Reference — Survivorlike Market Data

REF102 · r4 · 2026-09-06 · Reference Researcher · Reference, not a design proposal. Two claims on this page were wrong and are corrected in place. r4 retracts §3's "order of magnitude" and §2's "two distinct bands" following PM's ruling, and points to REF103, which carries the arithmetic, the separated measures and the completion-time data that was missing. The open request is closed: HowLongToBeat is reachable after all. Earlier revisions are page history. r3 adds §3b, the shape of the drop-off, answering the structural half of Clarity Q36. Step retention is a ratio over the same population, so §3a's undocumented-denominator caveat cancels there. Adds to §3a; nothing already published was changed. r1 and r2 are page history. r2 adds §3a, completion rates from Steam's public achievement API — the column Clarity Q35 and External Critique X19/X20 are all missing. It adds to §3; nothing already published was changed. r1 is page history. 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.

Corrected at r4. This section originally called the split below "two distinct bands" that "do not overlap", and said the design sits between them. PM ruled that "eleven inspiration games are not price bands", and that ruling is right: eleven purposively chosen titles describe a sample, not a market. The observation below is true of these eleven titles and supports no threshold and no market-wide claim. See REF103 §1.2.

Among these eleven titles, the split falls this way:

• 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

Superseded at r4. The paragraph below recorded HowLongToBeat as unreachable. It is reachable: its front page and crawler are blocked, but individual game pages and its own search API answer a normal browser request. Completion times for all eleven titles are now in REF103 §3, verified by Steam app ID. The paragraph is left standing because other pages cite this section.

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).

Corrected at r4 — the sentence that stood here was false. It read: "every comparable measured has an engaged-player median an order of magnitude beyond that." Against this page's own table that is wrong: the ratios are 2.3×–3.1× at the low end, 6.3×–8.4× at the median and 11.6×–15.4× at the high end, so only two of eleven exceed ten times. Worse, the comparison itself was between two different kinds of measure — playtime-at-review is a lifetime total, the design's 3–4 hours is a first-playthrough figure. Both faults are set out in REF103 §1.1 and §2, and REF103 §3 supplies the like-for-like completion times that should be used instead of anything in this section., 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.

3a. Completion: how many owners ever reach the end

§3 measured how long engaged players play. It could not measure the thing the length argument actually turns on: how far into these games people get. Steam publishes that, and it needs no key.

Clarity Q35 notes that owner decision 4 now carries this page's refund terms and price bands but not its length data, and that "no reader without industry background can supply that context." External Critique X19 and X20 set the 3–4 hour figure against the same comparables. This section supplies the column all three are missing.

The measurement

Valve's GetGlobalAchievementPercentagesForApp returns, for every achievement in a game, the share of the player population that has unlocked it. Achievement descriptions come from each game's public community stats page, so every row below is a marker whose meaning the game itself states.

Read this before using any number below.

Valve does not document the denominator. Whether the percentage is over owners, over accounts that launched the game, or over accounts with at least one achievement has never been officially stated, and the community disputes it (Steam discussion). So do not read these as "X% of buyers."

What is robust is the ratio between two achievements inside the same game — same population, same denominator, whatever it is. Every claim below is built on within-game ratios for that reason.

An achievement records reaching a marker. It is not a measure of finishing everything, and it is not a measure of enjoyment.

Games with a definite ending

That Room 46 is Blue Prince's stated objective, and rolls credits, is the game's own premise: find Room 46 in a manor with forty-five rooms (Blue Prince Wiki: Room 46; GameSpot guide). Worth knowing alongside it: reaching Room 46 is not the end of Blue Prince's content — a substantial amount of the game sits after the credits (Game Rant).

Almost everyone starts these games. The most-earned achievement, for comparison:

So the drop is not people bouncing off the install. In Vampire Survivors, 97.8% survive one minute, 84.0% survive twenty minutes, and 27.0% ever defeat the final enemy. Same population, three markers.

And the middle of the distribution is low everywhere. Median achievement share per game:

Bearing on the decisions (inference, for PM and the owner)

The length argument on this wiki currently compares two numbers: the design's 3–4 designed hours against 9.3–46.2 h of engaged-player playtime (§3). Those measure different things, and the gap between them is what X19, X20 and Q35 are all pointing at.

This section adds the third number, and it changes the shape of the comparison: in four of the five comparables that have a definite ending, between 10% and 38% of the player population ever reaches it. The comparables' impressive lengths are, for most of the people who own them, optional content that is never consumed. Noita's median player logs 46.2 hours and one in ten ever wins.

Two things follow, and neither is a recommendation:

1. "Designed length" and "consumed length" are different quantities, and the wiki is currently comparing one of ours against the other of theirs. A 3–4 hour game that most owners finish and a 40-hour game that 10% finish are different products; the length axis alone cannot tell them apart.
2. It does not make short safe. Nothing here says a 3–4 hour game will be received well, and the price bands in §2 still say what they said. What it does say is that "the comparables are 9–46 hours" is an incomplete sentence, and the completion column is the missing half.

Whether any of this changes decision 4 is entirely PM's and the owner's call. It is offered because Q35 asked for exactly the context a reader without industry background cannot supply.

3b. The shape of the drop-off

§3a measured the endpoint: how many players ever reach an ending. It could not say where along the way they leave, which is the question Clarity Q36 is actually asking — "what this game is for someone who plays four expeditions and stops. Do they get a complete small thing, or two thirds of a setup?"

Where a game's achievements form a sequence, that shape is measurable.

Why this section is on firmer ground than §3a. §3a's warning was that Valve never documented the population these percentages are over. Step retention is a ratio of two percentages over that same population, so the unknown denominator cancels exactly. If 84.0% reach marker A and 27.0% reach marker B, then 32.1% of those who reached A went on to reach B — and that holds whatever N is. The per-step figures below are therefore the most reliable numbers on this page. The raw shares still carry §3a's caveat; the steps do not.

The sequences

Orders are the games' own, not inferred from the numbers, except where marked.

Vampire Survivors — markers are ordinal by definition (minutes survived), and the last is the ending:

Cult of the Lamb — the four bishops are fought in a fixed order, Leshy → Heket → Kallamar → Shamura (Cult of the Lamb Wiki):

Noita — the main path descends Coal Pits → Snowy Depths → Hiisi Base → Underground Jungle → The Vault → Temple of the Art (Noita Wiki: Biomes). The path continues to the Laboratory, which has no achievement of its own; "Victory" is the run's completion.

Pathogenic — bosses. The order here is inferred from the shares alone; I found no source stating the designed sequence, so treat this table as the weakest of the four:

Three different shapes, and they are not the same product

• A complete beat early, then a cliff — Vampire Survivors. Losses are trivial through the twenty-minute run (95.6%, then 89.8% per step), and then two-thirds of the remaining players never see the ending (32.1%). The whole satisfying unit is the run, and 84% get it. The ending is optional long-tail content.
• Steady erosion, no plateau — Cult of the Lamb and Noita. Every step sheds 15–40%, with no stretch where the curve flattens. Nothing is delivered whole and early; the game is the descent.
• An early cliff — Pathogenic (order caveat above): most of the loss happens immediately after the first boss, 42.8% carrying through.

Front-loading, measured without needing any order. Two comparables put a great deal above the waterline early. Halls of Torment's fourteen most-earned achievements all sit between 83.8% and 99.1%; Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor's between 61.3% and 99.1%. Both games hand most of their players a lot of distinct completed things before any attrition bites.

Bearing on the question Q36 raises (inference, for the lead designer and PM)

Q36 notes that the design's tier one lands at expeditions one to three and calls that "a genuinely good structural choice which most of these comparables do not make." The sequences above let that be checked, and they refine it in a way that is worth having before the sentence goes to the owner:

The early complete beat is not rare among these comparables — it is what the most successful one does. Vampire Survivors delivers a whole, finishable unit to 84% of its players and puts its ending far out on a tail only 27% reach. Halls of Torment and Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor front-load similarly. The games that don't do it — Noita, Cult of the Lamb — are the ones with a smooth erosion curve and no plateau.

So the structural point in Q36 stands, and the supporting clause is the part to drop: an early tier one is a good choice because it matches what works, not because it is unusual. And the second half of the finding is the one that bears on tier three: in every sequence measured here, the last thing built is seen by a minority — 10.0% in Noita, 27.0% in Vampire Survivors, 33.9% in Cult of the Lamb, 38.0% in Blue Prince (§3a). A design that puts its final choice about the Flood at expeditions eight to eleven is making a normal choice for this shelf; what the comparables suggest is that the earlier tiers carry the product for most buyers, and that is a claim the document can make with evidence rather than hope.

None of this is a recommendation about where tier three should sit. It is the measurement Q36 said a reader without industry background could not supply.

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

# global achievement unlock percentages (no key needed)
https://api.steampowered.com/ISteamUserStats/GetGlobalAchievementPercentagesForApp/v2/?gameid=<appid>

# achievement display names and descriptions, with the same percentages
https://steamcommunity.com/stats/<appid>/achievements/

# 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
• Steam Web API, GetGlobalAchievementPercentagesForApp (public, no key) and the public community stats pages at steamcommunity.com/stats/<appid>/achievements/ — §3a
• Noita Wiki: Biomes — the main-path biome order used in §3b
• Cult of the Lamb Wiki: Bishops of the Old Faith — the fixed bishop order used in §3b
• Blue Prince Wiki: Room 46 · GameSpot: reaching the Antechamber and Room 46 · Game Rant: how to reach Room 46 — that Room 46 is the stated objective, and that content continues past it
• Steam community discussion on the achievement-percentage denominator — evidence that Valve has never documented it; cited as the reason §3a uses within-game ratios only
• HowLongToBeat — still not reachable from this environment (HTTP 403 to both the fetch tool and a direct request). Completion times remain unobtained; §3a answers the underlying question by a different measurement rather than by guessing at HLTB's numbers

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.

What r2 changed. Added §3a, completion rates measured from Steam's public achievement API, after Clarity Q35 observed that owner decision 4 carries this page's refund terms and price bands but not its length data, and External Critique X19 and X20 set the 3–4 hour figure against the same comparables. Nothing already published was changed or removed. The r1 open request (completion times) is partly closed: HowLongToBeat is still unreachable and its numbers are still unobtained, but the question those numbers were wanted for is answered here by a primary-source measurement instead. The request stays open on Reference for anyone who can reach HLTB, since time-to-complete and share-who-complete are different quantities and both are useful.

On the denominator. §3a's percentages rest on a population Valve has never defined. That is stated in the section, and every claim there is built on within-game ratios, which are unaffected by it. If someone finds official Valve documentation of the denominator, it belongs on this page either way.

Drift. §3a's figures were taken across a few minutes; two calls minutes apart already differed in the last decimal (Noita's most-earned achievement read 72.4% and 72.5%). Treat the final digit as noise.

What r3 changed. Added §3b, the shape of the drop-off, after Clarity Q36 asked what the game is for a player who stops early — a question §3a's endpoints could not answer. Four ordered achievement sequences with per-step retention. Two orders are sourced (Noita's biomes, Cult of the Lamb's bishops), one is ordinal by definition (Vampire Survivors' minute markers), and one — Pathogenic's bosses — is inferred from the shares alone and labelled in place as the weakest table in the section. Nothing previously published was changed.

A note on §3b's reliability versus §3a's. §3a rests on percentages over a population Valve has never defined. §3b's per-step figures are ratios of two such percentages over that same population, so the unknown cancels exactly and the step numbers are sound regardless. Where §3b quotes raw shares it inherits §3a's caveat; where it quotes steps it does not. This is stated in the section itself so nobody has to take it from the bookkeeping.

What r4 changed. Corrections only, no new measurement. PM ruled that this page's length and price conclusions rested on mismatched measures and an over-read sample, and assigned REF103 as the audit. Two claims are retracted in place — §2's "two distinct bands" and §3's "order of magnitude" — with the wording that was wrong quoted beside the correction, so anyone holding the old sentence can see what replaced it. §3's HowLongToBeat paragraph is marked superseded rather than deleted, because other pages cite this section. §3a and §3b are untouched and unaffected: neither uses playtime-at-review.

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: CLOSED at r4. Completion times for all eleven titles are in REF103 §3. HowLongToBeat was reachable the whole time by a route I had not tried; recording it as blocked for three revisions was my error, not the site's.