"In Steam, the share of games with fewer than ten reviews remains stable, at around 50%," say the authors of SteamTrender on the results of 2025
As Christmas approaches, we continue to review the year with experts from the gaming market. Next up is an interview with Lev Kobelev and Alexander Barabanov, the creators of the analytical service SteamTrender.
How was the year 2025 for your analytical service? What were the main outcomes or achievements?
Lev Kobelev, SteamTrender: The year 2025 was challenging for us. We work on development in our spare time, and for certain reasons, we had less of it this year.
The service broke down several times because Steam significantly changed page layouts, and we couldn’t parse data correctly. Nevertheless, I think our main achievement is that we survived this year and found an answer to the question: "Why are we doing all this, and what is the uniqueness of our service?" We realized that now is not the time to compete in accuracy prediction for specific games. Other services are already doing this better, and while we reach their level, they likely won't stand still either. Overall, I believe that when developing an indie game at the stage of competitor and market analysis, the performance of one specific game is not as important as a comparative, ordinal analysis of genres and their combinations. We will continue to develop this direction.
This year, we added a page for top-earning new releases on Steam, something I’ve long searched for on various services and never found. Now you can see all the games that have received between 500-1000, 1000-10000, and 10000+ reviews within the first two months of release. This, in our opinion, is sufficient cohort analysis to track not only obvious hits but also strong mid-tier performers that do well but remain outside the mainstream.
Why is this important? Oftentimes, the success of blockbuster hits on Steam is defined by circumstances that are very difficult to replicate, whereas many less successful projects capitalize on conditions that are easier to analyze and reproduce.
Additionally, we introduced a setting that allows for localizing tags within the top X. For those unaware, tags in Steam carry weight. The highest weight is given to those tags developers assign to their game themselves (typically the top four). This feature has made it easier to localize games by genre, preventing something like Elden Ring from appearing in a search for 'dating sim' just because a couple of thousand pranksters tagged the game as such somewhere at the 20th position by weight.
Moreover, this year, I exited the gaming industry, but I want to maintain a connection with it — and our service helps me do that.
How has the Steam games market changed over the past year, based on the data you've collected?
Alexander Barabanov, SteamTrender: Well, the year isn’t over yet. Typically, these metrics can be gathered around January-February. Still, some conclusions can already be drawn.
The market continues to show mixed dynamics. On one hand, PC platform revenue is growing. On the other hand, it is increasingly consolidated among the top percentile, and the rest must try to divide the leftovers. The share of games with less than ten reviews remains relatively stable, at around 50% of all released games.
Here's what we've observed over recent years:
2023
- Total games – 14,112
- More than 50 reviews – 2,501 (17.72%)
- More than 500 – 749 (5.31%)
- More than 1,000 – 485 (3.44%)
- Average project revenue — $26,942
2024
- Total games – 18,560
- More than 50 reviews – 3,601 (19.41%)
- More than 500 – 808 (4.35%)
- More than 1,000 – 502 (2.70%)
- Average project revenue — $25,489
2025 (as of December 10)
- Total games – 18,941
- More than 50 reviews – 2,412 (12.73%)
- More than 500 – 565 (2.98%)
- More than 1,000 – 345 (1.82%)
- Average project revenue — $24,837
As we can see, the number of games has stabilized after sporadic growth since the introduction of Direct in early 2018, but the average revenue is declining, and reaching the coveted top percentile of 500+ reviews is becoming more difficult each year — and that's where 90% of the platform's revenue is consolidated.
How would you describe the current state of this market?
Alexander: The importance of organic reach in today's conditions is declining each year (this is evident from the constantly declining user activity metrics at SteamFest from Chris Zukowski and Simon Carless, for example), while external marketing activity is becoming increasingly important.
You can directly observe this in the case of this year's popular genre, "friends-loop," which, with a short development cycle and low average price, entirely depends on social media virality and popularity outside of Steam.
What should studios consider if they plan to launch on Steam in 2026?
Alexander: Providing advice in the context of an ever-changing platform is challenging, but, for instance, next year, developers still have the chance to jump on the co-op games bandwagon before the market matures and evolves into something akin to the current indie horror genre, where only a very small percentage (just 1.8%, according to Zukowski’s sample) achieve success (more than 500 reviews) despite a large number of games with successful tags.
The cozy game segment is also doing well and has already secured its place on the platform, demonstrating that "pandemic" casual players are not just interested in playing but have become a significant, stable part of the platform's audience with their tastes and preferences when it comes to mechanics and visual aesthetics.
It’s easier now to say which genres you definitely shouldn’t create games in. Nothing has changed here:
- Platformers;
- Point-and-click adventures;
- Pure puzzles;
- Visual novels (these have been consistently poor performers on Steam, with very weak average metrics).
However, if you really want to, perhaps you can. Just don’t expect to make money from it.
Have there been changes in the field of Steam analytics at the product level or perhaps in methods of analysis and forecasting?
Lev: The methods and analytics remain the same, but a new major player has entered the market — AppMagic. They have a very strong team of analysts and developers who have been providing quality analytics for the mobile segment for many years.
If they're entering Steam, they're serious. The coolest thing they have is the calculation of DAU and MAU. Now we don’t have to do it ourselves, just kidding.
Seriously, I will be watching their success with great interest. Respect and good luck to them!
What new trends do you expect in game analytics next year?
Alexander: It’s funny to see people who believe in the omniscience of AI asking LLMs for metrics and then quoting that information as if it were gospel, not realizing that in order for such a model to work, a large and detailed dataset must be available for the neural network to analyze and make conclusions. Since this doesn’t exist in the premium segment, AI often fills the gaps with either invented data or outright fabricated quotes. This creates an unhealthy precedent where people believe blatantly false information and begin including it in genuine documents (I’ve personally seen wishlist conversion rates claimed at 40% in these), amusing anyone with even a slight understanding of the subject.
In reality, nothing changes in this regard: we still look at review dynamics, sales top-charts, wishlists, and their interrelation. Unless Valve gives us new data sources, it's all going to stay the same.
Again, it’s interesting to watch AppMagic's new initiative. Much like in the mobile sector, the service is searching for partner companies willing to share their Steam account data. They’re doing this to aggregate the information for the market as a whole. To my knowledge, they’re the only ones doing this.
Currently, AppMagic’s accuracy is quite low, but maybe in a few years, something worthwhile will emerge. However, the premium Steam market is considerably less stable than mobile, where a few strong titles occupy the top positions for years, so in any case, the confidence interval will likely not be much more accurate than that of many current services.
What improvements are you planning to implement in your service in 2026?
Lev: We have many plans, but, as I mentioned, not much time. There's hope that this will improve. Sasha's release is about to happen (Alexander is the lead designer at Sad Cat Studios, working on the much-anticipated Replaced, with more than 700,000 wishlists according to Gamalytic. — Editor’s note), and they just announced the release date at the beginning of December.
Look, we still don’t have a basic feature — a game page. That’s our main priority. Once that’s in place, we can build additional features, such as review analysis: the countries reviews are coming from, what's praised, and what's criticized. Plus, the ability to sort reviews by language during searches to better understand geographic trends.
Additionally, we’d like to implement some unusual search methods, like finding related projects to selected ones: if you’ve picked some shooters and MOBAs, we understand that you might want a shooter-MOBA hybrid. I’m also thinking about “image-based” search: sometimes, you want to find a game similar in style or color palette. But this is all still very raw, needing further development.
Finally, we need to extend the Tag@k feature to the Tags and Trends pages.
In a sense, I’ve realized we're an "indie" service. We can’t compete with giants like Gamalytic, VG Insight, or AppMagic. So we focus on small but useful features that, from the unit economics perspective of the giants, may not make sense but are fun for us to create.