Every January, I download a list of all the games that were released in the previous year and filter the list down to the games that earned at least 1000 reviews.Then I do a deep dive, look at their steam page, look at their screenshots, check the tags, and read reviews.
To read my past ones see these:
Then I try to assign the game 1 and only 1 genre.
Why? Because I think the best indicator of viability of a genre is not looking at the game that made the most money, but instead looking at what genres have the most entries. That indicates the audience is more likely to be omnivorous and buy more games. Games like Fortnite make a lot of money but that genre is winner take all. Don’t make a Battle Royale.
Additionally:
- It is possible to make a living off Steam and it is important to stay abreast of what actually is selling on Steam.
- Many of the games that do well fly under the radar of “the discourse.” Content creators, people on social media aren’t talking about many of these games. They just quietly sell copies by word of mouth.
- In my experience a “Well marketed” game can by itself earn about 150 reviews by pure developer will. However to get to 1000 reviews, the Steam playerbase needs to really like the game which the Steam algorithm picks up on and promotes.
- 1000 reviews also typically correlates with revenue of $150,000+ which is typically “real steam.” And Valve will unlock additional features such as Daily Deals.
In short: I am trying to figure out, what are the games that Steam players actually enjoy playing and are buying a lot of so you can potentially make a viable living doing this instead of just wishing and praying.
Side note: My survey stops at games that earned 1000 reviews minimum. HOWEVER, many games can earn $150K+ and get Daily Deals with as few as 500 reviews. I know several developers who have done that! If you got 525 reviews and earned $150K+ I am proud of you. I am sorry you didn’t show up in my survey. I have to draw the line somewhere.
It takes me about 16 hours to go through all the games, I just don’t have time to expand my scope to all the games that earned 500+ reviews.
Watch my recap live
In today’s blog post I am hitting the highlights of my findings.
Next week I am going to do a deeper look at specific games in my annual LIVE recap of the previous year. This is a premium talk I give every year and only available to people who have purchased Game Marketing Ideas.
I will be covering:
- A look at games that were made by small teams.
- Budding genres that might be the next big thing
- What happened to the porn games?
If you bought game marketing ideas in the past, you have access to the next one I am doing. You don’t have to buy a thing because all courses have lifetime access.
If you haven’t purchased Game Marketing Ideas, I am putting it on sale for this month’s event.
Buy it here before February 3rd
Stats of the games that hit 1000 reviews
- Sample date: January 4th, 2026
- Data source: VGInsights.com
- Total games released in 2025: 20,282
- Total games that hit 1000: 608
- AA & Indie games that hit 1000 reviews: 579
- Games after filtering out: 520
The reason I do this research is to find out what genres have an active audience that you could make a game for. Because of this I filter out games for a couple reasons:
- Has a famous IP. For instance some “indie” studios make a game using the Warhammer 40,000 license. Tribute Games Inc is a great indie studio with the best pixel art in the business. They released Marvel Cosmic Invasion in 2025 which is a beat ‘em up starring Marvel Characters! Side scrolling beat em ups are a hard genre on Steam, but does this game mean they are coming back or is it popular because of the IP? Too hard to tell.
- Only one (non English) language: I filter out Chinese-only games because that market is very specific. There are cultural reasons that the game might not translate to wider Steam. I don’t understand Chinese or the culture because of my background. I would love to read a similar analysis done by a Chinese blogger. Please send me links if you know of any.
Golden age
Every January I snapshot the number of games that hit 1000 reviews in January, then look at how many released to see how many succeeded.
2025 had the highest percentage at almost 3%.
As I mentioned in an earlier blog post, we might be in a bit of an indie golden age.
| Total 1000 | Games Released | Percentage succeed | |
| 2022 | 337 | 12304 | 2.74% |
| 2023 | 354 | 13834 | 2.56% |
| 2024 | 445 | 18,239 | 2.44% |
| 2025 | 608 | 20,282 | 2.99% |
3% success rate is still really really hard to achieve. But the numbers are going in the right direction.
Genre table
So of the games that made it through those filters, here are the genres for all the games released in 2025 and earned over 1000 reviews:
Top 10 genres by number of “hit” games in them:
- Narrative (51)
- Simulation (43)
- Horror (39)
- RPG (28)
- Idle / Incremental (27)
- Roguelike (22)
- Sexual content(21)
- Multiplayer Shooter (Back again) (21)
- Shooter (21)
- Management (19)
Genre changes through the years
Indies always fret that “Steam changes so much! And the genre that was hot this year will be gone next year.”
But really, looking at the data, not much changes in a 4-5 year period.
| Rank | 2025 | 2024 | 2023 | 2022 |
| #1 | Narrative (51) | Horror (47 games) | Horror (28 games) | Horror (29) |
| #2 | Simulation (43) | Narrative (30) | Open World Survival Craft (23) | Shooter (23) |
| #3 | Horror (39) | Simulation (27) | Simulation (21) | Sexual content (20) |
| #4 | RPG (28) | Shooter (27) | Narrative (20) | RPG (19) |
| #5 | Idle / Incremental (27) | Open World Survival Craft (23) | Multiplayer Shooter (20) | Simulation (17) |
| #6 | Roguelike (22) | Sexual content (20) | Vampire-Survivor-likes (17) | Narrative (17) |
| #7 | Sexual content(21) | Idle / Incremental (20) | Shooter (16) | Roguelike (14) |
| #8 | Multiplayer Shooter (Back again) (21) | Management (19) | City Builder (16) | Strategy (14) |
| #9 | Shooter (21) | RPG (17) | RPG (15) | City Builder (12) |
| #10 | Management (19) | Roguelike (16) | Sexual content (14) | Action-Adventure (12) |
| Same as previous year | 9 of the 10 (multiplayer shooter too Open World Survival Craft) | 7 of the 10 the same as previous year | 8 of the 10 games the same as previous year |
I counted up how many genres were in the top 10 the previous year.
9 out of the 10 genres at the top of the list in 2025 were exactly the same as the years previous. The only change was that Multiplayer Shooter knocked Open World Survival Craft off the top 10 list.
In 2025 there were 15 Open World Survival Crafts that earned at least 1000 reviews. So it’s not like they are gone, they just didn’t have as many as previously.
Sexual Content
People always fret that NSFW games “flood” Steam. Well, that isn’t the case. It is always about 10% and as a percentage they are lower than they have been for the last 3 years.
- 1,846 were released
- 20,282 games
- 9.10% total games
Survivorship bias
As required by the laws for Reddit, I must show this image and account for SURVIVORSHIP BIAS.
Lets compare the number of games that hit 1000 reviews as a proportion of the total number released in 2025 for that genre.
| Genre | Num games with 1000 Reviews | Total released in this genre in 2025 | 2025 Percentage reaching 1000 | 2024 Percentage reaching 1000 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Open World Survival Craft | 15 | 72 | 20.8 | 24.47% |
| Farming | 5 | 60 | 8.3% | 20.83% |
| Roguelike Deckbuilder | 11 | 212 | 5.1% | 6.71% |
| Management | 19 | 549 | 3.4% | 5.43% |
| Simulation | 43 | 1,048 | 4.1% | 3.76% |
| Idle | 27 | 965 | 2.79% | 3.05% |
| City Builder | 2 | 397 | 0.5% | 2.70% |
| Metroidvania | 3 | 269 | 1.1% | 2.21% |
| Horror | 39 | 1,208 | 3.2% | 1.81% |
| Automation | 5 | 420 | 1.19% | 1.57% |
| RPG | 28 | 1,158 | 2.4% | 1.46% |
| Tower Defense | 9 | 511 | 1.76% | 1.44% |
| Racing | 14 | 654 | 2.1% | 1.34% |
| Sexual Content | 21 | 1,846 | 1.1% | 1.26% |
| Souls-like | 3 | 340 | 0.8% | 0.83% |
| RTS | 4 | 442 | 0.9% | 0.82% |
| 3D Platformer | 8 | 1,390 | 0.05% | 0.72% |
| Colony Sim | 2 | 193 | 1.0% | 0.63% |
| VR | 1 | 368 | 0.27% | 0.43% |
| Puzzle | 14 | 4,022 | 0.34% | 0.36% |
| 2D Platformer | 3 | 1658 | 0.18% | 0.25% |
| Point And Click Adventure | 3 | 1658 | 0.18% | 0.13% |
NOTE: I don’t have time to personally check all 20,000 games that released in 2025 and assign a single genre. Instead I must rely on Tags to get the “total released” number. Unfortunately many developers mis-tag their game. So I have to approximate the true number using a combination of tags.
For instance everyone uses the “RPG” tag if they have numbers that go up. So I filter for games that have both “RPG” and “Story Rich” tag. That gets a close number and I know you will be able to find example true RPGs that don’t fit that, but it is the best I can do.
Here are other genres where I had to make some special tag filtering:
- Simulation = Games like Car Dealer Simulation. Combination of Simulation + Management
- Horror = Tags Horror + Dark
- RPG = RPG + Story Rich
- Immersive Sim = Immersive Sim + Shooter //Too many people tag their simulator games as “immersive sim” but when I talk about this genre I mean the System Shock style FPS, RPG, multiple ways to win type of games..
- Management = Management + Economy
What’s going on with Narrative?
51 Total narrative games reached 1000 reviews in 2025 moving it to the #1 genre on Steam. If you look at my “Genre changes through the years” table you can see it climbing every year.
What is narrative? When I classify it I use a semi broad brush. I include Visual Novels of course, but also detective games, and spooky but not quite horror games. Basically they are games where the story is more important than the actual gameplay. I try to think, if the story was bad, people would say the game were bad? Other genres can have bad stories but the gameplay is so fun people don’t mind.
Here are some from my sample that I consider “Narrative”
Games like Rue Valley
Visual Novels such as Wednesdays.
However the greatest increase in Narrative games this year was from FMV games out of China. I saw them in previous years but they were rarely translated to English so I would remove them from my year in review. But this year translations were much more common and English-speaking players are trying them.
Note that Steam filters review counts for your selected language. So if you look at their store pages they will not show 1000+. Data analysis tools like VGInsights collate reviews across all languages.
Here are some examples
Revenge on Gold Diggers which bills itself as “The First FMV Game Against Emotional Fraud”
Road to Empress I has a “historical” narrative angle to it:
These aren’t just one Studio pumping these out, there are many:
- 前方工作室 (Front Studio)
- 相逢互动娱乐 (Yi Xiang Feng Interactive Entertainment)
- Storytaco
I counted 19 FMV visual novels reaching 1000 reviews that were also fully translated. So even if I strip out the FMV games, that still leaves 32 in more traditional narrative game styles and making it the 3rd most popular genre after Simulation and Horror.
These FMV narrative games might be breaking through to Western audiences and could be worth a look. Panic (the publisher of Untitled Goose Game and Firewatch) did produce an FMV game called Blippo+. But it only got 250 reviews but a ton of “Best of 2025” nods from cool people. I think Blippo+ was just too weird and, well not enough choices that asked the player whether they wanted to punish the bikini clad woman in their house. The FMV games that do well, have to be kinda… cringe. They need to be “basic” and melodramatic with some, trashy, slightly lascivious fun. So if you have attractive friends and can make a down the pipe mystery dating game, maybe try an FMV narrative game.
Oh and to Revenge on Gold Diggers’s claim that it is “The First FMV Game Against Emotional Fraud” will have to fight with the Clue interactive VHS game that my family owned back in the 80s:
No I don’t actually have influence on the industry
A lot of people on Reddit complain that their are too many roguelike deckbuilders these days (even though there are not) and point the blame at this article I wrote in 2022 that showed a high median revenue but low total count for roguelike deckbuilders.
But that chart also shows that Puzzle and Platformers were the least performant genres.
But as you can see from this graph, the number of Puzzle Games and Platformers greatly increased the year following my article while the number of deckbuilders only modestly increased.
I checked the stats and that “Top Genres of 2022” blog post was read only 50,000 times since it was published.
You know why so many people are making Roguelike Deckbuilders? Because Slay the Spire is a very fun game and millions of people played it.
I am a weatherman. I report on what is happening. I don’t cause the weather to change.
The absolute legened of Tucson-based weather forcasting: Michael Goodrich.