In our last blog post, we looked at what genres performed well on Itch in 2025. However, our analysis was limited to Itch's official list of 17, which is missing a lot of actual game genres and themes. I think we can do better!
Let's look again at the official genre list:
AdventureVisual NovelRole PlayingActionPlatformerSimulationPuzzleInteractive FictionSurvivalShooterStrategyCard GameFightingEducationalRacingRhythmSports
You might note that several popular game genres are missing. Where is Roguelike? Or Horror?
In this blog post, we'll be looking for these missing genres in the game tags. Let's dive in!
Tags revisited
Among games released in 2025 (or roughly 2025, see the last blog post), 27 569 unique tags were used. That's obviously way too many to go through manually! But by applying Data Science & Algorithms™, maybe we can make sense of these tags and find the hidden, latent genres that they describe.
Finding latent genres
In this section I'll describe the method I used to find latent genres in the 27 569 tags. I will try not to turn this into a research paper, but the explanation is bound to be slightly technical. If you just want the results, you can skip this section, but make sure to at least look at the pretty pictures below!
First, for each tag, I created an embedding,
i.e. a high-dimensional vector which numerically describes the tag's meaning. I used OpenAI's
model text-embedding-3-large to create these; you call the model through their API with a piece
of text as input, and it gives back the embedding vector. The fascinating thing with these vector
representations is that you can compare two embeddings with each other to see how close they are
to each other in the vector space, and these distances correspond really well to the meaning of
the embedded text.
With all tag embeddings in hand, I created my own list of latent genres together with
groups of core tags that I felt strongly related to those genres. For example, roguelikes
might be tagged with roguelike, roguelite or one of the many misspellings, while a comedy
game might be tagged with funny or parody. Taking the average of each group of tags'
embeddings gives a value to compare other tag embeddings to, to see if the other tag
describes approximately the same thing as the tag group. This average value is called a centroid.
The latent genres I landed at were:
RoguelikeMetroidvaniaSurvivorslikeTower DefenseEndless RunnerARPG / SoulslikeJob SimulatorFarming SimStealthIdler / IncrementalCo-opCitybuilder / TycoonAutomationAuto BattlerDetective / MysteryReal-Time StrategyTurn-Based StrategyHorrorCozyLGBTAdult / EroticRomanceFantasySci-FiComedyFurry
Some of these are clear genres that prescribe specific mechanics, others would be better described as themes. You might disagree with my choice of genres and groupings, and you are free to do so. :) But if there is a specific genre you feel is missing, there is a decent chance that I tried to include it but that the tags or the tag embeddings just weren't good enough to classify games of that genre without also misclassifying a bunch of other games.
Now with this list of latent genres, their corresponding core tags, and their centroids, I classified each game. I compared each game's tags to the centroids, weighting tags by frequency to mitigate noise. This comparison would yield a similarity score, and if the score was above a specific threshold the game would be classified into that latent genre. A hard override was also used, meaning a game would automatically be classified if it was tagged with one of the latent genre core tags.
Let's have a quick look at a sample of tags and their similarity scores when comparing with a few of the latent genres.
I think this heatmap shows that tags are close in similarity to the expected
latent genres. We also see that it's not 100% perfect; for example, the adult-oriented tags
eroge (short for erotic game) and domination get some unfortunate similarity to the LGBT
latent genre. But with some fine-tuned thresholding, we can mitigate most of those problems.
The embedding vectors consist of 3072 numbers, i.e. they are 3072-dimensional. This is hard to visualize directly, but using a technique called UMAP we can project them down to 2D. Below is a plot with one dot for each tag used by at least 20 games, colors representing which is the closest latent genre centroid, and opacity showing how close that centroid is. While you clearly cannot make a perfect 2D plot of a 3072-dimensional vector space, I think this is still pretty neat and shows some clear clusters.
Note that I am not claiming to have created a perfect game classifier, and my method is not really at a research level, but from manually reviewing lots and lots of classifications I feel pretty happy with the results. Speaking of results, let's have a look at the classifications.
So what latent genres did the games belong to?
After running our classification method, each game was classified as belonging to zero, one or multiple latent genres. Let's first look at the top 20 most rated games from 2025, which genres were set by their authors, and which latent genres they get classified into.
| Title | Number of ratings | Genre(s) | Latent genre(s) |
|---|---|---|---|
| The Freak Circus | 4682 | Visual Novel | Horror, Romance |
| Serenitrove | 2094 | Adventure | Cozy |
| Don't eat the cashier! | 1928 | Interactive Fiction, Visual Novel | Romance |
| Chrala can't Escape NSFW | 1784 | Simulation | Adult / Erotic |
| Dragonsweeper | 1646 | Puzzle | Roguelike |
| 🔴REC NSFW | 1324 | Role Playing, Simulation | Adult / Erotic |
| Where Eternity Sleeps | 1300 | Visual Novel | Horror, Romance, Fantasy |
| Pack | 1042 | Puzzle | Cozy |
| CreepyDates | 945 | Visual Novel | Romance, Comedy |
| Criminally Yours | 921 | Visual Novel | LGBT, Romance |
| Big Bad Dogs | 811 | Visual Novel | Horror, Romance |
| Mousetrap NSFW | 810 | Action | Stealth, Adult / Erotic |
| Mansion Days: Roommates NSFW | 777 | Visual Novel | Adult / Erotic, Romance |
| Problematic Subjects NSFW | 758 | Simulation | Adult / Erotic |
| Type Help | 740 | Puzzle | Detective / Mystery |
| Dungeon Raid | 697 | Card Game, Role Playing, Strategy | Roguelike, Fantasy |
| My Fluffy Neighbor NSFW | 661 | Visual Novel | Adult / Erotic, Romance, Furry |
| Hollowspire | 638 | Simulation | Idler / Incremental |
| Dressmaker | 628 | Simulation | Cozy |
| Heartstop Tour [FULL GAME] | 605 | Interactive Fiction, Visual Novel | LGBT, Romance |
All-in-all, I am really happy with these results!
Now, which latent genres were the most common among games released on Itch in 2025?
Ah, yes, horror. rat in dungeon was, of course, right. And very much so! There are lots of horror games on Itch: 17 857 games were classified as horror, which comes down to 8.9% of the total games in the dataset.
Itch acknowledges that horror is a popular theme, and "Horror games" is one of the top
options in the site's menu. But if you click on
that link, you are
taken to a page with all games tagged with Horror, which in our dataset comes down to 8.1% of
all games. So just relying on the single tag undercounts compared to our classifier.
I think it would be interesting to see how common these latent genres are in comparison to the official genres, so let's plot that out. Latent genres are marked with <> in their labels.
The latent genres that appear in this top 15 are Horror, Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Roguelike,
Adult / Erotic and Idler / Incremental. I think it can be argued that Fantasy and Sci-Fi
are not really game genres, just very popular themes. Horror, Roguelike and Idler / Incremental
are however clear genres IMO, and if Itch would ever want to bump up their 17 official genres to
a nice round 20, then these are the ones I would recommend. One could argue that
Adult / Erotic should be on the official genre list as well, but I can see how Itch would prefer
if it is not.
Now, it would be interesting to see how the official genres and latent genres are typically paired up. In the following heatmap, we can see just that.
(Note that tooltips don't work for this heatmap on mobile: I opted for making it scrollable instead.)
Nothing very surprising here, the plot seems to confirm my suspicions at least. Seeing this feels like good validation for the latent genre classification, since official genre was not used as an input.
Which latent genres were popular in 2025?
But now, on to maybe the most interesting part. How do these genres fare in the big battle for our attention? Below, we see the mean number of ratings for each latent genre.
Four latent genres are clear top contenders: Romance, Adult / Erotic, Furry and LGBT.
This makes a lot of sense, if we consider how Visual Novel is the king genre of Itch. I would
say that these four latent genres represent some of the most popular themes in visual novels. And
of course porn is popular.
But the plot above has a big weakness in that very popular games skew the means significantly. So let's utilize my favorite visualization from the last blog post, now with latent genres. Here we see, for each latent genre, the share of games that got 0, 1-4, 5-49 or 50+ ratings. Then we can more clearly see which latent genres tend to get significant attention across the board.
We see the same four latent genres at the top of this plot. And wow, these games get a significant amount of attention! Especially the LGBT subculture is really strong on Itch, which I think is lovely to see. Also the furry subculture seems to have found a home on Itch. But honestly, most games classified into these latent genres seem to perform pretty decently. Just look at the next plot, where we combine our latent genre list with the official genre list again (looking at the top 15 genres so you don't have to scroll too much).
And what we see here is that our plot is dominated by latent genres! The only Itch genres that
even appear in the plot are Visual Novel and Interactive Fiction. It makes sense to me that
specific subcultures are strong on Itch, but I'm not sure why these latent genres generally
perform well. One hypothesis is that well-tagged games that belong to clear, modern genres or
themes (which I'd say describe these latent genres overall) tend to be well-made and thus popular.
Or maybe it's much more simple: these latent genres just happen to be more trendy and popular than for
example Platformer or Educational.
But the plots above mainly tell us: "If a game belongs to a specific genre, how probable is it that it gets a significant number of ratings?". The genres are very different in size though, so I think we should plot out the number of games with 50+ ratings in each latent genre.
Ah. This plot tells us something interesting: While Horror games don't perform
outstandingly in number of ratings on average, among the most popular games Horror is still big. So
publishing a Horror game on Itch does not guarantee it will get attention; I assume the game also
actually has to be good.
Also, let's not sleep on the Idler / Incremental, Detective / Mystery and Roguelike genres.
The data clearly shows that these are strong and healthy indie genres on Itch, and I would say
they are on Steam as well. There are also a decent number of popular Cozy titles.
And from the above plots, we see one hyped up genre that does not seem very popular:
Survivorslike. Perhaps this was more popular a few years ago, but looking at Itch in 2025, the
genre's popularity seems to have declined significantly.
Key takeaways
Horror is big on Itch
There clearly are a lot of horror games on Itch! And a lot of popular ones, too, but the vast majority do not get much attention. However, this is a genre with strong crossover appeal with the Steam audience, so if you're aiming to eventually release a horror game commercially on Steam, starting with publishing a prototype, vertical slice or demo on Itch might not be a bad idea. If it stands out, you might have a hit on your hands.
Subcultures have found a home on Itch
LGBT and furry subcultures, as well as players who are into romance games, have found a home on Itch. Games with these themes tend to garner a lot of attention. This correlates well with our findings in the previous blog post, where we saw that visual novels and interactive fiction are strong: these genres are often the formats in which these stories are delivered.
Porn is popular
Who knew? I think there might be an overlap with the subcultures mentioned above, and NSFW games often come in the form of visual novels. (But I think it's important to note that the vast majority of visual novels on Itch are not pornographic.)
Modern indie genres are strong on Itch
The data also shows that idlers and incremental games, detective and mystery games, roguelikes and to a degree cozy games are healthy genres on Itch. So if you're not into visual novels, horror games or porn, there might still be a chance for you to get attention releasing on Itch.
Latent genres dominate engagement
One interesting takeaway from the data is that, on average, games of these latent genres get
more engagement than the official genres on Itch do. Visual Novel and Interactive Fiction are
the only official genres that make an appearance on the top 15, and LGBT, Furry, Adult /
Erotic and Romance are stronger than both of them.
Why is this? I'm not sure. One possible reason is that the official genre list contains many "old-school" game genres, while many of the latent genres are trendier and represent stronger subcultures. Whatever the reason, it's clear that these communities have found a home on Itch and that's reflected in the data.
Closing words
If you've read through the whole blog post and reached these closing words, I'd like to sincerely thank you! It really warms my heart.
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Thanks again for reading! 💕