Steam Page Conversion Rates by Genre: 2026 Benchmarks

Genre moves your Steam page conversion rate more than almost any single page fix. The median store page converts 8-12% of visitors into wishlists, but a factory-automation game routinely runs 15-20% while a retro arcade game struggles to clear 4-7% with an equally competent page. Same effort, triple the output, purely because of who is browsing and how they decide.

That spread is the subject of this post. The overall medians come from our store page conversion benchmarks and CTR benchmarks; the genre splits below add the layer those posts only sketch. One honesty note up front: no public dataset publishes visit-to-wishlist rates by genre at scale. Valve does not release this, and the studies that exist measure adjacent things (mostly wishlist-to-sales). The genre table here is built from pages we analyze plus developer-shared Steamworks numbers, cross-checked against the public data that does exist. Treat the ranges as directional estimates, not physics.

Two numbers anchor everything else.

First, visit-to-wishlist: the median Coming Soon page converts 8-12% of visitors into wishlisters, with 12-18% good and anything above 25% exceptional. Second, CTR: 2-4% of capsule impressions becoming clicks is average, 4-7% is good, above 7% is top tier. Both full breakdowns, including traffic-source splits, live in the two benchmark posts linked above.

Genre acts on those two numbers differently:

• •Visit-to-wishlist varies a lot by genre, roughly 4% to 20% across the genres we see, because audiences decide at different speeds. A horror fan impulse-wishlists off one screenshot. A strategy fan reads the whole page, watches the trailer, and comes back tomorrow.
• •CTR varies less by genre than people assume. Chris Zukowski surveyed over 100 games and found CTR barely correlates with wishlist success at all - impression volume was the metric that tracked outcomes. Genre shapes CTR mostly through how well a genre’s aesthetic reads at thumbnail size.

So when you benchmark yourself, weight the genre adjustment heavily on the page-conversion side and lightly on the click side.

Here is the genre grid we use when auditing pages. Ranges are for Coming Soon pages with functional assets (readable capsule, 5+ screenshots, gameplay trailer); a broken page underperforms its genre floor.

Read the chart as tiers, not decimals. The claim worth trusting is that factory games convert at roughly double the rate of visual novels; the claim not worth trusting is that horror beats roguelites by exactly one point.

The mechanism behind the tiers is decision speed. High-tier genres pair a legible core loop with an audience that has already decided it wants more of that loop. Low-tier genres either resist the store page format (narrative quality does not screenshot) or face abundant free substitutes. Mid-tier genres have huge audiences that comparison-shop, which dilutes any single page’s close rate.

The click side of the funnel shows the same ordering, compressed. Our CTR benchmarks cover this in detail, but the genre-relevant short version:

• •Horror capsules over-perform when they use high contrast; the genre produces “what is that?” imagery naturally, and you can push toward the top of the 4-7% good band. The trap is dark-on-dark art vanishing against Steam’s UI. Our horror page guide covers capsule contrast specifically.
• •Roguelikes benefit from an audience that clicks novelty on principle.
• •Simulation and turn-based strategy run below average CTR because the gameplay is cerebral and a thumbnail is not. The winners lead with art style instead of trying to compress mechanics into a capsule.
• •Visual novels post weak CTR in broad discovery but respectable CTR inside their own tag pages, which is why tag precision matters more for them than for anyone else. The Tag Optimizer is built for exactly that check.

Given Zukowski’s finding that CTR is weakly tied to outcomes, I would not spend genre-benchmark energy here beyond one question: is your CTR above 2%? Below that, Steam throttles your impressions and the capsule needs work before anything else matters.

Since our genre table is an estimate, it should agree with the public data where they overlap. It does, in three places.

GameDiscoverCo’s conversion study. Their state of Steam wishlist conversions (games launching roughly September 2024 to September 2025) measured a different funnel stage - wishlist-to-first-week-sales, median 0.15x for games with 25,000+ wishlists - but the genre pattern rhymes. Online co-op “crewlikes” like Peak and R.E.P.O. dominated the top converters, while boutique narrative indies under-converted, collecting wishlists that never became purchases. Games priced above $10 dropped to a 0.10x median. Their top-20 converters also averaged 91% positive reviews after a week versus 67% for under-converters. Genre never outruns quality signals.

Alinea Analytics’ cohort tracking. Their wishlist-to-buyer analysis of Next Fest games followed October 2025 wishlist cohorts through launch: a niche car-mechanic sim converted 3.8% of that cohort in week one while an extraction shooter managed 1.3%. Niche-with-devoted-audience beating broad-and-contested is the same shape as our factory-versus-RPG gap, one funnel stage later.

Next Fest genre clusters. GameDiscoverCo’s June 2026 Next Fest analysis counted over 4,300 demos, 66% more than June 2025’s 2,645, with the top 10% gaining an estimated 3,000 wishlists each and the winners clustering around co-op, souls-like, and dark fantasy tags. Which genres sit at the top rotates between fests - February 2026 favored base building and open-world survival craft - so treat any genre hierarchy, including ours, as a snapshot with a shelf life.

What no public source provides is the direct genre-by-genre visit-to-wishlist table. That gap is why our estimates exist and why they carry the caveats they do.

Four limitations you should hold against every number in this post, ours included:

1. 01Selection bias. Developers who share Steamworks data or run their page through the analyzer are already marketing-literate. True medians across all of Steam are almost certainly lower than any published benchmark.
2. 02Genre boundaries are fuzzy. A “horror roguelike deckbuilder” belongs to three rows of the table. Steam tags overlap, and any genre bucketing involves judgment calls that another analyst would make differently.
3. 03Traffic mix contaminates comparisons. A horror game riding a streamer clip gets low-intent tourist traffic that depresses its measured rate; a factory game found only via tag pages gets pre-qualified visitors that inflate its rate. Some of the “genre effect” is really a traffic-source effect wearing a costume.
4. 04Small per-genre samples. Split a few hundred pages ten ways and some cells are thin. The tier ordering is stable across everything we have seen; the exact endpoints wobble.

Three worked examples of what the benchmark means in practice.

Roguelikes convert fast because the audience evaluates structurally: what is the run length, what carries over, what is the build variety? A page that answers those three questions in the short description and first screenshots hits the top of the 12-16% band. Pages that hide the structure behind lore drop toward the median. The roguelike optimization guide walks the specific checklist.

Horror has the highest ceiling of any genre we track - it is the genre most likely to break 25% on a Coming Soon page - because the purchase decision is emotional and immediate. The corollary is that horror pages fail differently: a horror page that explains instead of unsettles converts like a mid-tier genre. Atmosphere in the first screenshot does the selling; see the horror page guide for the asset order that works.

Strategy sits at the median and that is fine. Strategy buyers wishlist deliberately, then convert to purchase reliably later, which is why a strategy game’s launch math can outperform its unimpressive visit-to-wishlist rate - the full picture is in our wishlist conversion rate guide. For the page itself, differentiation from the twenty visible competitors is the whole job; the strategy optimization guide is built around that comparison-shopping behavior.

The practical payoff of genre benchmarks is traffic math. Wishlist targets are set in absolute numbers, but traffic needs scale inversely with conversion:

• •A factory game converting at 17% needs about 59,000 visits for 10,000 wishlists.
• •A strategy game at 10% needs 100,000 visits for the same target.
• •A visual novel at 7% needs 143,000 visits - roughly 2.4x the factory game’s traffic for an identical outcome.

That multiplier should set your marketing posture. High-converting genres can afford broad, low-intent traffic because the page closes efficiently. Low-converting genres need surgical targeting of communities already predisposed to the genre, since every wasted visit costs proportionally more. Model your own targets with the Wishlist Calculator, and check revenue by genre to see how these conversion gaps compound into dollar gaps.

Remember also that genre sets your revenue ceiling twice: once at visit-to-wishlist (this post) and again at wishlist-to-sales (GameDiscoverCo’s 0.15x median, with genre spread on top). A genre that wins both stages, like online co-op in 2025-2026, produces the outlier launches; a genre that loses both needs either a bigger audience pipeline or a smaller budget.

Genre explains the spread between games with competent pages. It does not excuse a weak page. Run these checks in order before concluding you are “just in a low-converting genre”:

1. 01Pull your real number. Steamworks, Marketing & Visibility, Store Page Traffic: visits versus wishlist adds for the same window. Not impressions, visits.
2. 02Compare against your genre’s band, not the global median. A 9% visual novel is winning. A 9% factory game has a page problem.
3. 03Segment by traffic source. If direct traffic converts under 12%, the page is broken regardless of genre. If Discovery Queue traffic converts at 3% while search converts at 15%, your page is fine and your genre baseline applies.
4. 04Check tags before art. Wrong-audience traffic mimics a genre penalty. Verify with the Tag Optimizer and our 2026 tag guide that your tags reach the people your genre benchmark assumes.
5. 05Only then benchmark your assets against the full conversion benchmarks and your genre’s optimization guide.

If you clear all five and still sit below your genre’s floor, run the page through the free Steam Page Analyzer - the usual culprit is a capsule-to-page mismatch that no amount of genre context explains away.