PC gaming intelligence · Steam · July 11, 2026
The top 10,000 Steam games by SteamSpy owner estimate — price, review tier, owner band, genres, platforms and release year — as one record each, queryable over one REST API. The top 1% of them hold 33% of an estimated 9.25B owner-copies. Filter by price, review tier, owner floor, genre or platform; sort by owners. Pay on success.
10,000
top games — one enriched record each, owner-ranked.
33%
owners in top 1%
73.8%
positive reviews
59%
tagged Indie
Snapshot July 11, 2026 — public storefront fields; owners are SteamSpy estimates.
10,000
top Steam games by SteamSpy owner estimate, enriched from the storefront into one queryable record each — price, review tier, owner band, genres, platforms and release year.
33%
of an estimated 9.25B owner-copies sit with the top 1% of games. The top 10% hold 65.1%. PC gaming is a Pareto world.
$9.99
median price of a new paid game in 2024, up from $4.99 through the early 2010s — and free-to-play fell from a ~32% share of new releases to under 8%.
73.8%
land in a positive review tier on Steam’s own volume-gated bands; 21.4% are Mixed and only 1.9% lean negative. Top games skew good.
Rank the 10,000 games by estimated owners and the curve is brutally top-heavy: the top 1% hold 33% of all estimated owner-copies, the top 10% hold 65.1%, and the top quarter hold 80.8%. Owner counts are SteamSpy estimates, so read these as the shape of the distribution, not to the decimal.
| Slice | Games | Owner share | Implied owner-copies |
|---|---|---|---|
| Top 1% of games | 100 games | 33% | 3.05B |
| Top 5% of games | 500 games | 53.7% | 4.97B |
| Top 10% of games | 1,000 games | 65.1% | 6.02B |
| Top 25% of games | 2,500 games | 80.8% | 7.47B |
Grouped by release year, the median price of a new paid game sat around $4.99 through the early 2010s, stepped up to the $8–$9 range by 2018–2019, and reached $9.99 in 2024. Free-to-play peaked near a third of new releases around 2019–2020, then retreated below 8%. The 2025 line rests on a small, early sample.
Free-to-play share of new releases: 16.3% (2012) → 31.7% (2019–2020 peak) → 7.7% (2024) → 3.8% (2025, small sample). Full year-by-year figures in the reference tables below.
Native platform support among top games peaked around 2013 and has fallen since. Linux support dropped from 44% of that year's top releases to about 11% by 2024; native Mac from 51% to 20%. The Steam Deck runs Linux, but Valve's Proton compatibility layer runs Windows games on it — so studios skip native Linux builds even as the Deck booms.
Using Steam’s own volume-gated review bands, 73.8% of these top games land in a positive tier — 4,479 are Very Positive and 934 are Overwhelmingly Positive. Only 1.9% (194 games) lean negative, 21.4% are Mixed, and 2.8% have too few reviews to earn a tier. Survivorship is part of the story: games nobody owns rarely accumulate a review consensus, so the demand-weighted head skews good.
Each game carries several Steam genre tags, so shares add past 100%. Indie sits on 59% of the top games — more than any other tag — with Action and Adventure close behind, then a cluster of RPG, Casual, Strategy and Simulation around a quarter each.
Across the whole catalog, most owned games sit at the low end: under $5 is the single biggest band, and free-to-play plus under-$5 together are more than half. Only a sliver price above $30 — the AAA tier is a small, high-owner minority.
Beyond Steam's ~20 official genres, players tag games with a far richer vocabulary — Roguelike, Metroidvania, Cozy, Atmospheric, Story Rich — and 99.8% of the top games carry them. Those tags also split on price: Open World paid titles run a $11.99 median, versus $4.99 for Puzzle.
| Community tag | Titles | Median paid price | Free-to-play % | Median owners |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Singleplayer | 7,140 | $7.99 | 15.6% | 350K |
| Action | 5,425 | $7.49 | 20.9% | 350K |
| Indie | 4,896 | $4.99 | 19.6% | 350K |
| Adventure | 4,867 | $7.49 | 17.1% | 350K |
| Multiplayer | 3,655 | $9.99 | 31.6% | 350K |
| Casual | 3,029 | $4.99 | 23.2% | 350K |
| Atmospheric | 2,909 | $7.99 | 13.1% | 350K |
| RPG | 2,868 | $8.99 | 19.4% | 350K |
| Strategy | 2,867 | $7.49 | 21.5% | 350K |
| 2D | 2,729 | $5.09 | 15.7% | 350K |
| Story Rich | 2,652 | $9.04 | 10.5% | 350K |
| Simulation | 2,592 | $9.79 | 18.8% | 350K |
| First-Person | 2,175 | $7.99 | 20.1% | 350K |
| Co-op | 2,008 | $9.99 | 25.6% | 550K |
| Open World | 2,002 | $11.99 | 20.4% | 350K |
| Great Soundtrack | 1,903 | $9.59 | 12.8% | 350K |
| Exploration | 1,889 | $8.99 | 10.6% | 350K |
| Puzzle | 1,832 | $4.99 | 12.6% | 350K |
| Shooter | 1,821 | $5.99 | 24.1% | 350K |
| Fantasy | 1,744 | $8.99 | 18.7% | 350K |
| Funny | 1,671 | $6.79 | 18.9% | 350K |
| Horror | 1,664 | $5.99 | 17.2% | 350K |
| 3D | 1,588 | $8.99 | 16.8% | 150K |
| Sci-fi | 1,572 | $7.99 | 15.1% | 350K |
| Third Person | 1,553 | $9.99 | 17.5% | 350K |
Everything above is Crawlora's own frozen State of Steam 2026 study — a one-time owner-estimate analysis of the top 10,000 games by SteamSpy rank, snapshotted July 11, 2026. The five datasets below are different: separate, continuously live-queryable per-app datasets, each with its own snapshot and its own document shape — one row per achievement, review, news post, or daily time-series entry, not one row per game.
One row per app × achievement
Achievement rarity
Global unlock percentages for 305,290 tracked achievements. At least 10,000 sit at or below 0.5% global unlock — genuinely rare — and at least 10,000 sit at or above 87.2% — near-universal. Among the single rarest 100 achievements measured, all 100 show a 0% unlock rate: no owner has ever earned them.
One row per app × review
Most-helpful reviews
331,626 of the most-helpful public Steam reviews, capped to the top-voted reviews per game. 77.5% are marked helpful/positive (257,068). Coverage spans many languages — english is the largest at 49% of the corpus, with the top 12 languages we checked covering 96.3% combined.
One row per app × news post
News & announcements
48,243 news posts and community announcements across tracked apps, spanning June 17, 2009 to August 20, 2026. Coverage is per-tracked-app, not universal — Counter-Strike 2 alone carries dozens of indexed posts, while a lightly-tracked app may show none yet.
One row per app × day (time series)
Concurrent players
75,956 daily concurrent-player snapshots, covering 1,999 apps on the latest tracked day (August 20, 2026) alone, with history back to July 12, 2026. Counter-Strike 2 led that day with 629,780 concurrent players.
One row per app × day (time series)
Price & discount history
185,000 daily price snapshots in integer cents, covering 5,000 priced apps on August 20, 2026, with history back to July 12, 2026. 409 of those (8.2%) were discounted that day.
One enriched record per Steam app. Grouped for readability; the API returns a flat object with genre and category arrays.
Identity
app_idnametyperelease_yearrelease_datePricing
price_centscurrencyis_freeprice_tierdiscount_pctReception
review_scorereview_tiertotal_reviewsmetacriticScale
owners_midpointowners_bandccumedian_playtimeTaxonomy
genres[]categories[]developerpublisherPlatforms
platform_windowsplatform_macplatform_linuxcontroller_supportThis schema covers steam-games only — see the five sibling datasets above for achievement, review, news, player-count, and price fields.
The search endpoint takes the filters below; combine any of them. Page with page and page_size (≤100 per page).
Full-text & taxonomy
Pricing
Reception
Scale & era
Platforms
Sort
relevanceowners_descprice_ascprice_descreview_score_descrelease_year_descThe full dataset holds 296,003 Steam games and grows as the crawl extends — the study above analyzes the top 10,000 by SteamSpy owner estimate.
Every query authenticates with an x-api-key header and reads the stored search index — there is no live crawl or proxy to manage, and you are billed pay on success. Three endpoints cover it:
GET /datasets/steam-games/search — filter, sort, page the catalog.GET /datasets/steam-games/items/{app_id} — one enriched game.GET /datasets/steam-games/facets — counts for any dimension.The same three are exposed as MCP tools — datasets_steam_games_search, datasets_steam_games_facets and datasets_steam_games_item — and covered by the client SDKs, so an agent can call them directly. Prefer live storefront data? The Steam API endpoints return app detail, reviews, players and SteamSpy on demand.
The five sibling datasets above are queryable the same way, each with its own search endpoint:
GET /datasets/steam-achievements/search — global achievement unlock percentages per app.GET /datasets/steam-reviews/search — most-helpful Steam reviews per app.GET /datasets/steam-news/search — news and community announcements per app.GET /datasets/steam-playercounts/search — daily concurrent-player time series per app.GET /datasets/steam-prices/search — daily price and discount time series per app.and as MCP tools — datasets_steam_achievements_search, datasets_steam_reviews_search, datasets_steam_news_search, datasets_steam_playercounts_search and datasets_steam_prices_search — covered by the client SDKs like the rest of the catalog.
Cite this
Crawlora (2026). Steam Games Dataset. Top 10,000 Steam games by SteamSpy owner estimate; public storefront fields. https://crawlora.net/datasets/steam.
Search with filters
# Very Positive indie RPGs under $15, most-owned first
curl "https://api.crawlora.net/api/v1/datasets/steam-games/search?genre=RPG&review_tier=very_positive&max_price=1500&sort=owners_desc" \
-H "x-api-key: $CRAWLORA_API_KEY"One game by app id
# One game by Steam app id (Half-Life 2 = 220)
curl "https://api.crawlora.net/api/v1/datasets/steam-games/items/220" -H "x-api-key: $CRAWLORA_API_KEY"Facet the catalog
# Facet the catalog by genre (or review_tier, price_tier, release_year …)
curl "https://api.crawlora.net/api/v1/datasets/steam-games/facets?facet=genres" -H "x-api-key: $CRAWLORA_API_KEY"The same numbers behind the charts above — plain and machine-readable for search engines and AI answer engines that cannot parse an SVG.
| Year | Titles | Median price | Mean price | Free-to-play share |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2012 | 234 | $4.99 | $7.10 | 16.7% |
| 2013 | 317 | $5.12 | $8.75 | 12.3% |
| 2014 | 627 | $4.99 | $8.09 | 16.9% |
| 2015 | 755 | $4.99 | $8.09 | 24.9% |
| 2016 | 919 | $3.89 | $7.55 | 22.6% |
| 2017 | 812 | $4.99 | $9.81 | 27.6% |
| 2018 | 728 | $8.99 | $12.05 | 30.4% |
| 2019 | 696 | $9.94 | $12.87 | 31% |
| 2020 | 873 | $7.49 | $12.64 | 31% |
| 2021 | 845 | $6.99 | $10.86 | 20.1% |
| 2022 | 684 | $8.99 | $13.50 | 12.3% |
| 2023 | 716 | $8.99 | $13.33 | 9.5% |
| 2024 | 707 | $9.99 | $14.61 | 6.9% |
| 2025 | 304 | $13.39 | $16.75 | 3.3% |
| Year | Linux support | Mac support |
|---|---|---|
| 2012 | 29.1% | 41.9% |
| 2013 | 44.5% | 51.7% |
| 2014 | 33% | 42.7% |
| 2015 | 35.9% | 46.5% |
| 2016 | 31.4% | 42.4% |
| 2017 | 26.5% | 37.3% |
| 2018 | 20.7% | 35.6% |
| 2019 | 16.4% | 30.2% |
| 2020 | 14.3% | 26.6% |
| 2021 | 15.5% | 26.4% |
| 2022 | 11.4% | 18.4% |
| 2023 | 10.1% | 18.6% |
| 2024 | 10.5% | 19.7% |
| 2025 | 9.5% | 19.4% |
| Review tier | Games | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Very Positive | 4,479 | 44.8% |
| Mixed | 2,143 | 21.4% |
| Mostly Positive | 1,700 | 17% |
| Overwhelmingly Positive | 934 | 9.3% |
| Too few to rate | 282 | 2.8% |
| Positive | 268 | 2.7% |
| Mostly Negative | 156 | 1.6% |
| Negative | 29 | 0.3% |
| Overwhelmingly Negative | 8 | 0.1% |
| Very Negative | 1 | 0% |
| Genre | Games | Reach |
|---|---|---|
| Indie | 5,900 | 59% |
| Action | 4,811 | 48.1% |
| Adventure | 4,079 | 40.8% |
| RPG | 2,522 | 25.2% |
| Casual | 2,512 | 25.1% |
| Strategy | 2,501 | 25% |
| Simulation | 2,306 | 23.1% |
| Free To Play | 1,304 | 13% |
| Massively Multiplayer | 575 | 5.8% |
| Early Access | 567 | 5.7% |
| Sports | 420 | 4.2% |
| Racing | 372 | 3.7% |
Query the top 10K Steam games — price, review tier, owners, genres and platforms — through one REST API. Market research, pricing analysis, competitive tracking or a games discovery feed: clean JSON, public fields only, pay on success.
The dataset holds the top 10,000 Steam games ranked by SteamSpy owner estimate, enriched from the Steam storefront to one record per app. It is the demand-weighted head of the catalog — the games people actually own — not every app on Steam (the store lists far more, most with negligible ownership). 7,981 are paid and 2,019 are free-to-play.
Ownership is seeded from SteamSpy, which estimates owners as banded ranges from Steam's public profile signals — not exact sales. We midpoint each band to a single number, so every owner figure is an order-of-magnitude estimate, not a precise count. Steam does not publish per-title sales, so estimates are the best public signal; treat concentration figures as directional. Everything else (price, review tier, genres, platforms, release date) is exact storefront data.
Public storefront fields: app id, name, release date and year, price and price tier, is-free flag, Steam's review score and volume-gated review tier, total review count, Metacritic where present, a midpointed SteamSpy owner estimate, concurrent-user peak, genres and categories, developer and publisher, and Windows/Mac/Linux platform support. No accounts, no personal data, no behind-login content.
Genres are Steam's ~20 official labels (Action, Indie, RPG …). Community tags are the crowd-sourced vocabulary players actually apply — Roguelike, Metroidvania, Cozy, Atmospheric, Story Rich, Souls-like — a far richer taxonomy that genres don't capture. 99.8% of the top games carry them, ordered by crowd weight, with the single top-weighted tag exposed as primary_tag. Filter with tag=Roguelike (or facet=tags / facet=primary_tag). They also price differently: Open World paid titles run a $11.99 median versus $4.99 for Puzzle.
They are Steam's own labels — Overwhelmingly Positive, Very Positive, Positive, Mostly Positive, Mixed, then the negative bands — which already fold in review volume, not just the raw positive ratio. In this dataset 73.8% of games land in a positive tier, 21.4% are Mixed, 1.9% lean negative, and 2.8% have too few reviews to earn a tier.
Yes. The dataset is queryable over Crawlora's REST API and via MCP: full-text and faceted search, one game by app id, and facet counts for any dimension (genre, review tier, price tier, release year). Filter by price, review tier, owner floor, genre, platform and era; sort by relevance, owners, price or review score. All billed pay-on-success.
This snapshot is dated July 11, 2026. Storefront fields are re-enriched as the crawl re-runs; SteamSpy owner estimates drift slowly. Dataset queries bill pay-on-success on credit-based plans (charged for results, not failed requests), with 2,000 free credits a month and no card to start.
Five separate, live-queryable datasets sit alongside steam-games: steam-achievements (305,290 global achievement unlock records), steam-reviews (331,626 most-helpful reviews), steam-news (48,243 news posts), steam-playercounts (75,956 daily concurrent-player snapshots), and steam-prices (185,000 daily price snapshots). Each is one row per app × achievement/review/post/day — not one row per game — and each has its own /datasets/<id>/search endpoint.
Both are daily time series. The latest snapshot at generation time was dated August 20, 2026, with history back to July 12, 2026; steam-prices covered 5,000 priced apps on that latest day, and steam-playercounts covered 1,999 apps. Query one app's trend with app_id plus sort=date_desc, or one day's cross-game snapshot with date=yyyy-MM-dd.
No — coverage is per-tracked-app and grows as the crawl extends, not a guaranteed row for every app in steam-games. Achievement and review records exist only for apps already crawled for that dataset; pass app_id to check a specific game, or use the live /steam/achievements or /steam/reviews endpoints for on-demand data outside the stored index.