How to Get Your Game to be Popular

There has to be a reason why games get popular. After all, you don't just throw a 2D platformer together in Unity and the next day, it gets millions of followers on Steam. So... how do games get popular? And what makes a game popular?

Well if you asked someone from the 1990s what their favorite videogames were, there's a high likelihood that you'd be met with the likes of Mario, The Legend of Zelda, Sonic, or Pokémon. Back then, these games were the ones that were produced and published by their mother companies. And so, they were the ones that obviously gained the most popularity. For a long time, this strategy has stayed the same. A more familiar example might be the pack-in game of Wii Sports, selling over 82.9 million copies to date.

So what about the modern day?

It's become increasingly apparent that there is a shift from console gaming to PC gaming. The amount of games on platforms such as Steam and Epic Games has ballooned tremendously, with up to tens of thousands of releases a year. However, even these platforms still have their own titles (Half Life, Counter Strike, Fortnite), that they heavily promote. How then, do games get popular today?

Enter the age of videos and streaming. What started off as simple Minecraft videos on Youtube has now grown into a whole industry. As of 11/21/2026, according to twitchtracker.com, there are approximately 2,162,562 viewers on Twitch in the games category, daily. This isn't even counting other platforms such as Youtube or Bilibili. It's no surprise that the games that are featured predominately on here are the ones that get the most traffic. Appeal to one streamer, and you effectively get thousands of viewers and potential players. Youtubers and Twitch Youtubers and streamers are now the silent backbone of the industry of getting games known.

But it does appear that there's an underlying, implicit factor running throughout these games. How do they gain so much popularity? It's in the name after all.

These games are predominately collective experiences. Yes, they may be fun to watch, but they also have the ability to be played with friends. There is no better way to add to the replayability of a game than to be able to play it with your friends, or against others. When people watch streamed content, they're able to picture themselves playing it. There's a reason why the first game that heavily increased the popularity of livestreaming was League of Legends, a 5v5 multiplayer game, or why the most popular traditional sports to watch are those with teams (basketball, football, soccer, baseball). What could be better than playing with your friends?

Now, does this mean that every game that has teamwork and is simple will succeed? Absolutely not. There are hundreds, maybe thousands of games that run under the radar. In a similar vein, there are plenty of games that are single-player that are still stellar (Expedition 33, Undertale, Red Dead Redemption II), and are incredibly popular.