WWII games released since 2023 reach 1,000 reviews 79% more often than games of the same genre, age and price model usually do. Mythology: 53% more often. Historical: 42%. Cyberpunk: 29% less often. 1980s: 45% less. Setting is its own effect, separate from genre. steammaho.com/news

Receipt. On Sep 3 we logged Halloween: The Game at 21,306 followers: 8 in 10 similar launches peaked between 103 and 23,030. It peaked at 33,639. Miss, 46% above the ceiling. Our follower count was 23 days old at logging (Steam throttles those reads); counts are now refreshed within days of launch.

Forecast, logged Sep 14. Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War IV launches Thursday with 89,619 followers. Of 44 tracked launches with a similar following, 8 in 10 peaked between 2,690 and 85,081 players in week one. Graded Sep 25. Also logged: Trails in the Sky 2nd Chapter, 55 to 12,776.

Receipt. On Sep 3 we logged Dungeon Settlers at 13,573 followers: of 231 tracked launches with a similar following, 8 in 10 peaked between 68 and 12,776 players in week one. It launched Sep 4 and peaked at 4,953. Inside the range. Every forecast, graded: steammaho.com/reports/scorecard

More endings, higher score: 81.4% positive with one ending, 84.7% with two or three, 85.8% with four to nine, 86.4% with ten or more. Ending complaints: 0.4% of reviews for one-ending games, 4.4% for ten or more.

steammaho.com/news/story-structure-and-reception-on-11-472-steam-games

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Games built around cooking earn less than games with cooking as a side feature. Steam games with 1,000+ reviews: median lifetime revenue $0.8M for 44 cooking games, $1.8M for 203 games with cooking on the side. Across 624 mechanics, the side-feature version wins 90% of the time.

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Sci-fi horror games reach 1,000 reviews 34% more often than horror games of the same age and price usually do. Horror set in a realistic place: 18% less often.

Horror isn't the crowded part. Horror in a realistic setting is.

#gamedev #horrorgames

#gamedev #horrorgames

How a story is wired vs how players rate it, on 11,472 Steam games: stories that branch and rejoin around the player's choices score +2.4 points over linear ones. Games whose tags promise a story but have none: −3.8.

steammaho.com/news/story-structure-and-reception-on-11-472-steam-games

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Setting, with genre held fixed: historical settings beat their genre's expectation by 29%, mythology by 26%, World War II by 37%. Fantasy and science fiction sit exactly at expectation.

steammaho.com/news/what-a-game-s-setting-predicts-on-steam-once-genre-is-held-fixed

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Dungeon Settlers launches Wednesday with 13,573 followers. Of 231 tracked launches with a similar following, 8 in 10 opened between 68 and 12,776 peak players in week one.

Logged before launch on our public scorecard; graded the week after.

steammaho.com/reports/scorecard

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Everwind went into launch with 101,271 followers and peaked at 2,690 players. How to Fish went in with 8,037 and peaked at 373,971
A following buys attention, not a number. Both are misses on our forecast scorecard, published next to the 9 of 12 we got right
steammaho.com/reports/scorecard

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Halloween: The Game launches Monday with 21,306 followers. Of 166 tracked launches with a similar following, 8 in 10 opened between 103 and 23,030 peak players in week one.

Logged before launch on our public scorecard; graded next week, hit or miss.

steammaho.com/reports/scorecard

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Prone aiming + recoil control appear together in 18 Steam games with 1,000+ reviews. Zero of them earned under $1M. Median lifetime revenue: $28M.

PUBG, Squad, Battlefield 1, Call of Duty WWII. Nobody small ships this pair.

steammaho.com/news/the-mechanic-combos-only-blockbusters-ship-2

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We put 84,000 Steam games on one map, arranged by the mechanics they share instead of genre. Games that play alike sit next to each other. Zoom out for continents of design, zoom in for individual games.

steammaho.com/map

Out of 84,321 Steam games, Hollow Knight's most similar game is Silksong, and Silksong's most similar game is Hollow Knight. They share 25 mechanics. No genre tags were used.

This pair is the standing sanity check for our similarity metric.

steammaho.com/app/1030300

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Steam's Survival Crafting Fest runs through Sunday. About 150 survival games launched on Steam every month of 2026. About half never collect 10 reviews. Of those that do, 19% reach 1,000. The median 1,000+-review survival game earned $1.7M.

steammaho.com/reports/sample/rooted

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Dodge wired to parkour appears in 27 games on Steam. Their median revenue is $72M. The market median is about $1M.

We went looking for mechanic pairs that appear in only 15 to 60 games. The list is full of games like Dying Light 2, Assassin's Creed Origins, Ghost of Tsushima.

Does a game earn more when it's BUILT AROUND a mechanic, or when it just has it on the side? We checked every mechanic with 50+ Steam games in both roles (1,000+ reviews each). 55 of 108 earn more as a side system. Only 12 earn more as the game's main focus. #gamedev #indiedev

We read 85,000 Steam games the way designers do: mechanics instead of genres. Which mechanics carry a game, how they wire together, and what that means in money. Open catalog and research at steammaho.com
#gamedev, #indiedev