That's exactly what I'm trying to explain here
, but some people here are trying to say that developers who publishing bad games on Steam are relied only on game sales and not cards sales. People are mostly buying those games not to play them either, but just farm those cards and sell them. What so unbelievable in my statement, that some devs are creating games only to get new app id and give it to cards farmers?
I already gave you example of game that
have around 60-70k owners according to SteamSpy but never was in bundles or had a major sale. I can't give you correct cards sales since median sales are worthless and doesn't show real picture, only Valve and those devs knows real sales figures but obviously they are not willing to share them with others. The only way to see something close to real sales figures is by clicking on this card in your steam inventory, for example
this card was sold
411 times in last 24 hours. This is just one card in one day, and it was selling like this
for months, and there is 5 cards in set. As i said before, maybe 500$ for you is "hardly breaking the bank", but for RU/CIS region this is huge money, people here have 100-200$ monthly wages. But of course ignorance is bliss, you can "guarantee" whatever you want but you are not developer and know nothing about real situation.