What makes a video game an RPG rather than an action-adventure? The answer is not always clear—and a look at one retailer’s bestselling games in 2025 shows just how closely the two genres can sit side by side.
An analysis by GAMIVO, a digital game-distribution service, examined its 100 bestselling video game titles of the year. Role-playing games and action-adventure games were tied as the most represented genres, each making up 21% of the list. In other words, both categories had a strong presence among the titles that topped GAMIVO’s own bestseller chart.
Survival games came next, accounting for 18% of the titles. Shooters made up 15%, followed by strategy games at 12%. Simulations represented 6% of the list, arcade sports games 5%, and pure adventure games 2%.
Those figures offer a snapshot of what appeared among one service’s top-selling games—not a count of every game played or sold across the industry. The analysis also does not compare the results with earlier years, so it cannot show whether RPGs or any other genre have grown more popular over time.
The categories themselves can be tricky to separate. Many games blend different mechanics, and action RPGs may share features with action-adventure titles. According to a GAMIVO representative, story, action, combat and exploration are among the elements associated with these genres. When a game brings several of them together, assigning it to just one box may be difficult.
The representative also claimed that fewer than 20% of games nominated for Game of the Year across the history of The Game Awards could not be classed as either action-adventure or RPG. The article does not provide an underlying count or explain the method behind that claim, so it is best understood as the representative’s observation rather than a detailed measurement.
The most useful takeaway is both simple and nuanced: RPGs and action-adventure titles shared the lead in GAMIVO’s 2025 bestseller list, while the genre labels themselves can overlap. The findings tell us about the mix of 100 top-selling titles on that particular service. They do not, by themselves, reveal the number of people playing each genre or establish a broader industry-wide trend.
Source: RPGs and Action-Adventure Games Were the Most Popular Video Game Genres in 2025, GAMIVO Studies Show, GetNews, published on Barchart
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