Analyzing the Most Popular Mystery Games of 2024

Trends and strategies from the most successful mystery games of 2024

Happy Mystery Monday!

Last week, Chris Zukowski of How to Market a Game (or HTMAG) published his analysis of games released on Steam in 2024. Specifically, he looked at the games on Steam released in 2024 that also received at least 1,000 reviews, in order to identify common trends or patterns that successful games use.

After reading his article, I was curious about filtering those games to just the mystery-themed ones and seeing what conclusions can be drawn. After all, his advice is generalized across all of Steam — but do they hold up for our specific niche?

And to be clear: my own areas of interest are different from his, so I'm not going to focus on the exact same things he focused on. My goal is to just independently analyze the top mystery games released in 2024 and try to find out if they follow any kind of trends that other developers can leverage in 2025.

The biggest difference in my analysis is that my sample size is significantly smaller. Based on my inclusion criteria, there are only 19 mystery games that got more than 1,000 reviews.

I remember from my stats class in college that you need at least 30 data points to learn anything statistically significant. And maybe more importantly, I’d personally consider a game successful even if it has only a few hundred reviews in the same year, and it seems like a more reasonable target for developers to aim toward.

So I decided to expand my search for more games, until I ended up with the Top 40 most-reviewed mystery games of 2024. Since there were only a little more than 400 mystery games released in 2024, that also makes this a list of the top 10%.

Today's article will cover:

• A list of 40 mystery games — what I consider to be the top 10% of mystery games released in 2024, based purely on review count

• Common trends among these top games

• Analysis of monthly and median review counts

• Analysis of review counts relative to subgenre

• Analysis of review counts relative to price point

• How mystery games on Steam compare to the overall Steam market

• Advice and strategy for mystery gamedevs going into 2025