Horror games sell worse in October, marketing blog argues
A data dive by How To Market A Game finds October is the most crowded month for horror releases but one of the worst for revenue, upending standard indie launch advice.
AI-drafted from 1 source. This story was written with AI from the outside reporting listed under Sources, and checked by automated tools before it went up. The originals have the full detail.
An indie marketing blog has crunched three years of Steam sales data and concluded that October, the month every horror developer assumes they must launch in, is actually one of the worst months to do it. The analysis comes from How To Market A Game, which pulled data on 7,019 horror-tagged games released since January 2023 from the analytics service GameDiscoverCo.
The logic behind an October launch feels obvious. Halloween means scary things, horror games are scary things, therefore October is horror month. The blog's own numbers back up the assumption, at least on the release side: developers pile into October more than any other month, and that herding gets worse, not better, among studios that actually make money from their games.
Why the median revenue graph is misleading
The first chart the author produced showed flat median revenue across every month, which looked odd until they explained the cause. GameDiscoverCo defaults games with very sparse sales data to a floor value of $1,000, and the blog notes that over 60% of horror games in the data set hit that floor. Filtering the data down to games that made at least $100,000 lifetime changes the picture entirely. Among that group, October turns out to be the third worst month for revenue, while June, the month with the fewest horror releases, has the best median take.
What Resident Evil's player counts actually show
To test whether players simply flock to horror games seasonally regardless of new releases, the author looked at concurrent player numbers for Resident Evil, reasoning that if any game gets an October revival it should be a horror classic like this one. The data does not cooperate. Peak concurrent players tend to land in March or July, and the spikes that do appear near Halloween line up not with the season but with Capcom's own October discount sales, including a 75% off promotion the blog dates to late September through early October 2025. The largest spike in the data set, in March 2026, coincides with a separate anniversary sale rather than any calendar association with horror.
The blog also tackles the argument that horror content creators drive October sales through themed streams. Using a “7 days of Spooks” stream by the YouTuber Vargskelethor as an example, the author notes the games played spanned everything from 1990s shareware to a Sega Saturn release, none of which had launched in October, and one game, Signal Simulator, showed no seasonal bump in player numbers around the streamer's November playthrough despite a genuine, unrelated spike in December.
What this means for developers deciding when to launch
None of this is a controlled experiment, and the author is upfront that the underlying player count and revenue data are noisy. It is also one blog's read of one analytics provider's numbers, not an independent audit. But the pattern, developers clustering into the busiest, least rewarding month out of habit rather than evidence, is the kind of thing worth checking before committing a launch date. For a small studio with one shot at a Steam front page slot, picking June over October on the strength of this analysis would be a genuine gamble against convention. Whether the effect holds outside this particular data set, or survives contact with a bigger sample, is not something the blog itself claims to have settled.
Sources
- You probably shouldn’t launch a horror game in October (How To Market A Game)
Image: How To Market A Game