Games with which tags are popular on the Steam Deck — statistics from GameDiscoverCo

The founder of the analytics service GameDiscoverCo, Simon Carless, attempted to determine which genres are popular among Steam Deck owners. To do this, he studied user reviews on Steam.

UFO 50

As the analyst explained, he considered reviews only from those gamers who spent at least 50% of their time playing the games they reviewed on the Steam Deck—this specific tag can be seen on Steam. He then selected titles with at least 100 similar reviews and whose revenue reached at least $1 million, excluding free-to-play games from the statistics. After this, Carless looked at the tags of the games on the resulting list.

It’s important to clarify that tags on Steam cannot be completely equated with genres. This is because they can be set by both developers and gamers, which sometimes leads to various discrepancies.

According to Carless’s observations, Steam Deck owners are most interested in 2D platformers. For games with this tag, the median share of reviews from those who prefer playing on Valve’s portable PC is 2.31%. Although this is a small number in itself, it is even smaller for other games.

Here is how the current top-5 tags on Steam with the highest median share of reviews from Steam Deck owners looks:

1. 2D platformer — 2.31%;
2. card roguelike — 2.03%;
3. Metroidvania — 1.98%;
4. boomer shooter — 1.7%;
5. party RPG — 1.64%.

For comparison: the least popular among Steam Deck owners are MMORPGs (0.1%) and grand strategy games (0.12%).

Additionally, the analyst named specific paid titles on Steam with the highest share of reviews from those who played primarily on the Steam Deck. The top five include: UFO 50 (19.2%), Minishoot’ Adventures (14.72%), Dungeons of Hinterberg (13.96%), Mina The Hollower (13.71%), and Rogue Prince Of Persia (13.49%).

You can view all of Carless’s compiled statistics in this table.