With a good game, hard work and a bit of luck you’ll do fine on Steam.
June 19, 2015 11:36 PM   Subscribe

Sergey Galyonkin, creator of Steam data tool Steam Spy, offers some analysis of use to game developers and of interest to gamers: Some things you should know about Steam.
posted by Pope Guilty (27 comments total) 17 users marked this as a favorite
 
I think his prescription re: targeting female gamers only exacerbates the problem, but the rest of the article is pretty interesting.
posted by Pope Guilty at 11:37 PM on June 19, 2015


When it comes to game themes, Russians love World War 2 and post-nuclear apocalypse

That...fits well with my stereotypes of Russians.

“Grand Theft Auto V” was recently released on Steam with Chinese localization and special pricing (29.99 dollars versus the usual pricing of 59.99 dollars) and managed to gather 11 percent of its users from China — that means 225,000 copies of the game were sold through Steam in China alone making about 6.75 million dollars in gross sales.

Oh awesome. They should set the next game somewhere in China (or a fictionalized setting in China). That would be awesome.

Really like the targeting portion about hitting abandoned genres. I do want some more traditional RTS games and have been waiting basically forever for a true modern spiritual successor to TIE Fighter. Love Cities: Skylines.

The localization seems pretty obvious to me. I've never played a game that isn't in English and I don't think I ever would. They are often confusing enough for me to learn how to play in English and it's my first language. Figuring out how to handle the UI is often a problem for me with less polished Indie titles. I'm experienced enough to push through it if the game is fun, but a lot of people will just give up.

I think his prescription re: targeting female gamers only exacerbates the problem, but the rest of the article is pretty interesting.

I think the point was that Steam needs to take the lead on this, not that developers shouldn't target women. If Steam isn't getting women into the store, the developers inside have nobody to sell to. Until then, the developers will target them where they are.

My Mom plays a lot of simple web based puzzle and card games on her laptop, there is so much better out there in that genre I wish she would access but Steam isn't really anything she would ever be aware of or really get. There is some real room for improvement there.

(I can't get her to play Hearthstone either, damn it. She would like it!)
posted by Drinky Die at 12:04 AM on June 20, 2015 [1 favorite]


How is he determining which gamers are women? It's not unknown for women to lie about their gender in an online game environment.
posted by Elementary Penguin at 12:10 AM on June 20, 2015 [2 favorites]


I don't like a lot of things about this article. The gist of which seems to be "make your game for redditors"
posted by hellojed at 12:28 AM on June 20, 2015


I don't like a lot of things about this article. The gist of which seems to be "make your game for redditors"

I'm curious where you're getting that, aside from the stupid, counterproductive conclusion he draws from his gender divide breakdown. That part's dumb, yeah, but the rest of it looks like trend and business analysis to me.
posted by Pope Guilty at 12:37 AM on June 20, 2015


I didn't like the tone very much, and the following:

Details in the graphics like this one where "Without 8-bit graphics" is seen as a sort of positive qualifier. He describes the game, in the graphic as "not a retro roguelike (that’s something these days)". Well what isn't something? It seems as though he's valuing this particular game over others because of the art style and concludes that's part of the reason for it's financial success.

Then there's this graphic featuring people who don't exist. No Hipster is going to tell you to port a game to mobile.

He says not to go into Mobile because...the market's saturated? Many of his suggestions in the article (Marketing, Support after launch) work really on mobile. I don't think he has any experience in this area and dismisses it too quickly.

The "typical" early access graph doesn't have any actual numbers attached to it, so I don't know if this is actually based on numbers or if it's the author's opinion.

There's the following passage:
"It is a common misconception amongst game developers to ignore gamers or press when they don’t agree with you or with your vision. A good game is good regardless of what everyone says, right?"
Developers absolutely read reviews, even app store reviews. I'm not sure why he thinks they do not.

Overall it's kind of a "steam is great, do some obvious stuff" article with some mediocre infographics. Many gamers see being on steam as a badge of legitimacy. If you sell a game on another platform (such as the Humble Store, or Itch.io) many people will want Steam keys to go with their purchase. This article seems to be preaching to that choir.
posted by hellojed at 1:22 AM on June 20, 2015 [3 favorites]


It seems as though he's valuing this particular game over others because of the art style and concludes that's part of the reason for it's financial success.

In comparison to other Roguelikes it probably is. But what's wrong with visual art being a differentiating factor? It wasn't just gameplay that sold so many copies of Myst. Or story that made Citizen Kane a classic. Could you elaborate on what you mean because I don't get it? Every review of the game I've looked at praises the art, "The writing and art are fantastic. The voice acting is also great, packing just enough bravado to stick the landing on lines bogged down with improbable eldritch imagery. The character and background art is delightfully macabre, like a colorized Edward Gorey expedition through hell."
posted by Drinky Die at 1:32 AM on June 20, 2015 [1 favorite]


I think not having retro graphics in a rouge-like is a selling point. I love the genre, but it's full of "retro" style graphics. It gets very samey, and not having them is a way to attract interest.
posted by Braeburn at 1:55 AM on June 20, 2015 [3 favorites]


I'd be OK with this article if it was titled "Here are my opinions on how indie games could succeed on Steam." The premise of the article, though, is that he has gathered reliable statistics and is going to write about findings from them.

"Clone a good game" and "Ignoring the reviews" have nothing to do with the statistics he gathered, and "A Way to Succeed" just jumps right into "Let’s talk about several successful games of 2015 for example." He does the typical how-to-succeed blog post thing where he looks at a handful of big successes and tries to extrapolate conclusions from them. It has nothing to do with whatever he's gathered from SteamSpy.
posted by ignignokt at 3:07 AM on June 20, 2015 [2 favorites]


They should set the next game somewhere in China (or a fictionalized setting in China)

That sounds like a good way to get the game banned in China or worse, to end up with a GTA game set in China that *wouldn't* be banned in China.
posted by kewb at 4:12 AM on June 20, 2015 [3 favorites]


Heh, yeah I know it's a challenge. But Blizzard pushed through their Panda problems.
posted by Drinky Die at 4:14 AM on June 20, 2015


All I'm saying is that I wouldn't expect to get to drive the tank in that one.
posted by kewb at 4:17 AM on June 20, 2015 [3 favorites]


Heh. Got me there. Russian WWII Nuclear Apocalypse Alternative History setting it is.
posted by Drinky Die at 4:28 AM on June 20, 2015


"Create a game for female audience!"

"Women already have their own digital game distribution, it's the iOS app store, next"

Quit reading there.
posted by trunk muffins at 6:30 AM on June 20, 2015 [6 favorites]


I think the point he may be missing with women gamers is that it's possible to make a game more inclusive for women without alienating male gamers in the process; IE, it's not a zero sum game, so it's not time wasted. He says 18% of Steam users are women, but if you look up earlier in the article only 22% of users are Americans, and nobody is going to tell you not to bother to sell to Americans.

It is interesting to contemplate why Steam is not more welcoming for women. I think there are a lot of potential issues, some of which they may not be able to control. I'd love to see more detailed data on women gamers. From this article:

Senior analyst Stephanie Llamas wrote in a follow-up blog post that the growing popularity of "casual platforms" has helped reinforce the false assumption that women are primarily casual gamers. But the reality, says Llamas, is that half of female PC gamers in the US consider themselves either "mid-core or hardcore gamers."
"It is true that 58 percent of mobile gamers in the US are women. But it is also true that just over 50 percent of American PC gamers are women," she wrote. "In fact, women are the largest gaming demographic for PC role-playing games (54 percent) and they represent almost 40 percent of MMO and digital console gamers. So to say that women are just casual gamers is empirically false."


So if women are 54% of RPG gamers on PC, but only 18% of Steam users... hmm. I'm not sure if that means that women are getting their games somewhere other than Steam, or if they are playing a lot of RPGs but not a lot of games like DOTA or CS which end up taking a lion's share of Steam account activity.
posted by selfnoise at 6:34 AM on June 20, 2015 [1 favorite]


So if women are 54% of RPG gamers on PC, but only 18% of Steam users... hmm.

Or a big chunk of people are being less than frank about their self-identification in a notoriously hostile environment.

The data make it seem like Steam has millions of women customers it doesn't know about.

Now that's an opportunity for any game dev.
posted by Combat Wombat at 6:54 AM on June 20, 2015 [3 favorites]


He didn't claim that 18% of Steam users are women. (That data may be impossible for an outsider to determine.) He states that 18% of visitors to the Steam home page are women, a fact from which I think we can conclude little with regard to the gender distribution of Steam's user base.

I checked my own profile and I didn't even see an option to indicate gender, not that I would disclose that publicly, and I suspect the same is true for many other women.

Free-to-play and RPG titles, according to the author's data mining, are among the most popular on Steam. According to data in a comment above (thank you!), a not - insignificant proportion of consumers of those titles are women. I wouldn't disagree that Steam can probably do a better job of making the platform more visible to women, but I also think it is baseless to conclude that female Steam users exist. We're just invisible, as motherfucking always.

As an aside, the "Make games for female audience!" quip enrages me because it's a complete misunderstanding. Lots of folks would like to see games which don't assume the player is an 18-year old boy and no one else exists or matters.
posted by trunk muffins at 7:11 AM on June 20, 2015 [2 favorites]


s/exist/don't exist . On mobile and can't edit.
posted by trunk muffins at 7:14 AM on June 20, 2015


trunk muffins: "I checked my own profile and I didn't even see an option to indicate gender, not that I would disclose that publicly, and I suspect the same is true for many other women."

Which is presumably why he resorted to Alexa stats of people visiting the web site.

The trick here is he goes directly to "games aimed exclusively at a female audience" but when he's talking about Russian or Chinese or German gamers, he's happy to go, "these kinds of games are popular among German gamers" without the assumption that you can only focus exclusively on German gamers or ignore them entirely.


A couple of my games got swathes of Russian Let's Plays. I never did figure out why. Neither was WWII or post-apocalyptic, so this doesn't explain it.
posted by RobotHero at 8:27 AM on June 20, 2015 [3 favorites]


Sidenote: If you want GTA + China, it already exists, and it's called Sleeping Dogs.
posted by tau_ceti at 9:59 AM on June 20, 2015 [3 favorites]


Thinking about it further, the fair thing for him to do would be to take the same approach. "Here are some types of games that tended to be popular among female Steam members." It's up to the game developer what to do with this information.

Except, because gender isn't in the Steam profile, his Steam Spy stuff won't get him stats for that. I wonder if some of his dismissal of it is sour grapes. (Some of it can also be sexism. It can be more than one thing.) "I don't have any info on this stuff, but it probably isn't important, because reasons. Anyway, it turns out Japanese people like zombie games! Isn't that interesting?"
posted by RobotHero at 10:58 AM on June 20, 2015


tau_ceti: "Sidenote: If you want GTA + China, it already exists, and it's called Sleeping Dogs."

e:f;b.
posted by Samizdata at 11:47 AM on June 20, 2015


Since most of the discussion here is on female demographics, here is another survey on the gaming preferences and experiences of teenage girls:
According to their study, girls don't just play games, they are prolific gamers; although many of them have developed a negative association with that specific term. Of the girls in the study, 26% played first person shooters, 36% played RPGs, and 15% played MOBAs. In all, more than 80% played at least one type of game, with many of them playing several. These are genres that are typically considered the preserve of the male “core” gamer, but as Wiseman quipped, "we have girls who like blowing shit up." During another presentation, Wiseman said, she presented a few clips and images from Call of Duty, and the girls "went bananas… high-fiving and cheering."
I also want to nitpick that graphics are not the same thing as aesthetics. It bugs me that most developers, players and writers don't realize that, but aesthetics are an enormous factor in why I might purchase a particular game, while graphics are essentially irrelevant to me. I know I'm not alone in this, but I feel it's not a popular viewpoint in games culture (so, probably more prominent than I suspect).
posted by byanyothername at 12:28 PM on June 20, 2015 [3 favorites]


A buddy of mine here in Seattle works at Steam. They do regular tours of the offices. He says that people are constantly shocked at the fact that the CEO (or owner? I forget the structure, but The Guy In Charge) has the same sort of work desk in the same open area as everyone else, and he does many of the same tasks as the regular employees. People sputter in shock that he doesn't have his own office, but that's just not how they roll.
posted by scaryblackdeath at 12:40 PM on June 20, 2015


It would be an absolute snap for Steam to derive stats on the average amount a user plays for games they never end up paying, and I imagine they'd be completely horrified if that information ever went public.

oh hey Cities: Skylines is only 20 bucks on summer sale I really should get around to that
posted by FatherDagon at 4:10 AM on June 21, 2015


I think the point he may be missing with women gamers is that it's possible to make a game more inclusive for women without alienating male gamers in the process; IE, it's not a zero sum game, so it's not time wasted.

I had the same thought. I would look to Mad Max: Fury Road as an example. It's not so much that the movie is feminist as that it's not anit-femenist which I think is a happy medium. Make games like that, and you'll sell them to men and women alike just fine. You don't need your game to cater to women, you just need it to not drive them away.
posted by VTX at 7:47 AM on June 21, 2015 [2 favorites]


One data point I would like to see because I feel like it would be the most relevant would be a breakdown of spending on games by sex rather than simply "% of gamers are male/female". I always see the latter but not so much the former.
posted by Justinian at 5:42 PM on June 21, 2015 [2 favorites]


« Older How To Make Grill Cookies   |   Gimme Shelter Newer »


This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments