You don’t need to invent a genre, saturation is the wrong question

The word saturation is on everyone’s lips these days. But on Steam, with maybe 1-2 genres as exceptions, Puzzle Platformer and Beat ’Em Up for example, games are still a long way from saturation. New players arrive every day and the audience gets bigger by the day. For Steam to saturate the way mobile did, the audience itself would have to top out and the number of new releases would have to grow faster than that audience. On top of that, new players only reach mobile when people reproduce. Mobile has 5-6 prevalent genres, Steam has close to 60+. So niches will always exist.

But that does not lead to “then let me find an unsaturated genre and get into it.” An unsaturated genre does not mean a genre you can enter.

Zukowski asked exactly this question about friendslop recently, and his answer was no. When Lethal Company came out in December 2023, the total number of people playing friendslop was 197k, and that day everyone said “right, this genre is saturated.” R.E.P.O. came out in March 2025 and the concurrent number went up to 281k, and at the MECCHA CHAMELEON launch it hit 350k. So every new hit grows the genre, it does not split the existing pie.

You cannot answer this question by counting releases either. In 2026, 785 games came out in RPG and 1087 in idle clicker, and only 67 in battle royale. Can you look at that and call battle royale open ground? Of course not. Many games does not mean closed, and few games does not mean open.

So saturation on its own tells you nothing. When you are deciding whether to enter a genre you need to look at three separate numbers, and everyone only argues about the first one.

The first is demand, meaning whether the audience is hungry. As long as Steam keeps growing the answer is the same for almost every genre: hungry. So the number everyone has been arguing about for months already had its answer from the start.

The second is distribution, meaning how much the winner takes. In Zukowski’s data the friendslop game at the top takes 47-50% of the genre, then drops to 10% within 3-9 months. That is not an open field, someone new climbs to the top every few months. This cycle is normally much longer, but in friendslop it is so short that it produces a new nuclear game almost every 2-3 months.

The third is the denominator, meaning how many people go in and come away with nothing. Nobody shares this because nobody has data that complete. Every game on those charts is already a hit: Lethal Company, R.E.P.O., PEAK, Content Warning, Mage Arena. The ones that came out in the same period and never made it onto the CCU chart do not appear there.

Put the three together and friendslop looks like this. Demand is high, distribution is winner takes most, the denominator is unknown. That is not what an open market is called. But if you can get to the top the payoff is very big, Mage Arena took only 11.75% of the genre and did 624k copies and $3.7M net revenue in one week, which are incredible numbers for a game at that scale.

The uncomfortable conclusion is this. The genres people argue about being saturated or not are already the genres where the winner takes most, because those are the only ones with numbers big enough to make a chart out of. Nobody posts charts about boring genres with a flat distribution, but there is more left for whoever goes in.

So the saturation argument is really an argument about distribution. Friendslop is cheap to make, which is why everybody makes it. The winners are the ones that blow up with streamers and friend groups in the first week, so the thing that knocks you out is distribution more than quality.

You do not need to invent a new genre, niches will always exist. Before you go in, answer three questions. In your launch week, how many people will recommend the game to a friend or pull one in, how will you reach those people, and if the first week does not land, what do you have left for a second attempt. If you do not have all three answers, the genre is not the hungry one, you are.