README.md

metadata

license: cc-by-4.0
pretty_name: Steam Catalog Dataset — State of Steam 2026
tags:
  - steam
  - pc-gaming
  - game-pricing
  - steamspy

Steam Catalog Dataset — State of Steam 2026

Open aggregate data behind The State of Steam 2026, a study of the top 10,000 Steam games by owner estimate. Every field is a public storefront / third-party-estimate fact — no personal data.

Built by Crawlora by dogfooding its own APIs: the game universe is seeded from SteamSpy's owner-ranked all pages and enriched with the public Steam storefront (appdetails). The full dataset is queryable live at https://api.crawlora.net/api/v1/datasets/steam-games/search (and via the datasets_steam_games_* MCP tools).

What's inside

File	Description
data/summary.json	The full aggregate rollups behind the study — pricing by year, review-tier & price-tier distributions, top genres, ownership concentration (Pareto), platform-support trends by year, review sentiment by genre.
data/sample.jsonl	200 sample game records (top by owner estimate), one JSON object per line — the shape of the queryable dataset.
data/pricing-by-year.csv	Titles, free-to-play share, median/mean paid price by release year (2006–2026).
data/platform-by-year.csv	Native Linux and Mac support share by release year.
data/review-tiers.csv	Games per Steam review tier (Overwhelmingly Positive … Very Negative).
data/genres.csv	Games carrying each Steam genre tag (multi-tag; shares add past 100%).
data/categories.csv	Games carrying each Steam category (Family Sharing, Single-player, …).
data/price-tiers.csv	Games per list-price tier (free, under $5, … $30+).
data/release-years.csv	Games per release year.
data/review-by-genre.csv	Titles, median review score, free share per genre.
data/ownership-concentration.csv	Owner share held by the top 1/5/10/25% of games.

The CSVs are flat cuts of the same rollups in data/summary.json — pick JSON for programmatic use, CSVs for a quick load into a spreadsheet or pandas.read_csv.

Sample record fields

appid, name, developer, publisher, is_free, price_cents, initial_price_cents, discount_pct, price_tier, owners_min/owners_max/owners_midpoint (SteamSpy estimate range), owners_bucket, ccu (peak concurrent), positive/negative/total_reviews, review_score, review_tier (Steam's volume-gated bands), average_forever_min/median_forever_min (playtime), genres, categories, metacritic, recommendations, required_age, release_date/release_year, coming_soon, platform_windows/platform_mac/platform_linux, language_count.

Headline findings

• Ownership is wildly concentrated. The top 1% of games hold ~33% of all estimated owners, the top 10% hold ~65%, the top 25% hold ~81% — of ≈9.2 billion estimated owner-copies.
• New-game prices are climbing and free-to-play is retreating. Median paid new-game price rose from $4.99 (2012–2016) to $9.99 (2024); free-to-play's share of new releases peaked ~32% (2019–2020) and fell to ~8% (2024). (2025–2026 have small samples and are caveated in the study.)
• Mac and Linux support is collapsing despite the Steam Deck. Among top games, native Linux support fell from ~44% (2013) to ~11% (2024) and Mac from ~51% to ~20% — Proton makes native builds unnecessary.
• Top games skew overwhelmingly positive. ~73% land in a positive review tier, only ~2% negative.
• Indie dominates. ~59% of top games carry the Indie tag.

Methodology & caveats

• Universe: the top 10,000 games by SteamSpy owner estimate (of ~10,900 tracked at capture). The head of Steam, not the full ~90k+ long tail.
• Owner counts are SteamSpy public estimates (ranges), not exact sales. We keep min/max/midpoint; concentration figures use midpoints.
• review_tier follows Steam's own volume-gated algorithm ("Very Positive" needs 50+ reviews, "Overwhelmingly" 500+), so it matches the store label rather than raw ratio.
• Recent release years (2025–2026) have small samples; the robust price/platform trends run 2012→2024.
• Snapshot date: 2026-07-11.

License

CC BY 4.0 — free to use with attribution. Cite as:

Crawlora (2026). Steam Catalog Dataset — State of Steam 2026. https://github.com/Crawlora-org/steam-catalog-data

See CITATION.cff.