Indie market report: September 2026
Published and frozen. Counted on 9 Oct 2026.
1,825 indie games released on Steam in September 2026
Up 115% against September 2025 (850).
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.
Biggest movers in filling pressure
- Cozy is filling faster than a month ago: announced upcoming games moved from 145% to 181% of the games already released (+36 points).
- Auto Battler is filling faster than a month ago: announced upcoming games moved from 70% to 85% of the games already released (+15 points).
Where supply moved fastest
- Cozy shipped more games in its last complete quarter than the same measurement showed a month ago: 252 to 662 (+163%).
- Visual Novel shipped more games in its last complete quarter than the same measurement showed a month ago: 461 to 875 (+90%).
- Idler shipped more games in its last complete quarter than the same measurement showed a month ago: 474 to 843 (+78%).
- Deckbuilding shipped more games in its last complete quarter than the same measurement showed a month ago: 287 to 468 (+63%).
Releases per quarter, by genre
Last 8 complete quarters. All 18 tiles share one y scale (0 to 1,054 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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Puzzle Platformer | 4,223 | 3302026 Q3 | 13% | 10,000 | 20 |
| Souls-like | 1,554 | 1192026 Q3 | 17% | 10,000 | 52 |
| Open World | 6,901 | 4992026 Q3 | 18% | 35,000 | 126 |
| Survival | 7,379 | 6642026 Q3 | 19% | 10,000 | 36 |
| Metroidvania | 1,461 | 762026 Q3 | 20% | 10,000 | 48 |
| Horror | 10,896 | 1,0102026 Q3 | 21% | 10,000 | 46 |
| Bullet Hell | 3,738 | 5072026 Q3 | 21% | 10,000 | 20 |
| Visual Novel | 6,195 | 8752026 Q3 | 24% | 10,000 | 50 |
| City Builder | 1,755 | 1782026 Q3 | 26% | 10,000 | 79 |
| Tactical RPG | 1,589 | 1772026 Q3 | 29% | 35,000 | 39 |
| Tower Defense | 2,133 | 2932026 Q3 | 30% | 10,000 | 23 |
| Immersive Sim | 3,564 | 6602026 Q3 | 36% | 10,000 | 34 |
| Roguelike | 5,442 | 1,0542026 Q3 | 42% | 10,000 | 34 |
| Farming Sim | 922 | 1782026 Q3 | 44% | 10,000 | 50 |
| Idler | 1,648 | 8432026 Q3 | 73% | 10,000 | 24 |
| Deckbuilding | 1,366 | 4682026 Q3 | 80% | 10,000 | 43 |
| Auto Battler | 720 | 2722026 Q3 | 85% | 10,000 | 30 |
| Cozy | 779 | 6622026 Q3 | 181% | 10,000 | 60 |
Methodology and caveats
- Data counted on 9 Oct 2026 (UTC), covering all of September 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 (8 weeks available for this report), so absence of a finding means no move large enough to report.