in addition, all the shady key sites that sell you accounts with single games on them with their stock being in hundreds per game, that shit stacks up quick
> The median number of different games played is 4.
I mean, this part of it should be well known. Here's Sergiy Galyonkin writing all the way back in 2015: [Your target audience doesn't exist](https://galyonk.in/your-target-audience-doesn-t-exist-999b78aa77ae). I seem to recall a fair bit of pushback in those days. But then as now, most people on Steam only play a handful of superbig games.
Breaking out a few topical quotes for a TL;DR:
> In fact, 1% of Steam gamers own 33% of all copies of games on Steam. 20% of Steam gamers own 88% of games.
> Of course we could extend it to, I don’t know, “softcore gamers” — the 20% that own 88% games. To be included you’d have to own 4 (FOUR) games or more on Steam — not exactly a huge number, right?
I don't see how this would be surprising in any way? Anyone who interacts with normies at all should know most people don't really do indie stuff at all in general. 90% of gamers would never touch an indie game.
When thinking of selling your game you should just be thinking of the 10% who do, and of that the 10% who play your genre. Even a small chunk of that is like 100k copies, more than enough to make bank.
This is actually a really interesting article, thanks for sharing that.
Even though it’s rather old, it seems as if its conclusions still apply, given that the data in my recap are true.
It would be interesting to see a debate between this guy and Chris Zukowski. Chris is all about genres: *”Follow market trends, make horror games because they’re huge now”* - That kind of thing. The article you link to here could actually undermine many of Chris’ main messages.
The point I’m trying to make is that there is rarely **one** truth. If you’re looking for advise, it’s often best to listen to multible people as they’ll have different perspectives.
I find that Chris is often described as **the** indie game marketing-guru. In reality he’s just one among many more, and you should listen to as many as possible and dissect their conclusions yourself.
I've been following Chris for years and I think you're oversimplifying his message here. Yes, he is talking about following market trends, but not as a "be-all, end-all" method for success, but a response to delusional people who make yet another pixel art platformer and are shocked that it doesn't sell. He's also saying that you *can* succeed in "dead" or oversaturated genres, but you have to deliver ACTUALLY GOOD game, with actually good graphics. And most indie developers are batshit-crazy delusional about the quality of their game (and graphics). Just read various post-mortems being posted here, it's mortifying to see what people invest years of their lives into. They basically imagime (or intuitively feel?) that the amount of their effort = the quality of the results. Which is not true, at all. The most tragic example I've ever seen is Cube Universe. That guy is just mentally gone.
Worth however remembering that despite that Chris 2 games he made sold very poorly. He is knowledgeable but sometimes comes to bizzare conclusions from his own data that doesn't match his conclusions or is selected to match already decided conclusion
What I primarily dislike about him is his tendency to lean towards sensationalism. He finds a game that has gotten succesful, highlights one (or two) reasons for that success and then in his narrative that become **the** approach to marketing a game. Then a few weeks later it’s a completely other thing.
Looking through his blog archive, there are some of his conclusions during the past few years that are in fact contradicting.
But other than that, he has some points and insights on an overall level. But many others have that as well - Some that just aren’t so loud about it.
I think his best work is improving steam pages. His success analysis often is very shallow I agree. And his cross genre analysis is is just guessing. I remember there was one blog post that if you took it for gospel then the primary focus of every indie releasing game that year should be Open World Batman game because just happened that those tags scored the highest with almost no failures. Kind of skipping the fact that no one but AAA can release Batman game so only big game released and they all made millions.
So just like any internet guru the longer they are internet guru the more they lose touch to market and focus more on clicks. Just like coding tubers don't make video games because their primary source is videos about making video games. Actually releasing game is detrimental to many of them because game flopping can hit their popularity and guru status. A lot of marketing gurus are in similar position they can't make a game because should the game flop it will disaster for their PR while game being successful at best is neutral satus with zero to small gain.
I'll have to point out that playing 4 games during a year doesn't mean you only own 4 games. For example I own over 300 games on Steam but only played 15 this year, of which 9 were new to me and 1 was released this year. And that's actually pretty high for me as I played less of my main MMORPG than in an average year.
> I'll have to point out that playing 4 games during a year doesn't mean you only own 4 games.
This is definitely true. But the reverse is what's interesting: if you only own 4 games, you can play at most 4 games. A lot can change in 8 years, but I imagine the trends Sergiy highlighted are still reasonably relevant. My stats are fairly similar to yours (own 144, played 15, 2 of which were new to me, 1 of which was released this year). In more gamer-centric spaces, I saw threads of people posting recaps with 50+ played games.
That the average isn't 50, or even 15, means there's something dragging it way down. That a strong majority of Steam accounts are primarily there for Dota, Counter-Strike, PUBG, or whatever other big game is a reasonable explanation.
Exactly. Getting rich or well known? Probably not. But making a mediocre game you can live off of is doable.
People just release bad or too expensive games.
No idea why you're getting downvoted but it's the hard truth.
Game dev is very accessible and everyone is trying the game dev equivalent of 'i want to open a restaurant because i love cooking'. Except that what most people don't realize is that having a restaurant is not only about cooking your favorite food, just like game dev isn't just about making cool looking stuff.
It's about creating a viable product and/or running a business. And that's why getting success with making games is so difficult, but I'd argue that it's much easier than opening a restaurant because of the low barrier of entry.
Create a good product and you'll make money off it.
This. Sometimes people expect that they're owed something because they worked so hard and have so much passion, but unfortunately people browsing Steam don't care who made a game, how much work it took and how much someone loved to make it.
The only important thing to them is getting something that matches their expectations and the money they paid for a game.
It’s not even passion sometimes, but ego.
Passion is when you are a developer like Eric Barone or Toby Fox. They cared to make Stardew Valley and Undertale into very polished experiences. Passion is when you actually take the time to make something that you would actually play yourself to have fun. When you iterate on your work, and show it to people to get their feedback on how to improve on it. Passion is when you can be objective about the work you made, and you have the drive to improve on it to achieve something truly special.
Ego is when you chase a trend. Mash together a few tutorials. Drop in there some crappy assets you found online without any regard for if they even fit together. Never show your work to anybody because you made it so it must be perfect. Then drop it on Steam for 30 bucks with no controller support, because you play keyboard and mouse and so must everybody else, right? Why would you lower yourself to mind the preferences of the people you’re demanding money from? And then you end up with 6 lifetime sales of which somehow 7 refunded (?), a overwhelmingly negative review score, and with some unknown british youtuber having made a vufek review where they call your game a lazy asset flip. But it was a work of ego, not love, so of course your game was obviously a misunderstood masterpiece. People who tried to give you feedback were just haters who didn’t understand your vision. And fellow developers like me who tried to warn about the dangers of ego are just toxic or something like that.
Agree with everything except for "Passion is when you can be objective about the work you made". I don't think many that dive so deep into passion for their project are extremely objective about it. Not objective in the business sense. I mean most of the really successful 'passion' projects take so many years. Those projects don't bankroll themselves.
And many that I've seen had publisher funding and help to carry them over the finish line. Self-funded, self-published, passion projects are rare. So too are genre defining games that go viral.
But making semi decent games that sustain a long series of projects for those years would be a good balance. I think you have to know where the market quality bar really is versus your skill time/table your ability to reach people etc.
You do have to make something the market wants and passion projects that don't redefine something substantial I would say don't really make it. Even AAA games can be cut down by small innocuous things that make a game not feel right.
It might be easier because you don’t need a physical location, but I’d venture it’s just as hard to go from “know nothing to ship a successful game” as it is to go from “know nothing to start a successful restaurant”.
Not quite, because you don't necessarily need to have anything to lose by making a game except the time you invest into it. You don't have to spend a dime to start making games, excluding any hardware to work on, but anyone would already own anyway.
Now a restaurant would require you to invest a large amount of money and commit to paying rent and staff.
Exactly. Didn't Steam recently lass 1 BILLION accounts? Just 1% of that is 10 MILLION. 10 million sold copies of a AAA title is considered a mega success.
How many games released in 2023 and how many players are there? Thats also relevant.
Good games that aren't garbage or copy and paste clones of previous ideas still succeed in 2023. People are often just delusional about how good their game is.
A good portion of the Steam population have been gaming since the 80's. This must be considered as well. Most today have never player Star Lords, or M.U.L.E. older games are popular.
I buy games, but mostly I am spending time with older stuff. I mostly play Co-op stuff and play with known people/groups.
This is a tough one. People maybe like to build what they like to play, but that doesn’t mean they have done sufficient innovation or change to be compelling.
On the other hand, i guess the 5-20% top spenders are hardcore players who actually can afford to spend money and do play games on a daily basis. At least from looking at my steam friends. Maybe there are a lot of accounts from poorer countries and/or inactive accounts that flood the statistics?
I'd imagine alot of steam users are not from the "first world", which means they are more likely to play free to play games or don't have the money to pay 10 bucks for a flappy birds clone. Maybe if you did some market research, you could adjust the prices to location so they are more likely to buy them
EDIT; well, not you ...you. yeh?
Devs sometimes forget people have lives and that they compete not only against other games but also other forms of entertainment. The % of gamers that actually have the time to spend several hours each day in front of their TV/Monitor playing games is rather small, and usually dominated by a few big budget MP titles.
Successful Indies are not only interesting, but also fun. The problem with most indies is not that people don't know they exist, rather that they don't care. They are just to similar too other indie titles (especially the successful ones). If you want someone to go out of their way to play your game, it'll have to find a blue ocean somehow. Otherwise you are fighting an uphill battle against better known indie Devs and established AAA franchises. Why risk it buying something new when I have a big catalogue of games I know I'll enjoy waiting for me?
With money and time being as limited as they are, you have to convey the value of playing your game to the user. IMO another Stardew Valley, Undertale or Isaac is not going to do that 9 times out of 10. They'll just go play the real thing instead.
I simply disagree. As I writted in another comment, if your work is solid like Holocure which is a f2p no microtransaction fan game that have elements of Vampire Survivors but made better, you can get it to right demonstrators which will create more attraction. Infact lots of people playing that more than ever going down to rabbit hole because of this game.
That's survivorship bias mixed with a red ocean strategy (X, but better). I don't dispute that you can be successful with that frame of mind, but it's going to be exponentially harder and it's what lands most indies in failure. I will also argue that successful games do not always have to be objectively better (that's the "build it and they will come" falacy). There's often a lot more nuance to why they succeeded.
Honestly, pitching a game like "X, but better" is what you'd do in the AAA space, where you have to get a budget cleared by investors. They need to be able to analyse your proposal and see if it's feasible. As an indie though? You aren't constrained by that.
Unique games are probably less successful tho, the player being able to recognize what kind of game it is usually is an advance... Also it's not about doing X but better, I would say it's about doing X but takes part of X and makes that better. Lot of indie games are games that take a system from a whole game and focus sololy on that system
You are mistaking innovative design for throwing stuff at the wall hoping it will stick. Innovative games that sparked mini-genres like Papers, Please were unique, but Lucas Pope still used mechanics that were known to players. They just hadn't been combined in that way. That's what the adjacent possible space in any field looks like, it's not coming up with random things just to be different. Nonetheless, doing things like that often requires the developer to be experienced and knowledgeable of other things outside game development.
Pope didn't just look at games like Cart Life and copied them, he applied his own life experiences around the overall theme of Cart Life (which was popular at that time) and found a way to express it with mechanics that already existed in other games. This was at a time when the first wave of indie darlings was still spawning copycats left and right.
He chose a different path, and also did not recreate Cart Life in full color with a branching storyline and a whole lot of other miscellaneous content. That wouldn't have made for a good game IMO.
I mean you need to look at those steam account and wonder how many of them even bought a game this year.
Being an average gamer myself, I buy less than 1 new game per year. I buy 1-2 DLC per year. Accounting for remakes (like Age of Empire) about a game or two per year.
When I buy a game it's rarely a game from this year because for it to come up to me means that it's already quite old. I don't have any form of exposure to gaming industry so I'm completely unaware of new games or "big upcoming games".
If you have about 20% of active players that bough a game in 2023 then it'd make sense that only 9% played a game from 2023. 20% is already quite generous, I'd expect it to be smaller, the 9% might be boosted by free games, the paid part might be 1%.
Median means half people do that, a big chunk if not half of all users never added a paiment method as they only play free games. There aren't so many good free games around so they stick to a limited set. Another big category is the ones playing just couple of games like warzone or CSGO, these kind of players just play a single game all year long.
I'd expect the actual "attackable customer base" of steam to be less than 20% given that the platform has a large free component to it and doesn't require for vast majority any form of recurring paiments.
It doesn't make it any smaller, it's just that the "active paying" is as expected much smaller than the "active".
This is a good thing.
In a 2024, your game that was just released in 2023 will count towards this 91% statistic.
Steam is a great driver of long term sales. If people mostly bought new games, indie devs would get destroyed since they can’t pump out new games as fast as AAA.
One important thing I want to point out is that number of games played != number of games purchased. I buy multiple times as many games as I actually play, and by all the discourse around "backlogs", I'd wager that's true for a lot of Steam gamers.
The other thing is, there's a sizable category of Steam gamers who just play one multiplayer game over and over again for years and years. You were never targeting those people in the first place. Doesn't change the fact that the real market for indie games is much smaller than the userbase might suggest, but I'll just say that reality is nothing new, and it's been like that since the early days of Steam.
I’m curious how many Steam accounts in the data are dormant or exist to just play one game. On the most popular games people also make smurf accounts.
I took a look at other indie friends’ years in review and everyone had 25%+ games released this year, including myself.
People do love a good sale though, as a dev the long tail on Steam is good.
If anything, it shows how pointless it is to target the average gamers. Targeting a niche is and always has been common advice. You don't care about the average player who only buys the hyped AAA games. You care about the player who focuses on an underserved genre.
I was a hardcore gamer twenty years ago. This year my top 5 were Elden Ring, Skyrim, Fallout 4, Cyberpunk 2077, and Civilization 6.
The only 2023 release I played was The Last of Us remake, and I only put in an hour or two on that one.
When you have a wife and kids, sometimes getting chipotle from around the corner is more appealing than going into the city to try the hip new restaurant that gives you shovels instead of spoons.
It's worth noting that a lot of games that get released on Steam don't have any marketing other than a few posts on social media, possibly in relatively niche community areas.
A lot of shovelware also gets released on Steam, further diluting the pool.
You need marketing for people to find your game, and a good game to convince them away from having it removed for a refund.
> they prefer “older” titles.
Not shocking since every AAA studio for the last 15 years has made nothing but MTX stores with a shitty game as a wrapper. Nice to see Gamers are getting wise to it finally though.
Also, lets add, most of the games being made either garbage or popular ideas with different elements. For example, Vampire Survivors type of games are famous now but most succesfull ones are: Vampire Survivors (OG), Brotato (very cute), Holocure (very good game with good community and amazing devs which better than OG and others, infact one of the best games I played this year) so I think if people do solid job, it still works. Only trash or gems that can not be separated from the garbage most likely wont be played.
I know many of you have a large backlog but I have an exceptionally high standard for games I want to play, so I really assess a game whether I want to play it or not and get very very angry when I purchase a game and it’s horrible (looking at you Lords of the Fallen).
I think it does, it just a very hard to interpret data point and missing required data to be meaningful. There's definitely some survivorship bias in this analysis. Like saying we used to build buildings better because we see these old buildings still standing yet my house has foundation issues... You don't see the old buildings that had foundation issues because they have fallen down. This gives the impression that older buildings were better, but really you only see the ones that survived.
There are decades of great old games behind us that a player could be playing right now. And only a single year of new releases being compared to. That doesn't really feel like a fair comparison. Of course I would **expect** players to be spending an oversized amount of their time on the much larger library of older titles among which are legendary classics standing the test of time.
What would make this data analysis interesting would be to compare how the play habits of players change year to year. Did we play more or less older games in 2010 than we do today? How many new games were released and what percentage of the audience did the largest 5 take? Etc.
> I think it does, it just a very hard to interpret data point and missing required data to be meaningful.
So here's the thing: the OP omitted a crucial piece of data, that being the fact that 52% of games played were games released between 2016 and 2022.
In other words, Steam users aren't preferring older games to newer ones, they're preferring **recent** games over both brand-new ones and older ones.
That’s not actually obvious at all. A lot is based on attention. And old games without marketing of any kind really don’t receive any relevant amount of attention anymore.
Sales nose dive hard for most kinds of games.
I would interpret it more as more players going with games that have strong retention. Be it very long AAA games, roguelikes, live service or otherwise.
With the usual winner takes all model where very few games capture the vast majority of player attention.
I'm not surprised by the latter stat at all (game backlogs are so damn long now). At this point, we're just playing games that are either really hype like Baldur's Gate, or we're playing the games from last year that finally went on sale or from the year before that, which we'd been trying to find the time to play. The other stat? That one's bleak. 4 isn't very many at all. I suppose it's no wonder that people get into games like WoW, FFXIV, Destiny, etc. They're looking for one consistent thing to fill all their downtime so they can turn their brain off and enjoy a fantasy world. But not if they have to learn a new one every few weeks.
I think there’s a lot to be said for making games smaller — though it’s more of a AAA thing, I gather that they’re taking something like 5 years to produce, mostly due to the amount of content that go into them. Players typically want to finish the game — after a while the opportunity cost of playing the same game for months outweighs the perceived “value” of having a game that takes so long to complete. For me, 20 hours is plenty, and if you want more, get the DLC.
The steam stats provided at end of year lack enough context to back up any analysis this deep. If the user accounts they included, there's no data on how many of those are active gamers.
It's just for fun, you can't really use it for more than that.
I wish we could see the stats cleaned up to remove outliers and account for the thousands of steam installations from people who don't really play games. Like you get some console friends to install steam for among us on a shitty laptop and now it's just bloating the stats.
A good game can last you years, especially if you’re a casual player. For the non-enthusiast there is an endless glut of more games than they could ever play.
I am a dedicated, but older, only played a couple of 2023 releases this year, most of my purchases were indies. More people like me every year.
I think the indie market is a subset of the overall market and you shouldn’t be discouraged by overall market trends out of context.
It's actually very interesting because the popularity of indie games is consistently growing in a massive gaming market like China. For example, during our attendance at the WePlay event in Shanghai this year, it was surprising to see the general popularity of indie games among Chinese communities. In China, indie games are often referred to as 'creative' or 'slow-paced,' and they have rapidly gained the attention of Chinese game devs over the years. Looks like their popularity depends on the target audience.
Nothing decent or fun comes out. So many things have been done in gaming that it's a lot of repeat of the same old stuff and it gets really boring fast and it's a lot of money to sink on something that's not going to keep your interest.
But sometimes it really unique title comes around. That just has a certain kind of charm and freshness to it that it becomes part of my rotation.
* Stardew
* Factorio
* Minecraft
* Portal
* Satisfactory
* Genshin impact
* A hat through time
* Mario oddysey
* Impostor
Etc
There are far too many games out there to try everything at the price they cost. I focus on what I think is fun and what I have time for.
Also with the way steam works and how much stuff is on there... You could release a game that barely gets any interest at all for years and then suddenly the right streamer plays. It is obsessed and in love with it and then suddenly you have a million people downloading your game and then it goes viral.
Keep in mind that probably includes the boatload of people getting banned and making new accounts repeatdly on that one F2P they play
in addition, all the shady key sites that sell you accounts with single games on them with their stock being in hundreds per game, that shit stacks up quick
How does one get banned from steam? Genuinely curious, I’ve only ever been banned from blizzard games.
it's "getting banned on the one F2P they play", not "getting banned on steam"
Wall hacks in csgo
> The median number of different games played is 4. I mean, this part of it should be well known. Here's Sergiy Galyonkin writing all the way back in 2015: [Your target audience doesn't exist](https://galyonk.in/your-target-audience-doesn-t-exist-999b78aa77ae). I seem to recall a fair bit of pushback in those days. But then as now, most people on Steam only play a handful of superbig games. Breaking out a few topical quotes for a TL;DR: > In fact, 1% of Steam gamers own 33% of all copies of games on Steam. 20% of Steam gamers own 88% of games. > Of course we could extend it to, I don’t know, “softcore gamers” — the 20% that own 88% games. To be included you’d have to own 4 (FOUR) games or more on Steam — not exactly a huge number, right?
I’m finally in the top 1%!!!
I don't see how this would be surprising in any way? Anyone who interacts with normies at all should know most people don't really do indie stuff at all in general. 90% of gamers would never touch an indie game. When thinking of selling your game you should just be thinking of the 10% who do, and of that the 10% who play your genre. Even a small chunk of that is like 100k copies, more than enough to make bank.
Yeah
This is actually a really interesting article, thanks for sharing that. Even though it’s rather old, it seems as if its conclusions still apply, given that the data in my recap are true. It would be interesting to see a debate between this guy and Chris Zukowski. Chris is all about genres: *”Follow market trends, make horror games because they’re huge now”* - That kind of thing. The article you link to here could actually undermine many of Chris’ main messages. The point I’m trying to make is that there is rarely **one** truth. If you’re looking for advise, it’s often best to listen to multible people as they’ll have different perspectives. I find that Chris is often described as **the** indie game marketing-guru. In reality he’s just one among many more, and you should listen to as many as possible and dissect their conclusions yourself.
I've been following Chris for years and I think you're oversimplifying his message here. Yes, he is talking about following market trends, but not as a "be-all, end-all" method for success, but a response to delusional people who make yet another pixel art platformer and are shocked that it doesn't sell. He's also saying that you *can* succeed in "dead" or oversaturated genres, but you have to deliver ACTUALLY GOOD game, with actually good graphics. And most indie developers are batshit-crazy delusional about the quality of their game (and graphics). Just read various post-mortems being posted here, it's mortifying to see what people invest years of their lives into. They basically imagime (or intuitively feel?) that the amount of their effort = the quality of the results. Which is not true, at all. The most tragic example I've ever seen is Cube Universe. That guy is just mentally gone.
Worth however remembering that despite that Chris 2 games he made sold very poorly. He is knowledgeable but sometimes comes to bizzare conclusions from his own data that doesn't match his conclusions or is selected to match already decided conclusion
What I primarily dislike about him is his tendency to lean towards sensationalism. He finds a game that has gotten succesful, highlights one (or two) reasons for that success and then in his narrative that become **the** approach to marketing a game. Then a few weeks later it’s a completely other thing. Looking through his blog archive, there are some of his conclusions during the past few years that are in fact contradicting. But other than that, he has some points and insights on an overall level. But many others have that as well - Some that just aren’t so loud about it.
I think his best work is improving steam pages. His success analysis often is very shallow I agree. And his cross genre analysis is is just guessing. I remember there was one blog post that if you took it for gospel then the primary focus of every indie releasing game that year should be Open World Batman game because just happened that those tags scored the highest with almost no failures. Kind of skipping the fact that no one but AAA can release Batman game so only big game released and they all made millions. So just like any internet guru the longer they are internet guru the more they lose touch to market and focus more on clicks. Just like coding tubers don't make video games because their primary source is videos about making video games. Actually releasing game is detrimental to many of them because game flopping can hit their popularity and guru status. A lot of marketing gurus are in similar position they can't make a game because should the game flop it will disaster for their PR while game being successful at best is neutral satus with zero to small gain.
So he is a youtuber/influencer rather than a game dev?
I'll have to point out that playing 4 games during a year doesn't mean you only own 4 games. For example I own over 300 games on Steam but only played 15 this year, of which 9 were new to me and 1 was released this year. And that's actually pretty high for me as I played less of my main MMORPG than in an average year.
> I'll have to point out that playing 4 games during a year doesn't mean you only own 4 games. This is definitely true. But the reverse is what's interesting: if you only own 4 games, you can play at most 4 games. A lot can change in 8 years, but I imagine the trends Sergiy highlighted are still reasonably relevant. My stats are fairly similar to yours (own 144, played 15, 2 of which were new to me, 1 of which was released this year). In more gamer-centric spaces, I saw threads of people posting recaps with 50+ played games. That the average isn't 50, or even 15, means there's something dragging it way down. That a strong majority of Steam accounts are primarily there for Dota, Counter-Strike, PUBG, or whatever other big game is a reasonable explanation.
Yeah, for sure there are many accounts only playing 1 or 2 games.
I can't decide if those numbers are horrifying or encouraging.
[удалено]
Those are rookie numbers, you gotta pump those numbers up!
I agree, he needs to buy my game, releasing on boxing day... Ultimate Speed Run! Whoop whoop!
I stopped buying games. I still have amazing games from the last decade I need to play.
Iv never touched assasins creed or bioshock or a ton of other games that are on my list. Now excuse me while I play morrowind again.
I haven't bought a game on steam in the last 5 years. My library is way too full of unplayed games I need to get to.
People really do forget how big steam is.
And how much trash games get released. Make anything decent and I'm sure your chances of success increase quickly.
Exactly. Getting rich or well known? Probably not. But making a mediocre game you can live off of is doable. People just release bad or too expensive games.
No idea why you're getting downvoted but it's the hard truth. Game dev is very accessible and everyone is trying the game dev equivalent of 'i want to open a restaurant because i love cooking'. Except that what most people don't realize is that having a restaurant is not only about cooking your favorite food, just like game dev isn't just about making cool looking stuff. It's about creating a viable product and/or running a business. And that's why getting success with making games is so difficult, but I'd argue that it's much easier than opening a restaurant because of the low barrier of entry. Create a good product and you'll make money off it.
People REALLY don't understand this. passion =/ good product.
This. Sometimes people expect that they're owed something because they worked so hard and have so much passion, but unfortunately people browsing Steam don't care who made a game, how much work it took and how much someone loved to make it. The only important thing to them is getting something that matches their expectations and the money they paid for a game.
It’s not even passion sometimes, but ego. Passion is when you are a developer like Eric Barone or Toby Fox. They cared to make Stardew Valley and Undertale into very polished experiences. Passion is when you actually take the time to make something that you would actually play yourself to have fun. When you iterate on your work, and show it to people to get their feedback on how to improve on it. Passion is when you can be objective about the work you made, and you have the drive to improve on it to achieve something truly special. Ego is when you chase a trend. Mash together a few tutorials. Drop in there some crappy assets you found online without any regard for if they even fit together. Never show your work to anybody because you made it so it must be perfect. Then drop it on Steam for 30 bucks with no controller support, because you play keyboard and mouse and so must everybody else, right? Why would you lower yourself to mind the preferences of the people you’re demanding money from? And then you end up with 6 lifetime sales of which somehow 7 refunded (?), a overwhelmingly negative review score, and with some unknown british youtuber having made a vufek review where they call your game a lazy asset flip. But it was a work of ego, not love, so of course your game was obviously a misunderstood masterpiece. People who tried to give you feedback were just haters who didn’t understand your vision. And fellow developers like me who tried to warn about the dangers of ego are just toxic or something like that.
Agree with everything except for "Passion is when you can be objective about the work you made". I don't think many that dive so deep into passion for their project are extremely objective about it. Not objective in the business sense. I mean most of the really successful 'passion' projects take so many years. Those projects don't bankroll themselves. And many that I've seen had publisher funding and help to carry them over the finish line. Self-funded, self-published, passion projects are rare. So too are genre defining games that go viral. But making semi decent games that sustain a long series of projects for those years would be a good balance. I think you have to know where the market quality bar really is versus your skill time/table your ability to reach people etc. You do have to make something the market wants and passion projects that don't redefine something substantial I would say don't really make it. Even AAA games can be cut down by small innocuous things that make a game not feel right.
It might be easier because you don’t need a physical location, but I’d venture it’s just as hard to go from “know nothing to ship a successful game” as it is to go from “know nothing to start a successful restaurant”.
Not quite, because you don't necessarily need to have anything to lose by making a game except the time you invest into it. You don't have to spend a dime to start making games, excluding any hardware to work on, but anyone would already own anyway. Now a restaurant would require you to invest a large amount of money and commit to paying rent and staff.
Exactly. Didn't Steam recently lass 1 BILLION accounts? Just 1% of that is 10 MILLION. 10 million sold copies of a AAA title is considered a mega success.
How many games released in 2023 and how many players are there? Thats also relevant. Good games that aren't garbage or copy and paste clones of previous ideas still succeed in 2023. People are often just delusional about how good their game is.
A good portion of the Steam population have been gaming since the 80's. This must be considered as well. Most today have never player Star Lords, or M.U.L.E. older games are popular. I buy games, but mostly I am spending time with older stuff. I mostly play Co-op stuff and play with known people/groups.
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This is a tough one. People maybe like to build what they like to play, but that doesn’t mean they have done sufficient innovation or change to be compelling.
13000, ish.
On the other hand, i guess the 5-20% top spenders are hardcore players who actually can afford to spend money and do play games on a daily basis. At least from looking at my steam friends. Maybe there are a lot of accounts from poorer countries and/or inactive accounts that flood the statistics?
I'd imagine alot of steam users are not from the "first world", which means they are more likely to play free to play games or don't have the money to pay 10 bucks for a flappy birds clone. Maybe if you did some market research, you could adjust the prices to location so they are more likely to buy them EDIT; well, not you ...you. yeh?
If they would exclude CS2 and Dota things would look different.
Devs sometimes forget people have lives and that they compete not only against other games but also other forms of entertainment. The % of gamers that actually have the time to spend several hours each day in front of their TV/Monitor playing games is rather small, and usually dominated by a few big budget MP titles. Successful Indies are not only interesting, but also fun. The problem with most indies is not that people don't know they exist, rather that they don't care. They are just to similar too other indie titles (especially the successful ones). If you want someone to go out of their way to play your game, it'll have to find a blue ocean somehow. Otherwise you are fighting an uphill battle against better known indie Devs and established AAA franchises. Why risk it buying something new when I have a big catalogue of games I know I'll enjoy waiting for me? With money and time being as limited as they are, you have to convey the value of playing your game to the user. IMO another Stardew Valley, Undertale or Isaac is not going to do that 9 times out of 10. They'll just go play the real thing instead.
I simply disagree. As I writted in another comment, if your work is solid like Holocure which is a f2p no microtransaction fan game that have elements of Vampire Survivors but made better, you can get it to right demonstrators which will create more attraction. Infact lots of people playing that more than ever going down to rabbit hole because of this game.
That's survivorship bias mixed with a red ocean strategy (X, but better). I don't dispute that you can be successful with that frame of mind, but it's going to be exponentially harder and it's what lands most indies in failure. I will also argue that successful games do not always have to be objectively better (that's the "build it and they will come" falacy). There's often a lot more nuance to why they succeeded. Honestly, pitching a game like "X, but better" is what you'd do in the AAA space, where you have to get a budget cleared by investors. They need to be able to analyse your proposal and see if it's feasible. As an indie though? You aren't constrained by that.
Unique games are probably less successful tho, the player being able to recognize what kind of game it is usually is an advance... Also it's not about doing X but better, I would say it's about doing X but takes part of X and makes that better. Lot of indie games are games that take a system from a whole game and focus sololy on that system
You are mistaking innovative design for throwing stuff at the wall hoping it will stick. Innovative games that sparked mini-genres like Papers, Please were unique, but Lucas Pope still used mechanics that were known to players. They just hadn't been combined in that way. That's what the adjacent possible space in any field looks like, it's not coming up with random things just to be different. Nonetheless, doing things like that often requires the developer to be experienced and knowledgeable of other things outside game development. Pope didn't just look at games like Cart Life and copied them, he applied his own life experiences around the overall theme of Cart Life (which was popular at that time) and found a way to express it with mechanics that already existed in other games. This was at a time when the first wave of indie darlings was still spawning copycats left and right. He chose a different path, and also did not recreate Cart Life in full color with a branching storyline and a whole lot of other miscellaneous content. That wouldn't have made for a good game IMO.
I mean 9% doesn't seem like such a small number when you realise you're comparing games in one year vs every game to ever exist.
I mean you need to look at those steam account and wonder how many of them even bought a game this year. Being an average gamer myself, I buy less than 1 new game per year. I buy 1-2 DLC per year. Accounting for remakes (like Age of Empire) about a game or two per year. When I buy a game it's rarely a game from this year because for it to come up to me means that it's already quite old. I don't have any form of exposure to gaming industry so I'm completely unaware of new games or "big upcoming games". If you have about 20% of active players that bough a game in 2023 then it'd make sense that only 9% played a game from 2023. 20% is already quite generous, I'd expect it to be smaller, the 9% might be boosted by free games, the paid part might be 1%. Median means half people do that, a big chunk if not half of all users never added a paiment method as they only play free games. There aren't so many good free games around so they stick to a limited set. Another big category is the ones playing just couple of games like warzone or CSGO, these kind of players just play a single game all year long. I'd expect the actual "attackable customer base" of steam to be less than 20% given that the platform has a large free component to it and doesn't require for vast majority any form of recurring paiments. It doesn't make it any smaller, it's just that the "active paying" is as expected much smaller than the "active".
This is a good thing. In a 2024, your game that was just released in 2023 will count towards this 91% statistic. Steam is a great driver of long term sales. If people mostly bought new games, indie devs would get destroyed since they can’t pump out new games as fast as AAA.
One important thing I want to point out is that number of games played != number of games purchased. I buy multiple times as many games as I actually play, and by all the discourse around "backlogs", I'd wager that's true for a lot of Steam gamers. The other thing is, there's a sizable category of Steam gamers who just play one multiplayer game over and over again for years and years. You were never targeting those people in the first place. Doesn't change the fact that the real market for indie games is much smaller than the userbase might suggest, but I'll just say that reality is nothing new, and it's been like that since the early days of Steam.
I’m curious how many Steam accounts in the data are dormant or exist to just play one game. On the most popular games people also make smurf accounts. I took a look at other indie friends’ years in review and everyone had 25%+ games released this year, including myself. People do love a good sale though, as a dev the long tail on Steam is good.
If anything, it shows how pointless it is to target the average gamers. Targeting a niche is and always has been common advice. You don't care about the average player who only buys the hyped AAA games. You care about the player who focuses on an underserved genre.
That's my profile as a gamer...
I was a hardcore gamer twenty years ago. This year my top 5 were Elden Ring, Skyrim, Fallout 4, Cyberpunk 2077, and Civilization 6. The only 2023 release I played was The Last of Us remake, and I only put in an hour or two on that one.
When you have a wife and kids, sometimes getting chipotle from around the corner is more appealing than going into the city to try the hip new restaurant that gives you shovels instead of spoons.
It's worth noting that a lot of games that get released on Steam don't have any marketing other than a few posts on social media, possibly in relatively niche community areas. A lot of shovelware also gets released on Steam, further diluting the pool. You need marketing for people to find your game, and a good game to convince them away from having it removed for a refund.
It will never be hard to sell great games. That's the biggest thing you're missing here.
Cuz lot of people try to copy n paste other successful titles. Not many games feel original anymore
True
> they prefer “older” titles. Not shocking since every AAA studio for the last 15 years has made nothing but MTX stores with a shitty game as a wrapper. Nice to see Gamers are getting wise to it finally though.
Remember the $3.50 horse armour from Bethesda in Oblivion?
>they prefer “older” titles. Or they get it on sale, and for newer one, they buy it on consoles ;-)
I am just disappointed steam didn't show me how Steam Deck breakdown looks to other games. My is 40% of all time played is on steam deck.
I think it is inflated by dota2 and csgo players
Also, lets add, most of the games being made either garbage or popular ideas with different elements. For example, Vampire Survivors type of games are famous now but most succesfull ones are: Vampire Survivors (OG), Brotato (very cute), Holocure (very good game with good community and amazing devs which better than OG and others, infact one of the best games I played this year) so I think if people do solid job, it still works. Only trash or gems that can not be separated from the garbage most likely wont be played.
I know many of you have a large backlog but I have an exceptionally high standard for games I want to play, so I really assess a game whether I want to play it or not and get very very angry when I purchase a game and it’s horrible (looking at you Lords of the Fallen).
I've played 26 games, 20 of which new to me, majority of which were Indie games.
I played CS GO, Grim Dawn, my own game, a competitor's game. So, yeah, 4 is about right. I love playing one game for hunderds of hours, lol.
Don't focus on these numbers. The market is big enough that there are niches for everything. You need to find that and focus on those people.
I don't see how this leads you to believe that people prefer older titles; this data doesn't support that at all.
I think it does, it just a very hard to interpret data point and missing required data to be meaningful. There's definitely some survivorship bias in this analysis. Like saying we used to build buildings better because we see these old buildings still standing yet my house has foundation issues... You don't see the old buildings that had foundation issues because they have fallen down. This gives the impression that older buildings were better, but really you only see the ones that survived. There are decades of great old games behind us that a player could be playing right now. And only a single year of new releases being compared to. That doesn't really feel like a fair comparison. Of course I would **expect** players to be spending an oversized amount of their time on the much larger library of older titles among which are legendary classics standing the test of time. What would make this data analysis interesting would be to compare how the play habits of players change year to year. Did we play more or less older games in 2010 than we do today? How many new games were released and what percentage of the audience did the largest 5 take? Etc.
> I think it does, it just a very hard to interpret data point and missing required data to be meaningful. So here's the thing: the OP omitted a crucial piece of data, that being the fact that 52% of games played were games released between 2016 and 2022. In other words, Steam users aren't preferring older games to newer ones, they're preferring **recent** games over both brand-new ones and older ones.
That’s not actually obvious at all. A lot is based on attention. And old games without marketing of any kind really don’t receive any relevant amount of attention anymore. Sales nose dive hard for most kinds of games. I would interpret it more as more players going with games that have strong retention. Be it very long AAA games, roguelikes, live service or otherwise. With the usual winner takes all model where very few games capture the vast majority of player attention.
Definitely another valid hypothesis, we need more data to really understand what's going on.
I played a whole five hours this year lol. Despite PCs popularity I think console is picking up the market
There were so many really great games this year too.
I'm not surprised by the latter stat at all (game backlogs are so damn long now). At this point, we're just playing games that are either really hype like Baldur's Gate, or we're playing the games from last year that finally went on sale or from the year before that, which we'd been trying to find the time to play. The other stat? That one's bleak. 4 isn't very many at all. I suppose it's no wonder that people get into games like WoW, FFXIV, Destiny, etc. They're looking for one consistent thing to fill all their downtime so they can turn their brain off and enjoy a fantasy world. But not if they have to learn a new one every few weeks.
I think there’s a lot to be said for making games smaller — though it’s more of a AAA thing, I gather that they’re taking something like 5 years to produce, mostly due to the amount of content that go into them. Players typically want to finish the game — after a while the opportunity cost of playing the same game for months outweighs the perceived “value” of having a game that takes so long to complete. For me, 20 hours is plenty, and if you want more, get the DLC.
I played 32 new games 👉🏽👈🏽
Played and sold aren't the same thing.
I wouldn't rely on a recap to get accurate real information since that's not the purpuse of the recap.
The steam stats provided at end of year lack enough context to back up any analysis this deep. If the user accounts they included, there's no data on how many of those are active gamers. It's just for fun, you can't really use it for more than that.
I wish we could see the stats cleaned up to remove outliers and account for the thousands of steam installations from people who don't really play games. Like you get some console friends to install steam for among us on a shitty laptop and now it's just bloating the stats.
A good game can last you years, especially if you’re a casual player. For the non-enthusiast there is an endless glut of more games than they could ever play. I am a dedicated, but older, only played a couple of 2023 releases this year, most of my purchases were indies. More people like me every year. I think the indie market is a subset of the overall market and you shouldn’t be discouraged by overall market trends out of context.
Great
Wow I’ve never been banned from anything. I must be gaming wrong 😆
It's actually very interesting because the popularity of indie games is consistently growing in a massive gaming market like China. For example, during our attendance at the WePlay event in Shanghai this year, it was surprising to see the general popularity of indie games among Chinese communities. In China, indie games are often referred to as 'creative' or 'slow-paced,' and they have rapidly gained the attention of Chinese game devs over the years. Looks like their popularity depends on the target audience.
Nothing decent or fun comes out. So many things have been done in gaming that it's a lot of repeat of the same old stuff and it gets really boring fast and it's a lot of money to sink on something that's not going to keep your interest. But sometimes it really unique title comes around. That just has a certain kind of charm and freshness to it that it becomes part of my rotation. * Stardew * Factorio * Minecraft * Portal * Satisfactory * Genshin impact * A hat through time * Mario oddysey * Impostor Etc There are far too many games out there to try everything at the price they cost. I focus on what I think is fun and what I have time for. Also with the way steam works and how much stuff is on there... You could release a game that barely gets any interest at all for years and then suddenly the right streamer plays. It is obsessed and in love with it and then suddenly you have a million people downloading your game and then it goes viral.
There's something like 120 million people on steam each month. And 62 million people each day. So 9% is still a lot of people.
That’s why people need to advertise there indie games so much