Benchmark of Steam Genres: Inequality Index, Oversaturated Niches, Top Grossing Categories, Anomalies, and Perpetual Underdogs

Instead of the traditional mid-year review, we have prepared an extensive report on the state of genres on Steam. Inside, you'll find a wealth of data, charts, and conclusions about the highest-grossing game categories, oversaturated niches, and undervalued subgenres. We will also discuss tags with the most uneven revenue distribution.

Let's start with some basics. As a starting point, we used Steam's own genre classification, which is also reflected on SteamDB. Valve offers a conditional three-level hierarchy:

• Top-Level, or Super-Genres, such as action, adventure, RPG, strategies, etc.;
• Genres in a broad sense, derived from top-level categories, like platformers, visual novels, JRPGs, grand strategies, etc.;
• Sub-Genres — precision platformers, first-person shooters, action roguelikes, etc.

The narrower the game category, the more accurate the results. There can be thousands of simulators released in half a year, but only a few hundred life simulators. Since each product has up to 20 tags, ideally, we should look at the combination of tags to study a specific game category. This is precisely what we did when researching individual niches and releasing benchmarks on them: RTS, idlers, adult projects, turn-based strategies, etc.

However, in this report, we will not narrow the scope of analysis that much. The main goal is to study the state of different game genres and categories in a broad sense. We will only look at releases from January 1 to June 30, 2026.

The tag system on Steam is not perfect because users actively influence tags, and developers do not always classify their creations accurately. Some tags are genuinely painful. A prime example is Immersive Sim, which includes anything from 007 First Light to the Chinese FMV hit Road to Empress II, except for actual immersive sims. So, it's worth keeping this nuance in mind.

Before we delve into results and conclusions, here are some market statistics for Steam for the first half of the year:

• In the first half of 2026, almost 12,000 new games were released on Steam;
• Their total gross revenue exceeded $1.9 billion;
• The median revenue was a modest $196;
• The share of games with revenue below $1,000 — 67%;
• Only 145 titles surpassed the $1 million mark — 1.2%;
• The revenue for new releases in the 95th percentile (top 5% most successful) was $130,000;
• Revenue in the bottom 30% (30th percentile) was $21;