SteamSpy: Steam sales in 2015

The most surprising thing to me was April being 2nd biggest month, I thought #1 and #2 will be between November and December.

April is when GTA V launched, so it distorted things pretty heavily.

As well as a few other smaller successes like Mortal Kombat, Pillars of Eternity (launched later March, but sold a lot in april), Killing Floor 2 early access, etc.
 
Microsoft was so dumb to not try to get into this market. The future of gaming will be Steam boxes and PCs connected (either directly or streaming) to living room TVs.

I wonder how well Origin is doing in comparison.
 
Glad to see games like Life is Strange, and Undertale going hard, and strong. 2015 was definitely a good year indeed.
 
naisu. Lord Gaben doth treat us fairly. happy for rocket and skylines. gtav deserves the top spot, even with my quibbles theres soooo much there for 60 bones and the cars are just fun as fuck.
 
'So, including Dota 2 and Team Fortress 2 revenue, Valve is controlling around 15% of it. Pretty impressive!'

It feels a little underestimating the revenue both games bring, Valve @ 15% implies 550m for both titles.

Compare to say Tencent's online game revenue grew 28 percent to $2.14 billion in just the first quarter of last year, 2015, people should stop saying Valve has a monopoly.
 
More than 350 million paid games in a year is impressive. If that turns out to be normal going forward, Steam will sell more games in 5 years than PS2 did in ten. And that's just paid games, not DLC or F2P titles..
 
shamelessly reposting the pic from this afternoon, because we know how this will end.

Unfortunately I forgot to include "PC success makes me physically sick to the stomach" and "the growth is from bored PSN XBL Players who couldnt play because of the Holiday DDOS attack"

slAxxyR.png

None of these sound like good conversations. Let's have none of them.
 
I think Sergey excluded Valves cut. If you take Fallout 4 who never had a Sale and multiply by 60 Dollar, you get a much higher revenue than the one stated in the List. if you work with 70%, it is not exactly the same number but in the ballpark.
But maybe Sergey could tell us.

You're forgetting about discounts and regional pricing. The games are cheaper in some countries.
 
'So, including Dota 2 and Team Fortress 2 revenue, Valve is controlling around 15% of it. Pretty impressive!'

It feels a little underestimating the revenue both games bring, Valve @ 15% implies 550m for both titles.

Compare to say Tencent's online game revenue grew 28 percent to $2.14 billion in just the first quarter of last year, 2015, people should stop saying Valve has a monopoly.
Dota 2 is way smaller than Crossfire or League of Legends.
 
Not to case for everyone I am sure bigger publishers and devs get better cuts.

Nope, but if memory serves, there was originally an alternative option for Source Engine licensing -- a reduced upfront free in exchange for a greater cut for Valve, which is how the paid version of Garry's Mod manifested.

Edit: Worth of mouth was kind to Mad Max.
 
How is it that Pillars of Eternity is in the second list with 600k units, 21M$ revenue, and not in the first list, which is sorted by revenue and ends at 10M$?
 
How is it that Pillars of Eternity is in the second list with 600k units, 21M$ revenue, and not in the first list, which is sorted by revenue and ends at 10M$?

it confused me to for a second, but the left and right tables have different timeframes. The right is 2015, but the left says april to december 2015.
 
So, the average price paid for a game on Steam is $10. I have no comparison with anything, it just seems like an interesting statistic.
 
Two things bother me. One probably just cosmetic, but there's one finding I'm not quite confident in.

helped over 350 million paid games find new owners.
This strikes me as really weird phrasing. Is there some nuance buried in it I'm not seeing, or is it just "350 million sales"?

It brought over 3000 new games (compared to 1900 in 2014)

(...)

The number of monthly releases on Steam stopped growing

This threw up red flags. I'm not sure you can conclude that the monthly release rate has slowed quite yet. From looking at the associated graph, it seems the release rate is a little cyclical, with more releases between roughly May-Sept or so than the other half of the year - but it looks like they've come to the 'stopped growing' conclusion based on those last few months of 2015. In particular, the biggest sustained growth period seems to be Jan-Feb-Mar-Apr, and we've not had that yet. Their conclusion may well be correct, of course, but I think we'll get a clearer picture of things in April.
 
This strikes me as really weird phrasing. Is there some nuance buried in it I'm not seeing, or is it just "350 million sales"?

SteamSpy tracks number of game owners. Just because someone owns a game on Steam, doesn't mean Steam got a sale from it. For example, Humble Bundles give Steam keys.
 
So, the average price paid for a game on Steam is $10. I have no comparison with anything, it just seems like an interesting statistic.

It is interesting but I doubt that most people can interpret it correctly. A few fanboys will jump straight to the conclusion that "lolz PC gamers only buy games on sale". What is really happening is that Steam has a library of thousands of games, most of which are cheap and bring down the average price.
 
shamelessly reposting the pic from this afternoon, because we know how this will end.

Unfortunately I forgot to include "PC success makes me physically sick to the stomach" and "the growth is from bored PSN XBL Players who couldnt play because of the Holiday DDOS attack"

slAxxyR.png
This will surely be useful in future threads.

It is interesting but I doubt that most people can interpret it correctly.
So it's like most statistics ;)
 
It is interesting but I doubt that most people can interpret it correctly. A few fanboys will jump straight to the conclusion that "lolz PC gamers only buy games on sale". What is really happening is that Steam has a library of thousands of games, most of which are cheap and bring down the average price.
Exactly. "Average price" is meaningless, you should look at the distribution of revenue by game price :)
 
Wasn't Scholar of the First Sin cheaper if you already owned DkSII? The revenue on that one might be off, no?
 
It is interesting but I doubt that most people can interpret it correctly. A few fanboys will jump straight to the conclusion that "lolz PC gamers only buy games on sale". What is really happening is that Steam has a library of thousands of games, most of which are cheap and bring down the average price.

Clearly. I mean, a humble bundle can mean 5 games bought for $1.

I'd just like to see a comparison with something else. Like, NPD has software at ~5 billion in US in 2014. Can we get a number of copies for that sum anywhere?

Even then, it's not a perfect comparison, since retail US versus digital WW is different. But any comparison would be imperfect.
 
Geez so much money made for Ark. I hope they actually polish the game. Just shows you can make a fortune by making a fraction of a game.
 
Clearly. I mean, a humble bundle can mean 5 games bought for $1.

I'd just like to see a comparison with something else. Like, NPD has software at ~5 billion in US in 2014. Can we get a number of copies for that sum anywhere?

Even then, it's not a perfect comparison, since retail US versus digital WW is different. But any comparison would be imperfect.
It's really pointless to compare Steam to consoles. While Steam is big, it's only a fraction of PC market. :)
 
It's really pointless to compare Steam to consoles. While Steam is big, it's only a fraction of PC market. :)

I know, I was just trying to compare something of the same "volume": 3.5B vs 5B.

I'm always trying to get something new from numbers. I'm guessing you can understand that, considering you made the site :)
 
I didn't realize the escapists was so popular. Congrats to the developer, quite the turn around from their first game:
Game 1 - Spud's Quest, 2,173 ±1,029
Game 2 - The Escapists, 612,670 ±17,258

I guess I won't be seeing a Spud's Quest sequel anytime soon :(
 
Clearly. I mean, a humble bundle can mean 5 games bought for $1.

I'd just like to see a comparison with something else. Like, NPD has software at ~5 billion in US in 2014. Can we get a number of copies for that sum anywhere?

Even then, it's not a perfect comparison, since retail US versus digital WW is different. But any comparison would be imperfect.

From the PAL thread:

Code:
UK physical software sales

2015 - 28,000,000 units / £928m
2014 - 30,200,000 units / £948m
2013 - 34,500,000 units / £1,015m
2012 - 39,600,000 units / £1,046m
2011 - 55,400,000 units / £1,420m
2010 - 63,000,000 units / £1,530m
2009 - 74,600,000 units / £1,620m
2008 - 82,800,000 units / £1,905m
2007 - 75,900,000 units / £1,720m
2006 - 65,100,000 units / £1,360m
2005 - 61,300,000 units / £1,350m
2004 - 59,700,000 units / £1,350m
The exchange rate for 2007 and 2008 was roughly £1=$2, so that gives you a comparison for the $3.5 billion.

What these numbers do show is just how much the physical market has declined. If that NPD figure you have is right then it means the UK market in 2008 wasn't too far off the US market in 2014, which is pretty astonishing.
 
From the PAL thread:


The exchange rate for 2007 and 2008 was roughly £1=$2, so that gives you a comparison for the $3.5 billion.

What these numbers do show is just how much the physical market has declined. If that NPD figure you have is right then it means the UK market in 2008 wasn't too far off the US market in 2014, which is pretty astonishing.

Thanks for the data.
Wow, £33 per game on average. Really interesting numbers.
 
I find legacy sales of some of the older PC titles utterly fascinating:

AoE2 sold close to 3 million with the HD remaster alone and because of that we are getting new DLC after more than a decade of it's original release. AoE3 has sold 1,5 million and Age of Mythology is at 700k now, also with new DLC coming out.

Jedi Knight (970k), Jedi Outcast (1m), Jedi Academy (1.4m), KotoR (2,2m) and KotoR 2 (1,7m). Oh, and Republic Commando? Almost 1.1m in sales since 2009.

BG (with new DLC too) and BG II have sold 800k together too. That's insane compared to some quality newer titles.

Deus Ex at 1m, Deus Ex 2 at 800k while Human Revolution is at 1.2m seems utterly perplexing to me. All are quality titles, but those porting jobs must come in very profitable with a big return of investment, even if you consider the inflated price point.

System Shock 2 is close to 700k.

I guess my point is - it must be pretty comfortable to be the owner of one of these legacy titles. Means a steady income over the years (even if mostly over sales and bundles) and I hope they lead to the revival of some classic series or at least to the end of some licensing limbo for titles like No One Lives Forever.

I'd also love to have some references to the sold through numbers on gog for these titles, since I'd love to know how successful titles like System Shock 2 really are by now.
 
He wrote about the Winter Sale: https://medium.com/steam-spy/about-steam-winter-sale-76a75abe152a#.hed54rn8q

At least 46 million copies of games found their new owners during Steam Winter Sale. And that only includes games that sold over 1,000 copies, because smaller changes are barely detectable by Steam Spy. That’s 50% more compared to Steam Summer Sale.

If we assume that all of those games were sold on Steam (it’s probably not the case because of bundles and third-party stores) and account for regional pricing, we can conclude that Steam Winter Sale brought at least $270M in revenue.

That’s almost twice as much as Steam Summer Sale did.
 
Top Bottom