In the last blog post I pointed out that indies should be optimistic about the Steam marketplace because there are so many genres just exploding in popularity and most of those games can be made in short periods of time.
Here are the genres that I really think fit this:
- Friend-slop
- Idle / Incremental games
- Horror meta-genre (this is where the counting the number of genres gets dicy)
- Horror casino
- Horror friend-slop
- Horror simulation
- Pure horror
- Simulation (mostly shop simulators but can be other things too)
- Rage games
- Autobattlers
- (MAYBE) Vampire Survivors gen 2
But how long will this last? In today’s blog post I want to take a meta view to see how things evolve. This won’t last forever. But I still think there are many ways to take some of these genres.
What the Steam “great conjunction” lifecycle looks like
The most recent great conjunction was with Vampire Survivor-likes. The cycle goes through several phases.
I pulled the concurrent player count data for the top 26 vampire survivor likes and combined them into a single timeline. I used a “100% stacked area chart” which helps us see what the proportion of the games take up among players. Basically since Vampire Survivors was the founder of the genre, 100% of the players were playing that game. But as more and more games entered the marketplace the share of players were spread among other games. Here is that chart:
When looking at this chart, focus on what happens when new games arrive on the scene. Do they take over for the initial entrant in the genre? How often is there turnover in the #1 game?
Phase 1: The proto game (not on graph)
In this phase a weird and very rough-around-the-edges game releases and nobody plays except some weird game developers who are deeply inspired by it despite its very crude exterior or terrible UX. This phase is similar to that old joke about the Velvet Underground credited to Brian Eno:
“The first Velvet Underground album only sold 10000 copies, but everyone who bought it formed a band.”
Brian Eno (supposedly)
Poncle admits that “Magical Survival” for android was one of the inspirations for Vampire Survivors.
There is always one of these for every boom:
- Minecraft was inspired by Zachtronics’s Infiniminer
- Slay the Spire was inspired by Dream Quest
Phase 2: The genre defining hit
Eventually one of those inspired designers makes an improved version of the “proto game” to make it widely palatable to the general public.
The public loves these changes and the game goes big! It is a huge! A runaway success!
This is Vampire Survivors when it hit in 2021. The question is, how dominant is it? Is it always 90% of the market? Or is it quickly overturned by someone else?
Phase 3: The second wave variants
Observant developers jump on the success of the phase 2 genre defining game and stretch it in new ways. These developers are usually small teams who can pivot faster than big mature studios. The variants usually don’t reach the success of the original but they find their niche by changing something about the defining game: making it easier, making it harder, adding more controls, taking controls away.
The second wave games usually make a fraction of the sales of the genre defining game but it doesn’t matter because a fraction of multiple-million seller is still a lot of money. The audience buys these second-wave variants because they are desperate for more of the first game so try everything and anything that resembles it. It is like every player is drunk, every player is looking to hook up, and they just don’t care how ugly you are (even though you aren’t ugly. You are charming).
Example Vampire Survivor variants: Brotato, Rogue Genesia, Nomad Survival, Soulstone Survivors
If we zoom in to just the Phase 3 section of the chart, look at how many big “stalactites” pierce the share of Vampire survivors like. The combination of Brotato and the new entries often pushed Vampire Survivors to sub 25% of the market. To me this shows that there is a lot of curiosity in the market. Players are frequently moving from game to game. This means that new entries can expect to see big sales.
A very static genre like Battle Royale has one or two dominant games and entires rarely eat into their share of the playerbase.
Phase 4: The end of the conjunction.
Once the second wave variants mature, an evolutionary tree of genres emerges. The genre usually fractures into specific sub-genres. The slower but more established studios are now releasing games in this new genre. They were slow to jump on the trend but their experience in making highly polished games allows them to bring very good looking and more accessible games that the second wave variants couldn’t achieve.
The bigger studios can also use their superior business development prowess to bring in famous intellectual property.
The bigger studios also charge more and so are much more profitable and are promoted by the Steam algorithm more vigorously.
These bigger developers set the new baseline of quality with the fanbase. Lower-quality games developed by small teams cannot compete and their games do not sell.
Examples of Phase 4 Vampire Survivors: Deep Rock Galactic Survivor, TemTem Swarm, Warhammer Survivors
This chart is a zoom in on the Phase 4 of the vampire survivor likes. I consider Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor. Notice how it is basically the last game to break through and push back on the top two games of Vampire Survivor and Brotato.
By May of 2025 there were basically 3 major games in the VS-likes: DRG:S, Vampire Survivor, Brotato. The three of them held over 75% of the market share. That is the oligopoly that has kept out other entrants for over a year.
Then Megabonk hit. It completely took over the genre and you can clearly see it wiping out the share of the competition. THIS is why I think there COULD be a v2 VS-like space. This is risky but maybe the genre is cracked open again.
The great conjunction is in Phase 3: You know what to do
As I mentioned, we are in an amazing time where there are multiple games in Phase 3 right now.
The fan base there is drunk.
They are looking for anything that resembles these hit new games.
You need to get something out before we transition to Phase 4. The big studios are already starting down the road to making these grand conjunction games. They are probably in the due-diligence phase where they will hold 30 meetings, generate over 5000 power-point slides, and 40 excel spreadsheets worth of sales data. Once they figure out this is worth their money, they are going to fire their Death Star laser at this genre and your chances will be obliterated.
Now is the time.
Let’s look at a proportional CCU chart for friendslop as one example. Here are the top 23 friendslop games:
Notice how there have been multiple phase 3 events here. This is showing a very dynamic market.
Zoom in on Phase 3A, and you can see Lethal Company took over for a little while. Then recently REPO, then PEAK each had periods where they took over 50% of the marketshare when they released. I made this chart before the surge from RV There Yet? hit. But when it launched RV There Yet hit 100K CCU. On the same day Peak’s hit 24K, and REPO’s 32K CCU.
Basically, similar to Vampire-Survivor Likes there is still a lot of slack in the market. A game can launch, pull players away from the Phase 2 genre leader.
The fan base is still hungry.
But we don’t know how long Phase 3 will be for the friend slop space. The party ends when a few games take over and form their oligopoly.
You could invent a key mechanic
But trying to make a game for phase 3 isn’t just a greedy cash grab.
You could define the genre.
During the Great Vampire-Survivors-like Conjunction of 2021 smaller developers just like you made important contributions to the genre.
Rogue Genesia established a deep and complex meta level map very similar to Slay The Spire.
20 Minutes TIll Dawn popularized click-to-fire bringing an important branch to the genre as to how much control players should have over the main character.
When I was talking to the Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor team about how they made their Phase 4 version they said that they played every single Vampire-Survivor like and listed out every important feature and one by one decided which ones to include or exclude. The traversed the evolutionary tree made by developers.
If you jump on one of these Grand Conjunction genres you could get credit as the one who introduced a defining feature that influences all future games.
Why the urgency?
I have been studying the professional side of the industry for almost 20 years. I started making and publishing my own games in 2008. That year was key because the iPhone App Store launched in July 2008 and Microsoft launched “Xbox Live Community Games” (later renamed XBOX Live Indie Games) in November 2008. Both of these allowed people to publish their own games.
Over those years I have noticed every once in a while there are these “conjunctions” that pop up where there is an extremely hungry audience and the typical gate keepers or “big boy” developers aren’t looking. Smart smaller developers can jump in and do very well for themselves. But the window closes fast.
Here is a quick list I compiled of these “windows” opening.
Part 1: The plastic bag + magazine game era (1977–1983)
I am not this old, but you used to be able to make a game at home on your PERSONAL COMPUTER, print a manual and sell it at your local shop. These were the first indie developers (examples California Pacific Computer Company, Muse software). Check out these pictures of some plastic bag games. (side note UGH TOO MANY GAMES. LOOK AT ALL THIS SLOP.)
Whats going on with this game? Now that is some capsule art. Kids, don’t make your own capsule art.
Or do…
Part 2: Flash days
Flash days were a great time that allowed ambitious devs to make games quickly and earn some modest income via sponsorships. I consider the rapid work and cross-polination of the early flash community the incubator for the next wave of big time indie hits made by developers such as Derek Yu, Toge Productions, and Edmund Mccmillian.
Flashed force developers to make smaller games by necessity (both technologically and economically)
For an extended history of this period check out
Part 3: XBLIG
The small indie section of the Xbox Live Arcade was the first time I personally witnessed one of these great conjunction bubbles. It was a sub sub culture that existed on XBOX 360 and in various forms existed from 2008-2017. For the most part XBLIG games earned even less money than the median Steam Game.
However, Minecraft hit PCs in the early 2010s. But there was no console version so the XBLIG market stepped in to fill the gap in the market. A great conjunction! (on a smaller scale). If you made a Minecraft clone for XBLIG, you could actually make a decent amount of money. Here is a compilation of the Minecraft-likes that were released. However, the conjunction was over once Minecraft started moving over to Consoles.
Similarly there was another mini conjunction for games that included the XBOX avatars (Microsoft’s version of Nintendo Miis). Those “avatar” games did extremely well compared to the baseline XBLIG game. There was a mini avatar boom. Some games even escaped containment and became a hit on their own right such as A Kingdom for Keflings which was so popular it even migrated over to Steam: A World Of Keflings.
Part 4: Mobile
When the iPhone App store opened in 2007 the early developers had very little competition and there was no defined expectations for what a touch-screen mobile game was. This was a true cambrian explosion and very small, simplistic games made a lot of money.
But once the app store evolved with in-app purchases, free-to-play, complex paid customer acquisition, and huge well funded companies like zynga, the opportunities vanished. The conjunction was over.
The future is the hardest thing to predict
Nobody knows when the next boom of rapid-release genres will end. Making any game is a risky endeavour.
The good thing about jumping in now is that the “table stakes” for entering this endeavour our lower. A competitive game in these genres can be made relatively quickly. However in the next 6-12 months, more and more polished games will be released in these genres and the possibility of making a quick game could end.
The Horror genre has been incredibly resistant to big players taking over. But will other genres be like VS-likes where the ability to break through diminish?