// PC GAMER — GAMING
Vampire games on Steam are a recession indicator and I have the charts to prove it
Nothing is scarier during Halloween season than amateur statistics.
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Despite what the GDP tells me, the economy in the real world doesn't feel like it's doing too hot for the average joe. But during the recent years' descent into compounding supply crises and mass layoffs affecting thousands of workers at once, I've noticed another trend: Sure does seem like there are a lot of vampire games in the mix lately.
I started to sense an uptick after Arkane's ill-fated Redfall in 2023. There was Vampire Survivors and V Rising—and Nighthawks, Moonlight Peaks, Blood of Dawnwalker, and more. Given current circumstances, you might think I'm just primed to notice nightmarish aristocrats bleeding us alive to sustain themselves. But after too many hours of spreadsheet data entry, I'm convinced devs really have been dabbling more heavily in Draculas as the economy feels increasingly dire.Vampire games on Steam are a recession indicator. And I have the charts to prove it.
At first glance, assessing whether Steam's vampire offerings can serve as a bellwether for economic sentiment could seem like a simple task. Steam has a Vampires tag, after all. The release dates are right there. Easy, right?
The Vampires tag is—perhaps fittingly—a horror. Devs and users freely slapping the label on anything with even one Dracula would be bad enough, but the advent of Vampire Survivors created a categorization disaster. Before Steam added a discrete bullet heaven genre, its countless imitators were content to use the Vampires tag as a makeshift discoverability solution. It's a mess in there.
Not only that, but I wanted a more complete picture of Steam vampire activity than release dates alone can provide. When games on Steam might have taken anywhere from seven months to seven years to develop, it would've been fruitful to know when games were first listed to gauge the level of collective vampire interest among Steam devs.
Steam itself doesn't provide that info. SteamDB, however, tracks whenever a game first appeared during its scraping of Valve's store data. That's a good substitute for listing time—but unlike Steam proper, SteamDB doesn't have a public API for pulling that information.
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End result: I individually sorted through the 1,213 Steam games with the Vampires tag at time of writing, manually collecting their release dates and first appearance in the SteamDB archive after determining whether they were, in fact, vampire-ass vampire games.