Castlevania: Symphony of the Night has entered the chat.

I guess concurrent player count means a bit but no, it's not niche.

Also the term metroidvania is used very loosely these days, like souls-like.

theres really 2 types of metroidvanias, platforming based ones or RPG stat based ones, Hollow knight is your platformer while Ast Libra is more of an ARPG in 2d. being someone who likes the Ast Libra types kind of sucks because the genre is being dominated by the platforming types. That being said Super Metroid is one of my favourite all time games and that had no stats, what it did have was an atmosphere and a balanced gameplay system, so the problem i have with a lot of the modern games is they have nothing to offer other than challenge. player count means nothing how many people are playing Banana? humans are idiots and steam perfectly represents that with the direction it is heading.

Which is fine, it's nearly 2026 surely you must have learned now.

Gatekeep more, not less.

Metroidvanias are still mostly indie titles, so they're not going to have the kind of mainstream appeal of most big-budget AAA games. Silksong is a crazy outlier. But for every one gamer that's played something like Bloodstained, 30 gamers have played Battlefield 6.

i mean the word "metroidvania" alone shows that they are at least a bit above niche, no? metroid and castlevania are both popular series, and spiritual successors to them like bloodstained have also proven to be quite popular.

hollow knight is its own thing now, it is fully "up there" with the likes of metroid and metroid style castlevanias.

There’s also:
Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night-peak 26,934

And as someone else mentioned, the origin game of the genre (Castlevania: Symphony of the Night) still isn’t on Steam for unknown reasons (it is on modern consoles).

Metroidvanias are the most common type of side scrolling platformers made since a while ago.

Yes when there's Tevi but everyone is only playing Silksong

While Hollow Knight and Silksong are good, I’ve a hard time to understand why they seems so much more popular than rest of the stuff in their genre.

引用自 Will be deleted：

While Hollow Knight and Silksong are good, I’ve a hard time to understand why they seems so much more popular than rest of the stuff in their genre.

while hollow knight is not really a souls-like, it takes a lot of inspiration (chiefly in the storytelling and atmosphere department) from fromsoftware games. those are very popular, so a lot of folk who like those also like hollow knight.

Bloodstained is better than all the games listed in OP

It's just not popular in this day and age, most new gamers prefer something more 3D I guess.
Hollow knight is one exception although I never understand the hype.

引用自 Will be deleted：

Is metroidvania considered niche besides Hollow Knight?
I looked at steamdb for most played metroidvanias.

The peak player count achieved:
Hollow Knight: Silksong: 587,150
Hollow Knight: 95,655 (achieved around the time silksong released)
STAR WARS Jedi: Fallen Order™: 46,550
Ori and the Will of the Wisps: 34,807
Dark Matter: 27,035

The 24h peak
Hollow Knight: Silksong 24,186
Hollow Knight 17,562
Dead Cells 2,645
ASTLIBRA ～生きた証～ Revision 1,116
Skul: The Hero Slayer 1,091

So on steam it look like the only really popular metroidvania games is really Hollow Knight and Silksong which seems leauges ahead of any competition and completely dominate its genre.

Gameplay wise metroidvania isn't a super niche genre, but if compared to Call of Duty, GTA, Battlefield, FIFA, etc. (aka the equivalent to junk food in videogames) yes it's a very niche.