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.
Having sold about 4.5m units in the first month since launch, New World has quickly established itself as a successful AAA game launch. It’s helped to bring Amazon on the map in world of video games and paves the way for further investment and expansion of the Amazon games division.
This article explores the launch and success of New World in numbers, covering sales, active players and more. For live data updates, visit the VG Insights New World Steam Stats page.
I recently wrote an article on how to estimate Steam game sales using an updated Boxleiter method or steam reviews to sales ratio.
This article explores the Steam reviews to sales ratio further.
There is a strong correlation between how many reviews a game gets and how many units they’ve sold. However, this ratio does depend on other factors – game’s release year, popularity and even price.
For example, a game with 100,000 units sold might have 1,000 reviews on steam. The ratio would therefore be 100,000 / 1,000 = 100.
We know that the ratio varies based on when the game was released – it’s come down from c. 90x about 7-8 years ago to c. 30x today. This article lays out how the Boxleiter ratio changes based on other factors:
This article looks at Valheim’s long waited update – Hearth & Home and its impact to new and old players.
We’ve previously talked about what led to Valheim’s success during launch. This is more an update what’s happened since.
In short, Valheim’s Hearth & Home update brings back some old players, but doesn’t expand the player base.
This mini-article looks at how important indie games are to the Steam ecosystem. We’ll dig into the distribution of Steam games based on publisher types.
The aim is to show what proportion of Steam games, unit sales and active players can be accounted to indie games VS large development studios.
This article lays out a way of estimating how many units any Steam game has sold. It will provide a right range for the majority of games.
We are using an advanced version of what’s been known as the Boxleiter method or the NB number – estimating Steam game units sold using the number of reviews they’ve got.
For example, a game with 100,000 units sold might have 1,000 reviews on steam. The ratio would therefore be 100,000 / 1,000 = 100.
We’re using the largest dataset to date for this analysis with over 10,000 video games’ review to sales ratios analysed.
We will cover how good of a measure total number of Steam reviews are for total sales. We will then explore how this has changed over time and which multiples to use depending on the game’s release date. Finally, we will demonstrate how accurate these estimates are.
Keep reading to find out the exact multiples to use.
You’ll get most out of this guide if you’re keen to learn more about pricing a video game and are open to mixing data with intuition.
Finding the right price for a game can make a huge impact to the game’s financial success. This article is a guide for indie developers on how to think about pricing and how to use the VG Insights pricing tool to help and find the right price for your game.
At the end of this article, you’ll be in a much better place to choose the right price for your game.
There are now over 10,000 new games on Steam every year and it’s becoming increasingly difficult to find a game to play, especially if it’s an indie game you’re after.
There are many ways to figure out which game to play next. This article by makeuseof captures most of them. You can also just use the Steam store search to find new games. However, we believe that our free Steam data platform can actually be even better for game discoverability.
We’ve recenlty looked into COVID impact on Steam game releases. We noticed a significant trend for both indie as well as AAA and AA games and have summarised it in the infographic below.
The above data was gathered through Steam API by using the Video Game Insights platform.
What are the important business questions that every indie game dev should ask themselves?
Developers who jump into the next game without thinking it through are much more likely to fail, not generate significant revenue and, often not even finish their game.
This article covers a set of questions that every indie developer should think about before, during and after making their game.