Hi there.  I run a Steam festival called the Love, Romance, and Heartbreak Debutante Ball which takes place each year around Valentine's Day.

Since this is to my knowledge the widest-scoped Steam festival in the romance space (e.g. it encompasses visual novels, non-visual novels, SFW games, NSFW games, games about romance, and games about heartbreak), I think the collection of games submitted give a pretty good indication of what the romance video game space looks like today.

There were over 500 games submitted for the upcoming 2027 edition of the Love, Romance, and Heartbreak Debutante Ball Steam festival, so I figured I could compile the information from all the submissions to give the closest thing to a complete picture of what the romance video game genre looks like right now.  Even if your game was not selected for the festival, I hope this provides a benefit to all submitted games, or to anybody working in the romance game space.

A few caveats before we get started:

• All data is anonymized, and I am excluding any responses where the "Other" option was selected (and the person therefore put unique text), as these may contain details that make an individual game identifiable
• Some categories can have percentages add to something other than 100% - e.g. a game may cross multiple genres, so "RPG" and "Visual Novel" might both be checked for the "what genre is the game?" question.  Also, as mentioned in the bullet above, I have excluded selections of "Other"
• I encouraged developers or publishers with a sizeable portfolio of games to submit all of their games in a single submission form for their convenience.  This means the number of games submitted is actually underreported in this data since sometimes one submission contains multiple games (e.g. you'll see in the graphs that there were 469 submissions, but since some submissions include multiple games, the final tally was over 500 games)
• The set of games that apply for a Steam festival may be biased toward those that prioritize marketing; games released long ago and are no longer being actively marketed, or games that are early in development, etc. may be under-represented
• Games must be on Steam; games on itch.io, console, etc. may have separate trends not reflected here
• This does not necessarily reflect the profile of games selected for the festival, only the profile of games submitted to the festival, which I have limited control over

Now, onto the findings.

Responses

The inaugural edition of the festival (submissions in 2025 for the festival Valentine's Day 2026) received about 300 submissions.  The upcoming 2027 edition received about 500 submissions.  This should not be taken to mean the number of games in this space increased by that amount year-over-year.  Instead, it reflects that the festival is more established and has simply garnered more submissions as a result.  It's probably true that there are more games in the romance space from one year to the next (the total number of games released on Steam each year continues to increase year-over-year, after all), but I believe the marked increase in submissions seen here is more to do with word spreading about this particular festival from first edition to second edition than truly reflective of the growth of romance games in the industry.

Is dating/breaking up the main focus of the game?

2025 submission form responses:

2026 submission form responses:

In this festival, submissions are open to games where the main gameplay loop is not related to romance but where the games have a noteworthy romance element (e.g. farming sims where the main gameplay loop is farming but you can still romance NPCs as a core feature in the genre).  As such, I ask on the submission form whether romance is the main focus of the game or not - roughly 60% of games submitted in 2026 selected that romance is the main focus, while ~40% stated that romance is not the main focus.

As you can see, this is a change from being roughly 50-50 in 2025 submissions.  So not only are there more games submitted in 2026, but a larger percentage of them have dating/breaking up as the main focus of the game.

Genre

2025 submission form responses:

2026 submission form responses:

In 2026, roughly 70% of the submissions are visual novels (or contain enough visual elements for the submitter to check the box for visual novel).  That leaves only 30% of submissions to not be categorized as visual novels.  Keep in mind that people can check multiple boxes here, so if it's a hybrid visual novel or even just a game that has visual novel elements, then the submitter may have checked the box for visual novel and the box for something else.  Still, the submissions lean heavily toward visual novel more than any other genre.  This has even increased in comparison to 2025, when submissions were comprised of ~60% being visual novels.

(My apologies on the labeling not showing up on every bar, but there were many free-form responses, so it only labeled every other bar.  But the other options shown here besides visual novels all held pretty steady year-over-year, moving no more than 2%.  For what it's worth, the second bar is RPG, and the fourth bar is interactive fiction)

Relationship milestones possible in the game

2025 submission form responses:

2026 submission form responses:

So what type of romance milestones can the player experience in romance games?  Meet cute, first date, and courtship are the most popular (the second bar is "first date"), with each of these being present in more than 50% of 2026 submissions.   They are all near or above 50% in 2025 as well.  Marriage is 3x-4x more common than divorce in both 2025 and 2026 (the bar in between them is "having kids").

(For 2025, the bars in order are meet cute, first date, courtship, engagement, marriage, having kids, divorce, breakup, friends with benefits, short lived e.g. summer-fling, forbidden love, enemies to lovers, and unrequited love.  2026 adds "loss of a loved one" after "breakup")

Safe for Work (SFW) vs. Not Safe for Work (NSFW)

2025 submission form responses:

2026 submission form responses:

NSFW games went from 10% of submissions in 2025 to 30% of submissions in 2026.  Does this mean that 3x as many NSFW games are being made now compared to a year ago (or more like 5x after factoring in the submission volume increase from 300 to 500)?  I'm not so sure.  I expect some of this growth is simply due to the fact that the Love, Romance, and Heartbreak Debutante Ball accepts NSFW games, which many other festivals do not.  In 2025, I was non-committal about whether the festival would include NSFW games (you can see I hedged my bet even within the question on the submission form), whereas in 2026, there was a track record of having had NSFW games in the 2025 edition of the festival and I no longer was wishy-washy about whether the festival would have NSFW games.  So now people were applying that maybe shied away from doing so in 2025 (and word of mouth in the NSFW dev community was perhaps better having seen the festival had NSFW games in 2025).  That said, I expect some of the increase in NSFW submissions comes from growth in the number of games in the space.

LGBTQ+ content

2025 submission form responses:

2026 submission form responses:

The majority of games submitted in 2026 contain at least some form of LGBTQ+ content (about 60%), down a bit from 65% in 2025 (just doing 100% minus the final bar for "does not contain LGBTQ+ content").  I expect this is above 50% because some games have optional LGBTQ+ content, such as a game with one male love interest and one female love interest where choosing one love interest results in a same-sex couple vs. choosing the other love interest results in a heterosexual couple.  This should not be interpreted as the majority of games being ABOUT LGBTQ+ or offering ONLY LGBTQ+ relationship content.

Among the LGBTQ options, it seems lesbian content is the most popular at about 40%.  Lesbian representation increased 1% year-over-year (38% to 39%), whereas gay representation decreased 7% (35% to 28%).  Rounding out the options, bisexual representation decreased 2%, transgender representation increased 1%, and queer representation decreased 4%.

Playable in VR

2025 submission form responses:

2026 submission form responses:

In 2025, only about 0.5% of games submitted could be played in VR.  In 2026, that number is now 1.5%.  Still quite small, but a bit of an increase, especially when considering that the overall number of submissions went up, so it's 3x in terms of percent and an even larger increase in terms of sheer volume.  But still seems like quite a small segment of romance games are being made for VR (whether VR is required or simply an optional playstyle).

Generative AI (gen AI)

2025 submission form responses:

N/A

2026 submission form responses:

Note that gen AI was not a question in the 2025 submission form and was newly introduced for the 2026 submission form.  Over 3/4ths of submitted games checked the box that "Gen AI was not used in any capacity on this project."  After reviewing the Steam page for all 500 games submitted to the festival, I can confirm that all of the games that said gen AI was not used did not in fact have a gen AI disclaimer on the Steam page (so either all of these games are truthful or they are consistent in lying on both their Steam page and on the submission form).  I am at least glad to see that nobody is clearly lying on the festival submission form to get into the festival (some may be lying on both the store page and the submission form, but at least nobody is lying on just the submission form).

Among games that admitted to gen AI usage in some form, some did not have gen AI disclaimers on their Steam page.  This is explained in a few ways: 1. on the submission form, I separate different uses of gen AI, and Valve does not require gen AI disclosure for all of these uses (e.g. coding or ideation), 2. when initially setting up the page, gen AI was not used, so the page was accurate at the time, but their processes have changed and the Steam page hasn't been updated accordingly, and 3. people providing misinformation (or lack of proper information) on their store page.

Among gen AI uses, having gen AI assets in the game (artwork, text, music, voice acting, etc.) is most common at 12%, with gen AI used for coding second at 9%, gen AI used in marketing materials third at 6%, and gen AI used for ideation fourth at 2%.  Note that these four options are not mutually exclusive, so people can check more than one of them.  Among the free-form responses, people self-identified using gen AI for localization/translation as well.

It pains me to say that one person clearly used gen AI to fill out the submission form (the text in their submission form included their prompt).  It should go without saying, but please don't use gen AI to fill out your submission form - hopefully, it's self-evident why that's a bad idea.  Thankfully, there was only a single instance that so obviously used gen AI to fill out the form (out of 500 submissions), so I won't take this as a larger trend.  Let's not permit it to become an actual trend.

There you go - a case study on the state of romance games in 2026, as told by the submissions to the Love, Romance, and Heartbreak Debutante Ball Steam festival.  I'd like to end by pointing out that these are the breakdowns for games submitted to the festival - I cannot control what games get submitted, and the games selected for the festival may or may not reflect the breakdowns shown here.