Best games on steam market2/29/2024 ![]() I have seen many developers achieve life-changing success – the type of success where you can pay off your mortgage, your mom’s mortgage and then not have to worry about money for at least another decade. ![]() But it would be pretty bleak.īut success on Steam is possible. I could take all the data across all games released by indie developers on Steam and find the average. All the data you see on the Benchmark page are from direct surveys I or other people have done. Therefore I have conducted a number of surveys and broad based data collection projects to get a quantitative assessment of what is typical. So I decided to document it in a new page called “Benchmarks”Īs I have worked on more and more games, consulted for publishers, and seen numbers shared by other developers on my Discord, I have gotten a pretty good sense of what is “normal.” But gut instinct is not enough. It is so confusing and none of this is documented anywhere. I feel for anyone just entering this space. If you had asked me at the start of my indie career what a typical wishlist conversion rate looks like I would have said “I don’t know 75% probably, but 95% if they really like your game.”īut guess what? A really good rate for Steam is 20% of your wishlists converting to a sale. Now, with those buckets established, let me give you my gut-check, ball-park, mental-model numbers of what weekly wishlist numbers look like for games in each of these buckets. Valve also sends you chocolate at Christmas time. Valve will start coming to you to ask if they can feature your game in one promotion or another. If you do an update, Valve will post your game in every widget they can. This is the bucket that every indie secretly hopes for when they launch their game. This is the bucket that I think one indie once called “F#CK you” money. This bucket is for the games that earn the real money. □ Diamond (Life Changing money): $1 Million+ ![]() Also your monthly earnings are consistent and you don’t have to do much promotion to earn them. You probably aren’t rich, but you and your team can start using the various Steam tools to promote your game. That is why I call this “Real Steam.” Basically Steam starts working for you at this earnings level. Also it is at this level where I start to see the various widget algorithms start to show the game day in day out. Why did I pick this specific number? In my experience, if your gross lifetime revenue is this amount and you ask Valve for a Daily Deal, they will usually approve you. In my experience, the Steam algorithm is kind of tuned to promote games that earn $250,000 or more. For more information on why games stall out, read my blog post about the middle domino theory. Games at this tier will often “stall out” at the 100-200 review range within the first 6 months and then just stop growing. Games at this earning level will also not get recommend via the Steam algorithm. The reason I stopped bellow $250,000 is that once you earn more than this number, Steam usually starts to give you some additional promotion. This bucket is still quite low but could be considered profitable if you are doing this part time, or as a hobby. Games in this bucket typically don’t get more than 10 reviews and the Steam algorithm will not recommend this game through the various widgets. So this result is usually a disappointment to most devs. I mean, if you made the game in 1 week and earned $5,000 that is pretty good, but, most indie developers don’t do that. This revenue bucket indicates that the game underperformed by most measures. Here are the gross, lifetime earning tiers: I have been doing this Steam thing for a while, and there are 4 possible levels of success your game can have.
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