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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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 Youtube 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)

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 YouTube tweet about the game to the community it fits best and then release the game.

Would like to see this updated

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

I'd love to see this topic revisited now.