Exploring why co-op games have become so popular and how they perform VS non co-op games
Looking at how many units PlayStation games have sold on PC and what Sony aims to achieve with this move
Summary
We have a used sample size of 55 publicly released Steam sales figures to test the VGI unit sales estimates
At an overall level, the VG Inisghts algorithm overestimates Steam games units sold by +3%
At individual game level, VGI estimates were in the +-15% margin of error for 84% of the games
A case study of how Fallout’s IP holder, Bethesda, made an estimated $80M from the TV show with almost no cost.
Exploring the free to play landscape on Steam – looking at the importance of FtP in general and digging into the largest games in that space
The PC market set records in 2023 with highest ever revenues, units sold and number of games released on Steam. What will 2024 bring?
Steam’s 2023 Black Friday saw record player engagement and units sold, but publishers were forced to discount steeper to fight for limited player attention.
Steam continues to reach new highs despite the overall games industry facing post-covid headwinds.
Q3 2023 saw Steam beat records in terms of new games released, total units sold as well as full game revenue.
This article explores the average selling price for Steam games. The analysis includes the actual price paid for the game and takes into consideration promotional sales.
We’re able to see the full impact of Covid to the PC games industry now, 3 years after the start of the pandemic.
Core Keeper is a sandbox survival sim that has been described as a blend of Stardew Valley, Terraria, Minecraft and Valheim. Essentially, it’s everything that Steam players love in one game.
It announced that by the end of June 2022 it had sold over 1 million units. This article explores the game’s performance as well as the reasons behind the game’s immediate success.
COVID boosted game sales across all platforms, but PC games were a strong winner. Steam games revenues grew by 31% in 2020 and a further 11% in 2021.
2022 has brought challenges to the industry. The whole industry will likely decline in 2022. Games on Steam will also see a decline, but will fare better than the rest of the industry.
2022 has already seen over 6,000 new games released on Steam. That’s over 34 games a day. How have they performed?
This article explores the sales performance and trends among the 2022 game releases so far.
Which countries dominate the Steam publishing space?
Getting a game published is hard as is. Finding out that all the publishers you’d want to get are abroad makes it even worse.
In this article we’re exploring where most Steam publishers are geographically. We’ve tagged over 2,300 Steam publishers countries. They collectively make up over 95% of the revenue on the platform.
The US tops the country list both in terms of number of publishers and by revenue they generate. However, there are a few surprising countries that make it to the top 10.
Only 10% of Steam developers have ever made more than $100k in gross revenue. This article explores what they’re doing that other developers aren’t. It covers self-publishing, genre focus, number of games developed and more.
We’ve just launched another big updated on the platform! Every individual game’s page now shows an overview of quick stats about the game as well as player insights.
Quick game stats
In the example of PUBG (vginsights.com/game/578080), you can now see how many active players the game has right now, what the peak has been in the last 24h, how well the game has been rated, how many units it’s sold and what the average playing time is for a PUBG player. It’s crazy how much time people spend playing it!
This feature is available for everyone for free and gives an immediate overview of the game and its performance
Player insights
This is a premium only feature that shows the game’s player distribution in terms of country split, regional split, average play time and how many games its players own on Steam in total.
We hope you’ll enjoy our new features! Happy exploring.
At the time of writing this, there are 44,000 developers who have released or announced a game on Steam. Collectively, they’re responsible for almost 70,000 games on Steam.
This article explores who these developers are, what type of games they make and how much revenue they generate.
We recently published a report about the Steam games market in 2021. Among other things, we reported that there were 11.7k new games on Steam in 2021. This sparked a heated Twitter discussion, culminating with Jeff Vogel’s article called “There are too many video games”.
Given that our data sparked the discussion, we would love to have our say in how to interpret the data. We will be addressing statements made in Vogel’s article that seem to reflect a broader school of thought around the state of the current games industry.
The last 2 years of the games market have been dominated by Covid. However, different types of games studios have seen contrasting effects. As a whole, the industry has seen a boom, but these gains haven’t impacted all games equally.
This report summarises PC games trends from 2017-21. It is using public data from Steam API as well as proprietary data gathered by Video Game Insights. Occasionally, references are made to other reports summarising 2021 games landscape.
Having sold about 4.5m units in the first month since launch, New World has quickly established itself as a successful AAA game launch. It’s helped to bring Amazon on the map in world of video games and paves the way for further investment and expansion of the Amazon games division.
This article explores the launch and success of New World in numbers, covering sales, active players and more. For live data updates, visit the VG Insights New World Steam Stats page.
I recently wrote an article on how to estimate Steam game sales using an updated Boxleiter method or steam reviews to sales ratio.
This article explores the Steam reviews to sales ratio further.
There is a strong correlation between how many reviews a game gets and how many units they’ve sold. However, this ratio does depend on other factors – game’s release year, popularity and even price.
For example, a game with 100,000 units sold might have 1,000 reviews on steam. The ratio would therefore be 100,000 / 1,000 = 100.
We know that the ratio varies based on when the game was released – it’s come down from c. 90x about 7-8 years ago to c. 30x today. This article lays out how the Boxleiter ratio changes based on other factors:
This article looks at Valheim’s long waited update – Hearth & Home and its impact to new and old players.
We’ve previously talked about what led to Valheim’s success during launch. This is more an update what’s happened since.
In short, Valheim’s Hearth & Home update brings back some old players, but doesn’t expand the player base.
This mini-article looks at how important indie games are to the Steam ecosystem. We’ll dig into the distribution of Steam games based on publisher types.
The aim is to show what proportion of Steam games, unit sales and active players can be accounted to indie games VS large development studios.
This article lays out a way of estimating how many units any Steam game has sold. It will provide a right range for the majority of games.
We are using an advanced version of what’s been known as the Boxleiter method or the NB number – estimating Steam game units sold using the number of reviews they’ve got.
For example, a game with 100,000 units sold might have 1,000 reviews on steam. The ratio would therefore be 100,000 / 1,000 = 100.
We’re using the largest dataset to date for this analysis with over 10,000 video games’ review to sales ratios analysed.
We will cover how good of a measure total number of Steam reviews are for total sales. We will then explore how this has changed over time and which multiples to use depending on the game’s release date. Finally, we will demonstrate how accurate these estimates are.
Keep reading to find out the exact multiples to use.
You’ll get most out of this guide if you’re keen to learn more about pricing a video game and are open to mixing data with intuition.
Finding the right price for a game can make a huge impact to the game’s financial success. This article is a guide for indie developers on how to think about pricing and how to use the VG Insights pricing tool to help and find the right price for your game.
At the end of this article, you’ll be in a much better place to choose the right price for your game.
There are now over 10,000 new games on Steam every year and it’s becoming increasingly difficult to find a game to play, especially if it’s an indie game you’re after.
There are many ways to figure out which game to play next. This article by makeuseof captures most of them. You can also just use the Steam store search to find new games. However, we believe that our free Steam data platform can actually be even better for game discoverability.
We’ve recenlty looked into COVID impact on Steam game releases. We noticed a significant trend for both indie as well as AAA and AA games and have summarised it in the infographic below.
The above data was gathered through Steam API by using the Video Game Insights platform.
What are the important business questions that every indie game dev should ask themselves?
Developers who jump into the next game without thinking it through are much more likely to fail, not generate significant revenue and, often not even finish their game.
This article covers a set of questions that every indie developer should think about before, during and after making their game.
On Wednesday, 26th May, we’re planning on doing a Discord live event to talk about VG Insights, it’s features and video games market research in general.
We’ll hand out free trial accounts (2 week access) to all attendees for everyone to be able to test the full features of the website!
Loop Hero‘s been out barely a week as I’m writing this article. Yet, it’s sold over 500,000 units on Steam already according to Rock Paper Shotgun!
Loop Hero (Steam page) is only one of many indies that have achieved considerable and unforseen success. Fall Guys, Among Us and Valheim have all wildly overachieved the developers’ dreams. You can read more about Fall Guys‘ and Valheim‘s success in the other VG Insights articles.
This article explores the reasons behind Loop Hero’s success and what other indie decelopers could learn from it.
Valheim is still in early access. The mechanics are there but lacking in depth. Yet, it has sold over 5m units on Steam in about a month. So, what made Valheim so popular so quickly?
2020 was the year of games. Lockdown allowed gamers to play more and brought new people into the world of gaming.
11,622 indie games were released on Steam in 2020 – too many to play them all. There are some, like Among Us, that have reached everyone by now. However, there are a few that have got incredible ratings, yet, have largely gone under the radar to the general gamer population.
This article covers the top indie games released in 2020 that haven’t got the attention they deserve.
Marketing is one of the most important elements of being an indie game dev. There are many ways and methods to run a successful marketing campaign. All of them require significant time investment.
Promoting a game doesn’t always require a high budget. In fact, many indie games have successfully launched through free marketing tricks alone.
We’ve talked to developers about their top marketing tips and done our own research. We’ve summarised this in a list of indie game marketing tips to help small developers with $0 budget to get started on the journey. This is an indie game marketing 101.
According to Newzoo, the video game market hit $175.8bn in 2021 – more than global movie and music industries combined.
This article covers the key areas of video game market research. It gives a general industry overview. It covers types of research and the main sources of data.
No game developer wants to spend months or years on something that will ultimately only sell 100 copies. Even though luck is an important part of game development, prior research can significantly improve your chances.
Video Game Insights has a free tool called Steam Analytics. It is a great way to do some research in minutes and see if a video game idea has any potential.
This article provides a step-by-step guide to choosing which game to make next and walks through exactly how Video Game Insights can be used.
Fall Guys has come, seen and conquered. If you follow games, your Instagram, Twitter and news feeds are no doubt filled with funky looking… umm… jelly beans?
If you don’t know what I’m talking about, welcome back to Earth! You must be one of the two guys who SpaceX sent to orbit when Fall Guys launched. In a way, you are the fall guys now that you’re back, right? Cause you fell back to earth? Anyway…
What has caused Fall Guys to be so popular and dominate our social feeds? What can game developers learn from the success of Fall Guys?
We’ve put together an infographic highlighting indie game revenues on Steam in 2020.
How much money do Steam games earn? How much do indie games make? Is it worth being a game developer? How much is a typical indie game developer expected to earn by releasing a game on Steam?
We’re looking into Steam data to find out if being a solo developer is a sustainable career and what that means for your earning potential.
This is an article brought to you by a free games market research platform Video Game Insights and is based on Steam stats.
Are indie games too cheap? Should game developers charge more for their games? Will higher prices lead to lower sales? Indie game pricing has long been a topic of discussion.
In this article I will look at some Steam data to see if there is any evidence that indie game devs should charge more.