How to NOT Pick the Wrong Game Genre

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Picking the right game genre is critical for indie success. Your audience depends on both how many people could play your game and how many will actually see it. Some genres are oversaturated with too many strong competitors, while others are so niche they have no real audience. Both make it harder to get discovered and earn enough to sustain a studio. Passion matters, but if you want your game to succeed, you need to understand the market, your competition, and the financial realities of each genre and tag before choosing where to place your game.

Game genre is critical

Games are not made alike. Categories aren’t either. Any time a game is made, there is an adressable audience who would ever play your game. There is also a reachable audience, which is the small % of the adressable audience who will ever see your game. Both these two audiences is what will make or break a game.

But your game isn’t the only one. There are hundreds of thousands of games on Steam. Your game will be buried in a sea of alternatives. This is where picking the right genre can make or break your game release.

Let’s talk about it.

Why it matters

Genre, categories, and tags matter on Steam (and other platforms) because the algorithm’s will recommend games that are similar to players. If a player loves Baldur’s Gate 3, the algorithm will find games (like Dragon Age: Inquisition or Pillars of Eternities) of similar tags and recommend them.

This becomes key when you release your game, and need the initial traffic. It will also bundle your games during sales and events, further helping the right players discover your game.

Categories are not made the same

Game genres, tags, and categories on Steam vastly vary. Different genres has different pricing, different average playtime, and fanbases. However, when I analyze what genres I’d like to explore, I mainly care about three things:

• How many players buy games in the genre?
• How many games are being released in the genre?
• Quality-to-pricing expectations

Optimally, you release your game in categores where there are a lot of players, and too few games (top right). This massively increases the likelyhood that your game will sell, it lowers the requirements on quality/polish, and overall makes life much easier for you.

Let’s look at shit genres

I have my massive dataset over Steam tags, their performance, and estimations on their average financial success. Game development is more complicated than this, but bare with me. For the sake of argument here, I deem:

• Failure: Games which sold less than $10 000 before fees. This cannot sustain a 5-person game studio.
• Medicore: Games which sold between $10K and $50K before fees. This is alright, but won’t fund a game #2.
• Success: Games with >$50K in sales before fees. This will sustain a 5-person indie game studio.

There are two types of bad categories here, which is reflected in our quadrants.

• Oversaturated tags (bottom right, many players but many games), where there are so many games that the audience isn’t accessable (“Combat”, “Arcade”, “Minimalist”, “Linear”).
• Niche tags (top left, few competing games but also few players), where there isn’t really a meaningful audience to reach (“Pool”, “Snow”, “Bird”, “Utilities”, “360 Video”). (You can of course have both. I’d avoid the genres with few buying players and a ton of competing games.)

Note that either of these categoires are fine to release in. There are tons of successful minimalist games, and I am sure there are snow games that overperform (I fucking love Snowrunner). But these are red flags. If a genre is oversatured, it must make up for it in another way. If a niche genre is perfect for your game it’s 100% fine to build; but the genre will not do you favors. It is a price you pay to do something you want. (Remember the %business vs. %passion from the why indie games fail article)

Let’s also adress “Free-to-play”, where the average revenue is massive, but the failure rate is 91%. Releasing high-quality games F2P with microstransactions is the #1 way to make bank. It is however shared with thousands of games that are nonsense or passion project, simply released for free. Most free-to-play games never make any revenue. Releasing your game as a monetized F2P game requires multiple other articles, which we may get to one day.

Do not select genres which do not serve you

Making games and earning enough money to sustain your team is difficult. If you build for a game category which is either too niche, or too oversaturated, you start in the negative. It is hard as it is. Releasing games in categories with less than 15% success rate and >80% failure rate means you’re trying to do something very difficult, and beginning uphill.

As of 2025, here are a set of Steam tags which are on average underperforming:

Linear	Artificial Intelligence	Top-Down	Snow
Logic	Cartoon	Old School	Tabletop
Minimalist	Casual	Stylized	Education
Abstract	Parkour	Puzzle	Pool
360 Video	Cats	Mini Golf	Cartoony
Score Attack	Relaxing	2D	Ambient
Tutorial	Philosophical	Asymmetric VR	Combat
Quick-Time Events	Jet	Electronic	2D Fighter
Utilities	Colorful	Physics	Action-Adventure
Trivia	Mahjong	Puzzle,Indie	Word Game
Platformer	3D	2D,Indie	Text-Based
1980s	Psychedelic	Aliens	Bullet Time
Underground	Magic,2D	Family Friendly	Psychological
Birds	Game Development	Pixel Graphics	Controller
3D Fighter	6DOF	Video Production	Demons
Arcade	Electronic Music	Gambling	Walking Simulator
Grid-Based	Archery	2D,Point & Click	Nonlinear
Nature	Boss Rush	Hand-drawn	Magic
Bowling	Futuristic	Time Manipulation	Conspiracy

I am sure many of you look at these and think “What? This makes no sense. Games with X is great!”. And you’re right ! This table does not tell the full story. But, for some reason, these tags are underperforming. Often, it’s due to them being niche (no real audience), or oversatured (too many high-quality options for players). It is up to you to find the reason before you decide what game you’re trying to build a game studio on top of.

Build the game you want to build, but investigate the space first

You should build the game you’re passionate about. I am not trying to fight that at all. It is wonderful, and makes me happy to be a human that people can create things they dream about. But if you want to be able to sustain from it, and continue doing it, you need to consider the business side.

So let’s discuss some of the types of tags you’ll encounter

Platformer

Oversatured with quality.

An extremly beloved genre. It is however absurdly oversatured. It is the 38th most common tag on Steam, with only 12% success rate. There are endless options of 10/10 games. The adressable market is massive (it is a beloved genre), but it is oversatured. Your game will go up against Geometry Dash, Celeste, Hollow Knight, Cuphead, Rayman Legends, It Takes Two, Dead Cells, Brawlhalla, Split Fiction, & many more. How will your game compare? Can your game be the best in the world at it’s niche?

Similar tags: Tabletop, Stylized, Indie, Action-Adventure, Pixel Graphics

Mahjong

A rigid category.

There aren’t many games (~100), and they tend to underperform. There is no innovation in the space, and not enough of a passionate playerbase to really innovate. The players want Mahjong and for it to feel like Mahjong. So any innovation kills it for them. You can make a big breakthrough (See “What the Golf” for Mini golf), but the tag for Mini Golf doesn’t serve. What the Golf was a massive success dispite having the bad tag of Mini Golf. Not because. The game is just so great it powered through, finding players who love it without the Steam tag’s help.

Similar tags: Bowling, Mini Golf, Chess, Pinball

Abstract

No similarities between games.

Tags like “Abstract” does not serve you because they aren’t specific enough. Few people are fans of “Abstract”; they just enjoy the mechanics of some abstract games. So when Steam recommends your game to new players, it can’t target the right players. Thus, if games are tagged as primarily “Abstract”, Steam will waste its effort promoting it without selling any copies.

Similar tags: Minimalistic, 360 Video, Quick-time Events, Grid-based Movement, Bird, Pool. I mean, who plays ALL the “pool” games.

Summary

• Be mindful about the business side of things. Just because you are passionate doesn’t mean we can’t try to get you successful as well.
• Genre can make or break indie games, so pick the right category and tags for your game.
• Understand each genre, category, and tag you expect your game to have.
• Some genres are oversatured with too many good games for your to compete.
• Some genres are so niche they hurt your games discoverability.
• Some genres have strange price-to-quality expectations, making it harder to financially sustain the studio.

Next article will be how to pick the RIGHT genre. Or at least how I do it.