Let's Be Realistic: A Deep Dive into How Games Are Selling on Steam

[Music] it's not so warm because apparently I brought the weather with me so I apologize for bringing the depressing weather and also some numbers so so here's a thing in February around 850 games launched on Steam which is about 40 a day and about 82% of those didn't even make minimum wage now later in the talk I'm going to explain where these numbers are coming from but by this I mean that a singular person the the money that came out of 82% of the games that came out on Steam would not support a singular person on American minimum wage which I had to Google and and of the of every other game 7% of those games are launched on Steam actually made enough money that the studio would survive again this surviving thing is kind of my opinion of how much money you would need to survive but yeah roughly about 7% could actually go on and make another game so hello hello I am Mike I have been writing about games for a very long time if you know me already you maybe know me from when I was in D Gamescom many moons ago Gamasutra and other places I then joined published a tiny bill several years ago we did a bunch of cool stuff and then last year because I'm an egotistical maniac I decided I had to start my own publishing label because I need to control everything and that has been going alright actually thank you very much for asking we released descenders last month the developers raged squid indeed whoo they made action Hank before which was an incredible game and then they stepped it up for defenders made a downhill mountain biking game and has done pretty well for us it's it's made more money in the first month then then ragequit made in the lifetime of action Hank so I'm obviously a marketing genius but it's it's been really good it means that like all of us we can all continue to publish slash develop games for a while now and I have all the games I've just not announced them yet because I like to keep things close to my chest so we actually announcing the second no more robots game next week and maybe if your point I will show it to you so yeah as as you probably knew going into this talk I don't know what you're here this is gonna be horrible I'm gonna just give you loads of numbers now some of them are going to be more meaningful and others I'll say that straight up from now I'm giving you all the numbers so that you can then decide afterwards well I think those ones will ball and all this kind of stuff but I felt like if I gave you everything then it might help so I'm gonna tell you what the average game is selling on Steam now how much money you can actually hope to make because obviously the average game on on Steam is CAC however being an early access does anything whether having a publisher does anything where they're pricing your game like the price that you choose for your game makes any difference and whether there are certain John Roos just seems to sell better in case you want to try and do that so before I start showing numbers this is the reason why I need to give this talk this is a genuine email that I've received and I received emails like this all the time the problem is that games aren't selling on Steam anymore I mean not on many platforms but specifically Steam but a lot of developers still think they are and and and that's kind of because developers are looking at these three things here well a lot of people are coming to me saying things like well our games a bit like limbo and limbo sold millions of copies so Morgan will as well that's not how it works but I get that all the time genuinely weekly I get people talking about games that came out two years ago even games that came out one year ago you can't even use them for comparison anymore because a lot has happened in the last year right video games are all over the place especially with steam director opening up anyone could put a game on Steam now and you can't rely on just being on Steam to sell your game a year ago you couldn't now you what you would you're gonna not do well if you're doing that and I really need to troll this home because a lot of people do not listen so I'm gonna show you numbers now so all of these numbers are estimates I don't have some magic back door to steam okay however I have been doing this for a while even back from like when I was writing about games I was working out sales figures etc in fact if you were here three years ago I gave a talk about sales figures across all platforms and and and that was as far as I understand pretty close to so that sort of right numbers so I'd be doing this for a while I think these numbers are pretty spot-on so a year ago a year ago this is kind of how games were selling and it was bad a year ago it wasn't good on average games that were coming out on Steam roundabout February to March in 2017 were selling about 500 copies and making about $2,000 in their first month and I include the average price there as all because I think the the price is going to be an interesting thing maybe you want to take some things away from from how much people are pricing their games and how much money they actually get all that the this is now so this is me taking every single game that came out on Steam in February working out pretty close estimates for how much they made I'll say that I've been optimistic I I sound horrible but I would say there's a lot of games that sold zero copies but I can't prove as they sold zero copies on up because it's a difficult thing to check but on average the average game on Steam now is selling about 50 copies in its first month and making about two hundred and fifty in revenue I'm using all medians here because there's also some big launches right that's not to say there aren't massive games that come out it's just that they are a very small piece of the pie really and the the average price is five dollars which i think is just ridiculous but yeah basically steam is is very rapidly just becoming like the App Store before and everything and and it means that you haven't been able to rely on steam to sell your game for a while now but now especially please though if you I see a lot of new developers committing and thinking if I put my game on Steam people will just buy it it's not gonna happen being on Steam means nothing now it hasn't for a while and now it does not at all so yeah Steam direct launched last summer it means anyone can pay $100 to put their game on Steam where we're getting nearly 900 games I would imagine it's gonna break a thousand games a month soon so on the day like we launched descenders last month I think there were like 45 games that came out that day and not even small ones it was there was a couple of the games which were which were big names so it's a you know it's a problem so yeah this is horrible but I'm sure a lot of you right now are sitting thinking yeah but they're all crap though aren't they and and I'm I'm not gonna put out a crap game and you know what you are right a vast majority of these games that are yeah I'm using to put these numbers together are just you know unity store asset flips or just rubbish I think the the the day the dissenters came out I worked out that like about 35 out of the 45 games that came out one of them was like a clone of human but a helicopter game where you hold the spacebar and me the helicopter go like that you're not competing with Mau let's be honest you're not competing with those games so those numbers I just showed you remove them from your brain immediately door even know why I showed them to you let's look at some proper ones now this is incredibly objective because this is it's not the right word this is me removing the crap you your idea of crap might be different to mine so maybe these numbers look slightly different to yours this is when I am trying to decide how my games are going to sell I am using these numbers right here so these once I have taken that over average and then I have removed all the games that I think we're never gonna sell in the first place and only left the ones that I think have a shot of doing well it looks a bit better 2,000 copies on average in the first month 12,500 in revenue and you see that average price is like double now the average price is $12 again I'm gonna talk a little bit more about this later but I think price is important and I'm if anybody who stupidly follows me on Twitter knows every now and again I'll go off about people pricing their games to low let me get to that so so this guy Jake he he's been doing some interesting cool stuff he's British as well tell you that and he essentially worked out this incredibly rough formula I say it's incredibly rough but it's matched descenders perfectly up to now and a bunch of other people I've talked through as well I've said it's match them pretty well so essentially you take your first week of sales times that by times up by 2 and you get roughly a first month times it by 5 and you get roughly your first year so so again this is this is an even super rougher estimate than things I've been giving you but taking my numbers and using his formula you're looking at about $30,000 in revenue on average for the first year so then what I've done is I've gone through I've been I've not just been taking how much games sell and how much revenue they make up and then just pulling together all information about what kind of games they are whether they're in early exit cetera early access is just a funny one we did early access with descenders and I I think for a while now the perception of early access I think sometimes we get a little bit worried that our people aren't going to buy cuz it's an early access and it will put them off I from what I can see it's just not true at all it seems like if anything sometimes a lot of the biggest releases in February were early access games people people a lot of players they used to being involved in the development of games now and actually find it a bit of a turn-on when a game is early access so so the numbers aren't that much bigger but you can see if anybody has been worrying about putting their game in early access and thinking or what if no one wants to buy it I don't think that's the case at all and I don't think you should worry about that kind of thing does having a publisher help so for the answer seems to be yes it's a tricky one right because it depends as well and so many factors it depends on the kind of deal you get with the publisher being a publisher myself I know what some of those deals look like so so the numbers are higher the numbers are you know sort of making five times as much money but of course then the publishers taking their cut and I don't know what else they're taking your dignity but you got you got to keep that in mind right and you'll see as well the publishers on average price their games higher as well I keep going on about price so let's talk about it when we were launching descenders and we were talking about the price of it rage squid were scared to go with a higher price and I don't blame them because it looks like when you look at the price of games it looks like you play as on buying games that are higher prices and I I did a horrible publisher thing and for no I didn't I just I just talked them into a higher price we launched it for $25 and that higher price point has honestly done incredible things for the game now that's not to say that that translates perfectly it's the old game I'm not saying just just five dollars that's not how it works if you're if your game is you know is is worth sort of fifteen dollars then it's worth fifteen dollars all I would say to you is that people are paying more for games they are they absolutely are and I honestly sometimes when I when I talk to like people in our community for example a lot of players will say that when they're looking at all the games that are coming out on Steam that day but ones that are higher price will actually jump out at them because they're like oh well why do they think they can charge more than everybody else so in a really weird way if your game if you think you know what my game might be worth more than um I'm giving it credit for it makes such a big difference because as well down the line you know when it comes to to sales when we eventually far far far down the line do a half price sale for descenders now it's basically like a full price launch for the average game on Steam which is amazing for us but yeah I this is this is one of those situations where maybe you maybe you know what your your game should be priced but do do have a think about it I really urge you to because I talk to developers all the time who are just pricing themselves lower and it makes a massive difference you know I did one of these word clouds I've not done one of these in years and I thought it might be funny so so I took all the genres of like the top 100 games and turn them into one of these word cloud things I mean survival and crafting a big did you know I couldn't believe it and shooters who would have thought I liked that bikes was there I feel like I was you know doing 140 I mean there was there was a couple of the bike games that came out as well but I was best and then there's a there's a few small ones as well which we're interesting visual novels do pretty well I don't know how many of you play that many visual novels and stuff but visual novels rarely explode but they a lot of the time due to pretty pretty darn well so yeah its dad this is this is probably the least useful slide in the whole thing don't worry but I I just thought it was pretty so I don't write I I talked really fast and showed you a bunch of numbers so here's a bit of a recap about 93 percent of people who are releasing games on Steam right now they don't make enough money that after they've released that game they can go make another money another morning another game and I don't mean of course you gotta be you know I'm sure a lot of people are doing it while also having a full time job or whatever so that's not taking that into consideration this is I'm talking doing games full time so ignore me if you're not one of those people but the the average PC game even after you cut out all the crap is making about $30,000 in the first year what you should take away from that is that you should have a plan basically you need to have a plan myself and rage grid we we plan for what if no one cares about mountain biking is every chance no one was gonna care so we planned what happens if this game tanks and and we had backup plans for what we were gonna do you need to have one of those because you don't just want it you don't want to get caught in a horrible situation where you release your game it it doesn't do as well as you were hoping you feel like crap because everybody do it even if your game feels while you feel that crap right so you're gonna feel like crap and then you you just spiral because so I I just urge you to please look at this number and think what happens if I make that in year one will I be okay what can I do on the side what can I do about it so things you can do about it you can come to one of these talks we I there's not enough time for me to talk it's you know in this talk about how you actually do be in that top seven percent however I am giving talk tomorrow and then the same talk on Friday so if you can't make it tomorrow then you can come to the Friday you want don't go to both that would be silly but it's going to be a talk that doesn't cover all of the things you've already heard before I'm not gonna be talking about how to write a press release or make a trailer or talk to youtubers or anything like that I'm going to be talking about what I found were the most important things that guaranteed of success with descenders that that no one ever talks about that just you know sort of the image of your game and the way that you the way you approach deals with the game and all that kind of stuff that maybe you haven't thought about but you really should be because it's the kind of stuff that actually makes games sell now cool that's it thank you I hope you're okay [Applause]

Channel: GDC

Views: 164,972

Rating: 4.5410147 out of 5

Keywords: gdc, talk, panel, game, games, gaming, development, hd, design, no more robots, mike rose, steam, steam sales

Id: WycVOCbeKqQ

Length: 19min 20sec (1160 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 02 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/codergaard]

He has some good points behind the hyperbole. He is spot on about pricing being important, about planning, about not being optimistic about sales, about the sheer number of poorly selling games, etc. But he's wrong that it's depressing. It's also not possible to make a clear separation between trash and non-trash games. There are nuances, because some of the games that are not trash can still be incredibly uninspired and/or shallow. It's not possible to make that cutoff as cleanly as he claims.

Turn it around - 7% of all games released make enough money to fund another game (and that's arguably counting titles that are not "serious" attempts). That's PRETTY DARN GOOD for a creative industry! That's not the case in music, not the case in theatre, not the case in movies, possibly not even novellists have these kinds of stats.

It's risky business starting a game dev company. That's not surprising. Entrepreneurship in general is risky and often much less financially rewarding than a regular job. Many, many entrepreneurs in all kinds of business have trouble surviving on their primary business, and need to secure funding, have side jobs, etc. It's normal. I really don't understand this weird fixation on indie game dev not being automtically financially viable as something extremely horrible and depressing.

Anyone who is even contemplating financial security to a degree that they expect minimum wages should not be starting a business. Starting a business is highly likely to involve long periods of extremely low payoff, lots of work, and a low chance of success. Not to mention how important business acumen is when doing this.

Being an indie game dev is not a job, it's running a start-up, which is unforgiving, unpredictable and unlikely to succeed. It carries tons of benefits, but for some it may not be the right choice, and a salaried job is the better way to go. It's depressing when people don't realize this, and get bitter, resentful and angry about something that is a natural state of things.

[u/Swiftster]

I'm surprised we got to 18% above minimum wage, I would have figured closer to a 1% value.

[u/tylerguitar75]

It’s not a dice roll. No 2 products are created equally.

[u/LeCrushinator]

ITT: People who didn't watch the video. He addressed a lot of points people here are trying to argue about.

[u/goodnewsjimdotcom]

I have done indie for 26 years. I made minimum wage one year, the rest nothing. I actually get a rush now programming since it is so easy to do big things with less code. I've gone from wanting to make money with my video games to,"This stokes me to game develop."

[u/Woolbrick]

Not at all shocking.

I remember in the early days of app store dev, it was revealed that something like 95% of all app store apps never even made a single sale.

One of the major problems is that there's far more games being developed than there are people with time to play them. You have 1000 new games being released every day, and in order to compete for precious downloads, they all have to be free, because nobody is going to plonk down $5 for a game when there's 900 new free alternatives every day.

This speaks to a much greater problem with the economy in general. With the advent of AI taking over service jobs, we're going to be transitioning to creativity-based economy, but there's simply not enough people to consume the products. The same problem is happening with the music industry right now. There's so much new music, and it has to compete with every other piece of music that's ever been written before, that the price of new music is now essentially zero, because if you want someone to hear your song, you have to give it out for free now, or else nobody is ever going to hear it.

We should probably start to talk about this problem as a society. But I'm not sure we're mature enough to do that.

[u/Kinglink]

82 percent of games also probably sucked?

Listen I'm all for Indie game devs getting sales but if the product you put out looks like this you don't deserve a ton of money and sales. I'm sorry making a game doesn't entitle you to fabulous riches, if it did less studios would fold. Even making a playable game doesn't entitle you to it, and there's even great games that have failed such as Psychonauts and Jade Empire.

That's the thing. Making games is fucking hard. It's not a process. It's an art. If you're a designer or a small indie studio, you might make something good that no one likes, you might make something shitty that sells a lot (Rust) you might get beaten by Hannah Montana, and yet you'll try.

It's just a simple fact of life, sometimes you'll hit gold, but the fact is most of these people making games on steam currently are making their first games, finishing before it's unique publishing it and going "Why am I not a millionaire?" If it was that easy I would have gone indie a long time ago.

[u/LawlausaurusRex]

Steam is acting a lot like YouTube now... they don't care if they have a billion trash games selling one unit each or a hundred great games selling thousands of units each. For Steam, the profit is almost the same. That's why Steam needs a real competitor, one that will keep them in check and make them think twice about annoying their customers and devs.

[u/zase8]

Here are the same slides for Jan 2018 https://drive.google.com/file/d/1rp1UcpI_96IeiXAAMRwAFjPWw9O6dNFE/view