Game genre map: popularity vs development cost by platform

How the coordinates are computed

X — genre popularity (“liveliness”), 0–100, log-normalised within each platform:

• Steam — total online players (yesterday’s peak CCU from SteamSpy) of all games with the genre tag.
• itch.io — sum of player ratings of the genre’s top games (itch does not publish player counts).
• Yandex Games — sum of ratings of the 24 most popular games in the category/tag.
• Google Play — sum of installs of the top games in the category or genre search.
• App Store — sum of ratings of the genre’s top games (free, paid and top-grossing) or genre search.
• “Demand per game” divides demand by the number of games — showing where competition is lower.

Y — development cost index, 0–100. It is an estimate, not a budget: 50% baseline complexity of the genre, 50% the median of signals from real top games: price, publisher, audience size (Steam); engine, 3D/2D, game jam (itch.io); 3D, multiplayer (Yandex); app size, big publisher, expensive in-app purchases (mobile).

A game on the map: X is the popularity of its genres (average X of the game’s genres on the platform), Y is its own development cost. Similar games are matched by shared genres (rare genres weigh more), close development cost and shared Steam tags.

Competition, niches and spend per player

• Competition on Steam, itch.io and Yandex is how many games the genre has. Mobile stores do not publish that, so there competition is concentration: the share of the top audience held by the three leaders. Steam also shows the hit rate — the share of games with 500+ reviews (roughly ≈ 17k copies) — and the top-10 share of online players.
• Niche = √(demand × (100 − competition)): high only when there is both demand and little competition.
• Spend per player = money spent on the genre ÷ players. Players are estimated copies (reviews × 35); money is copies × price × 0.65 plus DLC (each DLC bought by 15% of owners). In-app purchases in F2P games are not public, so mobile spend is not computed — the share of games with purchases is shown instead.
• Indie mode hides genres out of reach for a small team and counts only small studios. Genre tags of the most important Steam games are verified: the tag must be in the game’s top 12 and have ≥ 20% of the main tag’s votes.

Development cost is not only money

The index measures money and workload. The real cost also includes:

• time = money
• your health
• your relationships
• your age
• missed opportunities
• the game you could have made instead
• burnout
• self-confidence

Which metrics are available

Some stats are visible only to the game’s owner (Steamworks, Play Console, App Store Connect) and cannot be scraped. They are marked 🔒 with the closest public proxy.