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Steam 1998 to 2015 Million Sellers: LTD Data from SteamSpy

Shantom

Member
According to this estimation total games is somewhere between: 1 140 353 928-ish.

This doesn't include F2P, Free weekend bloatings, etc. because those aren't counted in profile games count.

Conclusion:
PC gaming is dead...
Meh, probably all from Humble Bundles ;)
 

RedSwirl

Junior Member
It is increasingly looking like Steam is just becoming "the game platform," where everything ends up.

Personally I don't mind since that just means it's becoming a better reflection of a plurality of the gaming landscape. My worry is that one store by itself might be too small a channel for such a massive market. Do people need to start thinking of Steam less as a store and more as just a shelf application after you get your games from somewhere else?
 
D

Deleted member 144138

Unconfirmed Member
Thanks OP

Never heard of Unturned...
 
For comparisons sake, how many 1million+ sellers were there on the Xbox360? PS3? Wikipedia lists ~60 for Xbox360, dono if there's a more accurate list around anywhere.

Impossible to say as there really isn't enough data. Total sw sales for each platform last gen are around 900 million for each.
 

madjoki

Member
It is increasingly looking like Steam is just becoming "the game platform," where everything ends up.

Personally I don't mind since that just means it's becoming a better reflection of a plurality of the gaming landscape. My worry is that one store by itself might be too small a channel for such a massive market. Do people need to start thinking of Steam less as a store and more as just a shelf application after you get your games from somewhere else?

100% agree with this. Steam is already the platform.

Unless you are big publisher you can't really survive without it.

Best gaming deals come from other retailers than Steam, because Valve doesn't pursue good deals, but expects publisher set deals themselves.

GMG aggressively cuts their margins in order to provide cheaper prices. Then there's Nuuvem and other regional sellers that have lower prices, that attract many 'enlightened' steam users.

On Steam, FO3 was originally on GFWL as well and I believe the retail release didn't require Steam. But I agree with your sentiment, it may still be right :)

Didn't require, and can't be registered on Steam.
 

SaberEdge

Member
Goddamn, Deus Ex Human Revolution must be near 4 million or so at this point.

Very impressive. Well deserved, too, imo.

On a side note, the fact I'm getting a new Deus Ex, The Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk 2077 all within the next few years is just incredible to me. Truly a golden age of gaming, I don't care what anybody says.
 

4Tran

Member
It stood to reason that PC gamers had very different tastes in games from console gamers, but it's nice to see confirmation from data like this. While AAA games still sell pretty well on PC, they certainly don't dominate the charts.
 

Unicorn

Member
All these people have HAWKEN, but where the fuck were they when I was looking for people to play with a couple months ago?
 

Velurian

Member
Some really interesting numbers there. Really.
I hope the devs/publishers are keeping their eye on this.
Goes to show, just how big the audience really is.
 

4Tran

Member
what's the price of some of those games though.

seems like a very padded list.
The prices vary a lot. Steam games have very long sales tails because there are constant sales and constant exposure due to them. Moreover, publishers will generally see 70% of any sale while a packaged console game might only garner them 40-45% of the sale. PC gaming is lucrative, which is why publishers that previously shunned this market are now ramping up their releases in it.
 
It is increasingly looking like Steam is just becoming "the game platform," where everything ends up.

Personally I don't mind since that just means it's becoming a better reflection of a plurality of the gaming landscape. My worry is that one store by itself might be too small a channel for such a massive market. Do people need to start thinking of Steam less as a store and more as just a shelf application after you get your games from somewhere else?

And it's great since you don't have to start your library from scratch every hardware generation change.
 

Shengar

Member
ctrl+f "Castle Crasher"
Yup, not only the game was constantly on 90% sale with Can't Stop Laughing Bundle, the game is really great as a local and online coop experience. Simple, but goofy and nutty, really deserved the number.

Also thanks for the 1 million aggregation so far!
 

kswiston

Member
Fallout: New Vegas sold more than Fallout 3? Yay Obsidian!

Steam wasn't mainstream big when Fallout 3 was released. Fallout 3 also didn't require Steam at all outside of the Steam purchased copies.

Every copy of New Vegas required Steam registration, including retail copies.

Retail was still big in Europe around the time of Fallout 3 (and CRPGs are big there as well), so you can't really draw many conclusions for that one.
 
Consoles are doing well.

PC is doing well.

Mobile us doing well.

Free to play is doing well.

Dedicated handhelds are... Well you can't win em all.

Who knew?? No part of gaming is DOOMED.
 

Kyougar

Member
That chart is missing Portal being free one weekend, about 5 years ago.

http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1265332

I remember because I bugged a friend who played only console games to get it. He did get it but I don't believe he actually played it. :(

The effect of free Weekends should not statistically matter after some months. And the effect of a free weekend 5 years ago should be Zero.


btw: Men of war 2 already lost 6 Million Owners over 24 hours (or 13 Million over 72 hours. I will update the number in a few days. we can see the effects of a free weekend live.
 

hemtae

Member
The effect of free Weekends should not statistically matter after some months. And the effect of a free weekend 5 years ago should be Zero.


btw: Men of war 2 already lost 6 Million Owners over 24 hours (or 13 Million over 72 hours. I will update the number in a few days. we can see the effects of a free weekend live.

The game was free to own forever that weekend though. It was for their mac launch iirc.
 

Saty

Member
The game was free to own forever that weekend though. It was for their mac launch iirc.

Yes. They also gave L4D2 for free for a period of 24 hours. Recently Payday 1 was also given away for good for a day. So it's best to mark those cases as well.
 

Almighty

Member
Well another confrimation that I am out of the loop. I haven't played most of the games on the 2014 list and the first game I played was the Don't Starve Together Beta. If my friend didn't talk me into playing it with him the next one would of been Thief.
 

szaromir

Banned
Way more than the original Deus Ex did which came out when the PC was allegedly in a golden age.

I guess PC gaming is dying though ;)
The term golden age refers more to the golden age of pc games design more than anything, clearly the platform is much healthier than back in the day, but around 1998-2001 we had a perfect storm of innovative and complex releases that has not occurred since.
 

Tapejara

Member
Seeing Spec Ops: The Line on there makes me happy.

Also, goddamn, Metro 2033 and Killing Floor sales are impressive. Well deserved, though of course Metro's sales are heavily influenced by Humble Bundles.
 

Almighty

Member
Yeah the free weekends are throwing off a lot of games, but assuming the site stays up long enough it won't be a huge problem in the future.
 
What the hell is Unturned? I know most of indie wonders like Cave Story, Minecraft, Spelunky, DayZ, Rust, Garrys Mod etc. But never ever heard of Unturned.
 
I wonder what the chart would look like in terms f revenue though. I'd wager a huge portion of the games at the top sold the majority of their copies for less than $10 a pop. Or worse, were in humble bundles.
 

Eila

Member
Yes. They also gave L4D2 for free for a period of 24 hours. Recently Payday 1 was also given away for good for a day. So it's best to mark those cases as well.

Add Red Orchestra 2, Arma: Cold War Assault and Portal to the list. Those are the ones I remember being given away to everyone who checked them on steam.
Now on external websites (as steam keys) there's been too many games given away, in different quantities. I remember some website giving away a million copies of Gun Monkeys, Dino D-Day and some other games.
 

kswiston

Member
Add Red Orchestra 2, Arma: Cold War Assault and Portal to the list. Those are the ones I remember being given away to everyone who checked them on steam..

Those are not the same as free weekends though. You got to keep all of those games permanently, so they are the same as "sold".
 

danthefan

Member
So Dark Souls sold nearly 2m on PC in the end?

It's mind boggling that it took a bloody petition to get the thing released on PC in the first place, and then the threw out a shoddy port. Did they totally misread the market or what?
 

Shantom

Member
Only for those with the marked x. And its not really useless.

Just a bit of clarification here, as far as I understand it: the one's marked with an 'x' are those that steamspy's system picks up as having lots of variation in the data, suggesting there might be a factor like a free weekend screwing with the numbers. The majority of games in the list marked as such haven't actually had a free weekend, and therefore should be accurate (e.g. Counter Strike:Source). However, there's also some games that have had semi-recent free weekends and which aren't marked as suspicious, such as Company of Heroes 2 and Rome 2.
 

Knurek

Member
So Dark Souls sold nearly 2m on PC in the end?

It's mind boggling that it took a bloody petition to get the thing released on PC in the first place, and then the threw out a shoddy port. Did they totally misread the market or what?

You'd think this would be obvious with the way Bamco embraced the platform since then...
 

kswiston

Member
Yes, they did.

All Japanese companies did. Sure, they often have to wait for those $5-10 sales to push large volumes, but we are seeing substantial numbers for a ton of genres that completely ignored PC until maybe 3 years ago (outside of Capcom, which has had good support for an entire generation).

Look at Naruto Ultimate Ninja Storm 3. It's sitting at 300-350k sales on Steam. That's well over 2x what the game sold in Japan (almost 3x the PS3 version). Sure, most of those copies went for $7.50-15, but that still translates to a $2-3M cut for Namco on what was a pretty barebones PC port.
 
So Dark Souls sold nearly 2m on PC in the end?

It's mind boggling that it took a bloody petition to get the thing released on PC in the first place, and then the threw out a shoddy port. Did they totally misread the market or what?
PC gaming isn't big in Japan, so Japanese companies, which are run by old men who refuse to listen to people who actually know better unless they have to, ignore the fact that PC gaming is a cost-effective way to get as many markets as possible and has significant long-tail.
 

Kyougar

Member
Just a bit of clarification here, as far as I understand it: the one's marked with an 'x' are those that steamspy's system picks up as having lots of variation in the data, suggesting there might be a factor like a free weekend screwing with the numbers. The majority of games in the list marked as such haven't actually had a free weekend, and therefore should be accurate (e.g. Counter Strike:Source). However, there's also some games that have had semi-recent free weekends and which aren't marked as suspicious, such as Company of Heroes 2 and Rome 2.

Yes, i was not sure for many of the listed games, if they had a free weekend recently. But some were making sense. Some franchises like Half Life with counterstrike had the same warning. Fear franchise, Company of Heroes, Call of Duty and some other franchises had the warning. It wasnt (most of the time) just not one game but the whole franchise who had the warning.


Other than that, i want to expand the personal Datapoints of those Million-Sellers with Information about Bundle-Numbers, Steamworks Titles and free-for-all (not bound to Steam) Titles.

Sadly, some People disregard the ownership-data completely if the Game was on a free weekend or in a bundle.

Men of war 2 should trickle out in some days/weeks.
 
Almost all of those are 10-20$ though.

Thinking of I don't think I've ever paid anything over $20 for something on Steam. And that only a few times on things like Torchlight II, Seems to the magic point to get people to impulse buy.
 
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