Average Game on Steam Sells an Estimated 32,000 Units - News
by William D'Angelo , posted on 22 June 2015 / 7,094 Views
Steam is one of the largest digital distribution services for video games. However, a new report by Sergey Galyonkin, which utilised data gathered by Steam Spy, has calculated that the average game on Steam sells just 32,000 units.
"The average game on Steam does not sell really well, at least not since 2012. While we all heard about breakdown success of some big titles, it doesn’t apply to your average title. The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim has about 8.6 million users on Steam, Grand Theft Auto V sold about 2.2 million copies in less than a month, but how does the average game on Steam perform? The answer is 32,000 copies."
The 32,000 figure might seem low, but that does include Early Access titles, which sell just 9,000 units on average. RPGs sell the best on average, with 55,000 units. The action and strategy genres are also popular, with average sales of 50,000 units and 40,000 units, respectively.
Free-to-Play games average 330,000 downloads. However, the majority of people who play free-to-play games do not purchase content. Galyonkin estimates that the "optimistic conversion rate" is 10 percent, or 33,000 paying users on average.
The average sales per game increased annually through 2012. However, ever since Valve made it easier for indie developers to release games for the platform average sales have decreased each year, starting in 2013.
"It’s no longer enough to just launch your game on Steam to sell something. Now you have to do PR, marketing, support and all the other stuff that only big companies were paying attention to before.
Unfortunately. marketing and PR isn’t a guarantee for a success. While it will obviously amplify your game sales tenfolds, it won’t mean much if the game isn’t performing really well on the word-of-mouth alone."
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A life-long and avid gamer, William D'Angelo was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel dedicated to gaming Let's Plays and tutorials. You can contact the author at wdangelo@vgchartz.com or on Twitter @TrunksWD.
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Not all of these games are bought either. Some are randomly made available for free or could be played for free over a week-end like Skyrim (that 8.6M number isn't the number of people who bought the game).
Very good article. Extremely well made. Keep it up, Will.
Most games on Steam are indie junk. So not that surpising. I get the impression PC games generally dont sell well at full price either.
Can somebody please explain to my how there being "crap" games on Steam causes "good" games to sell less? Because that's what I keep hearing. Fr the most part, I see alot of these "crap" titles sink to the depths of the steam store, so i really odn't understand why this affects anything.
In this case average is a bad statistic, since the 32K average will be badly skewed (too high) by the likes of Skyrim and GTA V that sell in the millions. The "average game" will in all likelihood sell much less than 32K. I wonder what the median game sales are. Median is a better indicator of what someone could expect to sell in this case because that controls for the mega selling AAA titles.
What about average price for games. You would think only games get sold at massive reductions in the steam sales.
YES STRATEGY!!!! :D
How do they keep shooters out of the ranking?
Probably placed under the "action" category.
Since opening the flood gates to a lot of plagiarized games via steam green light, a low average would be expect. The median sales of the games produced by the larger publishers would be a more representative figure of steam's health.
Steam has over 3700 games. Most of those are trash. So it's not surprise.
A pretty subjective opinion. Steam is newly discovered Platform for Visual Novels and also JRPG's. It's a great Platform for such Niche-Games and I'm happy to see specific Games there. Of course there is much Shovel-Ware on Steam available, but no one is forced to buy these Titles.
I know, but there are games like "Rock simulator" or tens of different pixel RPG titles.
@Koinzell of course no one is forced to buy the crap. But the point is the crap is there and it makes the numbers in the article somewhat skewed downwards. Unless you filter out the shovel-ware that no one buys then the real numbers are still anyone's guess.
Surprising? not at all. this is the result of high fragmentation of the market, the flood of low budget and low quality games. this is what you wanted, this is what you get. buckets and buckets of crap, and underneath them, burried and suffercating, the games that once made the PC great.
