Vampire games on Steam are a recession indicator and I have the charts to prove it

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.

Datawalker

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?

Wrong.

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.

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.

My process for parsing that last bit was pretty straightforward. A vampire game is a game whose developer sat down with an obvious interest in making a game about vampire stuff:

• Game where you are a vampire, are concerned with vampires, or are generally surrounded by notions of vampirism? Vampire game.
• Game where there just happens to be, you know, a couple vampires somewhere? Not a vampire game.

I'll admit there's an amount of subjectivity involved in my methodology, and it likely wasn't flawless—I only just realized that Resident Evil Village didn't appear in the Vampires pool, despite its big vampire lady being responsible for ongoing sexual awakenings for at least a third of the internet. But, if anything, my figures provide a conservative estimate: I excluded games that just didn't have that vampire stink on them despite literally starring Dracula as the protagonist.

Tragically, this means Hotel Transylvania 3: Monsters Overboard didn't make the cut. Apologies to Adam Sandler.

Unholy ascension

The results of my very professional data collection are clear: For years, the number of vampire games released on Steam has been increasing. In 2016, only four vampire games launched on the platform. A decade later, 65 vampire games have been released on Steam so far in 2026—and more have scheduled launch dates before the year's end.

There's been a sharp increase in the last six years. In 2020, the highest number of vampire games that launched in a single quarter was six; in 2026, it was 24. Developers are listing more vampire projects on Steam, too. Nine first appeared in SteamDB's archive in 2016; last year, 99 entered the database.

It should be noted, of course, that the number of Steam releases in general has massively increased over the same period, from 9,634 game launches in 2020 to 21,263 in 2025. But it's not just the number of vampire games that's increased; it's the percentage.

The figure swings dramatically, but particularly over the last six years the percentage of vampire game launches has been trending steadily upwards, barring one particularly severe drop in mid-2025. The rate is still low—less than 1 in 100 games on Steam is a proper vampire game—but in some recent quarters, the percentage of vampire games was more than double what it was at the start of the decade.

I'd have liked to calculate similar percentages for how many vampire game listings have been popping up over the same period—but that would require manually recording the first SteamDB appearance dates for over 100,000 games. My bosses are already annoyed at the amount of time I've spent in spreadsheets this week.

Instead, I've calculated what I call the Vampire Menace Rating™, which divides the number of quarterly vampire game appearances on SteamDB by the quarterly total of game launches on Steam to provide a more relative image of how vampires are occupying the total mindshare. While the resulting chart's trend line has a slight climb, I wasn't sure what to make of it at first glance… until I compared it to Dracula's Castle from Castlevania. The implications, I think you'll agree, are chilling:

Okay, fine. The VMR™ might need some work. The increasing number and percentage of vampire games, however, is very real.

Blood forensics

Alright, so the number and percentage of vampire games on Steam has been trending upwards over the last six years. But can we really call that a recession indicator when we're still regularly hearing that the US stock market is breaking records and GDP is still embiggening? Sure, I might have a worsening sense of existential dread, but isn't everything good if the number is still going up?

If you happen to be—for example—one of those benefitting from the circular investments of infinite money into the emerging AI apparatus, you're probably delighted by the macroeconomic trends. But over those same six years, an accompanying set of signals indicate that, just as Nosferatus have skulked onto Steam, the average person in the US hasn't been thriving.

US Census Bureau data shows median household income rose between 2020 and 2025, even when adjusted for inflation—but only by about 4.6%. Costs, however, have risen faster. From the start of 2020 to now, the Consumer Price Index for all urban consumers—representing the costs of goods and services for roughly 88% of the US population—has increased by 27-29%, depending on whether you include the more volatile prices of food and energy.

Likewise, the Producer Price Index for wholesale trade industries has climbed over the same timespan, meaning retailers are paying more for the goods they stock their shelves with—a cost increase that's passed onto the consumer.

Unsurprisingly, there are indicators that the average American is struggling with those increased costs. After an initial dip at the start of the decade, the delinquency rate on credit card loans across all US banks has been trending upwards, signalling that American borrowers have been less capable of keeping up with payments.

At the same time, the US personal savings rate—essentially, the amount of income remaining after taxes and expenses—has been trending downwards over the last six years, meaning Americans have less money left over to save towards future prospects.

In short, things are costing more than our wages can keep up with, we're increasingly incapable of meeting regular financial obligations, and we've got increasingly less money to stash away as a safety net. Is it any wonder, then, that we see vampire games on the rise when so many of us are anxious about being bled dry?

At least we now have an exciting new metric for economic soothsaying. Now, I guess we just… wait to see what happens vis-à-vis the vampires. Happy Halloween?

To any actual economists out there: You're welcome. And I'm sorry.