Indie market report: July 2026
Published and frozen. Counted on 19 Aug 2026.
1,600 indie games released on Steam in July 2026
Up 78% against July 2025 (900).
What moved this month
Written from the week-by-week history, with thresholds: a genre appears only when its move clears both an absolute and a relative bar. A quiet month is meant to read as a short section, not as manufactured drama.
Nothing crossed the thresholds this month. History is still building: 1 week of snapshots so far, and month-on-month findings need at least two months.
Releases per quarter, by genre
Last 8 complete quarters. All 18 tiles share one y scale (0 to 929 releases), so tile heights are comparable across genres. The number beside each genre is its most recent complete quarter. A flat stub means the quarter could not be measured, which is not the same as zero.
The 18 genres, slowest-filling first
"Filling" is announced upcoming games as a share of games already released. High pressure is not automatically bad and low pressure is not automatically good - a pocket can be filling because it is hot, or calm because it is dying.
| Genre | Games | Releases last quarter | Filling | Typical owners | Typical reviews |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Visual Novel | 6,195 | 4612026 Q2 | 16% | 10,000 | 52 |
| Survival | 7,379 | 5162026 Q2 | 17% | 10,000 | 38 |
| Horror | 10,896 | 8022026 Q2 | 18% | 10,000 | 46 |
| Metroidvania | 1,461 | 682026 Q2 | 20% | 10,000 | 48 |
| Puzzle Platformer | 2,033 | 2482026 Q2 | 24% | not measurable | - |
| Bullet Hell | 2,520 | 4032026 Q2 | 29% | not measurable | - |
| Souls-like | 817 | 882026 Q2 | 33% | not measurable | - |
| Tower Defense | 1,375 | 1912026 Q2 | 34% | not measurable | - |
| Immersive Sim | 3,212 | 4622026 Q2 | 34% | not measurable | - |
| Idler | 2,540 | 4742026 Q2 | 35% | not measurable | - |
| Roguelike | 5,442 | 7512026 Q2 | 35% | 10,000 | 34 |
| Farming Sim | 922 | 1112026 Q2 | 37% | 10,000 | 50 |
| City Builder | 970 | 1442026 Q2 | 39% | not measurable | - |
| Open World | 2,877 | 3932026 Q2 | 39% | not measurable | - |
| Tactical RPG | 940 | 1122026 Q2 | 40% | not measurable | - |
| Auto Battler | 720 | 1712026 Q2 | 60% | 10,000 | 30 |
| Deck Building | 1,366 | 2872026 Q2 | 64% | 10,000 | 43 |
| Cozy | 779 | 2522026 Q2 | 105% | 10,000 | 60 |
Methodology and caveats
- Data counted on 19 Aug 2026 (UTC), covering all of July 2026. The month is closed and this document will not change again.
- Release counts come from Steam's own store search: the Indie tag, games only, sorted by release date. Year-on-year uses the same day range in both months.
- Per-genre release counts per quarter are real counts from store search, not a sample. A quarter we could not measure is left blank rather than drawn as zero, because zero and unknown look identical and mean opposite things.
- Typical-game owners and reviews are medians of an even sample spread across the whole ranked list for the genre, so the long tail is represented and not just the head. Where too few games in a genre have measurable owner data, the figure is withheld rather than printed: the surviving few are the biggest games and their median reads far higher than what a new game there should expect.
- Owner figures are SteamSpy estimates, so treat them as a relative footprint, not a precise number. Wishlist counts are not public on Steam.
- Findings are generated from the weekly snapshot history with fixed thresholds (1 week available for this report), so absence of a finding means no move large enough to report.