The cozy game boom is the clearest trend on Steam over five years of data
The GameDiscoverCo newsletter studies how people find the games they play. You may remember the time they analyzed the names of bestselling games on Steam to learn what they had in common. Their latest look at Steam is an in-depth study of keywords in capsule descriptions—the paragraph of summary under the icon on the top-right of a Steam page that tells you it's "a first-person horror game that combines intense action and adventure elements" or whatever.
GameDiscoverCo's rigorous work has resulted in a spreadsheet of the top 1,000 keywords, filtering out "the" and "but" and so on. While the straight-up list of keywords that occur the most in capsule descriptions isn't enlightening—the word "game" is at the top, followed by "world"—the list also breaks down keywords used in games that grossed more than $100,000 LTD (life to date), and splits them up by year.
Which means we can see the rise of cozy games on Steam quite clearly. As GameDiscoverCo put it, "New games that admit they are cozy in the description went from 0.4% (2022) to 3.1% (2025) for titles that gross >$100k LTD." That's a huge change in just three years, an increase of 675%. It lines up with the research our Lauren Morton did using Google search results to see how cozy gaming distinguished itself from "wholesome" in 2021 and then rose above "casual" in 2022. Line goes up, as they say.
Looking at GameDiscoverCo's list of keywords from successful games that increased the most in frequency over the last five years, cozy comes in at the top with "solo" not far behind, rising by 450%. As GameDiscoverCo points out, that's not a boost for singleplayer games, which usually use the word "singleplayer" if necessary. "Solo" is what you say when you're pointing out that a game can be played "solo or co-op", "solo or PvE", and so on. It's actually a rise in multiplayer, but especially the kind of multiplayer that, like Subnautica 2, needs to reassure solo players they're welcome too.
More tellingly, games with the word "factory" in their summary have gone up 325%, because we sure do love a management sim on PC, while "adult" went up 314%. The keywords "expand" and "shop" have also become more common over the same period.
While cozy gaming's rise in popularity goes hand-in-hand with a dilution of the term, it remains an interesting lens to view games through. It's often a way to say "non-violent" without coming off as judgemental of violent games, though it can also more specifically be a synonym for a certain kind of farm-life sim, and a way of describing the kind of games that would have been dismissed as being "for girls" in the dark days of the 1990s when even mascot platformers wanted to be edgy. The broadness of its applicability can even be an advantage.
Best cozy games: Relaxed gaming
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Best JRPGs: Classics and beyond
Best cyberpunk games: Techno futures
Best gacha games: Freemium fanatics