There are several genres that Steam players love the most, but the market as a whole is not stagnant. Game marketing expert Chris Zukowski has analyzed how many games and in what niches performed the best in the first half of 2024.
Games in the picture: Buckshot Roulette, Chained Together, Deep Rock Galactic Survivor, Spirit City: Lofi Sessions
In a new post on his How To Market A Game blog, Zukowski shared results of his analysis of new games released on Steam from April 1 to July 12 (the day after the end of the Summer Sale). He focused on titles that managed to reach 1,000 reviews.*
*Zukowski uses this number as a “somewhat-arbitrary metric” because a) most games don’t get to 1,000 reviews; b) it correlates to about $300k in gross revenue, which is a major milestone that qualifies a game for various promo stuff from Valve like Daily Deals or Pop-ups. He also cautioned devs against trying to artificially get to 1,000 reviews because it is “not some magic algorithm number where you hit it and amazing things happen.”
- 160 new releases got to 1,000 reviews during this period, compared to 72 titles in the first quarter. Excluding AAA and games based on major IP, there were 119 “true indies” that crossed this mark.
- In the first half of the year, a total of 232 games can be classified as “hits” (those with 1,000+ reviews). So there will be around 500 such titles by the end of the 2024, in line with previous years.
- This is great news for developers of these games, but a worrying sign for the rest of 8,000+ projects already released on Steam this year. “If more games are being released and yet the number of ‘hit’ games is static, there is a higher percentage of studios that will be disappointed,” Zukowski noted.
- There were also 28 titles that crossed the 1,000 mark in the following quarter after their release. For example, indie RPG Felvidek got 188 reviews in the three days of its March 29 launch, but currently has 1,713 “Overwhelmingly Positive” reviews.
- The sad news is that of the 8,000+ new releases on Steam this year, not a single game with fewer than 400 reviews in its first month reached the 1,000 mark later. So hoping that your project will suddenly become a “sleeper hit” months after launch is a lost cause.
- “I am sorry, but if your game doesn’t sell well in the first month, there really isn’t much evidence that the game will become a hit,” Zukowski said, adding that “if you are nowhere near earning $150,000 gross revenue within your first 6-9 months, there isn’t much you can do.”
What were the top genres on Steam in the first half of 2024?
- Co-op games are striving, accounting for 21% of all “hit” releases on Steam this year. So there were 51 co-op titles with 1,000+ reviews. This is in line with last year’s trend when games with this tag captured 36% of the total copies sold on the platform (via VG Insights).
- Horror remains one of the top-performing genres on Steam, with 20 “hit” titles already released in 2024. Last year, this category saw 28 games with 1,000+ reviews.
- Other genres that continue to appeal to Steam players are Open World Survival Craft (16 games with 1,000+ reviews in the first half of 2024), Simulation (7), City Builder (7), Management (7), Farming Sim (7), and Roguelike Deckbuilder (4).
- Here are some games in these core genres that reached 1,000+ reviews: Supermarket Simulator, Infection Free Zone, Night Raider, Slice & Dice.
- Vampire Survivors-like roguelikes (auto shooters, bullet heaven, whatever you want to call them) are in decline: only one game in the genre has managed to become a “hit” since the beginning of 2024 — Deep Rock Galactic Survivor. For comparison, there were 17 auto shooters with 1,000+ reviews last year.
- Idle games are trending right now, with 8 “hits” already released this year (there were only 3 such titles per year in 2022 and 2023). Zukowski cited Sixty Four and Spirit City: Lofi Sessions as examples, also pointing at the popularity of what he called “Dead Simple idlers” like Banana and similar card-farming clickers.
- Another interesting trend is 3D games with PS1 aesthetic and low poly graphics — e.g. Crow Country and Buckshot Roulette (it is a huge hit with over 2 million copies sold).
- VR remains a very small niche, with only 1 game in this category reaching 1,000+ reviews this year.
- 2D platformers are still not a goldmine — Zukowski once again noted that most titles in this genre have poor sales, but indie devs continue to make a lot of them. However, already four 3D platformers have become “hits” since the beginning of 2024, including Little Kitty, Big City, Rooftops & Alleys, and Chained Together (it’s also co-op!).
- 9 adult games have become “hits” this year so far, but Zukowski thinks other devs shouldn’t worry about it: “Consistently 10% of all best selling Steam games are adult. It is just the pornographic tithe to support the church of Valve.” Last month, we also published an article about the state of the adult games market.
To learn more about each genre, general trends, and other data about the state of the Steam games market in 2024, check out Zukowski’s full post.