Let's Be Realistic: A Deep Dive into How Games Are Selling on Steam 

Nice to see someone using the numbers but there's a lot of questionable reasoning here. A correlation alone does not establish cause and effect. For example, the fact that games with a publisher sell better doesn't mean you should take your current game to a publisher - it probably means that games with publishers are already higher quality. The same goes for games with higher prices.

"75% off" is where the magic happens. I have many games in my library that I'm quite confident i'll never play, that got purchased due to that.

I was ready to sell a game for $5-$10. Yeah, never mind now. This is described in Paradoxical Warfare as an example. A Jade jeweler couldn't sell her inventory. She discounted and discounted but no one bought. She accidentally posted the wrong price when listing a discount. So instead of $30. She put $300 or something like that. She had a line of customers checking out her stock. They even bought from her. The lesson being that a higher price indicates a higher product value in the customer's mind. The paradox being that a higher price brought a sale versus a discount. Before you ask why not charge $200 for a game, the balancer is economics. No one is going to pay more than they think something is worth.

Many people (me included) just add interesting games to their wishlist and wait a year or two for them to hit the 66% - 75% off on a sale and buy them then, so increasing the price might be beneficial when you do the numbers. Tho I think I should point out that I'm in the, rather large but not particularly heavy, minority that has a decade or more worth of backlog in their steam library so I'm always catching up with games a few years after they release.

15:05 So I should rethink the turn-based multiplayer robot dating arena I've been working on?

Come on audience, give the guy a few laughs when he jokes, they weren't that bad.

As a customer viewpoint, finding new games on Steam is hard. The start page is bad and includes random staff. The platform is cluttered and it does not help to sort titles anyway. I would like to see a separated part from small and big games at least.

I think that you left out an important point. Namely, even good games are terrible at release nowadays: 1. Uncertainty about which of the 100s of games is actually good 2. Full of bugs 3. Expensive 4. DLC packs So, I simply always wait for at least a year because: 1. Good games will still be talked about, have good reviews and RU-vid Let's plays 2. Bugs are patched as much as they will ever be for the game 3. Price is very very low compared to the original price 4. You can get the complete package (game+DLC)

clearly what we need is for devs to make more open world crafting finger family games

7percent survival , that is litteraly the best odds i have ever had in my life

2020: Devs pay money so that people play their games.

For a talk based around numbers, that had some of the wooliest data collection and statistics that I have ever seen.

the problem with the numbers is that they do not reflect marketing in anyway. if you where to compare marketing of all of the games you will see a VERY clear difference in the amount of money a game makes. publishers will go out of their way to market the game, this is the reason they sell so many more copies. this whole video could be summed up to "market your game and charge more!". edit: also paying streamers big bucks to play your game helps even more, but no one talks about that.

Yeah, I think the “race to the bottom” mentality of pricing, when it comes to indie games at least, is more harmful than helpful. If you price it low, it probably won’t make someone more likely to buy it than if you price it higher (within a certain range), and, as an added effect, will mean that you get less overall money for your work. A part of this mentality, I think, is influenced by how players talk about some sort of ratio between price and the amount of content in a game/the amount playtime you’ll get out of a game, which is kind of a terrible way to think about games, IMO, because of how incredibly subjective it is. It also de-incentivizes Indies from being able to sell games at what they actually need to make in order to continue to make games/keep a studio open/feed yourself/whatever.

I never look at the steam store. I just search titles I’m already interested in lol. If you have no marketing out of steam, I’m not gonna know about it.

Thanks for the video, good talk. One comment though, publisher stats are a bit problematic to compare to the overall stats. Publishers don't just publish a random selection of games from the general population, they have their own filtering, and it is likely that publisher games are of higher quality than the general population to start with, and it's possible that that is the main cause for the increased numbers, not the publisher itself.

I think this is why marketing is super important in this instance you don’t want your game to get lost in the sea of forgotten games make sure to put trailers on RU-vid tweet about the game to the community it fits best and then release the game.

He says that 93% of PC Developers don't make enough money to survive, but he also says the average PC game makes $30k in its first year. Even if it took a year to make your game, that would be $30k - 40% that steam keeps, leaving $18k or about $1500/month. I am lucky to make even half of that panhandling. I would love to make $1500/month. Just saying.

The market has become oversaturated with spam games because of the ease of development. A decade ago it was seriously challenging to learn C+ from scratch and build a game with it. It took enough effort that it kind of was it's own quality control. Now that people can just put garbage together with the ease of assembling a lego house we kind of have the industry that we deserve. What we really need are playtesters and a quality control standard because right now there is no filter and games are not even criticized at all most of the time before they are uploaded. Steam and other virtual consoles have become as bad as flash game websites. As a creator you just can't see everything by yourself, you have to let people play it, poke around for problems and offer suggestions. This anything goes kind of thing is going to collapse on itself eventually because entities like Steam are actually losing money by supporting it. Microsoft realized this way back when they started the Indie Arcade on the 360. It began strong and then quickly turned into "Pay 1 dollar to see a boob after you solve the puzzle."

I think the reason Survival/Crafting games are so high is the large number of asset kits out there and as it's a popular genre, people think it's a easy road to becoming a millionaire.

Awsome report but you forgot one major factor! The 30% steam takes off your sale

Steam really needs quality control. If you don't set standards, everyone suffers in the end. And indie devs need higher standards for their art.

In addition to the published games having higher quality, he is saying average but using the median numbers

Would like to see this updated

He says "being on steam does nothing now" multiple times, but I would argue that NOT having your game on Steam will hurt your sales in the most cases, because people now often use it as a centralised "game folder" or because the purchase is streamlined and so on.

@No More Robots - what was the backup plan? I think that's a really important aspect that got skipped over.

Really bad talk. The entire point of the talk is the stats but he doesn’t once explain how he arrived at them. He says that he removed games that never had a chance, and admits this is subjective, but doesn’t even offer his subjective criteria for determining if a game had no chance. He also states: the average games makes X amount a year and can therefore not sustain someone. He then admits that he doesn’t know if people made their games while concurrently working full time. He also makes no indication that he took development time into consideration. If I release a game each week and make $30k each then I’ll do great! His numbers might be meaningful, but he hasn’t convinced me.

I'd love an update of this talk with new numbers!

Great talk. The resource limit for most people when playing games is time. Not money. So having a higher price point signals that the game is better value (for hours spent) than the competing lower priced games.

Gonna be honest, I don't know how useful this set of data is given that any aspiring devs taking the effort to watch GDC videos presumably already have higher quality standards than > 95% of Steam releases. Will the avalanche of cack out there negatively affect your game's sales? Probably. Will it be the determining factor in whether your game gets buried? Almost certainly not.

Wow, I was wondering about selling my game on steam too. It's a very interesting subject for me. Thank you

Most games on steam fail because they are competing for the share of mediocrity.

So in conclusion... Don't go into indie game dev for the money. I think this has been fairly standard knowledge for a long time.

Maybe.. just maybe there are TOO many games? There are plenty I see and think "that looks ok" but its just "ok" and there are more games than I have hours in my life to give a proper look at.

i really love how one of the main point was "put a higher price to your game" it's something i really have heard about in the context of art comission, because you are selling time and effort, it's natural that the price you have reflect that

The way he speaks makes me curious how his code looks like.

Is Mike reading these? If so then there's one statistic that I would be very interested in from a marketing standpoint. Wishlists. How many percent of the pre-sale wishlist adds can we usually count as buys on estimating sales numbers?

I'd love to see this topic revisited now.

And I find less than 5 games a month interesting enough to buy. A lot of the games released are total garbage. Usually low effort unity marketplace soup. No one should be surprised that those don't sell.

first: what qualified a good game? second is that even taken into account here? by numbers alone we see nothing but an apocalyptic state for indie development, but we must remember that a huge percentage, much higher than only 50%, of these games released every year are unfinished, unpolished and unwanted. thats not to say polished and finished games have a 100% guarantee of seeling minimally, but its not possible that a finished, polished looking game will not sell at all you know. i've found from my own amateur analytics that games with high replayability tend to sell more over time than on release week, and also are easier to sell DLC to.

How is it not hard to believe that 93% of the indie games on Steam are shit and don't sell well? That question was rhetorical! I use steam I see all these TERRIBLE indie games that come out all the time, lol. I mean this is like complaining about how nobody wants to buy dog-shit cookies. They taste like dog shit! That's why nobody wants them.

As a aspiring to be game dev and someone who has been living all his life with games and the market ecosystem behind him I can tell you that its generally not the wisest thing to put all your efforts at joining a indie and trying to develop the next million dollar hit without any funds whatsoever. Obviously you are bound to fail especially when you start out, what you need is a plan B, the best one by far is becoming adept in programming and getting some experience in software development first. You can always pick up modeling/working with ue4 or any other engine as a hobby but if you tried to become a game dev and failed at making your game a hit you can always learn from the experience and resort to plan B for bread on the table. You can say what you want but gamers are the best consumers for the type of product you are trying to sell, they actively try to find the right product and generally don't have to much bias for one over the other. If your game is not selling well, its not the platforms or consumerbases's fault, you can either give up and stop or keep going on and learn from the experience while resorting to whatever plan B you have to survive.

Publishing a game is no different than opening a business in a strip mall or writing a book. You can't let the 90% failure rate stop you from trying or you will never start. Make something you want. Even if it fails to make money you will have learned something. Stephen King wrote a LOT of stories before hitting it big with Carrie.

It should be mandatory to have demos for first time publishers on steam. So that people can give feedback and reviews atleast on the demo and then maby buy the full game.

Where is the "Marketing on a Zero Budget" video.? I'm a sole Game Dev, and could need some ideas.

this was a really interesting talk. it's something that interests me as a gamer because i'm so picky and selective with games I buy and I often wonder what made a developer or publisher go down a certain route, or choose a certain price. I have alot of friends and family that are gamers, but since I'm the only female I don't have any way to compare if the way I buy games is somehow different because of that. My dad and brother won't spend money on a new game ever, period, unless someone else they know has gotten quite far in the game and can show what the end-game looks like. I, on the other hand, am the only person I know that will buy games at full price, after only reading/watching a few reviews. I won't usually buy games under $20, since I just assume they must be crappy cheap games to be priced so cheap, and I also won't buy a game that doesn't have footage of gameplay available for me to look at and some kind of reddit or youtube review where I can get a feel for what others think of the game and what the complaints or praises are. It was interesting to see some of the steam numbers. On that note though, I don't ever buy games from Steam, and in fact don't even have a Steam account lol. After watching this video I went and did some checking and I have 27 games, most of which are PC games, a small handful are for PS3. On average, the games I own cost $40 when I bought them (ranging from $15 in rare cases, going up to $60 in most cases). I'm also more likely to spend more money a game I already own, like buying DLC's and expansions, than I am to buy new games. I feel the guys I know that are games are all complete opposite. They tend to only buy games when they're dirt cheap, and as result have 100s of games, and also as a result have loads of games they haven't ever played just lying around collecting dust lol. I'm also 34 and make decent money while alot of the guy gamers I know are in their 20s, so not sure if that matters. Also, I tend to only play mmorpgs or other mmos, so that, I think, affects the price quite alot. I wouldn't touch a free to play mmo with a 10 foot pole lol. : / If a new mmorpg came out tomorrow and i had never heard of it before (no alpha or early access, etc) but they were charging $50 for it, I would be immediately interested and try to dig up info on it.

How I buy games: -The game seems interesting, I see the first part of a firstplay or stream -The game seems fun, has cool music and ambience -The game has something different, something that engages me....unless is aprt of a franchise I do like, then I hope is an evolution and not something completely different -I check every platform it is on, where its cheaper and if where its cheaper (usually pc) it has issues -I WILL buy almost blindly games that are too good of a deal for their content, I have no issue with 15-20 dollar indies like Shovel knight (first relase), Hollow knight, Celeste, but I do think a lot when a game is 30+ dollars, like a hat in time on switch, I only bought it for the positive reviews and it ended being shit, not even horse shit, the most useless shit, Fish shit.

250 per month is basically minimal wage where i live. Lmao.

Please upload his other talks too if you can! Great content, thank you GDC :)

So now we know why Epic Games Store needs to exist. Valve is singlehandedly killing PC gaming because it refuses to curate and lets every piece of garbage saturate the market. Legitimate indies are getting drowned in the garbage heap. Not to mention the hefty cut that Valve takes from them. This is all reminding me of the Crash of '83.

Is there any similar study about mobile market (App Store and Google Play)?

If the mean and the median are so far apart you probably need a better metric, like categories of games. These numbers are meaningless unless you know what kind of game you're selling I think.

I think a lot of games get buried in the pile and lost, just judging a game by its picture or title is all a lot of us have to go on and there has to be a better way to find what is good.

maybe I should just focus on virtual reality games instead since no one really makes good vr games yet

The huge huge majority of these games are achievement spam made by Russian/Eastern European 1-man and small teams hoping to score a quick buck off of an asset flip really. It's kinda polluting the data.

x1.25 speed is recommended.

Game industry is a big pile of shit. The only success Mantra. Make the most entertaining game you can.

Are there links to his other two talks. Very interested in what he has to say

Not trying to be mean to this man or anything but honestly I don't think he's very good at selling games. People don't give a crap when a game came out unless there is hype a game is becoming an asset like videos on youtube that will continually build revenue and need to be continually sold and pushed for two to three years a good example of this is skyrim their sales department knows how to sell a product. We see this kind of stuff alot in the retail business people don't really want the newest thing they want an experience that's for them on their time and their needs.

Exactly the same thing happened to the music industry. It's so easy and cheap these days to write music that supply outweighs the demand.

The amount of uh's and uhm's in this video tho........

$30 is the sweet spot for full title releases. I've thought this for 20 years, even when I was paying $90 for a new game on NES.

I think devs shy away from gore way too much. I understand this means a game is not for everyone, but cmon, no indie game is mainstream. Also, a lot of shit games use gore as their only draw, but it can really increase the experience of a game if used right and with very good animations. Imagine the original Fallout trilogy without those amazing kill animations. Not the same.

Could I interest you in my Adventure Anime Survival Crafting Shooter Sim I've been working on?

Love the new haircut, Yong

There are plenty of games 3 - 4 years ago with less than 10 reviews. Games that look good and even had money grants to support them, but well utter failures when it came to selling. You have always needed to promote your games. As for Early Access, just make the game look good and worth money so people will pay money for it. Early Access is a great way to cultivate reviews too before the launch. As someone that digs through games, I assume the $3 and under games are garbage eager to take your money. My friends have argued with me that any game under $10 is garbage. Plus people buy games on sale anyway.

Games done quick looks different this year?

the uuuh's in this really start grinding away at this presentation. If you dont know what to say next just dont say anything, pause a sec.

Nice talk! Would like to see some updated figures from 2021/2022 and maybe going some more in depth. Maybe an hour or so... :)

" *surprised* visual novels do pretty well" Sir, I have bad news for you

I think a lot of buyers are with me on this one: 1. No game is worth $/EUR 60, however long it's been in development and however good it is. (This is a lesson for even the biggest publishers.) 2. You can charge $/EUR 30 for the simplest game, if it's fun/exciting/casual enough. It can be a five hour SP campaign or simple action puzzlers. 3. If it's **NOT** fun/exciting/casual enough, we Add To Wishlist and wait for the next sale. 4. It does **NOT**, I repeat NOT, have to be original and have a "hook" to sell. It has never, ever been true. Rather, there's a sense of security in that you like that type of game so you'll buy it more readily. If a negative review says, "Oh, it's just XXX with YYY added", ka-chingg! So originality and great reviews only serve your ego. Do you want to make money, or do you want to feel proud? Publishers look for originality and hooks for some unknown reason, but all you have to do is make a game that is fun to play. The smallest tweak to a done to death genre can make it so. 5. Have you paid for marketing and are you selling it in at least 5 stores? If you haven't, you just don't want to make money. Valve does not "seed up and comers". Never. Ever. Yes, marketing works also for crap games. Really crap games. Really, really crap games. 6. Leave the game up for 10 years, just make sure it runs and money will come to you. I've actually bought games older than that, and so do others. All great businessmen see it in the long term. 7. 15:05 Multiplayer sells amazingly. It's what everyone wants (and then buyers hate on it when griefers ruin MP cos noone does MP correctly), but by then they can't refund. Probably the reason is that they're so popular they can move it off Steam and sell them separately and not pay the 30% cut. Absolutely if you make a game make it MP and it will just sell like crazy. I have more but I'll end it there.

Well, how about per category? Can you predict based on the look of a game or mechanics whether it will sell well? Just gross means over the whole population or even simple snippets won't clarify what you can make.

He didn't mention this : does early access make a difference ? and when what, etc.

I search for the game, I click add to cart, I go to cart, I select purchase and whip out my credit card. That is how we purchase games on Steam.

Here's a radical idea. Remake old games that were really great classics that have been mostly forgotten and put them on Android and IOS as well as PC. How can that not be a gold mine? They aren't selling on STEAM because there's too damn many of them. There are so many games released now every year. You have to make multiplatform games and filled those niches. Make for Linux, Android, IOS, and maybe consoles too.

Early access is a serious issue. First off, from a developer point of view, most players will have gotten the game and ditched it before it is done. Then you loose a ton of word of mouth sales, because gamers virtually do not know what early access actually is. They start making videos and reviews on a half finished product and often just tare your alpha apart. I understand the attractiveness of making that money while you are developing your game, but in the end it hurts sales badly.

where can i find his talks that he mention at the end of the video?(how to be in the top 7%...)

Am i the only one who thinks there weren't enough numbers?

This was one of the most useful videos I've seen from this channel. Or in general. Thanks so much!

They are small 5-9$ games who don't spend time to advertise, hype, or get a following so they just sit on a shelf. It's not steam, it's just the people

The fullstop is not pronounced as "aaaaaa"

thank you, I would have loved to know about new or different places to sell you games. Good talk though, thank you again .

Those figures about the percentage of game failures is interesting. It fits in perfectly with Sturgeon's Law. I'm of the mind that games are an art form and the art market is extremely fickle. Other art genres tend to be affected much more extremely, but generally speaking a few artists do extremely well, a few more find niche or cult followings, and the vast majority go completely unknown. Some of this is down to quality but a lot is sheer luck. There are also fads which affect sale figures; see for example how "survival crafting" was the biggest genre at the time of the talk. There are generally a few trend-setters that take most of the market and a ton of copycats trying to gobble up what's left.

Some British accents are straight up sexy, and other british accents are down right goofy sounding - Im with -> Oh and it's its subjective not Objective,

But what if you make 10 small games a year? 10k * 10 = 100k/year.

funny thing is that the 'indiepocalypse' annual is still more money than what the OpenSSL developers/maintainers were getting paid for

I have survived on 15k a year making my game so 30k a year is still a win for me lol

He says "uhhhh" sooooooo much

I haven't bought a single game on Steam since 3 or 4 years ago, simply because I still have 90% of my library unplayed and uninstalled. You only really invest yourself in a few games, and that's it. Generally, those are the games that are at the top of the hill, meaning that IF you even want to survive as an indie developer, you better have something original or new...

17:38 Is it me or did he unleash the inner Gru

When I click on a genre I like I only find a few games. It's like where are all the games you speak of? From the search results there are only a few games on steam.

High ratings are meaningless. There's tons of crap that has high scores. I don't trust high Steam scores at all. I do trust bad scores. I've seen games with average scores that are actually good, I've seen games with good scores that are actually bad, I've never seen a game with a bad score that was actually good. If a game has a bad score, I pass on it. If it has an average score, I do more research and might end up buying it.

Not succumb to the race to the bottom in price is something others have tested, I remember an article about App Store where the dev developed a super shitty game with the purpose of ramp the price every time he reached a certain threshold of sales. And worked

Spend a year making a game - earn $500 without taxes LOL

If a game looks like an asset flip, don’t buy it. They are so easily spotted, and can be effortlessly avoided

as a game dev myself its simple if your game is good it sells. I have never found a really good game that didnt sell

Can you do one version of that video on todays games?

The content was interesting and well thought out, but the presenter's "umms" and "ahhhs" were distracting.

15:06 Interesting that RPGs are not showing up at all in the word cloud. I know RPGs require a lot more effort to build compared to most games, so I wonder if that means that new RPGs will get more attention due to the relative rarity.

"The average game on Steam is cack" - Mike Rose, 2018