“...more games, more sales, more gamers.”
April 4, 2018 9:21 PM   Subscribe

Steam Spy has put together an interesting collection of stats and figures on Steam’s 2017, showing everything from the biggest games to the fate of indie sales. [via: Kotaku]

Highlights:
• 2017 was the best year for Valve so far. Every single metric you can imagine grew: the overall number of games sold, the audience, the total revenue and so on.
• By the end of 2017, Steam had 291M that have played at least one game at least once. 22% of them joined in 2017
• 57M people played anything on Steam in the last two weeks
• New players are buying less games than the old ones, especially with the majority of them joining from developing countries like China or Philippines.
• While 15 as a median number of games for users that have joined in 2003 might look high, it translates to only one game per year.
• Steam sales are skewed to the top with just 100 games (0.5% of all) accounting for 50% of total revenue.
• The top 20 list doesn’t look so surprising. PUBG, being the behemoth it is, took home cool $600M in sales (again, not counting in-app purchases). It’s also nice to see a bunch of indie titles in the list — Divinity: Original Sin 2, ARK, Rocket League and fans-favorite Cuphead.
• If you just look at the top 20 games, the situation hasn’t changed much. A game still has to make $22M to break into the top 20.
• If you look at the full price of the games on Steam, you can see a normal distribution around $9.99 — a so-called sweet spot that a lot of indies love.
• Games at higher price-points make more money, especially full-priced AAA titles.
• There are many users from China on Steam, but they don’t seem to be buying much outside of PUBG.
• Steam Direct caused a significant increase in the number of new titles releases but it’s nothing compared to the Greenlight launch.
posted by Fizz (34 comments total) 11 users marked this as a favorite
 
Gamer-daughter was just telling me the other day - the steampocalypse has begun; indie developers are seeking other markets. Steam's laughable search engine and pathetic suggestion queue means they can't get discovered on Steam.

Just under 7700 new games released last year... for a total market of just over 21k. One year's games are almost 40% of the market, because of the explosion of Steam Direct instead of Greenlight. He says Greenlight was more disruptive than the new Direct system, but doesn't explain why. (Greenlight had many problems, but Direct is likely to reduce Steam to "a handful of AAA expensive games and a flood of shovelware mobile ports.")
posted by ErisLordFreedom at 10:14 PM on April 4, 2018 [2 favorites]


Greenlight was basically shovelware, too, just shovelware that encouraged people to create scams to manipulate how to get it onto the market. If people are just going to pay to get things online, they might as well do that directly to Steam.
posted by Sequence at 10:26 PM on April 4, 2018


The problem is that Gaben, like many others in the tech industry *cough*zuckerberg*cough* believe that they can replace people with algorithms and systems - and keep getting proven wrong over and over. Steam needs curators to pick which games go on the market.
posted by NoxAeternum at 10:46 PM on April 4, 2018 [3 favorites]


I really need curators to help me pick which games to buy. I'm picky, and the algorithms fail me, because I often buy games in bundles and am picky at which games I actually enjoy.
posted by gryftir at 11:50 PM on April 4, 2018


indie developers are seeking other markets. Steam's laughable search engine and pathetic suggestion queue means they can't get discovered on Steam.

I find this a little odd, having never thought of Steam as anything but a distribution mechanism and package manager, kind of. I've never used it for discovery in any sense. If a game requires me to use some alternative to Steam though (Ubisoft, EA, Microsoft, Blizzard, I'm looking at all of you) then I'm just not going to bother with it.

Yeah, I basically see Steam as equivalent to DHL or UPS, not as equivalent to Amazon or ebay (though I recognise it kind of does both). I'm happy to buy stuff from wherever, but I'm not going to be happy if they're using some shitty distribution method (like ParcelForce, who seem unable to understand addresses, or EA Origin, which is a pile of crap).
posted by Dysk at 11:50 PM on April 4, 2018 [9 favorites]


The problem is that Gaben, like many others in the tech industry *cough*zuckerberg*cough* believe that they can replace people with algorithms and systems - and keep getting proven wrong over and over.

Looking at these sales figures, I would suspect Valve thinks they've been proven very, very right.
posted by straight at 12:47 AM on April 5, 2018 [1 favorite]


indie developers are seeking other markets. Steam's laughable search engine and pathetic suggestion queue means they can't get discovered on Steam.

I find this a little odd


I suspect what they mean is that they are seeking other kinds of marketing. I imagine most devs will continue to offer Steam keys for customers who prefer that option even if they're using other methods to get their games in front of people's faces.

For example, most Humble Bundle games provide Steam keys in addition to (or sometimes even in place of) direct downloads, even though most of their customers aren't discovering Humble Bundles through Steam.
posted by straight at 1:00 AM on April 5, 2018 [3 favorites]


I actually very rarely buy games except through humble bundle. Occasionally there's a bundle that looks interesting, but is on some other distribution platform than steam. In those cases, I just don't bother.

Did devs ever really see Steam primarily as a marketing rather than distribution platform? It's always been terrible for that...
posted by Dysk at 3:07 AM on April 5, 2018


Steam needs curators to pick which games go on the market.

I'm interested what kind of curation you would like to see, as I'm not sure myself what minimum standard I personally would set for what makes a valid, saleable game.

Valve were in retrospect way too limiting when they curated Steam, to the point where they had a lot of the problems usually associated with book publishers and the way they select new works. Their process was opaque, slow and seemingly arbitrary, which was not great for creators when their livelihood depended on getting their artistic works to market. Similarly, I also got the impression that there was favouritism for major creators, and too little faith placed in new, experimental or niche works. With both books and games, what the curators regarded as a valid work didn't quite match up to my opinion, and I'm sure my opinion is different to everybody else's.

Maybe some light touch, minimum standards would work? Allow games by default as long as they don't take the micky with actually being a playable, functioning game? Maybe Valve could take some more active role in policing new Steam games, but I'm not sure it would help the quality problems that much, and there's still problems defining even a liberal, permissive standard: The average piece of shovelware is more functional as a game than a visual novel, but visual novels are a popular form of modern gaming culture. Whether one thing is less valid than another to be on Steam is ultimately a subjective opinion.
posted by Eleven at 4:09 AM on April 5, 2018 [1 favorite]


The problem is that there are too many people trying to sell games, right? Active curation just changes where/when the winners and losers are selected. It isn't magically going to give customers more money, time, or interest in niche products.

I think the long term solution is fewer creators, slightly larger teams, and a focus for most developers on creating products that have a solid "floor" in terms of commercial appeal. I've already seen some prior solo devs go to work at "triple I" studios in the last year or so.

I also think indie publishers may become the true curators, if they haven't already, in terms of being able to push products above the torrent on Steam.

Related, two creators talk about their failures to sell:

Where the Water Tastes like Wine

Full Metal Furies (by the creators of Rogue Legacy)
posted by selfnoise at 4:19 AM on April 5, 2018 [2 favorites]


What I found the most interesting was the very low median number of games per user: 2 overall and even for long term users only a measly fifteen?

That means a very large number of Steam users use it only for one or two games, whereas I personally (checks steam) own 523?

Ninety percent unplayed of course, bought in Bundles and sales and such, but still.
posted by MartinWisse at 5:10 AM on April 5, 2018 [4 favorites]


What I found the most interesting was the very low median number of games per user: 2 overall and even for long term users only a measly fifteen?

That means a very large number of Steam users use it only for one or two games, whereas I personally (checks steam) own 523?

Ninety percent unplayed of course, bought in Bundles and sales and such, but still.


I told myself I wouldn't buy anymore games, even if they were on sale, until I had played the ones I currently have. That was three years ago. Almost no progress.

Life gets in the way.

On the plus side when I do buy the games I want they will be years out of date and super cheap.
posted by srboisvert at 6:04 AM on April 5, 2018


Now that all the indie games I want to play are eventually downloadable on my phone or console, I use Steam a lot less. PC is my least favorite gaming platform so now I only use it when I absolutely need a game before it's more widely released, like Into the Breach or anything Klei makes.
posted by tofu_crouton at 6:09 AM on April 5, 2018 [1 favorite]


this reminds me of a conversation i read yesterday about if my town had hit peak craft beer. The number of new breweries was increasing year over year, but the amount of craft beer sales was decreasing (being shifted over to craft liquor sales).

There's got to be an economic principle behind this. As the number of consumers increases, the number of businesses increases until at one point the supply outpaces the demand, and then it crashes?
posted by rebent at 6:18 AM on April 5, 2018 [1 favorite]


I've been following the indiepocalypse talk, especially about Where the Water Tastes Like Wine (which you should play if you like cool-ass narrative games!). One of the people behind the game Event[0] compared the initial sales of Event[0] with Where the Water Tastes Like Wine. The two games had similar-sized budgets and teams, and both are in the narrative-heavy game space. Event[0] had a low number of copies sold at launch, a lot like Where the Water Tastes Like Wine. But they've since reached 200k copies sold, and are making money on the game.

Steam is a distribution platform that's become a storefront, and it's got terrible discoverability for games. The days of getting sales simply because your game's on Steam are long gone. As Manu said in the link above, indie business plans can't look like AAA-game studio business plans. It's a super uncertain time to be a small team making games, but then, it's been headed that way for several years. I hope a lot of the cool game-making teams can pivot and survive.
posted by sgranade at 6:31 AM on April 5, 2018 [3 favorites]


I'm pretty games and computer-savvy, and I have 2 Steam IDs inadvertently, because I created a second one to buy a game at some point, or maybe when someone gifted me a game.

I could definitely see people creating a new ID every so often, finding it easier to make a new one than trying to remember what ID they used 3 years ago when they bought their last game. Buy a game, buy the expansion (that's median 2 sales!) and then play the shit out of it for a year or two. Move on, new game (maybe the sequel?) with a new Steam ID.
posted by explosion at 6:31 AM on April 5, 2018 [1 favorite]


Some multiplayer games ban players, and those players get around those bans by creating a new account. Some of those games are amazingly popular.

I don't know how much an impact it would have on the final figure, but I can believe that some of those 1-2 game accounts are effectively sock-puppets created by people who want to keep playing a game after they've been banned.
posted by YAMWAK at 6:38 AM on April 5, 2018


7
posted by the quidnunc kid at 6:55 AM on April 5, 2018 [5 favorites]


The problem is that there are too many people trying to sell games, right?

No, the problem is that there are a ton of games on Steam that just should not be there, be it because they're asset flips (that is, very basic games using cheap assets, meant to just grab money), the game is not designed well (we're talking Big Rigs Racing "quality" here), or the game is outright offensive (think Super Seducer here.) These "games" clutter up the storefront, make discovery much harder, and choke off the oxygen that the actual games need to survive.
posted by NoxAeternum at 7:03 AM on April 5, 2018 [3 favorites]


Hi, I'm one of those who doesn't have hundreds of games on Steam. Eliminating the games that are only in my library because they were given to every Steam user or had a free weekend or whatnot, I have 30 games, of which four or five are from the same Humble Bundle that my friend gifted me in 2012 (pre-Steam, and then I claimed the keys on Steam just to show them), two are "extras" bundled in by Steam, and five are VNs/CYOAs.

While I have bought a few HBs myself after getting a Steam account, I don't tend to actually claim the keys unless I intend to play them. I think I have put the unused keys in some group or other's "free Steam keys" spreadsheet; I don't know how many of them have been claimed by now, but even if it's just one, then I prefer that to having it sitting idly in my library.

I have also created alt accounts in the past, two if I recall correctly. I don't remember exactly why I created them. As junk inventory mules for TF2, possibly; this was when I played TF2.

I'm sure there are people who use Steam to discover new games that they want to play -- Discovery Queue (TM) and all that -- just as there are people who base their buying decisions around the ads they see, but it's not something I can really relate to. And, if the median number of game purchases per year is one (1), I wonder how much that has to do with the mind-numbing blitz that Steam shoves in your face. Wouldn't it make more sense for such a small number to be more influenced by "hey, what are my friends playing" or such?
posted by inconstant at 7:07 AM on April 5, 2018


I feel like the forewarned indiepocalypse is a bit overblown, but there is a problem there. I have too many games, which means that unless you are a developer I really love (like Campo Santo) I'm not buying your game in the first week. I'll wait for a sale, or, even more likely, a bundle. You have to build up some hype to get a lot of day one sales. WTWTLW sounds like an interesting, but flawed, narrative game. Guess what? I have a pile of those I still haven't played (including Event[0]).
posted by graventy at 7:34 AM on April 5, 2018


The problem is that there are too many people trying to sell games, right?

No, the problem is that there are a ton of games on Steam that just should not be there


But then there are countless stories of people like graventy and myself and srboisvert who have piles of games that presumably don't suck and may never catch up with them.

I really don't think asset flips are the problem. I think the problem is that most people don't actually play that many discrete games in a year, and there are a million things competing for scarce entertainment time, and people are not inclined to pay full retail for a product they may never even try.

Take away all the horseshit on steam and I think there are still way too many products to produce anything more than a very low percentage of winners.
posted by selfnoise at 7:48 AM on April 5, 2018 [7 favorites]


Plus, pre-greenlight steam had curators, and they would allow shit through and block great games all the time. Cave Story, maybe? Terraria? Googling this is impossible but there were a number of big-name indies that got denied several times before getting accepted.
posted by graventy at 9:14 AM on April 5, 2018 [2 favorites]


I've been cheating on my PC with my Nintendo Switch. Nintendo has been getting a lot of love and support for all of the "Nindies" (I hate this play on the word indies) that have been hitting their current store front. And one thing I'm hearing and reading quite a bit about is how many of these developers/publishers feel like their game has a better chance of making an impact and getting purchased on Nintendo's store front as opposed to the cluttered Steam store.

Indies on Nintendo: “We've been treated like royalty” [GamesIndustryBiz]
“"Definitely discoverability from our standpoint is one of the biggest things. It's going to be curated for quite a while, so if you can get on there you should be pretty golden. I also think that being able to take such polished games...with you on the go [is amazing]," he added.

The developers I spoke to were in consensus about the problems inherent in the mobile market and Steam. That's partially why they're so happy to have another platform to flock to. "I'll want it to be curated somehow because I don't want to be stuck - that's the problem with Steam right now because I feel like I'm just shovelware. It doesn't matter if there are so many users on Steam, because if you can't reach any of them with all the noise [in the marketplace] it doesn't matter. It's much better to get out on a platform where you can be seen," explained Lyngeled.”
posted by Fizz at 9:24 AM on April 5, 2018 [1 favorite]


Plus, pre-greenlight steam had curators, and they would allow shit through and block great games all the time. Cave Story, maybe? Terraria? Googling this is impossible but there were a number of big-name indies that got denied several times before getting accepted.

I remember hearing game developer Mike Bithell describe on a livestream how Valve initially rejected his game Thomas Was Alone, a narrative puzzle-platformer that would go on to win critical acclaim, plenty of awards, and quite a lot of sales. Someone at Valve looked at it, thought "it's just a bunch of rectangles, huh," and sent the rejection form mail. At the time, Valve's submission process if you didn't have a publisher was to send an email with your pitch and a playable version of the game, then wait 6 months or more until someone gets around to looking at it. Bithell was only able to get TWA on Steam pre-Greenlight by pulling strings with his industry connections to get directly in touch with someone at Valve who could override the decision.
posted by skymt at 9:51 AM on April 5, 2018 [2 favorites]


Indies on Nintendo: “We've been treated like royalty”

Most indies have not been treated by Nintendo like royalty (or at all).
posted by straight at 10:03 AM on April 5, 2018 [2 favorites]


Does Valve only allow game creators to market their games though Steam, or can they do their own marketing and point people to Steam to buy it? The first scenario seems like a legitimate complaint, but the second reminds me of clients who want you to build them a website and then get all mad when they’re not drowning in new sales after launch. Groupon went through that a while back.
posted by Autumnheart at 10:04 AM on April 5, 2018


Does Valve only allow game creators to market their games though Steam, or can they do their own marketing and point people to Steam to buy it?

Not only can creators sell games anywhere and market them however, they can generate and sell activation keys to download the game through Steam, for free. Valve only takes a cut of direct sales through the Steam store; if you sell your game elsewhere Steam acts as a free distribution and services platform. That's a large part of how it got such a dominant position in PC gaming.
posted by skymt at 10:11 AM on April 5, 2018 [3 favorites]


To be honest the Switch eShop is also slowly filling with horseshit, like zero effort mobile ports and the like. And NoA has historically been just as bad/weird about approving games as Steam. But right now it's a popular device without many games.

It's already worse about visibility of games than Steam (has very few systems to surface games and no recommendations system) so I'm not sure how long the honeymoon will last.
posted by selfnoise at 10:12 AM on April 5, 2018


Valve only takes a cut of direct sales through the Steam store; if you sell your game elsewhere Steam acts as a free distribution and services platform.
I've kind of been low-key wondering about this for a long time. Good to know.
posted by inconstant at 10:14 AM on April 5, 2018


It's already worse about visibility of games than Steam (has very few systems to surface games and no recommendations system) so I'm not sure how long the honeymoon will last.

Truth, I have seen a lot of crap games slowly trickle in. They definitely need to work on how they promote various games on the main page and their search/sort is also inconvenient and a little bit buried.
posted by Fizz at 10:24 AM on April 5, 2018


I use the queue a lot; last year, I found about one game for every two times I went through it (so, 1 in 24 shown) that I had some interest in; now, I'm lucky to spot one I like in five or six batches. And I have a heavily-filtered queue: no FPS, no RTS, no racing, no visual novels (I occasionally like visual novels but I am so NOT interested in the flood of scantily-clad large-chested women dating games); I block several other terms that cover most of the asset flips. And of course, no early access; been there, got burned; if a company wants me to do their beta testing, they'll need to find me somewhere other than Steam to make that pitch.

I like puzzle games... so I get to see poorly-converted mobile games, including a lot of free-to-play pay-for-extra-time games.

I'm not sure if there's a solution. Before Greenlight, Steam's curation blocked a lot of innovative, well-made indie games. During Greenlight, there were scams all over, and a lot of good games couldn't get enough visibility to get in. Now... endless shovelware, and Steam doesn't review them at all for playability or content, counting on the players to use the refund option and point out problem games.

I think the key problem isn't "there are too many crap games" but "their search and promo algorithms suck." I don't care how many terrible games there are; I care that I can't find the ones I like - so I'm not buying them. I care that I can't filter out categories during search. (There's a limited way to do this; it doesn't always work.) I care that they keep showing me VR games despite having them on my no-show list.

I have a few hundred games; my daughter has a few hundred more (we bought different bundles for a while); if I never buy a new game again, I've got enough to cover me for the rest of my life. "Where the Water Tastes Like Wine" is on my wishlist... but I'm not expecting to pick it up this year and maybe not next year.

Steam isn't going to notice this as a problem until their profits start dropping, though; PUBG was such a ridiculous success that Steam has got to be thinking, "every business decision we made in the last 12 months was perfect." So until indie games find a different marketing platform or Steam gets hit with lawsuits for hosting content that's illegal in some places, we'll get to watch the store become increasingly cluttered with utter junk.
posted by ErisLordFreedom at 10:41 AM on April 5, 2018 [3 favorites]


I use the queue a lot; last year, I found about one game for every two times I went through it (so, 1 in 24 shown) that I had some interest in; now, I'm lucky to spot one I like in five or six batches.

I just think this is a mistaken approach. Surely you want there to be a place to buy any game you want to buy. It's not in our interest for the place we buy games to have fewer games to choose from. There should be a place where you can say, "I want to buy XYZ game" and they have it, even if it's a game most people think is terrible.

That seems fundamentally incompatible with an expectation that you could browse through every single game that is released and find the ones you are interested in.

And there are lots of contradictory opinions about what makes a good game. I don't think we want some algorithm or a group of Valve employees making definitive decisions for everyone what counts as a good game or trying to guess what I think or you think would be a good game. I think we want to find groups of like-minded people to help us find games that we are interested in. There's no way Valve could perform that function for everyone who wants to buy games, no matter how many employees or algorithms they throw at the problem.
posted by straight at 12:45 PM on April 5, 2018 [1 favorite]


That seems fundamentally incompatible with an expectation that you could browse through every single game that is released and find the ones you are interested in.

I don't want to browse through every single game to find the ones I want. I want to browse through
  • Hidden object games
  • Point-and-click puzzle adventure games
  • Puzzle-focused walking simulators
  • Visual novels that are not focused on dating
  • Games with surreal graphics and low combat
I'm aware that last category would be hard to filter for, so I don't mind browsing through extras to find it. I also occasionally like minimalist strategy puzzle games, but the flood of new ones means I'm willing to skip seeing those for a while.

Steam has no way to show just those items in a queue. I can search for most of them by tags, but not "show me all of these and nothing else." The search results are in a list with tiny pictures and a link to each game's store page, not a queue-style display of each that I can read and then click on the next one - I have to search, right-click to open in a new tab, read it, close tab, right-click on the next one in the list, and so on.

Fortunately, someone else made a search engine that does most of what I'm looking for. So it's do-able... Steam just doesn't want to let people filter by "games I actually enjoy and would consider buying."
posted by ErisLordFreedom at 2:12 PM on April 5, 2018 [2 favorites]


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