What genres were popular on Itch in 2025?

In this blog post, we will look at what game genres were popular on Itch.io in 2025.

I have collected publicly available metadata about Itch games released roughly in 2025. I say roughly, since the dataset is derived from Itch's sitemap ordering, which might have led to some omissions or errors (in addition to any omissions or errors that are due to bugs in my code).

Let's dive in!

Itch releases aren't all games

Itch is not only a platform for distributing computer games, but also a popular place to publish asset packs, tabletop RPGs and various other types of projects.

For our analysis, we focus only on digital games.

Genres vs tags

On Itch, games are assigned genres and tags by the game author. Authors can pick among 17 predetermined genres, and a game can have zero, one or multiple genres. The genres on Itch are:

• Adventure
• Visual Novel
• Role Playing
• Action
• Platformer
• Simulation
• Puzzle
• Interactive Fiction
• Survival
• Shooter
• Strategy
• Card Game
• Fighting
• Educational
• Racing
• Rhythm
• Sports

Later on, we'll see how prevalent different genres were in 2025. But first, let's look a bit at tags.

Tags are set freely by the game authors. In 2025, a total of 27 569 unique tags were used! Here are the top 20 most popular tags:

I think it's interesting to see that No AI was the fourth most popular tag in 2025. AI sentiment doesn't seem to be very positive among indie game devs.

Popularity is extremely skewed

There are multiple ways to measure the popularity of a game, but for this blog post, we focus on the number of ratings the game has. We will look into the data, but first, let's just consider the other publicly available metrics that could have been used:

• Average rating
• Number of comments
• Number of collections each game appears in

Average rating doesn't seem to correlate at all with the number of ratings, and would IMO not say much about how popular a game was. For example, consider a game only rated by the developer's friends sitting at an average rating of 5 out of 5. The number of comments in the game's comment section would be a reasonable popularity metric, but one disadvantage is that many games don't have comment sections, instead opting for community pages or just having no way to comment at all. The number of collections a game appears in is probably a good popularity metric, but a bit harder to collect and thus out of scope for this blog post.

Note that while the number of sales or downloads would have been perfect ways to measure a game's popularity, they are not public information, so we have to make do with what we have.

So, let's look at the distribution of the number of ratings (note that you can change between linear and log scale in the plot):

As we can see, the distribution is extremely lopsided. A whopping 81% of games have zero ratings!

These are the top 10 games with the highest number of ratings:

Title	Number of ratings	Genre(s)
The Freak Circus	4682	Visual Novel
Serenitrove	2094	Adventure
Don't eat the cashier!	1928	Interactive Fiction, Visual Novel
Chrala can't Escape NSFW	1784	Simulation
Dragonsweeper	1646	Puzzle
🔴REC NSFW	1324	Role Playing, Simulation
Where Eternity Sleeps	1300	Visual Novel
Pack	1042	Puzzle
CreepyDates	945	Visual Novel
Criminally Yours	921	Visual Novel

Which genres show up most? Which are the most popular?

Now it's time to look at the most popular genres on Itch in 2025. First, we'll look at the total number of games in each genre:

Note that the sum of games in the plot above exceeds the total number of games, since games may have multiple genres.

Now, let's instead sort our genres based on their mean number of ratings:

We clearly see that Visual Novel is top dog, followed by the closely related genre Interactive Fiction. Simulation is also a strong genre. Note that despite being so common among uploaded games, Action and Platformer underperform when it comes to the number of ratings.

Looking at the standard deviations in the plot above, we can clearly see that the distribution is skewed within each genre. I also tried looking at median values, but spoiler: the median number of ratings for each genre was zero.

Let's create another visualization, putting the number of ratings in four bins: 0, 1-4, 5-49 and 50+. Then we can see for each genre what the distribution looks like: what share of games in each genre gets no, little, some, or a lot of attention on Itch?

This plot tells more or less the same story as the mean values above, but with clearer numbers showing that it's not only winner-takes-all. The third story-focused genre, Role Playing, also appears near the top here, clearly showing that story-focused games are popular on Itch.

How about NSFW games?

Maybe now you're thinking, isn't Itch filled with porn games? Are all these visual novels just porn?

I checked how many games have clearly NSFW tags such as NSFW, Adult or Erotic, and among the games released in 2025, 2.3% were NSFW. So it's not all porn.

But maybe all these popular visual novels are porn? Well, I redid the above plot with mean ratings, but filtered out all NSFW games and this is what we get:

The mean number of ratings for all genres shrank after filtering out NSFW games... And it shrank even more for the top genres. But let's look at what share of each genre is NSFW vs SFW:

So yep, there are a lot of NSFW visual novels. But the large majority is still SFW. Itch players aren't all degenerates!

Paid vs free

Let's see how the distribution of genres differs when looking at paid vs free games. The plot below shows, for each genre, the percentage of paid games in that genre vs the percentage of free games in that genre:

From this, we can see that Visual Novel, Role Playing and Racing (interestingly!) are clearly more common genres among paid games than among free games. The Platformer and Rhythm genres are definitely more common among free games.

But perhaps a clearer visualization would be to look at the distribution of paid vs free games in each genre:

Role Playing stands out as having a larger share of paid games than most other genres. Perhaps these games often are so costly to develop that it makes more sense to sell them than give them away for free?

And in second place, we see Visual Novel. I think these two plots show at least some overlap between what game genres are more commonly paid, and which genres generally are more popular on Itch. It's not 100% clear: for example, Racing doesn't seem to be very popular, but is overrepresented among paid games. Interactive Fiction games are often free, but are still very popular.

One way to look at it is that Visual Novel and Interactive Fiction are two very similar genres, with perhaps the most obvious difference being that the former has more graphics than the latter. Then it would make more sense to see that VNs are more often paid than IF games, despite both genres being popular.

Key takeaways

Popularity on Itch is extremely skewed

Most games receive zero comments and zero ratings. This is perhaps not that strange, since people tend to upload almost any game they create to Itch, no matter the quality, and often without attempting any marketing at all except maybe sharing the game among a few friends. At least I know that is true for me.

Itch players like story-focused games...

Another interesting takeaway is which genres were popular on Itch in 2025, and if I would hazard a guess, are generally popular on the platform. The two stand-out genres are Visual Novel and Interactive Fiction, which are clearly story-focused. Also Role Playing looks to be popular, and is interestingly an overrepresented genre among paid games. Itch players seem to like games with a focus on narrative.

... which differs from what Steam players like

It's interesting to compare what genres are popular on Itch with what is popular on Steam. As Chris Zukowski often says, "crafty buildy strategy simulationy" games are what work best on Steam. On Itch, we instead see that story-focused games are what works best: visual novels, interactive fiction and RPGs. Clearly, the target demographic of the two platforms is not exactly the same.

A common sentiment lately has been to, before trying to publish a game on Steam, see if a smaller version of that game such as a prototype works well on Itch. While this might still be a good idea, especially to gather feedback, it is worth noting that genre fit differs so results may not transfer perfectly.