The Outlier List

Welcome to The Outlier List, the leaderboard of the most unique games released on Steam.

With the flexibility to put creativity first, indie game developers have revolutionised the approach to game design. Some might call these games crazy, we call them art.

The Outlier List is a celebration of the games whose developers have ditched trends to let their imaginations lead the way and expand our definition of a game. Ultimately, they highlight that you don’t need to follow the crowd or mirror AAA titles to make a game that players will love.

We’ve used our Saturation Score to find the games on Steam that sit mostly on their own with very few similar games.

You can find a detailed overview of how we calculate this leaderboard at the bottom of the page

The SteamDB score is a rating that shows how well-received a game is by players on Steam, based on user reviews. It is adjusted for the number of reviews received to provide a more precise measure of player sentiment.

The estimated number of units sold, calculated based on the total number of reviews using the Boxleiter method.

The Saturation Score is a measure of how unique a game is compared to others on Steam. A lower score indicates a more unique game, while a higher score indicates a more saturated market.

How is The Outlier List calculated?

Everything we do at Game Oracle, including The Outlier List, is underpinned by our map of Steam which we built using our bespoke statistical models. We can use our Steam Map to assess how similar a game is to other games in the marketplace and how much "space" exists around a given title.

We use this to calculate a Saturation Score — a score between 0 and 10 that tells us how saturated the market is around a game.

Saturation Score Map — The graphic above shows you how we calculate the Saturation Score. We look at a fixed region of our Steam Map for each game (top) and count how crowded the immediate marketplace around a game is. This gives us a score for each game (bottom) with lower scores for more unique titles and higher scores for games in saturated markets with lots of similar games.

To create The Outlier List, we take the all the games in the bottom 1% of Saturation Scores and rank them by their SteamDB Score; a measure of how well a game is received by players. Then, in The Outlier List, we show the 100 most unique games that are most loved by players.

Intrigued by unsaturated parts of Steam?

Put trends aside to find your niche and uncover more quiet corners of Steam with our interactive Saturation Map - our 2D visualisation of the entire Steam marketplace.