u/_C_47_

By the way there is one more fresh example. How to Fish released five days ago and is already at 19,600 reviews, 94% positive.

Good point. Before answering I checked one thing: bigger games have longer mechanic lists in my data (median 10 tags in the under-$100k bracket vs 31 in the $10M+ one), partly because popular games have more text to read them from. So raw shares inflate with revenue, and I re-ran it only among games with 20-35 catalogued mechanics, comparing the $100k-1M bracket against $10M+.

What survives that control, share of games carrying it: Cover 5% vs 13%. Vehicle Driving 7% vs 18%. Open World 5% vs 14%. Weapon Customization 5% vs 12%. Fast Travel 9% vs 17%. Dodge 10% vs 17%. So yes, games that make $10M+ have a distinct profile, and it is an expensive-action-systems profile.

Only 47 games built around fishing ever reached 1000+ reviews, so the club is small. $1.65M medians and the ceiling of with Dredge at ~$25M. I would say worse pitches have been funded.

Dredge is the good counter-example in my data: it IS built around fishing (core mechanic in my catalog), about $25M estimated, 96% positive. The medians say fishing games usually earn less. They do not say fishing games are not allowed to win. A median hides its exceptions, and Dredge is a great one. Thank you!

Both #BLUD labels were wrong, you are right, and wrong in an interesting way: the analysis output for that game actually says "supporting" for both, but the stored row says "core". My import bug. Sounds as excuse, but anyway thank you! Fixed on the page now, and I found the same stored-vs-verdict mismatch on other rows, so I am auditing how far it goes.

On obscure games you are right too, and the post already treats them your way: every number in it uses only games with 1,000+ reviews, exactly because little text means weak labels. Below that line the pages exist but I do not run stats on them. #BLUD sits at 369 reviews.

And you are right, it is not your job to clean my dataset. But your two minutes cost me ten to fix, so if you ever feel like telling me more, I will gladly take it.

AI-assisted, yes, there is no other realistic way to read 85k games. Slop is when nobody checks the output. So check it: pick a game you know, open its page, tell me what is wrong. The Crusader Kings guy above just did and I fixed what he found within the hour.

You picked the exact test I use internally: twin games.

CK2's closest game in the whole catalog is CK3, and CK3's closest is CK2, both ways, followed by Sengoku, EU4 and Knights of Honor. The revenue comparisons in the post run on that layer, medians over groups of 100+ games, not on raw list equality.

Second, on the raw tag lists you are half right. The two games share 19 of ~40 entries. When I diff the rest it splits three ways: (a) real differences: Stress Management, Royal Court, lifestyle Perks and Legacy Progression are genuinely CK3-new systems, so identical lists would actually be wrong here; (b) naming altitude: CK2 says "Assassination" where CK3's murder schemes sit under "Espionage", CK2 has "War Declaration" where CK3 carries "War Score", same behavior, different granularity. This kind of noise is known, and it is exactly why the analysis runs on the similarity layer instead of exact names; (c) honest misses: CK3 missing "Mod Support" was simply wrong. Added.

The validation method, including this same twin-game test run on Hollow Knight vs Silksong, is written up here: steammaho.com/research

No, I did not play 9000 games, same as nobody who builds game datasets does. The labels are model-assigned: language models read each game's store text, player guides and player reviews against written rules for what counts as core vs supporting, several passes have to agree, and there are human review steps on top, I hand-check games constantly. The method is public on the site, linked in the post. It is not perfect, individual games can be mislabeled, but medians over groups of 100+ games survive some label noise. The best way to judge it: open any game you know well on the site and tell me what is wrong and I will apply corrections

Not stupid, exactly the right question. And no, it does not mean that. The comparison is between two kinds of existing games: games built around fishing vs games that have fishing as a side feature. The side-feature group earns more mostly because those are bigger games. The money comes from the game, not from the fishing. So adding fishing to Cyberpunk would not print money. But if you are choosing what to build next, "a fishing game" and "a big game that has fishing in it" have very different economics.

Fair questions. Two of them are actually covered in the post: all numbers are medians, not averages, exactly because of outliers (a few whales cannot move a median), and the budget/size point is the whole second half of the post, that is why the second comparison only uses games of similar size (20-35 catalogued mechanics). For fishing specifically the "bigger game" explanation wins there, the gap disappears at matched size.

The genre question is the good one, so I ran it just now. Fishing as a side system, median revenue by genre context: FPS $16.7M (17 games), Survival $5.5M (55), Adventure $3.1M (143), Open World $3.0M (110), RPG $2.0M (119), Simulation $1.7M (80), Casual $1.4M (68). So no, not the same value add at all, your instinct is right. Some caveat: the size matters here too, the shooters that bother to add fishing are mostly huge games.

Filtering by revenue brackets is the one I would avoid, that filters on the outcome itself. Genre splits I can run all day, name a pair.

Here are the suggestions ranked by what actually happens on steam. Games released since 2022: share that reached 1,000+ reviews, and median revenue estimate for the ones that did.

• Dating Sim: 5.9% reach traction, ~$730k median when they do
• Interactive Fiction: 4.6%, ~$730k
• Choose Your Own Adventure: 4.2%, ~$890k
• Card Game: 4.0%, ~$800k
• Visual Novel: 3.9%, ~$800k
• Word Game: 3.8%, ~$540k
• Idler: 3.5%, ~$310k
• Walking Simulator: 3.2%, ~$460k
• Point & Click: 3.0%, ~$580k
• Clicker: 2.9%, ~$270k
• Puzzle: 2.7%, ~$650k (13,000+ released since 2022, the most oversupplied genre on this list)
• Hidden Object: 1.4%, ~$340k

The catalog average is about 4.3%, so the narrative cluster everyone here recommends (visual novels, Twine-style IF, choose-your-own-adventure, dating sims) is genuinely the right call. The one suggestion "the data" would not reccomend is incremental games: clickers and idlers have below-average odds AND the lowest ceilings here, and the good ones are math-and-code heavy, which is exactly what you want to avoid.

I don't think so
to get there I already have to be interested, and I don't even know if it exists there

They will read any if your mail had some short trailers which could hook in 30sec

First some data on this. Among ~10k Steam games with 1000+ reviews, games with the classic level-up loop have a median review score of 83%. Games that ship progression without character levels (about 6.5k of them, so this is not exotic) sit at 87%. Direction is clear: players do not punish games for removing the XP bar.

Single-player already proved knowledge-as-progression works: Outer Wilds is the purest case, and smaller games built on knowledge gates score in the high 90s. So the concept is not the risk.

The MMO-specific problem is different: knowledge is the only progression currency that can be copy-pasted. In a single-player game I have to earn the insight; in an MMO it is on the wiki by day three, and your progression system flattens for everyone at once. That is why the MMOs that dropped levels (EVE, old Star Wars Galaxies) did not replace them with knowledge - they replaced them with wealth, territory, reputation and contacts. Those cannot be copy-pasted. So, yes it would work, but the load-bearing part of your design will be the property-and-reputation half, and the knowledge half will be a honeymoon that lasts until the wiki exists.

On itch the realistic risk is not theft, it is silence: a public tracker of itch shows that about 86% of itch games never receive a single rating, and the median rated game has 6 ratings total. The niches that do fine there are story games and horror; for most commercial genres the audience just is not there.

Steam side: among ~87k Steam releases since 2022, games that had a demo reached 1,000+ reviews 6.4% of the time vs 4.1% without. The demo hangs off a store page, and everyone it impresses is one click from a wishlist that actually counts at launch.

On the theft fear specifically: the downloadable build is the same Godot export whether it sits on itch or Steam, so the platform choice does not change how easy it is to rip. What changes is what you get paid for the exposure.

Of ~87k games released since 2022, the ones with a Steam demo reached 1,000+ reviews 6.4% of the time, vs 4.1% for games without one. But among the games that did reach traction median revenue is basically identical in both groups (~$930-960k). So a demo helps you get only over the visibility hump. Which fits what others said here: it converts fence-sitters and feeds festivals, it's not a discovery engine by itself.

But keep in mind that many games remove their demo after launch, so my "no demo" group contains ex-demo games and the real gap is probably bigger. And devs who bother making demos are usually also the devs who bother with marketing, so this is correlation, not causation.

Believe more in what you do and work hard, everything will come. Good luck!

From ~300 recent launches that went out with roughly 4-9k wishlists, the median first-week peak was about 36 concurrent players, and the middle half landed between 11 and 138. So 6k wishlists is real but it is not a launch by itself. And old wishlists convert worse - people wishlist and forget. The good news: the launch email still goes to all 6000 of them.

The page being old doesn't hurt you algorithmically, Steam reacts to recent velocity, not page age. So I would treat this as a relaunch, not a release: put up a fresh demo (demos can go up anytime, even after your Next Fest slot is used), apply to a couple of themed festivals, post some update news so the page shows life again, and only then launch, so the wishlist email lands on a warmed-up page.

I track Steam data as a side project, so a bit of numbers.

Across ~140k released games, about 13k are in Early Access right now, and nearly half of those entered EA more than 3 years ago. That graveyard is where the "death sentence" feeling comes from. But data itself doesn't show it: 5.7% of current EA games reach 1000+ reviews, vs 6.7% for games that never touched EA. Basically the same odds. Most games fail regardless of which door they walk through.

And among games that DO get traction, the EA ones actually sit higher on estimated revenue at the median (~$1.1-1.4M vs ~$0.9M for never-EA). Part of that is genre (survival and crafting games live in EA), part is time: an EA game has years to accumulate sales, not one launch window.

The one real cost I can measure: EA games settle around 3-5 points lower on review score, which fits the "people judge your half-baked build" complaint. So EA doesn't kill games, obscurity does. EA just makes the obscurity visible for years instead of one weekend.

How many wishlists you have in total now?

Flip the interview: instead of asking them to write code, give them code to review. Take a small AI-generated PR, put one subtle bug in it, and ask them to walk through it and tell you what they would change. Someone who can actually build will question the structure, catch the bug, ask what happens on edge cases. Someone who only types prompts has never had to judge code they didn't write, and it shows within ten minutes.

Same conclusion from a different direction. I use agents for bulk data work and the only thing that made the output trustworthy was the boring harness around it: written rules the output has to satisfy, dry runs first, and for anything important I run the task twice independently and only keep what both runs agree on. Disagreement between the two runs turned out to be the most useful error signal I have. Without that harness you are just the QA department for a very fast junior.

I keep a hobby dataset of steam releases so I checked. For 2024-2026 releases: horror tagged games reach 10+ reviews about 58% of the time, everything else about 48%. But median revenue among games that did get traction is slightly lower for horror, roughly 7k vs 8k. My own estimates, usual error bars apply.

So I think it was never about horror paying more. It was about horror getting ignored less. Streamers search a lot for cheap scary games, they go over usual "nobody-noticed" bar.
If the alternative is a genre where 2 weeks of work gets zero visibility, horror is better. As a get rich plan it was always obsolete.