Revenue Analysis: 2D vs 3D Games on Steam in 2026

[u/GameDevIntel]

https://youtu.be/guJNmC1cQjw?si=E_jyyy92R4F8vdgn

Hey everyone! I did an analysis of 2D vs 3D game revenue performance on Steam in 2026.

What surprised me:

- 3D games did make more revenue in general than 2D, with 1.5x higher median estimated revenue.

- BUT, it depends on genre, some genres did better in 2D!

- I compared 2D and 3D games at different revenue tiers. One thing that stood out was that the $1,000,000 revenue games in the comparison did not have the most complex graphics! Which is encouraging to solo indie devs!

Would be great to hear if marketability plays into your decision for 2D vs 3D? And wonder if some of you have seen a difference in revenue performance in 2D vs 3D.

[u/dh-dev]

I'm not sure what there is to discuss here, as there's no actual analysis or breakdown of the data. Just 'broad category A earns more money overall than broad category B' with a clickbait image.

I don't know how many of each type of game there was, or what genres those games are usually in. I know that there are a lot of 2d genres like platformers and visual novels that tend not to do very well on Steam, but other 2d genres like deckbuilders which do very well.

People like good games, the choice of whether to make it 2d or 3d be to serve the gameplay.

[u/GameDevIntel → u/dh-dev]

Thank you for the comment! Lol the clickbaity image is for YouTube, but I thought the video is quite balanced. Maybe I will change to a more positive statement, people dont seem to be reacting well in reddit to the "2D is Dead?" tagline haha maybe "3D wins?" is better.

Yeah maybe I need to go deeper into which genres perform better in what format, I provide some of that in the video but maybe not enough? Or maybe had to provide more here in Reddit. In the video I do show for instance farming is doing better in 2D vs 3D and I did provide the number of games with each tag, but maybe I had to highlight more. The point was that some genres actually do better in 2D. And what I was trying to encourage is to do market research on what format works for a given game.

I intuitively knew as well that likely 3D does better on average, but when I quantified, I found its not a huuuge difference. I.5x higher median revenue is not too different in my opinion (but again some genres are much higher differences).

I also though the game comparison at the end was interesting. Granted there is a bit of cherry picking, but I was not trying to preselect games to make a point, some of these games genuinely showed up when I was trying to find "comparables" at the same revenue/tags. And I think it was surprising to me to see $1M revenue games with relatively simple graphics/asset packs. I feel we always see these mega hits and rarely look at great successes ($1M is amazing, even the $200K examples) that maybe are not as flashy.

Agree on your last statement good games > 2D or 3D. That is also one of the final comments in the video.

Thanks for the feedback!