The following article is based on the data provided by Chris Zukowski on his blog post here: https://howtomarketagame.com/2026/01/27/what-the-hell-happened-in-2025/. Views expressed here are by the author and may not be the views held by Antlion Audio or other staff members.
Chris has been doing these annual articles for 4 years now and I find them incredibly interesting if you're at all into making games or understanding the indie game market. I believe he does an excellent job trying to do some pretty challenging analysis on what various trends mean to the game industry as a whole.
This week I took the time to read over this year's and was inspired to write a bit about the state of the game industry because for the first time Horror games dropped off the #1 spot (in fact, fell to #3) and got replaced by Narrative games for number of games that reached 1,000 reviews.
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This brings up an interesting question: Why?
Or maybe the better question is why are narrative games rising every year from 2022 when they were ranked #6 to their now #1 spot?
I have a theory and I'd like to float it here:
There are only 3 main factors that determine the average level of success for a new indie game outside of the quality of that game its self.
- How big the market for that genre is.
- How easy is it to get coverage for the game genre.
- How difficult it is to develop it with a small team.
I think 1 and 2 are closely tied together, but I wanted to separate them for ease of discussion. The first one is more looking at the total addressable market for a genre and the second is more akin to looking at how many / how easy the marketing path for them are for indies. Finally, #3 is more about volume. Open World Survival is the most likely to succeed statistically, but the volume is so low (72 releases in 2025 according to this article) that there's simply no way they can generate the number of hits required to be the highest in total volume also.
But why narrative? Let's take this step by step:
Market Size: Narrative games are pretty broadly defined in the article, but basically anything with a story as the focus of the gameplay that isn't directly horror. That covers a lot of subgenres, from visual novels to RPG element games like Disco Elysium. As gaming as a culture expands, narrative games have been growing for a very, very, long time. FPS gamers may call them filthy casuals, but casual gamers have outnumbered hardcore gamers for decades now.
Ease of Coverage: A lot of content makers cover narrative games. Simple choices make for good interactive content on stream. They do run the risk of spoiling too much, so there's a certain line that has to be walked as far as how much of the game is shown and/or how much a playthrough can vary. I think this is why kinetic visual novels (where the story unfolds the same regardless of choices made) struggle a lot more than more open narratives like Slay the Princess.
Slay the Princess, you know you want to.
Development Difficulty: Writing may not be easy, but it's a heck of a lot easier for most people than creating complex strategy or action games. A good writer and/or artist needs very little programming skill to create a narrative game relative to most genres and the content quantity can vary immensely from game to game.
In short, we have a growing and large market with plenty of content creators and low barrier to entry. A perfect storm for rising success, whereas horror games have both and immense market size and even higher ease of coverage, but tend to be more difficult to develop.
Both remain immensely popular genres for indies, and the point I am trying to make is not that horror games are finally dead; they are not. Rather, I wanted to put virtual pen to virtual paper and have a deep think about how this has slowly been changing over the last several years (decades really). Simply put: I think it just comes down to there are more people interested in narrative games than horror and they're easier to make, but that is offset by the fact that historically there have been more content makers for the horror genre. It takes a lot more time to build up or change a content channel, so the evolution of coverage has been slowly ramping towards the virtuous cycle of more (good) games -> larger audience -> more coverage -> more games. This has been slowly growing the genre for many years now.
I believe that narrative games will continue to top the chart for years to come at this rate, with the only likely obstructions probably being some major hit game coming out and creating a new sub-genre, like we had back in 2023 when Vampire-Survivor like games managed to break the top 10 or a lot of new tools that make developing other genres a lot easier.
Perhaps more likely even than that would be redefining the broad genre of narrative games into smaller sub-genres, which would diminish the success count significantly; but the same could happen to horror games or any other genre on this list.
Before I close out this article I also wanted to call out that narrative or horror games are not the most successful by percent of games released vs. high review count. That goes to game genres that have significantly fewer releases on average. I believe they follow the same general principals I outlined above: A large market and easy marketing. They tend to be constrained by the skill / effort it takes to craft one. We see Open World Survival topping the list, but it only had 15 "successful" games vs. narrative's 51.
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In particular though we see Roguelike Deck Building as what I think may be that sweet spot between relatively easy to make, easy to market, and with a large audience; Over 3x the number of game releases as the top 2 genres (which are both at least somewhat more complex), but still a significantly higher success rate than the average; something like 5% vs. 3%. Not quite double the chances of success on average, but a pretty huge lead on most other genres.
So I guess it's time to start making a narrative deck builder! We'll get right on that after this year's new product launches ;).