The cozy game boom is the clearest trend on Steam over five years of data

2 hours ago 5

A girl with long grey hair types away at a laptop on a desk accompanied by a white cat.

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.

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.

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Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.