The most played horror games on Steam

What we count as horror

Horror, here, is a label and not an opinion: a game makes the list if it has “Horror” among its genres in the site's catalog. Those genres come from the game's English Wikipedia article, except for Little Nightmares, which takes them from Steam user tags. Of the 313 Steam games in the catalog, 23 carry the label, and all of them had a figure. Every number in this article counts the players online at the same time at the moment of the check: a single reading a day, at 5:16 UTC, which is 6:16 a.m. in Italy, when it is early morning in Europe and still Thursday evening on the US West Coast. It is not the day's average, and it is not the peak either.

The ranking

The top ten: 1. Dead by Daylight (39,898); 2. Left 4 Dead 2 (26,879); 3. R.E.P.O. (26,421); 4. 7 Days to Die (13,766); 5. The Outlast Trials (10,394); 6. Resident Evil 4 (9,231); 7. Sons Of The Forest (8,282); 8. Phasmophobia (7,803); 9. Dying Light (5,162); 10. The Forest (4,875).

The other thirteen, in order: Resident Evil 2 (3,412), Lethal Company (2,143), Resident Evil Village (1,804), Resident Evil 7 Biohazard (1,489), Outlast (1,101), SILENT HILL 2 (572), Dead Space (500), Alien: Isolation (301), INSIDE (152), Five Nights at Freddy's (126), Little Nightmares (99), The Mortuary Assistant (88) and Amnesia: The Dark Descent (86).

On Steam, fear is better shared. On their store pages Left 4 Dead 2, R.E.P.O., Phasmophobia and Lethal Company describe themselves as co-op horror, and Dead by Daylight talks about four survivors. The eight titles below a thousand players online, from SILENT HILL 2 to Amnesia: The Dark Descent, add up to 1,924 players: fewer than Lethal Company on its own.

The podium brings two eras together. Left 4 Dead 2 carries a Steam release date of November 16, 2009; R.E.P.O. one of February 26, 2025, and it is still in early access: more than fifteen years apart and 458 players between them. Capcom brings four Resident Evil games with 15,936 players online in total, 9,231 of them in Resident Evil 4.

The R.E.P.O. jump

The day before, Thursday October 29 at the same time, R.E.P.O. had 9,259 players. On Friday morning it had 26,421, almost three times as many. On the afternoon of the 29th, “R.E.P.O. v0.5.0 - The Sunstone Update” had appeared among the game's official Steam announcements. The update is the obvious suspect, but our data only says that one thing happened after the other.

On the same 23 games, the October 29 check gave 145,938 players online: +12.8% in one day. Of the 18,646 extra players, though, 17,162 belong to R.E.P.O. Without it, the other twenty-two together rise by 1,484 (+1.1%), and Dead by Daylight alone loses 1,816. If Halloween moves anything, the next checks will show it, with one caveat: tomorrow is Saturday, and on the three weekend days we have data for (October 17, 18 and 25) the same 23 games were between 193,081 and 206,135 players online; on the weekdays from October 26 to 30, between 131,861 and 164,584.

In proportion, horror remains a noisy niche. The 23 games make up 3.8% of the 4,373,128 players online across the 311 Steam games in the catalog with a figure, and at the same time Counter-Strike 2 alone had 430,067, more than two and a half times all the horror games put together. Anyone looking for Project Zomboid won't find it: with 30,893 players online it would be second, but in the catalog its genres are Survival, RPG, Simulation, Indie and Early Access, with no Horror. The same goes for DayZ (21,762) and Unturned (14,317), zombie survival games that don't carry the label in the catalog. That is the limit of counting a label: you choose it first, and you don't change it to make the numbers work.