Valve, Data Deep Dive: How are new releases on Steam performing?

[Maddox]

We are constantly examining how the growth of Steam affects new titles and what it means for developers. Usually, our own internal questions mirror those of many in the development community.

One of our goals is to be a platform where great games can realize success. So a natural place to start this analysis was to ask: Are more games finding success? Of course, "success" is different for each developer, so we looked at several different benchmarks of success in this analysis.

Regardless of how we defined success, though, we found that an increasing number of games were achieving it.

We were encouraged by the results above - there are more hits than ever these days, and it looks like our decision to open the platform helped that happen. But we also wanted to study how releases across the distribution – such as the median release, the 25th percentile release, and the 75th percentile release – were doing. (The 'median release' is the game that half the releases did better than and half the releases did worse than. You could also call it the '50th percentile release.')

Here's a summary of what we found:

• Over the years, there's been a continuous increase in the number of games achieving success on Steam. We'll dig into this in the first section below.
• Earnings prospects for most - but not all - games improved in 2019. We'll dig into this in the second section below.

Steam :: Steamworks Development :: Data Deep Dive: How are new releases on Steam performing?

We are constantly examining how the growth of Steam affects new titles and what it means for developers. Usually, our own internal questions mirror those of many in the development community. In an effort to share some of our findings, we've put together the following post on how new releases...

steamcommunity.com