So You’re Making a Pixel Art Game?
The brutal 5% success rate and how to beat it
I’ve always loved pixel art and I know its an extremely common art style for indies. The other night I found myself randomly wondering how the art style performs on Steam, so I decided to find out.
I pulled data on every game released with the Pixel Graphics tag between August 1, 2023 – August 1, 2025 that earned 500+ reviews. That leaves us with a clear snapshot of recent pixel art games that broke through the noise. Using this dataset, I went on a quest to see what we could uncover.
Data Context
The data in this article is sourced from Gamalytic. You can check out the full dataset yourself in this Google Sheet. There are way more insights in there than I could possibly fit in this article. Keep in mind 3rd party tools like Gamalytic are based off estimates and thus should be taken with a grain of salt. This data only includes information from Steam and does not include how pixel art games performed on console or any other platforms.
I choose to look at the last 2 years of pixel art games for a few reasons:
Some of Gamalytic’s most useful data, like wishlist history, starts from August 2023.
Outside factors like Covid and the rise of AI can have a big impact. By keeping the timing recent it makes it more relevant to the current landscape you’d be releasing your game into.
It takes a long time to gather and analyze this data 🫠
Between August 2023 and August 2025, 6,422 pixel art games released on Steam.
But how many of them were actually successful? That depends on what you count as “success”. Success can mean different things depending on your goals. Revenue, player count, playtime, etc can all be signs of a successful game. For this article, I used 500 reviews as the bar. If you’ve hit that, you’ve got meaningful engagement and are probably doing well in other areas too.
After filtering out any games that haven’t reached at least 500 reviews, we are left with 343 out of 6,422 games. In other words only 5% of pixel art games released on steam over the past 2 years were successful.
A 5% chance of success my sound scary, but I promise it’s not as bad as it sounds. If you got worried by that number i’d encourage you to head over to the Gamalytic Games List and filter by the Pixel Graphics tag with the lowest review count. What you’ll find is thousands of games that obviously don’t pass the quality bar to be a serious contender. They also probably aren’t subscribed to this newsletter and thus didn’t know how to market their game :). But your game is good and you’re subscribed to OP Game Marketing right? RIGHT?
Best Pixel Art Steam Tags
If you simply want to know the top performers head over to the Google Sheet with the full data and filter by your preferred metric. Fair warning simply looking at the top of the list will give you outliers and not very useful data points. You probably won’t learn much from seeing that “Silent Protagonist” has the highest median revenue on the list but was only used in one title that did extremely well.
I don’t just want to know which tags are most popular or which ones had the highest median revenue. I wanted a metric that captured both: tags that are frequently used and consistently tied to higher revenues. So I built a “Success Index.”
Here’s how the Success Index is calculated:
Step 1: Used the median revenue of all pixel art games as the baseline (~$349k).
Step 2: For each tag, I divide its median revenue by that baseline.
Example: “Turn-Based” games has median a revenue of $1.1M, that’s 3.2× higher than the baseline.
Step 3: Weight by commonness. A tag on only 2–3 games could just be a fluke. To account for this, I multiply by log10(1 + number of games with the tag). This boosts tags that show up often, but only gently (logarithmic scaling prevents giant tags from steamrolling everything).
Step 4: Exclude generic tags. “Pixel Graphics” and “2D” are in every game here, so I removed them.
Step 5: Exclude rare tags. If a tag wasn’t used in at least 5 games I removed them.
Genre Tags
Turn-Based Strategy/ Turn-Based Combat / Turn-Based Tactics / Tactical / Combat.
Turn Based Strategy - 29 titles, 2.69 success index, $636,289 median revenue.
Combat - 66 titles, 2.39 success index, $456,764 median revenue.
Turn Based Combat - 36 titles, 2.23 success index, $497,302 median revenue.
Turn Based Tactics - 20 titles, 2.07 success index, $546,926 median revenue.
Tactical - 21 titles, 2.0 success index, $520,187 median revenue.
Turn-based and strategy are the beating heart of successful pixel art games. No surprise here, many of the most beloved pixel titles live in this space.
RPG / JRPG / Strategy
RPG - 130 titles, 2.56 success index, $422,750 median revenue.
JRPG - 36 titles, 2.17 success index, $483,584 median revenue.
Strategy - 90 titles, 2.65 success index, $471,836 median revenue.
Naturally RPG & JRPG’s are among the top contenders as they pair extremely well with turn based strategy mechanics.
While turn based strategy and rpg pixel art games have been popular for decades it was interesting to see the following genres growing in popularity as well. This reflects a larger trend on Steam of the below genres picking up steam in the last few years.
Card Game / Deckbuilding
Card Game - 25 titles, 2.03 success index, $502,082 median revenue.
Deckbuilding - 32 titles, 2.11 success index, $485,766 median revenue.
Roguelike / Roguelite
Roguelite - 75 titles, 2.53 success index, $469,465 median revenue.
Roguelike - 82 titles, 2.31 success index, $420,721 median revenue.
Simulation & Building
Building - 28 titles, 2.51 success index, $600,343 median revenue.
Simulation - 90 titles, 2.30 success index, $409,235 median revenue.
Thematic Tags
These shape positioning, tone, and marketability more than mechanics or genre.
Difficult - 29 titles, 4.17 success index, $985,441 median revenue.
Story Rich - 102 titles, 2.18 success index, $378,787 median revenue.
Atmospheric- 81 titles, 2.16 success index, $395,027 median revenue.
Cute - 101 titles, 2.16 success index, $375,839 median revenue.
Magic - 27 titles, 2.16 success index, $520,187 median revenue.
Fantasy - 87 titles, 2.13 success index, $381,866 median revenue.
Exploration - 83 titles, 2.12 success index, $385,709 median revenue.
Choices Matter - 41 titles, 2.12 success index, $455,662 median revenue.
Worst Pixel Art Steam Tags
I won’t go into details on these but in case your curious and don’t want to check the full data set, here are the tags with the lowest success index after filtering out tags used in less than 20 games.
Practical Takeaways
Turn-Based + RPG is still king.
Strong revenues, long-standing audience. If you’re making a turn-based RPG, pixel art is a great fit.
The “Difficult” tag could be a smart tag to use if it applies to your game.
It’s no secret that tags are very important in informing who Steam shows you’re game to. Marketers regularly experiment with different tags to see what games it compares theirs too and how it effects metrics. The Difficult tag shows up as a clear multiplier. Median revenue is almost 3x higher than thematic tags like Cute or Magic. If your game can genuinely deliver challenge, lean into this tag on Steam.
Deckbuilding Card Games with rougelite elements are the new kids on the block
While turned based RPGs have been the image of the classic pixel game for a while, deckbuilding games are gaining traction. Combine them with rougelite/rougelike elements and you’ve got a winning combo.
Pixel art fans skew fantasy over sci-fi
Fantasy, Cute, and Magic were some of the best performing tags while Sci-fi, Medieval, and Horror were on the lower end.
Pixel Art fans don’t have friends
The singleplayer tag was the 7th highest tag by success index having a median revenue of $358,633 in 248 titles. Yet another reason why pixel art is such a indie friendly art style.
Playtime correlates with perceived value.
Tags associated with long playtimes consistently align with higher prices and higher revenues.
Great Case Studies
This article is full of data that suggests what kind of games perform well, but marketing them is another story. I’ve covered the basics before, but if you want some pixel art specific marketing inspiration i’d recommend checking out the marketing of the following games:
Self Published
Externally Published
All of the games included in the data set were successful by some metric so if you’re still looking for marketing inspiration, pick a game in your genre and look at what’s working for them. Play their game, check out their reviews to see what players are and aren’t enjoying, look at their marketing strategies, etc. Also ask yourself: What festivals did they join? What creators covered their game (contact the same ones)? What were their major marketing beats between announcement and launch? How did they execute on these beats? What kind of content performed well?
Self published vs Published Titles
Every time I gather data on a large amount of games i’m always curious to learn how published versus self published titles faired.
Self-published: 153 games
Externally published: 187 games
Externally published games have much stronger medians. On average, external publishers bring in ~1.6× higher median revenue.
Median revenue = $426.6k (vs $260.7k self published)
75th percentile = $1.20M (vs $694k self published)
90th percentile = $2.93M (vs $2.37M self published)
Followers
Externally published: 8,014
Self-published: 5,176.
Pricing
Self-published: median price = $8
Externally published: median price = $15
Overall this data is pretty expected, I would seriously question the usefulness of publishers if the median revenue was higher for self published games across hundreds of games. It was interesting to see that the number of self published versus externally published games on the list weren’t that far off from each other. While it’s true that externally published games did better on average, every game in this data set was a success so this clearly shows that you can absolutely win as a self published game as well.
AAA, AA, Indie
There is no 100% agreed upon definition of what separates AAA, AA, and Indie game studios. Since I used Gamalytic’s filtering to collect this data, we’ll be using their definition for these groups:
Indie: Publishers who made more than $10k and less than $50m lifetime on Steam.
AA: Publishers who published at least 2 games, made more than $50m and less than $500m lifetime on Steam.
AAA: Publishers who published at least 2 games, made more than $500m lifetime on Steam and have at least $10m average revenue per game
By their definition AAA, AA, & Indie has less to do with studio size and more to do with experience. They also based their definition on the publisher rather than the developer, an irrelevant point if the studio self published.
As you can see from the data, pixel art is most definitely an indie dominated art style. This is likely due to pixel art being more straightforward to learn and easier to implement than 3D art styles. Pixel art has a strong indie identity as well so it helps if you’re leaning into the indie underdog narrative.
There’s also a trend of successful pixel art games moving to 3D art for their sequel. Great examples include Moonlighter switching to 3D for Moonlighter 2: The Endless Vault and Hyper Light Drifter switching to 3D for Hyper Light Breaker. Besides gameplay changes I suspect one reason they do this is to appeal to a much larger audience. While pixel art is a popular art style it’s still dwarfed in player demand & median revenue by 3D games. After the success of their first games they can afford the risk that comes with the much larger reward of winning with a 3D game.
Random Thoughts on Pixel Art Success
One common denominator you’ll see among the top pixel art games is fantastic art. This is not reflected in the hard data and while I do believe pixel art is an indie friendly art style that doesn’t mean it’s easy to do well.
Use Steam tags that make intuitive sense and accurately describe your game. Steam tags are weighted by the order you put them in. I’d recommend first and foremost choosing tags that make intuitive sense and accurately describe your game. After that use the data in this list to inform what order you should put them in (thus changing the weight).
Pixel art is certainly popular, but 3D art still has way more addressable market.
Data Versus Vibes
This data resulted in a healthy mix of confirming things I assumed to be true and surprising discoveries. Data like this is always useful from a market research perspective but be careful not to be blinded by data and lose the magic of game development. In an ideal world you should determine what game to make based off what genuinely interest and inspires your team as well as researched product market fit. Making a game that on paper should succeed is not the same thing as making a fun polished game.
"Pixel Art fans don’t have friends" damn, I mean, your right but why you gotta call me out like that
This is super interesting, I've been dabbling in pixel art recently and would love to make a game myself, but feel like I'm light years away from it. I'd make a case for pixel art games continuing to grow and be a popular category though as for people like me in my 30s(nearly 40😩) it feels like pulling on a cosy blanket from my childhood 😶🌫️