A terrifying 20,282 games were released on Steam in 2025, and just 608 managed to get 1,000 reviews, expert finds: "We might be in a bit of an indie golden age"

Annual game releases on Steam reached 20,282 in 2025, according to analysis from indie dev and marketing expert Chris Zukowski, and 608 of those games were able to crack 1,000 user reviews on Valve's platform – which might actually be a good sign.

In a report on "What the hell happened in 2025," Zukowski, comparing against similar data from the past three years, reckons more games succeeded on Steam last year, assuming you define success as hitting 1,000 reviews.

Zukowski is quick to qualify, "My survey stops at games that earned 1,000 reviews minimum. HOWEVER, many games can earn $150K+ and get Daily Deals with as few as 500 reviews. I know several developers who have done that! If you got 525 reviews and earned $150K+ I am proud of you. I am sorry you didn’t show up in my survey. I have to draw the line somewhere."

On his methodology, Zukowski says: "Every January, I download a list of all the games that were released in the previous year and filter the list down to the games that earned at least 1,000 reviews. Then I do a deep dive, look at their Steam page, look at their screenshots, check the tags, and read reviews."

That being said, a full 2.99% of the games released on Steam last year hit 1,000 reviews – up from 2.44% in 2024, 2.56% in 2023, and 2.74% in 2022, according to Zukowski's analysis, marketing a turnaround after years of slight decline.

This does mean that only a small percentage of the developers behind these games reached this level of success and visibility – and, again, they could well have made a solid living below this 1,000 review mark – but Zukowski reasons "the numbers are going in the right direction."

"We might be in a bit of an indie golden age," he adds, reiterating his view that rough-but-fun games can find enormous audiences, in no small part because "Steam players want fun first" and are often accepting of, and even hungry for, trendy games. Booming games like Megabonk, RV There Yet, and Peak lend some weight to his argument.

Doing his best to wrangle Steam's inconsistent tagging system and finagle his own filters for data scraping, Zukowski breaks down the 10 most-represented genres among these 608 standout games. Here's the full ranking:

• Narrative - 51 games
• Simulation - 43
• Horror - 39
• RPG - 28
• Idle / incremental - 27
• Roguelike - 22
• Sexual content - 21
• Multiplayer shooter - 21
• Shooter - 21
• Management 19

Horror consistently ranks highly in Zukowski's annual reports. In fact, this is the first time it hasn't taken the top spot in several years. Narrative games, which include visual novel, detective, and "spooky but not quite horror" games, have seen a notable uptick thanks to a wave of FMV games coming from China.

A more interesting data spread pits these genres against themselves, measuring what percentage of the games in each genre managed to hit 1,000 reviews. Here, Zukowski gets a bit more granular and specific, and the winner is pretty clear-cut.

A whopping 20.8% of open-world survival craft games, or a whole 15 different games, reached 1,000 reviews in 2025 – miles ahead of the second-place genre, farming games, which sits at 8.3% with five games. Other top genres include roguelike deckbuilder (5.1%, 11 games total) simulation (4.1%, 43 games), management (3.4%, 19 games), and racing (2.1%, 14 games).

Genres with the lowest percentage of highly reviewed games include 2D platformers (0.18%, 3 games), point-and-click adventure (0.18%, again with 3 games), and puzzle games (0.34%, 14 games). This helps frame how packed different genres are on Steam – and Zukowski says there aren't nearly as many sex games or roguelikes as online trends might suggest – and how many of those games actually reach the summit of their genre. Of 1,658 2D platformers released on Steam in 2025, just three reached Zukowski's 1,000-review benchmark.

This is imperfect data hindered by a muddy tagging system – "unfortunately many developers mis-tag their game," Zukowski laments – but it does offer an interesting look at trends and visibility on Steam, as well as the flow of the torrent of games pouring into the platform. And though we shouldn't read too much into it, it does speak to how approachable certain genres may be for game devs.

For instance: a whopping 4,022 puzzle games were released on Steam last year, Zukowski finds. I'll spoil for you now that one of the few puzzle winners was GOTY contender Blue Prince.

"You know why so many people are making Roguelike Deckbuilders? Because Slay the Spire is a very fun game and millions of people played it," Zukowski concludes. "I am a weatherman. I report on what is happening. I don’t cause the weather to change."

Before it could come to Steam, Valve made devs "record and send footage" of their game's "alien orgy" for verification, which was fortunately cleared for launch.