"Last April, the average number of copies sold per game was 13,655. This April, it’s been 7,188". Those numbers are also wildly inflated because of bundles (pennies on the dollar) and steam sales.
Average sales dropping, but top games doing just as well?
Seems like a market saturation story to me. Steam is slowly going the same way as the app stores.
Give it a couple more years and just being on steam won’t be enough to generate sales.
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Ya its getting to to the point where your better off somehow driving traffic to your own site
Well it’s hardly surprising, right? I’m not sure why so many folks around here seem to not realize it (hundreds of thousands, or whatever it is, of people working on games they will actually release sooner or later) is an issue and talk about “make better games”. That does nothing if nobody can find them.
I agree with you completely about [learning marketing and] building traffic to your own online properties. Currently, places such as the mobile app stores and Steam have a very sweet thing going on. People do the work to build the games. Then they link to their games on those sites providing a massive amount (across all of the tens of thousands developers) of free marketing happening for them.
However, it’s really not wise. I mean sure these stores have done a lot to help people connect with gamers. I’m not saying they haven’t helped out some folks. Obviously they did. But still it is always better to promote your own business instead of someone else’s (unless you’re doing it to practice marketing) and at the end of the day every link to a game on Steam or a mobile app store is helping to drive more traffic to their business not yours. I imagine many times someone follows a link to a game on Steam or a mobile app store then ends up browsing around, forgets completely about why they went there to begin with and tries a different game entirely.
I still believe the biggest issue is simply the number of people doing this. Imagine if every game dev focused on mastering marketing. It would just result in a massive amount of campaigns which would basically just drown each other out and it would end up back at the same place again.
But I think less people will be willing to focus on marketing and business building than focusing on game dev and posting a thread or a link or two to their game on Steam, etc. Focusing on marketing is the more sensible way to stand out instead of focusing on “make better games”. Obviously, just my view here not saying it is written in stone (although to me… yeah it kind of is lol).
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I mostly agree with you. But I’ll still say the winners are going to be the ones who “make a better game”. Trouble is better game is a relative standard. It’s not about making a game that is “this good”. It’s about making a game that is “better then the competitors”.
The absolute quality level of succesful games is spiralling upwards at a phenomenal rate.
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I agree with this for sure. I think it is from being misguided and “pushed” in this direction by many people sort of chanting a mantra “make a better game” over and over. So… people are trying harder especially on the presentation side.
Of course, I agree a person should make a good game. Or even a great game. BUT… there are plenty of games out there (especially on mobile) that obviously look to be quite well done, get very good ratings from players (those that actually played) and yet they are not very popular.
Here are 3 examples of Steam games that are extreme (chosen on purpose) to illustrate this:
Khaba 13 Reviews “Positive” Rating
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_qBTG0hRfkM
Project Tarvotan 7 Reviews “Mostly Positive” Rating
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTqMIgPdhfQ
RETSNOM 45 Reviews “Positive” Rating
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=df6XoyT5DjE
The key thing here is each of these games seems to be well done. Certainly enough they have Positive and Mostly Positive ratings on Steam by the people who bought them. The problem here is despite the amount of effort and time put into developing the games… it seems nobody knows about them.
At least now with this post a few more people will know about them. 
Looking around on Steam you can easily find other games with far more reviews and yet a Mixed or Mostly Negative rating. That is what blows the “better game” argument out of the water for me.
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It is the synergy of a good game, good marketing, and good luck.
EDIT: oh, karma, and voodoo also…
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Both are required. But the presentation side really depends on having a good game. If you post a video of gameplay, that will be most of your presentation. As developers we can too often look at the wrong things. When you look at a game (even yours), you need to ask yourself, “Would I play this?”. Obviously easier said than done, but you get the idea.
That falls under looking at it as a developer. Players don’t care if a “game looks well done”, they care if it looks like a game they want to play. Ratings can influence, but a handful of ratings mean nothing. People who buy games on steam understand that. You can easily find a dozen people that will like anything. A more meaningful statistic would be how many people looked at the page.
Looking at your examples:
The first thing I thought when looking at the video is that should be a mobile game. The second thing I thought was there was way too much dialog for a simple puzzler. Then I checked their site and found there is a mobile version. (poor marketing). The mobile version is 99¢ (not bad), but has no video, and the description doesn’t actually tell you what the gameplay is, and you can’t tell from the video. I wouldn’t buy it on steam. If I discovered it in the app store, I would skip it because I have no clue what kind of game it is, and not going to spend a buck to find out. The sad thing is that it appears to be exactly the type of game I love, puzzlers. I am their audience, but poor marketing choices never put the game in place would find it, or presented in a way I would know it was a game for me. (though I did actually buy it).
The video you posted is the developer talking about being an indie developer, not the game. As a player, I don’t care. (as a developer, don’t care either) The page on steam is tragic. Video doesn’t show gameplay in a meaningful way, and honestly, it looks painfully generic and cobbled together. (Space Shuttle shooting something?) Bad camera work and unclear graphics. And to top it off this is the description of the game:
[quote]
Project Tarvotan allows you to explore the depths of the Milky Way and local universe. Use your wit and resources at hand to plan out your path through each sector. Your demise lurks around every decision. Can you survive long enough and restore balance to the universe?
[/quote]What does that even mean? Is it a map type tactical game? Do I fly a ship? That is just story. Great for a book, bad for a game. The further description is more of the same. Frankly, it might be a good game, despite the graphics, but there is nothing to give me a clue as to what the gameplay is. As a player, I would skip it after the video.
Meh. It’s pretty much the cliche overdone indie game. Pixel platformer. There are thousands out there. It doesn’t look awful, but the repetitive blocks are doing it no favors. Google: indie pixel platformer, its not the worst, but wouldn’t stand out on page full of others. It’s a saturated genre, but has a good fan base. But there are a butt-load of more compelling competitors, and this one isn’t visually compelling or innovative. (its basically a clone of hit game Shift.) Though, at least their description is clean and clear:
The first one might do well if they did some basic marketing. The others are meh at best. Meh doesn’t sell games. Not when there are tons of Wow! games out there.
That isn’t necessarily the correct conclusion. Maybe millions of people know about them, they just weren’t interested. Tarvotan appears to have sold ~4000 copies, but averages 1 person playing it a day.
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Clickbait?
This data is not very useful.
I’d like to see median average instead of arithmetic mean.
Also, an attempt to check for correlation between steam rating and number of copies sold.
Also profit data.
Also, breakdown by tags/genre.
Also, average during sale/non-sale.
Also, graph of sales for the game lifetime.
Same data graphed on daily/yearly/monthly data.
Just two numbers from the same month one year apart… that’s not useful.
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Honestly median would be pretty meaningless also.
This whole thread is click bait. Sales aren’t ‘plummeting’ there are just way more titles than a year ago. I’m not sure if I’d call it saturation, but they eased up on greenlight and there are games flooding steam.
I don’t think anyone who’s done their homework in the last year expected steam itself to generate tons of sales for them.
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Well, at the very least it would allow you to check if last april had a big seller game that inflated the arithmetic mean.
Either way, when I see titles like this I start thinking that the author is trying to manipulate the readers (and lie to them) using statistics - in order to trick more people into reading author’s sh… stuff.
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I agree, but I think that in this situation the median may drop faster than the mean, you’re dealing with steam releasing like 2x or 3x more titles than it did a year ago.
But yeah, you always gotta ignore statistics. They’re all lies.
The real question is just total sales, which I imagine are actually increasing. My money is on the pie itself being bigger, even if you need to elbow more people out of the way to get your slice.
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Maybe check this out:
https://www.humblebundle.com/store/infinifactory?hmb_source=search_bar
I only started playing yesterday, but my first impression is very positive. The setting is roughly similar to portal, the puzzles are based around machine blocks a la minecraft/tekkit.
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Who needs better search capabilities at stores when I have the unity forums. 
That looks right up my alley, downloading now, thanks!
And as related to the topic, saturation and volume of games is a condition that I don’t see a simple solution for at the store or distribution level. Recommendations account for most games I play these days.
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Well steam had the curators but that just got dominated by the big youtubers which made it kind of useless. But they need something like you like Turret defence games well theres a front page and lists just listing all the good turrret defence games, another one for golf games etc.
Even then the curator stuff is pretty much dead once people realised that they don’t actually get anything out of it for the time they spend on it. A few YouTubers I watch made an off-hand remark about Steam curation a couple weeks ago the basically it started big and now no-one uses it.
What these statistics could be saying is that since the top selling games haven’t noticed any decline in sales and it’s only the average sales per game going down then first off there’s more games on the market for the same amount of buyers (probably wrong, market is growing) or no-one is buying the worst 100 etc. This could just be a sign that people have learned how to determine the games that are worth playing and deserve their cash and steer clear if they’re unsure. I’ve been burned personally a few times buying games that looked decent to begin with but were actually steaming trash.
As for the 3 games shown above…I wouldn’t buy or play any of those. They don’t look appealing or like they’re doing anything different or interesting. Plenty of better games I can spend my time on. That’s another metric people need to start taking into account as well. Gamers don’t just spend money on a game, they spend time. You have to show them that your game is worth both. Unless a game stands out then even if its $1 I’m not going to buy it because it isn’t worth my time.
I’d hope that with the average sales per game going down that it’d mean people who make the trash games would stop trying to make a cash grab but even if they do the reality is 10 others are already “working” on games of similar quality to push out onto Steam.
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It’s already not. A friend of mine has a couple of games on Steam. The newer of the two is incredibly successful - he did an amazing job of picking the right game to make, making it well, and then kicking ass in all of the related support activities. The other game, from somewhat earlier, got on Steam and I think he said it trickles in a few dollars a month. I could be wrong on that figure, but it was clear that there was no point having that game on Steam for the purpose of income generation.
That’s only one case study, so on its own we we can’t draw any hard conclusions from it, but I still think it’s safe to say that the days where just being on Steam was enough to make a project worthwhile are already long gone.
That’s assuming that they ever existed in the first place, of course. Back when Steam was highly curated, sure, just getting there may have been an indicator of success, but it might not have been the sole factor. Getting there was harder, which meant that to do it you needed a better game and you needed to already be doing a good job pushing it yourself. I suspect that it wasn’t so much that games were successful because they were on Steam so much as that games were on Steam because they were already becoming successful.
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Well, Greenlight etc. suddenly removed a barrier to entry to a system that lots of people were lined up to get into. The result was a massive and immediate jump in growth. There has been no similar increase on the purchaser side - that’s just the same steady growth it’s always had.
So, yes, the “average” has plummeted because that’s just how averages work. The same amount of stuff is now being spread amongst more people. The recent increase in supply has radically outstripped any recent increases in demand.
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As long as someone is making huge amounts of money then the trend will continue. These sorts of things are more often driven by the maximum amount of money made, instead of by the average. The chance of striking it big is appealing, even if mathematically it makes no sense.
Check out the extra credits video where they discuss the concept.
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To be honest that kind of makes sense, though. Who looks at the unsuccessful masses on Steam and says “I want to be like them?” Nobody. Targets are set based on the successful stuff. “Can I make a game as good as that?” and “if I do make a game as good as that, will people want to play it?”
It also goes back a bit to what others were saying about the average being a useless number. I really don’t care what unsuccessful games are making financially. What matters is a) how do we make our games successful? and b) if we manage to crack that nut then how much might our game make?
All of this stuff really only matters to people who want to make games commercially and are willing and able to approach it as a business, though. People doing this for fun, or for art-for-art’s-sake, can achieve what they want out of this without caring about all this.
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