FA550 Data Visualization · Stevens Institute of Technology · Fall 2025

What sells on Steam?

Steam is the largest PC games store, with tens of thousands of titles. Looking at genres, prices, VR and languages: indie is the most common tag, mid-priced games review best, VR titles review below the catalogue, and the share of English-only releases is falling, mostly because big studios localise more.

Average review score by price

% positive, priced games with reviews
Author
Zhenhan Chen
Data
Kaggle Steam store and player datasets · about 111,000 titles
Tools
Python (pandas) to clean and aggregate · Tableau for the original dashboards
Questions
Genres · price levels · VR · language support
01

Genres

How often each genre tag appears, and how the big ones grew. A game can carry several tags.

Most common genre tags

games carrying the tag

New games per year, by genre

2006–2024 · 2024 is a partial year

Do genres differ in user scores?

mean score difference, t-test
ComparisonDifferencep-value
Casual vs. Massively Multiplayer+12.86< 0.001
Indie vs. Massively Multiplayer+11.85< 0.001
Adventure vs. Simulation+3.98< 0.001
Action vs. Strategy+1.31< 0.001

Small, focused games score higher than massively multiplayer ones by more than ten points. With samples this large almost any gap is significant, so the size of the difference matters more than the p-value.

02

Price

Most games are cheap. Scores peak in the $15–30 band and drop for premium titles.

Games by price band

count

Price by release year

USD
AverageMedian
03

Is VR worth its price?

Not for reviewers: VR titles average about four and a half points below the catalogue.

VR games by genre

bar = number of VR games · label = average review score
04

Languages

English still dominates, but English-only releases have fallen from over half of new games to about 41%.

Share of new games that are English-only

% of releases each year
All gamesIndieNon-indie

Most supported languages

% of games

Languages per game

% of games

Indie studios stay mostly English-only, while non-indie publishers went from about half English-only to under 30% by 2024. Localisation looks like something budgets buy: the market is global, but translating costs money that small teams spend elsewhere.