LogInThe highest-rated games, most commonly used words in titles, underexplored combinations of genres, and more.
Did you know that the highest-rated game on Steam is an indie title? Or that there's only one game blending farming sim and battle royale mechanics? Or the fact that, despite the community's waning interest in virtual reality, the term "VR" appears more often in game titles than any other? For more fascinating insights into the game industry, check out this excellent video shared a few days ago by Newbie Indie Game Dev.
To gather the data, the author scraped Steam's entire catalog using several scripts that collected information such as game names, tags, prices, release dates, ratings, and review counts. After running the scripts for nearly a week and manually cleaning the data afterward, the developer ended up with a substantial list of 200,000 apps – 140,000 of which were games – each featuring 40 attributes, resulting in a massive database of around 8 million data points.
Leveraging the database, Newbie Indie Game Dev identified the most frequently used words in game titles, with terms like "VR," "simulator," "world," "space," "dungeon," "game," "adventure," and "puzzle" standing out above the rest. The author also discovered the best- and worst-rated games on Steam, uncovering, for example, that the indie title Terraria is currently the platform's best-rated game or that both parts of the Portal franchise are in the Top 50.
Even more interesting is the developer's analysis of video game genres based on the data, which highlights genre-genre combinations and reveals currently unexplored pairings. Examples include Board Game and Platformer, found in ten games, Card Game and Rhythm, seen in only five titles, and Battle Royale and Farming Simulator, encountered in just one game.
In the comments, the author shared additional highlights that didn't make it into the video, including insights on Steam's most commercially successful publishers, differences in genre popularity between indie and AAA games, the evolution of major genres over time, the relationship between a game's review score and its price, and more. Every sub-dataset mentioned by the developer, both in the video and the comments, is available as a convenient chart and can be accessed via the original video's description.
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