Steam Genre Benchmark: Inequality Index, Oversaturated Niches, Top-Grossing Categories, Anomalies, and Perennial Underdogs

To start, here are some preliminary points. As a starting point, we used the genre classification directly from Steam, which is also reflected on SteamDB. Valve offers a conditional three-level hierarchy:

• top-level, i.e., main genres (Top-Level or Super-Genre) like action, adventure, RPG, strategy, etc.;
• genres in a broad sense derived from the top-level (simply Genre) such as platformers, visual novels, JRPGs, grand strategy, etc.;
• sub-genres (Sub-Genre) like precision platformers, first-person shooters, action roguelikes, etc.

The narrower the game category, the more accurate the results. There could be several thousand simulators released over half a year, while life simulators might number only a few hundred. Since each product can have up to 20 tags, ideally, it is important to look at the combination of tags to study a specific game category. This is precisely how we approached studying individual niches and released benchmarks on them: RTS, idlers, adult projects, turn-based strategies, etc.

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

The Steam tagging system cannot be considered perfect because users actively influence the tags, and developers do not always accurately classify their creations. Some tags are particularly problematic. A notable example is Immersive Sim, which includes everything from 007 First Light to the Chinese FMV hit Road to Empress II, excluding actual immersive simulators. Therefore, we suggest keeping this nuance in mind.

Before moving on to results and conclusions, here are some data on the Steam market for the first half of the year:

• nearly 12,000 new games were released on Steam in the first half of 2026;
• their total gross revenue was over $1.9 billion;
• the median revenue was a modest $196;
• the share of games with revenue less than $1,000 was 67%;
• only 145 titles surpassed the $1 million mark — 1.2%;
• revenue for new releases in the 95th percentile (top 5% most successful) was $130,000;
• revenue for the bottom 30% (30th percentile) was $21;