Holidays do not give new games free visibility

Halloween, Christmas, Valentine’s Day, they all carry the same feeling. That week the store fills up with the theme and you want to make it there in time. But that crowd is not the player’s appetite, it is the store’s sales calendar. The moment you confuse the two, you walk into the busiest week of the year on your own two feet. And because sale periods usually land on these same days, you are fighting backlogs on top of everything else.

@Sphynixy brought this post’s subject up (thanks for that), he brought the article and wrote his own objection with it. He says, “I understand the competition, but autumn and winter feel more in tune with a horror game, in summer you fancy Dave the Diver.” He has a point, it really does feel that way, and you probably have the same feeling. But the thing that empties out June is exactly the same mechanism of thought, regardless of genre. “Everyone is on holiday, who is going to play.”

The idea that horror does not work in summer lives in you and in people like you. The player base is far wider than that. A horror player does not play by season, the guy wants to be scared in July too. CaseOh is the biggest example of this, he plays horror all year round and there is an audience of ten million behind him.

On top of that, in holiday weeks the player is not looking for something new either, they usually go back to what they know. They do one more run of the game they open at the same time every year, they download the thing they played with a friend ten years ago, they install something old that has been waiting in their library. Steam feeds exactly this, it has been running Scream Fest for five years and what fills the front page is almost always old games. Even Resident Evil’s concurrent player peak lands in March or July almost every year, and there is no steady October rise at all.

October is the month with the most new horror releases, no surprise there. But look at the ones earning over $100k and October is the third worst month of the year by revenue. June, the month with the fewest releases, is the month with the highest median. The title of Chris Zukowski’s article this week says it outright, probably do not release your horror game in October, and the data set is 7k+ horror games released since January 2023.

Look at the horror publishers and they do not gather in October either. Only two of New Blood’s thirteen games came out in October, and their biggest month is January with three games. Four of DreadXP’s twenty nine games are in October, but their heaviest month is August with six. Both of them push horror all year round, and for both of them the busiest month is outside October.

The bigger pitfall here is building the game on the holiday itself. Out of every holiday themed game released since 2020, there is exactly one that has passed 1,000 reviews, and it is a horror game, called Christmas Massacre. People play plenty over a holiday, they just do not play the holiday’s game. That week they open the AAA game they were waiting for, they go into the event in their live service if they play one, they install whatever they were given as a gift.

I saw this very clearly on the mobile side. Players were coming back for an event in a game that already existed, and they stayed after the event ended. But when you build the game on a theme from end to end, even if it works you get stuck in that window and the rest of the year passes dead. This is not a mobile-only thing either, it works the same on every platform. Running an event is always profitable, snow falling on the menu, a small one week mode, a seasonal item. What that really earns you is not even sales, you are reminding the player that your game is still there and still current. So a holiday is not a launch strategy, it is a reason to call players back if you already have them.

The real opportunity is not in those crowded weeks, it sits in the empty ones. In January 2026, 163 games entered Steam’s Popular Upcoming list and the median stay was 1 day, so most of them dropped off the next day. But the game that lasted longest stayed there 8 days, because nobody is releasing in that period and there is no game to push you off the list.

So do not wipe the holiday off the calendar, change its role. In the horror case that means release in June where nobody is, make your sales, and four months later take the second wave at Scream Fest with a hard discount. The holiday is not your release day, it is your discount and event day. If the game worked, in October you collect money as if you had done a second launch.

Do not take from this that anything released in October sinks, there are games that came out then and blew up. Lethal Company came out in October 2023 and became one of the biggest things in the genre in recent years. What is being said is not that October sinks you, it is that October gives you nothing extra. The games that win in that month were going to win whenever they came out, and their date added nothing for them.

On those days the player really is looking for that theme, but the game they are looking for is already sitting in their library.