Analytics: Action games and RPGs account for three-quarters of game revenue on Steam
The GameDiscoverCo service attempted to determine the real size of the Steam market (Total Addressable Market) and calculate the revenue across different game categories. They carried out an experiment: for each game that earned more than a million dollars, they kept only two key tags — one for genre and one for subgenre.
Main Findings
- Action games are the highest-grossing genre on Steam. They alone account for 58.37% of all games' revenue on the platform.
- Next are RPGs (17.11%), strategies (13.97%), simulators (9.76%), and sports games (1%).
- Arena shooters top the action genre revenue list, making up 18.99% of the genre's revenue or $9.52 billion. The second subgenre on the list is first-person shooters with $6.67 billion in revenue.
- The most lucrative RPG subgenres are action RPGs (26.45% or $3.89 billion), MMORPGs ($3.69 billion), and CRPGs ($2.69 billion).
- Among strategy games, MOBA leads the subgenre list (19.23% or $2.31 billion), followed by RTS ($1.84 billion) and grand strategy games ($1.16 billion).
- The most profitable subgenres in simulators are regular simulators (44.57% or $3.74 billion), profession simulators ($1.36 billion), and racing games ($942.89 million).
- Overall, the following subgenres showed the highest average revenue per game: arena shooters ($634.8 million), battle royale ($354.2 million), and hero shooters ($206.7 million). However, throughout Steam's history, only 29 games in these categories managed to earn more than a million dollars. Almost all revenue comes from select hits.
- Visual novels and roguelike deckbuilders are the subgenres with the lowest average revenue per game, with $4.2 million and $3.4 million respectively.
