Category: Updates

We have officially released a long requested feature – Player Overlap. You will now be able to see what other games players play for majority of games on Steam.

Example: NBA 2K23

Using the example of NBA 2K23, we can now see that NBA 2K players are more likely to also play other NBA 2K games (not surprising). But they’re also 20x more likely to play PGA Tour 2K23 (because there was a bundle c. 1 year ago). Interestingly, they are also much more likely to play Madden than your typical Steam player. That is mostly due to US focused playerbases for both games.

What do these metrics mean and what do I do with them?

Firstly, we’re showing overlap metrics for both lifetime sales (LTD) as well as last month’s active users (MAU).

LTD units sold overlap shows any Steam player who owns both games.
MAU overlap shows any Steam player who has played both games in the last 30 days.

Overlap itself shows actual # of people who own both games. Eg 394k people on Steam have both NBA 2K23 and 2K24.
Overlap % shows what % of all NBA 2K23 players own other games. Eg 18.4% of NBA 2K23 players have also bought NBA 2K24.
Overlap Index, perhaps most important of the 3, shows how many times more or less likely an owner of a game is to play other games. For example, an average NBA 2K23 player is 30x more likely to own NBA 2K24 VS your typical Steam player.

Methodology and Caveats

This is a new feature and still in its Beta phase. We’ve tested it extensively, however, there might still be edge cases to iron out. We’re confident that it is directionally right for majority of games, but we will continue to monitor it and tweak where needed. Note that all of these metrics are estimates based on sample sizes and therefore should never be treated as 100% accurate.

Methodology

Overlap % – We look at a large sample size of Steam players to see what games they play. In the NBA 2K23 example. we look at what % of players of NBA 2K23 in our sample play, for example, NBA 2K24. This is used to calculate the overlap %s.

Overlap – We then apply the overlap % to particular game’s (in this case, NBA 2K23’s) lifetime sales.

NOTE that because of that, the absolute overlap # for NBA 2K23 with NBA 2K24 does not match NBA 2K24’s overlap # with NBA 2K23. However, they are in the same ballpark and directionally similar. This is a fluke of this methodology and we will be looking to improve this going forward.

Overlap index – We take the NBA 2K23 overlap % with NBA 2K24 and divide it with Global NBA 2K24 owners %. In this instance, we know that 18.4% of NBA 2K23 owners own 2K24, but only 0.61% of all Steam players own NBA 2K24.

The Overlap Index is therefore 18.4%/0.61%=30.2

Example 2: Helldivers 2

In this example, we can see that these overlaps also work for very new games. The MAU overlap also exposes how popular games tend to overlap with other recently more popular games. For example, Fallout 4 is the 3rd most popular game to be played by Helldivers 2 players in May 2024 as a result of the recent Fallout TV show success. Other recent release, Content Warning also makes it to the top 10.

Who is this for?

This is a feature currently only for our Business Subscribers.

It’s designed to help larger studios and publishers to better understand their own playerbase. It can be used to optimize marketing targeting, to understand cannibalization and relative market shares between competitive games and to see what type of game elements and features your players might enjoy more.

Reach out to us at sales@vginsights.com to learn more!

We have significantly increased the accuracy of our player insights – average and median playtime as well as the country split of units sold.

1. Increased accuracy – Median playtime and country splits for games are now more accurate across all games
2. Quicker insights – Playtime and country split metrics used to take 1+ months since launch to be available. They will now often be available as soon as a day after the launch of a new game

Going forward, we will be able to also start showing how playtime and country splits change over time.

This is also a precursor for the long anticipated Player Overlap feature, launching in the coming weeks.

Games database now includes more metrics for our business subscribers

Business subscribers will now find 4 new groups of columns they can add to the tables – units, revenue, # of promos and average CCU by year.

Users can now easily see and compare how games have performed over the years.

All of the data is available as Excel downloads for the Business subscribers as per usual.

This will significantly improve the ability to do custom research and analysis with our datasets. We’re excited to hear how you’re using the new capabilities to drive business performance.

We’re pushing a major new update to the platform – wishlist estimates.

All Indie and Business subscribers will now be able to see how many outstanding wishlists any game has.

This includes:

Track weekly wishlist change in the Top Charts:

You can now see the biggest wishlist gains in the Top Charts, just like you already do for units sold, CCU and other metrics.

See how many outstanding wishlists any game has

Outstanding wishlists now appear in the individual games pages AND historical trends (but only starting from March 6th 2024 right now).

What about accuracy?

We’ve tested our estimates, and for majority of games, the accuracy tends to be in the same +-15% margin of error that we also aim achieve for our other metrics.

We’ll be publishing public test results soon!

Meanwhile, we are collecting datapoints to continue testing and refining our estimates. If you see large discrepancies, please do reach out!

We’ve released something you’ve long requested for – filters for genre analytics!

Genre analytics is a tool that allows players to quickly see which sub-genres over- and underperform in the market. These new filters allow you to narrow down the pool of games being looked at.

Example on how to use the tool:

Say you’re an indie developer thinking of genres to focus on for your new game.

You’d go to genre analytics and pick the following filters:

• Indie games only – exclude any AAA titles to make it more relevant
• Price $9.99-39.99 – you’re considering a paid game, but under the high end 59.99 or 69.99 price points
• At least 10 reviews – leaving out all tiny hobby projects
• Min pos rating of 70% – let’s assume your game will not be hated
• First release date – 2019 or later – make sure to only include more recent games in the landscape

This will leave you with over 8000 games in the comparison set and give you a picture that looks something like this:

Open world survival craft, colony sim and 4x games dominate that landscape. Say you like the idea of colony sims. Let’s dig deeper and add that as a filter.

From here, we can tell that survival element of colony sims (unsurprisingly) makes huge difference to games of this subgenre.

We’re happy to release a long requested feature – customizable dashboard. All users who are logged in are now able to see their own home screen – customizable with the most relevant charts, tables and news.

The first version of the dashboard has 4 types of widgets you can add:

• Top games – showing the top 10 games of last week by followers, units sold, revenue and more
• Steam market size – an up to date view of how the Steam market has grown
• Latest articles and reports – recently published analysis from our team
• Game performance – summary performance of any selected game on Steam

This is only the beginning. We’ll be adding many more widgets to the dashboard soon enough. These include custom alerts, genre analytics, game comparison views and more.