The Outlier List

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

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

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. On our Steam Map, similar games are close together and games that are very different from each other are far apart. How similar a game is to another is measured by the distance between the games. The closer games are to each other, the more saturated that market is on Steam.

We use this distance between games to calculate a Saturation Score — a score between 0 and 10 that tells us how similar a game is to the others around it.

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 all the games in the bottom 1% of Saturation Scores and rank them by their estimated number of wishlists for unreleased games or their SteamDB Score (a measure of how well a game is received by players). In The Outlier List, we show the 100 most unique games that are most anticipated or most loved by players.

Intrigued by unsaturated parts of Steam?

Put trends aside to uncover the quieter corners of Steam with our interactive Saturation Map