Design Measuring the Market (Steam)

[Kezarus]

Hi everyone!

So, I was using https://steamdb.info/ to gauge the market. Like, see how are other games faring in a certain genre, how much do they cost and how well they have selled.

Problem is that the average sales on Steam DB is bogus. It come to my knowledge that Steam is actively blocking the access of such information lately. But I don't know if that's is really true.

So, I was devising a method that rely on how many reviews a game have to measure (roughly) how much did it sell. So, if a game have 500 reviews and the percentage of people that left a review is 2%, 500 divided by 2% is 25k sales (roughly!).

The main issue is the 2%, is just a guess and I don't know if it's ok or not to use this metric. What do you think?

I am mostly doing this to decide what kind of game is worth doing or not. For example, if a genre in the price range of $10 are not selling well, but in the range of $7 are (and I could do said game genre), then we decide to make the game based on the numbers.


Thanks, =]
Kezarus

 

[curato]

steamspy is taking a crack at how many owners of a game there are. Probably as good as any guestimate you might make.

 

[rIKmAN]

It come to my knowledge that Steam is actively blocking the access of such information lately. But I don't know if that's is really true.

They aren't "blocking" it, but they changed the default setting for sharing information to "No" so only people who specifically go in and change it to "Yes" will be accounted for, which is a very small percentage of people in comparison to before.

As curato said, SteamSpy is probably the best ranged guestimate you will get aside the devs releasing actual figures.

 

[Deleted member 16767]

A lot of people refund too. I'm not sure if that's in their numbers. And tax + rev share with steam.

Edit: Steam is a good platform for indies. But I think the big AAA games earn more money on consoles and mobiles, where you can't refund. And I'm not sure if mobile games even has to share their revenue.

Edit 2: As an example, I have refunded a lot of games, and they wrote me one time "aren't you refunding a lot?", but I could still refund if I tell them that the game is too hard or that that my pc doesn't meet it's requirement. Essentially a renting store, playing a game below 2 hours and then refunding it. People need to get really hooked into the game. And they do that mostly when playing together with someone now that twitch just lets you piggyback single player games.

Edit 3: I can tell you that slightly above 50% of all players enjoyed their playthrough of my game on steam. The rest refunded it.

 

[Kezarus]

They aren't "blocking" it, but they changed the default setting for sharing information to "No" so only people who specifically go in and change it to "Yes" will be accounted for, which is a very small percentage of people in comparison to before.

As curato said, SteamSpy is probably the best ranged guestimate you will get aside the devs releasing actual figures.

In fact I didn't find any news related to that that isn't from a year ago or more. Some reports says that SteamSpy were fixing their algorithm, some say that is not in anyway related to the EU blocking of information. A bunch of things...

I was using SteamDB and SteamSpy as a info repository, but I got suspicious from those informations. Specially from some new games from our community here. SteamDB just say that they selled less than 20k units in a year or so.

So, to countour that, I think the 2% of reviews approach will be better. Just want to hear what people think about this.

 

[Kezarus]

Hi @mikix ! So the refund for indies is not that crazy for me at least. It was 5% of the total sales of a $1 game. Maybe when things get expensive, they change a bit. I agree with you.

The "Steam Bite" is 30% of what you selled. So, if your game amassed $100, $70 is yours and $30 is to Steam. In my case I even pay 27,5% of taxes on top of my $70 because of my country's tax policy. Even then it's worth it! =]

 

[YanBG]

% of reviews is what i'd base my estimates as well. Of course biggest help is to have existing playerbase. I just learned about these 2 games(different genres):
crafting rpg https://store.steampowered.com/app/599140/Graveyard_Keeper/
4x tbs https://store.steampowered.com/app/241000/Jon_Shafers_At_the_Gates/
Price is lower for the more popular but the studio has other 2 similar looking games with many reviews also.

 

[Fern]

It's really hard to base an estimate on reviews. I had a product that only sold $1,500 on Steam, it has about 15 reviews. I've had another product that has 30~ reviews but more than 4x the sales. It very rarely is an accurate estimate.