is where Review Guesser helps developers benefit a sense of what the market likes. You really should watch Steam. Look at top sellers, look at the top games of Steam next fest. 

Other than looking at every 1000+ review game here is my general tip:

Typically the games here are in the “Crafty Buildy” genre I talk about a lot. These games are high quality and in the “right” genres. 

Even if you haven’t heard about these games, don’t think they sold poorly. You would be amazed at how well some games do despite never making a splash in the “Indie Scene”

10,000+ Reviews

These are the mega popular indies you probably know about. These are the games that are like “But, ya what about Silksong” 

If it is by a well known studio and it doesn’t have a reputation as a “flop” I usually will put it in this review range. 

If the game is a genre definer like Slay The Spire, or Silksong, or Don’t Starve, then you pick the 100,000+ review choice. 

Study!!!!

If you are going to make games on Steam you must learn what is selling. You aren’t “chasing trends” you are understanding your customer and staying current on where the culture is. There is a culture. 

Games are a dynamic art form that is alive and growing and dynamic. You should be glad that genres evolve and there are “hot trends” because that means we are growing and vibrant. 

If the genres stayed the same and you could clone a 20-year old game then that means the genre has stalled and is dying.