Every year I do a deep dive into the games that found some sort of success on Steam in 2025. I want to discover what genres, what prices, and what art styles are in vogue?

If you want to see the results of my research, join the private lecture which is hosted on my Game Marketing Ideas site.

As part of the lecture you will also be provided a full list of all the 1000+ games so that you can deep dive into the data yourself. 

Purchase Game Marketing Ideas (75% off)

As a teaser into the type of deep dive you will get in this lecture, I am giving you a preview of my research into the question “Should I keep my demo up?” commonly paired with “I am making a short narrative game, “Do I really need to make a demo,and should I keep it up?”

Note: Developers put up and pull their demo at any time. Sometimes I think they forgot they even have it up. The following charts are based on data I sampled on Sunday February 1st 2026. Don’t yell at me if I said that a game has a demo up and it no longer is. Things change.

How many hit games still have their demo live?

In this chart you will see all the indie games that earned at least 1000 reviews in 2025. Then I scraped Steam to see how many of those games still had their demo live. 

Overall 21% of 2025s 1000+ review games have a demo up. 

And you would be surprised but that 21% is not all narrative games? 

I went through and I looked per genre how many games have a demo vs do not. 

The green line is the percentage of games that have their demo live.

What genres are post-release demos still up the most

Souls-like is the genre with the highest percentage of demos live. Here they are:

Demo live:

No Demo:

The next highest demo percentage at 50% was City Builders and Rhythm games.

Adult games don’t do demos

I will just leave it here that not a single NSFW game has a demo live post launch (or maybe even pre launch.) Seems like a very sensible business move if you just think about it for a bit.

But what about short, linear Narrative and Horror games?

This is the number #1 demo related question I get. Narrative developers especially are super paranoid about leaving their demo up. The fear is that players will get to the end of the demo and there is nothing motivating them to buy the full game. They got their fill. 

I suspect most people assume that demos only help highly replayable games so linear games are hurt.

But surprisingly, 27% of hit narrative games and 30% of hit horror games still have their demo up post launch. Here is a list. 

Horror games with their demo still up.

Narrative games with their demo still up

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Play these demos

If you are a narrative or any linear game designer, you MUST research. Play these demos. They are FREE! All of these games found an audience on Steam. They must be doing something right. 

This is free research. Please, play demos and learn how they are structured, how they encourage the player to wishlist & buy.

Do demos help or hurt visibility?

I have shown over and over that demos help games get wishlists pre launch. So my theory is that games that keep the demo up should have higher follower counts too. 

So let’s test it.

From Steamdb, I pulled the daily follower count for all the 1000+ review visual novels POST RELEASE. I removed free games because they basically function as a demo. 

I also only included follower increases starting 1 month after launch because every game has a different launch profile: some go viral, some are slow burns with good word of mouth and a long tail. By looking at games 30 day post launch I am seeing the resting rate when everything settled down, where the demo is supposed to help.

In the following graph I mapped the median daily follower growth of all the games in each category.

That is totally incomprehensible so I calculated the median daily follower count of all Demos vs Non Demo narrative games with 1000+ reviews

Notice that there is almost no difference between the two. Some days games with a demo do better, some days games without do better. 

I even went and did the average for all narrative games per day:

  • The average daily follower increase for a narrative game WITH a demo: 10.62
  • The average daily follower increase for a narrative game WITHOUT a demo: 10.57

A demo doesn’t appear to make a difference as far as wishlists. 

Do demos help or hurt review scores?

Tomas Sala the game developer of The Falconer and Bulwark keeps his demo up because he said he thinks it improves the review scores. His theory is the haters will realize they don’t like the game by playing the demo and never go on and buy it, and never go on to leave a bad score. 

Good theory. Let’s test it.

I grabbed ALL games that had 1000+ reviews in 2025 (not just Narrative Games) and compared the review score for games with and without post-launch demos:

  • The average review score for a game WITH a demo: 89.83
  • The average daily follower increase for a game WITHOUT a demo: 84.22

That’s something! Keeping a demo up increased scores by over 5.5 points.

But, I know several developers pull their demo down because patches and improvements on the main game build mean extra work to keep the demo up to date too. In that case, the additional demo work doesn’t seem worth it. 

So there is no clear benefit either way of keeping a demo up post launch. 

Why though?

Pre launch, demos are critical to getting visibility. No doubt about that. I think because it allows you to get into festivals and content creators. It is much better than social media alone. 

However post launch, if someone really likes it, they will just buy the game. Most content creators that are big enough to impact your visibility will just buy your game instead of playing the demo. 

Strangely, most people really don’t play demos; it is mostly content creators and taste makers. But those same taste makers would play a demo, are willing to skip to the chase and just buy the game. Therefore the demo is basically superfluous. 

So my basic advice is that if your demo is good, people seem to like it, leave it up. But if it is a hassle that requires a lot of updating, you can take it down without much impact to your visibility