Monitoring the situation on Steam
Introducing Steam Reports, my regular analysis of emerging microgenres on Steam
9000 Dimensions provides independent research and analysis specializing in the Steam market. Become a paid subscriber today to gain access to my in-depth reports analyzing emerging microgenres on Steam.
Read my first report which covers anomaly horror games where I dive beyond the hits including The Exit 8, The Cabin Factory, and I'm on Observation Duty.
Digging through the depths of Steam is a longtime hobby of mine. But with over 18,000 games released on Steam in 2024 alone, it’s becoming exceedingly difficult to fully grasp what’s happening on the platform. The Steam algorithm excels at surfacing new games for players, but for commercially-conscious developers, staying on top of all these games can be overwhelming to say the least.
The savvy game developer knows some genres sell better than others. But, is it possible to predict how your game will be received by this ever-growing black box? Should you even allow the ebbs and flows of trends and shifting player preferences to influence your creative process?
With my Steam Reports, I provide in-depth, data-driven analysis of emerging microgenres and trends on Steam for developers, publishers, and games industry professionals. I identify yet-to-be-established genres in the trenches of Steam in order to give you a better chance at releasing the next big hit.
The best game designers of the past decades have known that keeping your ear to the ground is a vital part of making great games. And the very first step toward making great games is playing more games.
Masahiro Sakurai, director of Super Smash Bros. and the Kirby series, explains:
I went out of my way to play games I didn't like or find interesting. Those ended up being a lot more informative for me… At home I have literally thousands of games, and I think of them as pearls of wisdom from my predecessors.
In his GDC talk about the design of Marvel Snap, game designer Ben Brode talks about how playing every digital collectable card game he could find was an important first step in his design process for Hearthstone.
[Game] designers are like chefs, for the most part we don’t invent new ingredients, we take ingredients that already exist and combine them in new and exciting ways.
The first thing I did when I joined the Hearthstone team was play literally every game in the digital collectable card game genre. And I learned a ton from playing these games. Sometimes I found a new ingredient I was excited to try. Sometimes I just found out I didn’t like onions or something. But that’s still really valuable. For example, I didn’t know that I wouldn’t enjoy a grid-based card combat system in a collectable card game until I played all these games. And it’s way cheaper to learn that lesson by playing someone else’s games than to have to prototype it yourself and learn it that way.
Brode then recalls asking Mike Elliot, prolific game designer who worked on Magic: The Gathering and hundreds of other board and card games, how he comes up with new ideas for games.
He told me he gets all of his game ideas from games conventions. He just walks the show floor where everyone's showing off all their new stuff that they've been working on and he just lets ideas come to him. He just soaks it up and when he leaves the convention he's got like 12 new ideas for games.
There are countless examples of this perspective across filmmaking, writing, and business.
Stephen King, as prolific a reader as he is a writer, says in On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, “If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.”
In his autobiography In Memory Yet Green, sci-fi author Isaac Asimov recalls reading all the pulp science fiction magazines he could get his hands on in his father’s candy store.
Legendary investor and Warren Buffet’s business partner Charlie Munger says, “In my whole life, I have known no wise people…who didn’t read all the time… You’d be amazed at how much Warren reads, at how much I read. My children laugh at me. They think I’m a book with a couple of legs sticking out.”
In addition to playing lots of games, you also need access to good data to contextualize where those games sit within the Steam ecosystem and how they perform outside of the platform with content creators.
There are two shortcomings with the Steam algorithm that make gathering this crucial data difficult:
It buries games that don’t quite take off beyond a small group of dedicated fans.
It fails to make connections among games within their respective emerging microgenres.
This means developers can’t fully grasp the scale of the latest trend. As an indie, not only do you have to worm your way through the platform to find these obfuscated games, but you also don’t have a chance at finding similar ones. You can tell Steam doesn’t really know what to do with these relatively smaller games when you see a random smattering of really popular titles in the “More Like This” carousel, rather than more aligned games.
Digging through Steam can feel a bit like experiencing whipsaw, the day-trader’s term for the sudden movement of a stock in the opposite direction of what was expected (usually resulting in losses). The experienced day-trader knows that if you just zoom out of the chart a bit all those small movements begin to flatten out. Accepting this chaotic reality is the first step toward becoming a great trader. The actual game to be played is that of emotional regulation.
You must become one with the chaos while simultaneously resisting it. You must learn to perform the proverbial dolly zoom… Step back and zoom in at the same time.
My reports will help you master the dolly zoom. You will be an expert at wading through the slop and be armed with the tools to uncover what really matters for Steam players.
This is what I offer paid subscribers starting with my Steam Reports series. I feature the hits and the flops to help you confront the chaos of the market. I clue game developers, publishers, and games industry professionals into what’s going on at the margins of Steam. And I connect these trends to the longer histories of game design, player expectations, and play patterns.
This in-depth research is typically only available to developers with a dedicated “spreadsheet wrangler” or “market oracle” at a big games company. By becoming a subscriber on 9000 Dimensions for just $5 per month / $50 per year you’re getting elite analysis for the price of a latte.
I update my Steam Reports quarterly with new data and upcoming releases. If there’s a game you think should be included in my reports, or if you want me to cover an emerging genre that you’re crazy about, please drop some comments!
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