Scope
Use these definitions when you decide which Steam genre you are competing in and which players you are building for.
The terms
Addressable market. The revenue a game at your scale could realistically reach inside your tag, which is not the same as the tag's total revenue. The method for estimating it is how to estimate your game's addressable market on Steam.
Average revenue (mean). The sum of every game's revenue in a tag divided by the number of games. On Steam it is a misleading statistic, because a handful of very large titles pull it far above what any typical game earns.
Comparable title (comp). A released game whose buyers are the buyers you are competing for. A game that resembles yours visually but sells to a different audience is not a comp. The selection method is how to pick comparable titles for your Steam game.
Core loop. The activity a player repeats: build, defend, explore, deduce, route. It is what a store page reader is deciding whether they want to do, which is why a pitch that describes the story instead of the loop tends to fail.
Follower. A player who has opted in to a game's updates on Steam. Follower counts are public for any game through its community hub, which makes them the only reliable public demand signal before release.
Follower-to-wishlist multiple. An industry rule of thumb, around 10 times, used to derive an estimated wishlist count from a public follower count.
The multiple is a convention rather than a measured constant, and the observed spread runs roughly 5 to 14 times, so anything it produces is an order-of-magnitude estimate and never a count.
The multiple holds only before launch: after release, followers keep accruing from people who already own the game, so the multiple stops meaning anything.
Genre. One of Steam's broad store categories, such as Action or Strategy. Genres are coarse, and they are not the unit Steam's discovery surfaces actually work on.
Genre-market fit. Whether the genre you are entering has enough demand to support your game, and whether your game is good enough for that genre. It is the first decision in how to market a Steam game, and every estimate below depends on getting it right.
Median revenue. The middle game in a tag: half earn more, half earn less. It is the statistic to plan against, because it describes a typical outcome rather than an exceptional one. The figures per sub-genre are on what the median game in your genre earns on Steam.
More Like This. The carousel of similar games Steam shows on a store page. It is the fastest public route to a starting comp list, though it is built on resemblance rather than on shared audience, so it needs filtering.
Positioning. The choice of which shelf your game sits on and which player it is for. It is a decision, not a document, and it is expressed through tags, the capsule, the short description and the pitch.
Power law. A distribution where a small number of members account for most of the total. Steam revenue inside a single tag follows one, which is why averages mislead and why a plan built on the top of a tag is a plan to be exceptional rather than a forecast.
Review multiplier (the Boxleiter method). Multiplying a game's Steam review count by a genre-specific number to estimate units sold.
The multiplier is not universal: Souls-likes sit around 9 to 15 times and CRPGs around 15 to 22 times, while cozy and mainstream survival audiences run closer to 39 times, so applying one figure across genres can be wrong by a factor of four.
Every figure the multiplier produces carries roughly 30 to 50 percent error either way.
Review rate. The share of buyers who leave a review, and the thing the multiplier above is really measuring.
The review rate runs roughly 2 to 3 percent for mainstream casual audiences, 5 to 7 percent for CRPG and narrative audiences, and 8 to 11 percent at the top for Souls-likes. This is why review counts compare well within a tag and badly across tags.
Short description. The Steam store field that carries your one-sentence pitch, shown at the top of the store page and in places across Steam where space is limited. Writing it is how to write a one-sentence pitch for your Steam game.
Tag. A label on a Steam store page, such as Colony Sim or Souls-like.
Valve says tags can be applied by the developer, by players with non-limited accounts, and by Steam moderators, so the set is developer-seeded through the Tag Wizard and then shifted by players over time.
Tags are the granular unit Steam's discovery surfaces actually key off, and they are the unit every figure in this cluster is measured against.
Target player. The specific person the game is for, described concretely enough to find them: what they already play, where they gather, what they complain about. "Fans of strategy games" is not a target player, it is a genre restated.
Total addressable market (TAM). The largest number of copies your type of game could sell. Useful as a ceiling and actively misleading as a plan, because a tag's total is dominated by its biggest titles.
Wishlist. A player saving your game for later purchase. Wishlist counts are visible only to the game's owner inside Steamworks, so any public figure for a game you do not own is a follower count multiplied by a guess.
How the terms fit together
They form one chain, and each link is an input to the next.
- Tag decides which shelf you are measured against.
- Comparable titles are the games on that shelf whose buyers you want.
- Review multiplier and follower counts are the only public signals those comps emit, so every estimate is built from them.
- Median revenue for the tag, checked against the middle of your comp set, gives the addressable market.
- Positioning, expressed through the short description and the core loop, is how you claim the shelf once you have chosen it.
Break the chain at step one and everything downstream is precise about the wrong market.
The three confusions that cost the most
Genre and tag are not the same thing, and the difference changes every number. A genre is a broad store category; a tag is the specific label Steam's discovery surfaces actually use.
Sizing a market from the genre rather than the tag produces an estimate that describes a shelf the game will never appear on.
A wishlist count is not public and a follower count is. These get used interchangeably, and only one of them is a real observable number for a game you do not own. Every tool presenting another studio's wishlist count is presenting a derived estimate.
The average and the median are not interchangeable, and the gap is enormous. In a power-law distribution they describe completely different games. Quoting an average as though it were typical is how a genre that mostly earns four figures gets described as a six-figure opportunity.
Sources: Immutable's calibrated Steam genre multiplier table, computed in June 2026 against developer-confirmed sales figures for 16+ games; Steam's own published store and community data surfaces. The follower-to-wishlist multiple is a widely used industry rule of thumb rather than our own measurement. Steam reports wishlist counts only to the game's owner.
