How to Market a Game: Steam in 2024

More games were released than ever, success rate dropped.

Chris Zukowski examined the state of Steam in 2024.

Figures are provided by VG Insights. Chris removed projects based on major IPs and projects not translated into English. The list includes games classified by VG Insights as AA or indie. Some projects associated with large companies (like Tencent) were manually removed from the list.

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Overall market status

• In 2024, 18,324 games were released on Steam. This is a historical record and 30.8% more than the previous year.

• However, upon closer inspection, 75% of these projects have fewer than 50 reviews. There's a high probability that these are very small projects that never managed to break through the platform's information noise.

• At first glance, the year seems successful for indie developers. In the 2024 calendar year, 445 indie game and AA project developers surpassed the 1,000 review mark. This is 25% more than last year.

❗️In Chris's methodology, 1,000 reviews is the benchmark at which a game can be considered successful. Of course, this is a very conditional figure.

• However, considering the number of projects released to the market, the actual success rate fell to 2.44%.

Genres and Trends

• Chris suggests distinguishing between trends and working genres on the platform. Many genres popular now were also popular 20 years ago. In particular, simulators have been in the top 10 for "success" for the last 3 years.

• But a trend example is Vampire-Survivor-like projects. It quickly appeared at the top and just as quickly left it.

• Speaking of interesting genres, horror is the #1 genre on Steam in the last 3 years in terms of "success" (number of projects that exceeded 1,000 reviews) for small developers.

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• However, the above refers to absolute numbers. What's important is the probability of success. Here, Open World Survival Craft projects lead by a large margin (24.47% exceeded 1,000 reviews), followed by farming games (20.83% chance of success).

• To better illustrate the picture, Chris removes from the sample all projects with fewer than 700 followers (which, according to statistics, should equal about 7,000 wishlists). In other words, the list below excludes very small projects from the sample.

• The ranking, in this case, didn't change much, but it's evident that the Success Rate across all genres increased.

• In 2024, 1,640 games were released on Steam in the 18+ category. Despite the large number of released projects, the share in the total volume is the lowest in the last 6 years - 8.77%.

Source