FMV by the Numbers: Releases Tripled in Two Years, and Almost Nobody Noticed

To build the FMV Directory we went through every game on Steam that players tag as FMV, 614 in total, and kept the ones that pass a simple test: live action is central, it is a full game, and at least 25 people have reviewed it. That left 291 released games and 24 announced ones. Counting them up produced a curve we did not expect to be this steep.

The curve

For a decade, FMV on Steam was a steady cottage industry. Between 2014 and 2023 the number of qualifying releases moved between 9 and 19 a year, with no trend at all.

Year	Qualifying FMV releases	Player reviews those games have today
2021	19	7,001
2022	13	21,296
2023	15	56,106
2024	45	42,738
2025	70	121,422
2026, to mid-September	38	41,687

Then it tripled. Forty-five releases in 2024, seventy in 2025, and 2026 had already reached thirty-eight by the middle of September, with the busy autumn window still to come. Games released in 2025 alone account for a third of all the reviews the genre has collected on Steam since 2013.

What happened in 2023

One game. Love Is All Around, released in October 2023 by the Chinese studio intiny, now sits at 45,892 reviews, 93 percent of them positive. It proved that a filmed romance, shot fast with a small cast, could sell like a mid-sized indie hit. The release calendar since then is largely the industry answering that proof.

The answer peaked, so far, with Revenge on Gold Diggers in 2025: 51,237 reviews, the most-reviewed FMV game on Steam, ahead of every Western title in the directory, including Her Story (10,411), Not For Broadcast (12,695) and Late Shift (9,264).

The audience is bigger than the hits

It would be easy to read this as two blockbusters and a long tail. The data says otherwise. Sixty-five FMV games have passed 1,000 reviews, and forty-one of those were released in 2024 or later. That is a working middle class of titles, which is what a genre needs to keep studios alive between hits.

Quality has not collapsed under the volume either. The median game in the directory has an 83 percent positive rating. Among games with at least 1,000 reviews, the best-rated are almost all from the last two years: Heartbeat in Thailand at 98 percent, Forbidden Solitaire and Hua Manlou at 97. The only pre-2024 title in that top ten is Contradiction: Spot the Liar, from 2015, still at 95.

The language gap is closing

In 2024, 13 of the 45 releases shipped without English. In 2025 it was 12 of 70. In 2026 so far it is 4 of 38. Studios that once released for the domestic Chinese market alone now localise at launch, because the first wave showed that players elsewhere will show up.

Mac support tells a similar story of widening reach: 17 of this year’s 38 releases run on macOS, against 16 of 45 two years ago.

Who makes these

Counting games by credited developer, Wales Interactive still leads with ten, among them The Complex, Five Dates and Bloodshore. Behind it the list is dominated by names most Western players have never heard: MYSTERY CROWN with eight, Good Gate Media and KARMAGAME with six each, then intiny, Storytaco, Mountain and Sea Studio and D’Avekki on four.

What comes next

Twenty-four announced games already meet the directory’s tag test. They include Sam Barlow’s Precognition, dated 2028, Doctor Dekker 2, and ALT Lab’s two-player New World: Bonds of Shadows, which Steam lists for September 22.

The honest caveat: Steam tags are applied by players, review counts measure engagement rather than sales, and console, mobile and streaming releases are outside this dataset. But as a measure of direction, it is hard to argue with. Interactive film stopped being a revival around two years ago. It is now a release schedule.

Method: Steam store data for all languages, collected September 18, 2026. Inclusion rules are published on the directory page. Spotted an error? Write to [email protected].