Video Game Insights - Games industry data and analysis

Core Keeper is a sandbox survival sim that has been described as a blend of Stardew Valley, Terraria, Minecraft and Valheim. Essentially, it’s everything that Steam players love in one game.

It announced that by the end of June 2022 it had sold over 1 million units. This article explores the game’s performance as well as the reasons behind the game’s immediate success.

COVID boosted game sales across all platforms, but PC games were a strong winner. Steam games revenues grew by 31% in 2020 and a further 11% in 2021.

2022 has brought challenges to the industry. The whole industry will likely decline in 2022. Games on Steam will also see a decline, but will fare better than the rest of the industry.

2022 has already seen over 6,000 new games released on Steam. That’s over 34 games a day. How have they performed?

This article explores the sales performance and trends among the 2022 game releases so far.

Which countries dominate the Steam publishing space?

Getting a game published is hard as is. Finding out that all the publishers you’d want to get are abroad makes it even worse.

In this article we’re exploring where most Steam publishers are geographically. We’ve tagged over 2,300 Steam publishers countries. They collectively make up over 95% of the revenue on the platform.

The US tops the country list both in terms of number of publishers and by revenue they generate. However, there are a few surprising countries that make it to the top 10.

Only 10% of Steam developers have ever made more than $100k in gross revenue. This article explores what they’re doing that other developers aren’t. It covers self-publishing, genre focus, number of games developed and more.

We’ve just launched another big updated on the platform! Every individual game’s page now shows an overview of quick stats about the game as well as player insights.

Quick game stats

In the example of PUBG (vginsights.com/game/578080), you can now see how many active players the game has right now, what the peak has been in the last 24h, how well the game has been rated, how many units it’s sold and what the average playing time is for a PUBG player. It’s crazy how much time people spend playing it!

This feature is available for everyone for free and gives an immediate overview of the game and its performance

Player insights

This is a premium only feature that shows the game’s player distribution in terms of country split, regional split, average play time and how many games its players own on Steam in total.

We hope you’ll enjoy our new features! Happy exploring.

At the time of writing this, there are 44,000 developers who have released or announced a game on Steam. Collectively, they’re responsible for almost 70,000 games on Steam.

This article explores who these developers are, what type of games they make and how much revenue they generate.

We recently published a report about the Steam games market in 2021. Among other things, we reported that there were 11.7k new games on Steam in 2021. This sparked a heated Twitter discussion, culminating with Jeff Vogel’s article called “There are too many video games”.

Given that our data sparked the discussion, we would love to have our say in how to interpret the data. We will be addressing statements made in Vogel’s article that seem to reflect a broader school of thought around the state of the current games industry.

The last 2 years of the games market have been dominated by Covid. However, different types of games studios have seen contrasting effects. As a whole, the industry has seen a boom, but these gains haven’t impacted all games equally.

This report summarises PC games trends from 2017-21. It is using public data from Steam API as well as proprietary data gathered by Video Game Insights. Occasionally, references are made to other reports summarising 2021 games landscape.