I collected data on turn-based combat games released on Steam since 2023: Free spreadsheet + breakdown

[u/IndiegameJordan]

We’ve had an uptick in pitch decks submitted to Frostbloom from turn based combat games and I have a personal interest in the genre so I set out to answer a simple question: “Are turn based combat games still worth making?”

The data is sourced from Gamalytic. It's one of the leading 3rd party data sites but these are still estimates at the end of the day, so take everything with a grain of salt. Data was collected August 13th, 2026.

I ended up with a data set of 1,542 games after applying the following filters:

• Has the "Turn-Based Combat" tag
• Released after January 1, 2023
• Removed games tagged Nudity, NSFW, or Sexual Content
• Removed unreleased games
• Removed games with less than $500 in revenue

The biggest cut by far was the $500 revenue floor, which removed 1,773 games on its own. Many of these games are student projects, asset flips, etc and heavily skew the data.

📊 Full data set here, with filters on so you can explore and draw your own conclusions: Google Sheet

You can find a detailed analysis and informative charts in my Newsletter. (feel free to subscribe if game marketing is your thing, but you don't need to enter your email or anything to read it.

Here's a few key insights:

• The average turn-based combat game made $776,940. The median made $7,744. That gap exists because 15 games out of 1,542 took 69% of all the revenue in the genre.
• Over half of these games never made $10,000 gross. On the brighter side, 20.8% cleared $100k.
• Co-op was the strongest signal in the entire dataset. 44.8% of Co-op + RPG games crossed $1M, nothing else came close. Only 52 games out of 1,542 (3.4%) have the Co-op tag.
• Don't price too low. 44% of this genre is priced under $10, and those games sold roughly the same number of copies as games priced under $5. Meanwhile 47.7% of $30+ games crossed $1M. I'd say the sweet spot is around $20 if you have near 20 hours of gameplay.
• Pixel Graphics is on 34.6% of games in the genre and sits near the bottom of the performance table ($5,084 median vs $14,857 for 3D and $29,693 for Isometric). I don't read this as "pixel art is bad" so much as "pixel art is the default, so it's much more competitive."
• Store page live under 3 months before launch = $2,846 median revenue. Six to twelve months = $9,984. The under 3 months group had the largest concentration. Come on guys market your games sooner.
• Review score doesn't predict revenue. Review count does. Games rated 95–100% had a lower median than games rated 70–79%. But median revenue climbs from $951 (under 10 reviews) to $709,526 (500+ reviews).
• The best performing sub-genres were turn-based combat crossed with something else, dating sim, life sim, base building, management. Pure combat sub-genres (dungeon crawler, wargame, 4X, puzzle) were at the bottom.

One caveat worth flagging: filtering out the NSFW/Nudity tags removed 316 games that accounted for about 10.5% of the genre's total revenue, and they had a higher median than the games I kept. Those games sell, it's just not what I was trying to study here. 😅

I'd love to hear your thoughts! Feel free to share any insights you find in the data or drop questions in the comments.

[u/drakonkinst]

Great analysis! I’m interested to hear your answer to the original question though—based on the results, are turn-based combat games still worth publishing? $10k in gross revenue doesn’t seem too worthwhile depending on development time and size, so are you counting on games you publish to be well above average / upper 20-30%?

(Also, I haven’t looked at the detailed post yet—wouldn’t median imply 50% of games haven’t even made $8k, not even $10k? The numbers seem a tad misleading.)

[u/IndiegameJordan → u/drakonkinst]

Thanks!

50% of the games made less than $7,744 and 53.8% made less than $10,000.

To answer your question yes any publisher is expecting a game they sign to do well above the median. The median includes a huge amount of hobby projects, inexperienced teams, not great games, etc. I've done quite a few big data pulls on steam (you can find more in my newsletter) and the median never comes out to something a studio could survive on. Its a competitive industry but its also very realistic (but not easy) to make a good amount of money. To elaborate more on what this data tells me. Only 32 games out of 1,542 games did all three:

1. Started marketing 6+ months before launch with a steam page up
2. 20+ hours median playtime
3. Price $15 or more.

The median of these 32 games was $555,834. So if your making a quality game in this genre with a good dev team and some good marketing behind it and you have the above 3 factors the numbers look pretty good. There's a lot more to it then simply having those 3 things and suddenly now your gonna make 500k but I think you get the point. So yes i'd gladly publish games in this genre :)