Video Game Insights - Games industry data and analysis

We are kicking off 2026 with a foundational update to the platform – significantly improving the precision of our Steam data and introducing a new layer of geographical depth to our analytics.

New Feature – Country Level Time Series

We have launched a powerful new capability on the platform – Country Level Time Series. Users are now able to filter individual game pages by specific countries or regional groups to view performance trends over time, rather than just static snapshots.

Eligibility: All games are able to have country-level data; however, the minimum units needed to select a country is 25,000 units sold for that specific country or region.

This moves our analytics beyond Global averages, allowing you to validate regional launch strategies, track retention spikes in specific markets, and analyze localized commercial performance with unprecedented detail.

What changes on the charts? When a country filter is applied, the Quick Stats, Commercial Performance and Historical Data graphs dynamically recalculate. You can now view Daily Estimated Units Sold, Cumulative Units Sold, Outstanding Wishlists, Playtime & Revenue Analysis, specifically for that region or country.

Additionally, Player Insights (such as “Players by Country” and “Wishlists by Country”) now re-baseline to represent 100% of the selected region. This gives you the exact percentage split for that specific geography, for example, isolating the market share of China vs. Japan vs Other Asia within an “Asia” filter.

Platform availability These features are currently available for only Steam and PlayStation data.

Updated Steam data accuracy

We are released a large update to the VGI platform on January 10th, 2026, which significantly improved our Steam platform estimation accuracy.

Note that historical Steam data for most games has been impacted by this update!

We encourage all API users to refresh the historical data they pull from the platform to ensure consistency in estimation methodologies.

What changed? The 5 key metrics that were impacted are units sold, revenue, DAU, MAU and wishlist estimates. While all data saw slight changes, the impact varies by metric and release date:

• DAU & MAU – The algorithm has been tweaked to be a bit lower historically. All DAU & MAU will be c. 8% lower pre May 2025.
• Units Sold – We’re giving the full weight to the profile based estimates for games released post March 2024. Previously some of the units still included review based estimation weighting. No change to pre March 2024 games.
• Wishlists – Minor tweaks to sample size itself – we’re leaving out some unrepresentative accounts.

Why the change? This is part of our continuous effort to improve our estimation accuracy. In our tests, we noticed accuracy for newer games on Steam slipping and have tackled that in this update.

We are releasing a large update to the VGI platform on the 9th January 2026 which will significantly improve our Steam platform estimation accuracy.

Note that historical Steam data for most games will be impacted by this update!

What is changing?

The 5 key metrics that will be impacted are units sold, revenue, DAU, MAU and wishlists estimates.

All data, including historical data, will see slight changes, however, the main impact will be to units sold for games released after March 2024.

We encourage all API users to refresh the historical data they pull from the platform to ensure consistency in estimation methodologies.

Why is it changing?

This is part of our continuous effort to improve our estimation accuracy. In our tests we’ve noticed our newer game accuracy on Steam slipping and we have tackled that in the coming update.

We will be sharing a detailed document with the changes and impacted games with customers upon request.

The VGI platform has changed slightly – you might have noticed our new top bar and nav bar colours. Yes, it looks more like Sensor Tower!

Our UI/UX goal for 2026 more broadly will be “looks like Sensor Tower, feels like VGI”.

New filters – IP and Franchise

We have launched a set of new filters on the platform – Game Franchise and Game IP. Users are now able to narrow down their search to specific IPs and franchises to make analysis more useful.

This has been put together by the SensorTower Game IQ team who’s also responsible for the SensorTower App taxonomy – guaranteeing high quality, high coverage and matching methodologies across VGI and Sensor Tower.

Demographic breakdown – age and gender breakdown for games

We have launched demographic data estimates for 450 larger games, giving you an idea of exactly who the audience is that’s playing these games. This covers age and gender and we’ll be expanding this coverage across more games and more metrics as we go.

UI Changes

The new darker top bar and side bar are another step closer to matching our visuals to the broader Sensor Tower portfolio. There’s a lot more to come in 2026 where we will start using Sensor Tower’s much more powerful charts and other features.

Upcoming change to Steam estimations

We will be launching a major update in December that impacts how we estimate Steam units, revenue and engagement metrics.

We will be moving to a new estimation model which will impact thousands of games, including the historical data. This will significantly improve our accuracy across these metrics.

Note – this does impact many games and will also override historical data.

More details will be announced soon. We will make sure to give users ample time to prepare for the change before it happens.

We have a big announcement. On October 16th we’ll be merging our customer database with Sensor Tower’s.

Maintenance window announcement

VGI will be performing an upgrade to improve our user login and management on Thursday between 8am-12pm UTC.

What to expect:

• Most users will likely experience minimal or no interruption
• Some users may be logged out and need to re-authenticate
• Users may need to reload the web page if encountering unexpected application behavior
• There may be short periods of intermittent connectivity

Short Summary: Does anything change for me?

1. I have both VGI and ST accounts
   You can now log in to both VGI and Sensor Tower using your Sensor Tower login details – your accounts have been merged and your Sensor Tower logins will work across both products.
   
2. I have only VGI account
   Your VGI account will continue working normally – no changes!
   
3. I have only ST account, but now also want to use VGI
   You can use VGI “Free” version with your Sensor Tower account without needing to do anything else. Or you can book a demo with our team to get access to the full VGI capabilities.

Full Overview of the Login Changes

Generally, the user experience will not change. You’ll still be able to use VGI and Sensor Tower more or less how you used to. However, there are a couple of things to look out for.

1. Seamless experience between platforms – your Sensor Tower login details now also work for VGI. If you have access to both platforms, you’ll be able to swap between them without having to log in or out separately
2. Enterprise management portal – our enterprise customers will now be able to mange their own user accesses
3. Our login page changes from https://app.sensortower.com/vgi/login to https://app.sensortower.com/users/sign_in, but all the URLs on the platform are automatically directed to the right place anyway, so you should not see any practical UX change.
4. SSO login support – You can now use SSO login on VGI just as it’s been possible on Sensor Tower previously already

As always, you can reach out to support@sensortower.com with any questions or problems you might have!

We have gone through a lot of small updates recently, but 3 of them are worth talking about in more detail.

Upgraded Genre Analytics

There are several new updates in our genre analytics tool.

1. New metrics to choose from – units sold
2. Genre Analytics is now also availe for Console as well – You’ll be able to see genre and subgenre performance for PlayStation and Xbox
3. We swapped the old Steam genres for our new Sensor Tower taxonomy genres – meaning the subgenre classification quality got a massive improvement.

Together, these make the genre analytics tool a lot more useful than it was before.

Wishlists Owned Player Insights

You can now see how “hardcore” the wishlisters of a particular game are. Do they have hundreds of other wishlists and, therefore, are unlikely to ever convert to sales or are they hyper-focused on a few games they want to buy?

Remake/Remaster filter

Our filters now include a “Remake/Remaster” option. The Sensor Tower taxonomy team has gone through and tagged all of the remakes and remasters of games to allow for easy filter options.

Available Platforms now shown in Games Database

Games Database got an update where you can now see exactly what platforms games are available on.

As part of us joining Sensor Tower earlier this year, we are making changes to our back-end and databases. As part of that, there is some expected downtime on the 6th September 2025 that you should be aware of.

• Why are we making changes? 
  We’re moving to Sensor Tower infrastructure which will allow us to make the website faster and will greatly improve our capacity to develop new features going forward. As part of this upgrade, our service will also transition from vginsights.com to app.sensortower.com/vgi.
• What is happening? 
  We will have a big migration event happening on Saturday the 6th September and our website as well as API will see some downtime between 7am – 4pm UTC on 6th September.
• How big is the disruption? 
  We’ll try to minimize the time our web portal and the API are offline, but we anticipate up to 8 hours of downtime on the portal and up to 2 hours of downtime on our Business API.
• Important note about the Business API
  For now, the Business API will continue to operate from its existing URL. However, it will also be moved under app.sensortower.com/vgi soon, and we’ll share more details ahead of that change.

Please take this into consideration if you need to do any urgent analysis over that weekend or if you have any automated API calls set up for that day.

Please share this internally as needed!

Apologies for the disruption and let us know if this causes any critical issues!

Since May, we observed increased fluctuations in our wishlist data. After investigating, we identified and resolved the issues that were contributing to the elevated volatility in the outstanding wishlists metrics.

As a result, you’ll now see that the wishlist trends for most games appear much smoother and more consistent—just as expected.

As a side effect of the fix, historical wishlist counts have slightly changed across all games. In our testing, these adjustments have had no meaningful impact on overall accuracy, and most changes are minimal.

That said, we recommend all clients pull the updated wishlist data for their analysis. For those using the API, we suggest refreshing your databases with the latest historical figures.

As ever, please contact us at support@sensortower.com if you have any questions!

Today is the day we officially launch the VGI PlayStation and Xbox data.

Console insights are updated daily, giving you the most current insights available on the market.

What’s new?

PlayStation and Xbox data almost entirely matches with what we already had available on PC before. You’ll be able to see:

• Performance and Commercial
  • Units Sold (Daily basis)
  • Prices (Daily basis)
• Engagement
  • Daily Active Users (Daily basis)
  • Monthly Active Users (Daily basis)
• Player Insights
  • Playtime Breakdown (Life to date, updated daily)
  • Country and Region Breakdown (Currently PS only. Life to date, updated daily)
  • Games Owned Breakdown (How many other games players own on the platform. Life to date, updated daily)
• Player Overlap
  • Showing what other games PS and Xbox gamers are playing. % overlap, overlap index, MAU overlap etc – fully replicating Steam optionality.
• Reception
  • Rating (Daily basis)
  • Number of Reviews (Daily basis)
• Metadata
  • Developer and publisher information
  • Release dates
  • Genres & subgenres
  • Game engine

On top of that, we have released a new genre taxonomy which you can read about here. It unifies our games across PC and console and provides a consistent taxonomy going forward.

How can I access it?

The PlayStation and Xbox data is available as a new product add-on

Ready to see the data for yourself? Request a demo or contact your Sensor Tower Account Director!