2025 Was the Year Indie Games Took Over Steam

I’ll be honest—last year felt like a turning point. Whenever I opened Steam, my discovery queue wasn’t filled with another endless open-world or live-service sequel. Instead, it was packed with weird, wonderful projects from tiny teams. 2025 turned out to be a monster year for indie and double-A games, and the numbers back up that gut feeling.

Back in July, I’d noticed that 40 percent of the best-performing new Steam releases came from smaller studios. Games like Peak, R.E.P.O., and Schedule I were already racking up insane player counts. By the time the leaves started falling, the streak hadn’t just held—it smashed a record that had stood for nearly a decade.

Eight indie games crossed 100,000 concurrent players on Steam in 2025. That’s not a typo. Eight separate titles, from long-awaited sequels to absolute unknowns, hit that milestone. The previous high-water mark was seven—set way back in 2016 and then tied in 2024. 2025 cleared it with room to spare, and we still had months left on the calendar.

Some of these breakout stars were expected. Die-hard fans had been counting down to Hollow Knight: Silksong, Hades 2, and Deltarune for years. When they finally dropped, the player numbers exploded just like everyone predicted. What makes 2025 really special, though, is the pack of surprises that came out of nowhere.

Schedule I hit a staggering peak of 459,000 concurrent players in the first quarter. R.E.P.O. followed with 271,000. Then Bongo Cat, an idle game that nobody saw coming, ballooned to 194,000 users. The most recent shocker was Megabonk, a 3D bullet-heaven romp that basically asks, “What if Vampire Survivors
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