Steam looks democratic: anyone can browse thousands of games across dozens of genres.
But the catalog is uneven: action games dominate the number of titles, while free games perform surprisingly poorly in player ratings.
Therefore, the best way to understand Steam is to compare popularity against satisfaction: the chart below lets you switch metrics, isolate a genre, and see which categories rise or fall when the definition of success changes.
Genre Comparison
Top genres by number of games
Project Video
Our demo walks through the main finding: Steam's most visible categories are not necessarily where players report the best experience.
Open video on YouTubeTakeaway
The Steam library reveals behaviors about its audience and its catalog's performance. Action games dominate the catalog by a massive margin, making up nearly twice as many as the next closest genre. However, when you switch to 'view by ratings' they barely pass the top half of genres. The genres players enjoy the most are Software Training, Web Publishing, Design & Illustration; niche categories with tiny download counts but satisfied audiences.
The Free to Play games reveal an interesting pattern. In a catalog, free sounds like an obvious value choice but Free to Play games rank last in player ratings. Players aren't indifferent to free games, they actively rate them worse than games in every other genre, including those that cost $10 or more.
Altogether, these three findings suggest that on Steam, popularity and price are poor measures of quality. Free games score the worst, the genre with the most titles doesn't top the ratings, and the highest-rated genres are ones most players have never downloaded.
Our visualization lets you explore these for yourself. Starting with the Games view, the Action genre seems to dominate, but clicking to Ratings flips that idea entirely. The top 6 / bottom 6 split makes the information easily visible and the average reference line gives every view a concrete benchmark to compare against.