Challenging genre norms

Wishlist Rundown - Week 41, 2025

Good morning.

This week I examine the risk and reward of challenging established genre norms, look at how creating a game based on real-world concepts can boost appeal, and dive into the emerging opportunity around taking a hardcore genre and making it cozy.

As a reminder, every Monday, I look at upcoming indie games that have gained a bunch of wishlists leading up to launch. I give my take on why these games are hyped and what you can learn from them. Consider becoming a paid or free subscriber so you can stay ahead of the market and make more hit games.

Let’s get into it…

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Challenging genre norms

Since Steam introduced tags in 2014, they have become a key feature for game discoverability among players and developers alike. Tags on Steam are used to specify a game’s genre including top level categories like Adventure, RPG, and Simulation along with more specific categories like Battle Royale, City Builder, and Roguelike. They’re also used to identify even more specific subgenres like Creature Collector, Looter Shooter, and Souls-like as well as themes and moods as wide ranging as Dinosaurs, Noir, and Relaxing.

An example of some Steam tags from the page for recent hit survivors-like Megabonk

Periodically, Steam creates new tags to capture emerging categories that have enough interest and attention behind them, but don’t fit within existing tags. Last year they added the tags Dice, Boomer Shooter, Dwarf, and Elf. All in all, there are over 450 tags on the platform. With all those tags available, players, and sometimes developers, can mis-tag a game. As Steam explained shortly after they first launched the feature:

Tags can be a good indicator of when there is a mismatch between how you perceive your game, and how your game is perceived by customers.

Getting your tags right is simple, but important. Not only do tags give players a sense of what they can expect from your game, they’re also used by Steam’s recommendation algorithm all across the platform. One of those places is the “More like this” carousel, which can drive significant traffic to your game’s page. From Steam when this feature first launched in 2014:

If you visit a product page for a game on Steam, you’ll notice a section just above the reviews called “More like this”. With the addition of tags, we can better figure out which games are most closely related thematically and stylistically. As a result, the amount of traffic through the ‘More like this” section of the product page has tripled, which indicates to us that customers are finding those suggestions much more relevant.

Now, imagine you’re an indie developer (this shouldn’t be too hard for you, my dear reader). You’ve been hard at work on your latest game and you’re ready to start marketing it. First step: a store page on Steam. You upload your capsule art, put the finishing touches on your description, and add some tags that seem right for the kind of game you’re making. You submit your page for review. A few days later, Steam approves it and it’s live! Hooray, time to share it with the world.

You visit your page and scroll to the “More like this” section, curious to see what other games the Steam algorithm is recommending to shoppers. You see the following:

• The latest game in a 20-year-old AAA franchise that was launched exclusively on PlayStation 5 and sold 5.1 million copies within its first week.

• A remake of a game from 1997 which was voted “Best Game Ever” by users of GameFAQs in 2004 and 2005.

• A remaster collection for a franchise that includes the world’s most recognizable characters owned by one of the longest-running and most successful media companies.

• A game based on a book and subsequent movie franchise that is the 8th highest grossing media franchise of all time at $34.7B, sitting just above the Marvel Cinematic Universe at $34.3B.

Talk about stiff competition.

Can you guess the game that’s more like this?

Unless you’re working on the latest AAA action adventure game set in a fantasy world, your “More like this” carousel should definitely not look like this. If it does, it’s a sign of one of the following:

1. Your tags aren’t specific enough

2. Your game isn’t specific enough

The former is easy to fix: just think about the games that are most similar to yours and copy their tags. The latter can signal a deeper problem.

The screenshot above is from the Steam page for upcoming title Dreams of Another (releasing October 9th with 19K wishlists). A post on the PlayStation blog by Baiyon, the Creative Director of Q-Games and developer of Dreams of Another, describes the game saying:

[Dreams of Another is a] philosophical and allegorical gaming experience where shooting creates rather than destroys.

Reading this description, the first comparable games that come to mind are certainly not the big budget hits like God of War, Final Fantasy, Kingdom Hearts, or Hogwarts Legacy. But come to think of it, there really aren’t many games that are “more like” Dreams of Another, and that seems to be by design. Baiyon’s description continues:

Piece together the interwoven stories in this unconventional game that challenges common tropes and invites players to understand not just the game, but their own life in a whole new light.

“Challenging common tropes” is an honorable effort, but doing so presents you with an even greater challenge: properly positioning your game on Steam. Paradoxically, the less similar your game is to other games on the market, the harder it can be to market your game. It can be especially difficult to understand when you’ve crossed the threshold between “unique enough to stand out” and “so esoteric that you fail to break through”. If you’re going to make something intentionally unconventional, it’s worth thinking carefully about how potential players will discover your game. The least you can do is optimize your “More like this” results on Steam.