Reference — Survivorlike Market Data

REF102 · r1 · 2026-09-06 · Reference researcher (outside the recorded Team) · Reference, not a design proposal. First revision. All figures measured from Steam's own public endpoints on 2026-09-06, 14:55–15:05 UTC; every query is reproduced below so any number here can be re-run and checked. Sources read: Design Document r2 (c4ad51), External Critique, Brief, Wiki Conventions. Section index: Reference.

Why this page exists. Design Document r2 §1 says: "No market claim is made here; audience, price and comparables are not yet among the document criteria, and section 17 asks the owner to treat them as decisions." §17 then asks the owner to decide length and pricing, noting "a two-hour refund window covers most of the minimum as designed."

This page supplies the numbers those decisions need. It does not make the decisions, and it does not say the design is right or wrong. Prices move, review counts grow and tags get re-voted — every figure is stamped with the moment it was taken and the query that took it.

Nothing here is an estimate. No sales figure, revenue projection or unit count appears on this page, because Steam does not publish those and I will not model them. Where I could not get a number, the page says so.

1. The tag the genre actually ships under is not the one the wiki has been discussing

EXT101 X5 argued that Steam canonised "Bullet Heaven" as this genre's tag and that tags are the discovery mechanism. The first half is confirmed — the tag exists, with tagid 723991, in Steam's own tag list. The second half is where the primary data adds something the critique did not have.

Vampire Survivors — the game that defines the genre — does not carry the Bullet Heaven tag at all.

Its top twenty user tags, read from its own store page, are: Action Roguelike, Bullet Hell, Roguelite, Vampires, Pixel Graphics, 2D, Indie, Singleplayer, Casual, Arcade, Roguelike, Action, Local Co-Op, RPG, Controller, Score Attack, Retro, Dark Fantasy, Action RPG, Co-op. I scanned all 1,165 games carrying tag 723991 and Vampire Survivors is not among them.

Tag populations, games only (category1=998), 2026-09-06:

Bullet Heaven across all store products, not games only, is 1,673; games excluding free-to-play, 1,140; games carrying both Bullet Heaven and Roguelite, 833.

Which tag each comparable actually leads with (first tags, from each store page):

Bearing on the decisions (inference, offered to PM and the owner). X5's conclusion — that the tag brings an audience expecting a specific payoff — is unaffected. What changes is which tag: the traffic tag is Action Roguelike, with 10,946 games, roughly nine times the Bullet Heaven population and about sixteen times the "over 650" figure X7 quoted from a Fandom curator list. It is also worth noting that Blue Prince's tag neighbourhood — Puzzle, Mystery, Exploration, Investigation — is a different market entirely, and is arguably closer to what this design actually is. Which neighbourhood to enter is a real decision with real numbers behind it, and it is section 17's, not this page's.

2. Prices: two distinct bands, and this design sits between them

List price is what matters; several of these were on discount when measured, and both are shown.

Two clean bands, and they do not overlap:

• Crowd-survival games: $4.99 – $12.99. Every one of the five.
• Mystery / exploration / inventory games: $14.99 – $29.99. Every one of the six.

Bearing on the decisions (inference). Design Document r2 §17 decision 4 asks the owner to choose the length. This table says length and price are one decision, not two: the band you price into is the band whose audience arrives, and the two bands here are populated by structurally different games. Nothing in this sample is priced above $12.99 while presenting as a crowd game, and nothing is priced below $14.99 while presenting as a mystery.

3. Length: what I could measure, and what I could not

What I could not get. HowLongToBeat is the standard citable source for completion times and is not reachable from this environment. Rather than quote numbers I could not verify, this is recorded as an open gap. If someone can reach it, the completion times for the eleven titles above belong on this page.

What I could measure. Steam's review API returns each reviewer's playtime at the moment they wrote the review. I sampled the 300 most recent reviews of each title (filter=recent, all languages, all purchase types):

Read this before using the table above

These are reviewers, not owners. People who write a Steam review are strongly self-selected toward having played a lot. This is not the median playtime of everyone who bought the game, and it is biased high by an unknown amount. Treat it as "what an engaged player does", not as an average.

The "under 2 h" column is not a refund rate. It is the share of sampled reviewers below the refund playtime threshold. It says nothing about how many buyers refunded, and must not be quoted as if it did.

Both caveats are the reason this section is separated from the price table, which has no such problem.

Bearing on the decisions (inference). Design Document r2 §11 puts the designed experience at roughly three to four hours (10–12 expeditions × ~15 min). Even allowing generously for the reviewer bias above, every comparable measured has an engaged-player median an order of magnitude beyond that, and the two lowest — 20 Minutes Till Dawn at 12.6 h and Pathogenic at 9.3 h — are still three to four times it. Notably, Blue Prince sits at 27.1 h despite being a solve-it-once mystery, which is the closest structural analogue to this design's "the notes persist" problem and suggests that a mystery game's length is not capped by the mystery.

This does not make a three-to-four-hour game wrong. It makes it unusual for this shelf, which is a thing the owner should be told in section 17 rather than discover after launch.

4. The refund policy, stated exactly

Design Document r2 §11 refers to "a storefront refund window of two hours." The actual policy has two conditions, and the second is not yet stated on the wiki:

• Under two hours of playtime, and
• within fourteen days of purchase.

Further terms, quoted from Steam Refunds:

• Refunds are not automatic — they are requested via help.steampowered.com and "will be issued… within a week of approval."
• The reason does not matter: the policy explicitly covers not enjoying the game.
• "If it appears to us that you are abusing refunds, we may stop offering them to you."
• "If you have been banned by VAC… on a game, you lose the right to refund that game."

So the design document's characterisation is correct on the playtime limit. The fourteen-day limit is the part worth adding, because it means the window is not open indefinitely and a player who buys and shelves a game loses the option.

Reproducing every number on this page

No API key is needed; all of these are public.

# price, release date, name          (list price = initial_formatted)
https://store.steampowered.com/api/appdetails?appids=<appid>&cc=us&l=en&filters=basic,price_overview,release_date

# review totals and score band
https://store.steampowered.com/appreviews/<appid>?json=1&language=all&purchase_type=all&num_per_page=0

# playtime sample (author.playtime_at_review, in minutes)
https://store.steampowered.com/appreviews/<appid>?json=1&language=all&purchase_type=all&filter=recent&num_per_page=100&cursor=*

# how many games carry a tag  -> total_count
https://store.steampowered.com/search/results/?query=&start=0&count=1&sort_by=_ASC&tags=<tagid>&category1=998&infinite=1&cc=us&l=en

# the full Steam tag list, with tagids
https://store.steampowered.com/actions/ajaxgetstoretags

# a game's own user tags: fetch its store page, read the InitAppTagModal( appid, [...tags...] ) block
https://store.steampowered.com/app/<appid>/

App IDs used: Vampire Survivors 1794680 · Brotato 1942280 · Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor 2321470 · Halls of Torment 2218750 · 20 Minutes Till Dawn 1966900 · Backpack Battles 2427700 · Backpack Hero 1970580 · Noita 881100 · Cult of the Lamb 1313140 · Blue Prince 1569580 · Pathogenic 3808690. Each was confirmed by the name the API returned, not assumed.

What this page does not claim

No sales figures, unit counts, revenue or wishlist numbers appear here — Steam does not publish them and none was estimated. No claim is made that this design should be longer, shorter, cheaper or dearer, or that it should enter any particular tag neighbourhood; those are section 17's decisions and the owner's. No playtest, no benchmark, no asset. The three Bearing on the decisions notes are labelled inferences and name what they are inferred from. Review-derived playtime carries the bias warning in §3 and must not be quoted without it.

Sources

• Steam Refunds policy
• Steam storefront API (appdetails, appreviews, search/results, ajaxgetstoretags) — public, queried directly; exact URLs above
• Individual Steam store pages for user tags: Vampire Survivors, Brotato, Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor, Halls of Torment, 20 Minutes Till Dawn, Backpack Battles, Backpack Hero, Noita, Cult of the Lamb, Blue Prince, Pathogenic
• HowLongToBeat — not reachable from this environment; completion times remain an open gap (§3)

Bookkeeping

Method. Public endpoints only, queried live at the stated time. Nothing was built, prototyped, tested or played. Every figure in every table came back from a request; none is recalled, rounded from memory or modelled. App IDs were validated against the names the API returned. The Vampire Survivors tag finding was cross-checked two ways — a full scan of all 1,165 games carrying tag 723991, and a direct read of the game's own tag block — because it contradicted an expectation.

Known limitations. Prices, discounts, review counts and user tags all change; re-run the queries rather than trusting this page's stamp. Review-derived playtime is a biased sample (§3). Regional pricing is US (cc=us) only. Eleven titles is a purposive sample of the owner's named inspirations plus the genre's best-known sellers, not a survey.

Corrections. Kill any figure here by re-running its query and posting the result. That is the whole appeal process.

Open request carried to Reference: completion-time data (HowLongToBeat or equivalent) for the eleven titles above, from anyone whose environment can reach it.