Two game devs launch SteamTrender, free tool for exploring and analyzing key Steam trends by user tags

The more tools, the better! A new analytics service called SteamTrender has emerged to help developers and data enthusiasts better navigate Valve’s ever-expanding game platform.

SteamTrender was developed by Lev Kobelev, product analyst at MY.GAMES, with the help of Alex Barabanov, lead game designer at indie team Sad Cat Studios. The latter is currently working on the upcoming 2.5D cyberpunk action game Replaced.

The service uses tags that each Steam game has to analyze the popularity of various genres and explore key trends on the platform. According to Kobelev and Barabanov, “this allows us to better understand current audience & developer preferences, essentially identifying trends that dominate current Steam.”

SteamTrender is free to use and allows everyone to:

• Browse the top 100 trending games with 1k-10k reviews in the last two months;
• Collect stats for certain user tags and compare them against each other by the number of games released and other data like median reviews, owners, and revenue;
• Check out the most popular games with certain tags and download up to 1,000 titles as an .csv file;
• Explore trends for selected tags over a five-year period preceding the pivot year.

For example, here is a table of competitors with the City Builder, Simulation, and Strategy tags, excluding the Multiplayer tag.

And here is an overview of trends among CRPGs with a turn-based combat between 2019 and 2024, excluding games with fewer than 100 reviews.

As Kobelev and Barabanov explained in the FAQ section, SteamTrender collects data directly from Steam at the beginning of each month. However, the platform filters out review bombs and reviews from users who received the game for free, as well as excludes demos, prologues, and free-to-play titles.

While SteamTrender provides revenue estimates based on the Boxleiter method, the devs warn that services like VG Insights and Gamalytic have more reliable data on this particular metric with lower margins of error. “Our primary goal is to identify and understand the relative trends behind certain tags on Steam, so we rely on the standard Boxleiter method for this purpose,” the disclaimer reads.

SteamTrender is currently in beta, with its creators planning to continue improving the service and its accuracy by adding new features and fixing bugs.