How to do a competitor analysis for an indie game on Steam

To do a competitor analysis for an indie game on Steam, pick 8 to 12 games that share your most specific Steam tags and audience, then compare them on price, review count and score, tags, languages, store page and update cadence. Estimate their sales as ranges from review counts, mine their reviews for what players love and hate, and use the gaps to set your positioning, price band, feature priorities and launch window.

What is a competitor analysis for a Steam game?

A competitor analysis is a structured comparison of your game against the handful of Steam games that the same players are most likely to buy instead of yours. It is not a list of every game in your genre. It is a working document that answers four practical questions: who are we up against, what are they charging, what do their players praise and complain about, and where is the gap we can own.

The stakes are real. Steam received roughly 20,000 new games in 2025: How To Market A Game counted 20,282 using VGInsights, while GamingOnLinux, using SteamDB data, counted 19,008 and found 9,269 of them had 10 or fewer reviews. Knowing exactly which games you compete with is how you avoid becoming one of those.

How do you find your real competitors on Steam?

Start from how Steam itself decides what is similar. According to Valve's Steamworks documentation on tags, the top 20 tags on a game decide which tag pages and "More Like This" lists it appears in, and overlap between several tags matters more than their order. Some of Steam's algorithms also give rarer tags more weight than broad ones such as "Action". Your competitors are the games that share your specific tags, not your generic ones.

1. Write down your five most specific tags. "Roguelike Deckbuilder" or "Co-op Horror" tells you far more than "Indie" or "Casual".
2. Collect candidates from three places: Steam's tag pages for those tags, the "More Like This" row on the store pages of games you already know are similar, and the games your playtesters compare you to unprompted.
3. Sort candidates into three groups. Direct competitors share your genre and your core hook. Adjacent competitors share your audience but play differently. Benchmarks are the genre leaders you will never match on budget but that set player expectations.
4. Cut to 8 to 12 games. Remove anything carried by a famous licence or a large marketing budget unless it is a benchmark. Keep games released in the last three to four years, because player expectations and price points move.
5. Check the list with a second method. If a game keeps appearing in your rivals' "More Like This" rows but not on your list, it probably belongs on it.

If you want a quick first pass, the ReviewPulse competitor view matches up to ten rivals on shared tags and Steam's own suggestions and ranks them by score, estimated sales and price. Treat the result as a shortlist to refine, not a final answer.

What should you measure for each competitor?

Keep the same columns for every game so the comparison stays honest. A spreadsheet is enough.

You can check language, trailer, Steam Deck and tag coverage against rivals side by side on the store page checks view.

How do you estimate a competitor's sales from public data?

Valve does not publish sales figures, so every outside number is an estimate. The most common method is the review multiplier, sometimes called the Boxleiter number: count a game's reviews and multiply by an assumed number of sales per review. How To Market A Game's benchmark page lists how that ratio has drifted over time, from 79 to 43 sales per review between 2013 and 2017, down to a median of 31 in 2021 with a spread of 20 to 55.

Two rules keep this honest:

• Always use a range, not a single number. A game with 2,000 reviews has probably sold somewhere between 40,000 and 110,000 copies on that 20 to 55 spread. Genre, price and audience change the ratio.
• Revenue is not units times price. Discounts, regional pricing, refunds and Steam's cut all come out first. Valve's standard split is 70/30 in the developer's favour, moving to 75/25 after $10 million and 80/20 after $50 million, as reported when Valve introduced the tiers in December 2018.

ReviewPulse shows sales and revenue as estimate ranges for the same reason. Use them to rank competitors against each other, not to quote exact figures in a pitch.

What do competitor reviews tell you that sales numbers cannot?

Reviews are where competitors' players tell you, for free, what they would pay for. Read the negative reviews of your top three direct competitors first. Recurring complaints such as "too short", "no controller support" or "dead multiplayer lobbies" are feature gaps you can close. Recurring praise tells you the minimum your game must match.

Filter by playtime when you read. A complaint from someone with 80 hours in the game is about depth or endgame; a complaint at 40 minutes is usually about onboarding, performance or price. The review analysis view groups reviews into love and hate themes by hours played and language and links to the exact reviews behind each theme, and rival player insights does the same across your competitor set.

A worked example: how Peak used a rival to set its price

Peak, the co-op climbing game from Aggro Crab and Landfall, launched on 16 June 2025. In an interview with GameDiscoverCo, the team said they set the base price at $8 because Landfall's earlier co-op game Content Warning was $8, and then discounted it to $5 for launch week. Peak launched with 29,384 wishlists and had sold 4.5 million copies by early July 2025, according to the studio.

The lesson is not "price at $8". It is that the closest competitor in tone, session length and audience set the anchor players already accepted, and the team priced against it deliberately. Your competitor table should let you make the same call in one glance: what do games like ours cost, and are we offering more, less or something different for that money?

How do you turn the analysis into decisions?

1. Write a one-line positioning statement. "Like X, but with Y, for players who Z." If you cannot fill in Y from your competitor table, you have not found your gap yet.
2. Pick a price band. Place yourself relative to the median of your direct competitors and justify any premium with content or features the table shows rivals lack. Check regional prices too; the regional pricing view shows what rivals charge across 16 countries.
3. List three feature gaps to close and three strengths to match. Take these straight from the review themes.
4. Choose a launch window. Check what is releasing near your date. When Hollow Knight: Silksong was dated for 4 September 2025, Game Developer reported that games including Demonschool, CloverPit and Baby Steps moved their release dates to avoid it.
5. Fix your store page against rivals. Compare your capsule, trailer opening and short description with the three strongest pages in your set.

How often should you repeat a competitor analysis?

Do a full pass when you choose a genre, again when your Steam page goes live, and again about three months before launch. In between, check monthly for new releases with your tags and for big updates from existing rivals. Steam's landscape moves quickly: a single breakout can reset price expectations and fill the discovery queue for weeks. A competitor list that is six months old is a history lesson, not a strategy.