A ridiculous amount of games release on Steam every week and basically none of them make any money. It only takes a cursory browse of Steam’s unfiltered new release list to understand why this is true.
But which genre is most likely to make money or be a hit? Ichiro Lambe, Matt Martindale and Dr. Tim Ermilov have collaborated on a Steam revenue report on weloveit.io and, as the name implies, the purpose of the site is to estimate the earnings of all Steam games, or at least, those with a price tag and at least one review.
The trio doesn’t have access to Valve’s internal sales data, so they rely on the Boxleiter method to estimate that data, which assumes that a games’ review count is “roughly proportional of its sales, so multiplying reviews by a constant gives an estimated unit count.” For a standard estimate (rather than a conservative or generous one) the multiplier is 35 times the amount of user reviews.
This may not provide exact figures, but as the site notes, it’s a technique used by analysts and publishers and there aren’t very many better ways to arrive at a sales estimate. And so, in the style of all great data enthusiasts, they’ve used the technique to map the success (or lack thereof) of over 100,000 Steam games in handy graph form.
Baldur’s Gate 3 is estimated to have made $1,795,480,003 since its early access launch in late 2020. On the other hand Free Solo, a physics climbing game released in March, has made an estimated $34.
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In the graph below every dot is an individual game (for a much better view of this graph you’ll need to visit weloveit.io).
(Image credit: weloveit.io)
I was fascinated by the “genre economics” section, which uses user tags to get a sense of how genres rank on Steam. “A game counts towards a genre only when the tag is one of its six most popular tags,” according to the study, so there needs to be pretty unanimous agreement among Steam users that the tag is accurate.
According to the data, sandbox games have the highest “hit rate” on Steam. Hit rate measures the amount of games with the tag that have made more than $100k. The sandbox tag has a 27.3% hit rate.
Of course,”sandbox” is unwieldy and impractical as a genre designation: the most popular games with the tag are unhelpfully different: Terraria, Red Dead Redemption 2 and Project Zomboid. But it does at least demonstrate that games promising some amount of freedom are preferred by Steam users, whether they be sloppy retail sims or $400 million cowboy adventures.
The next tag, FPS, is probably the “real” genre winner. It has a 21.6% hit rate, though keep in mind a lot of games that aren’t strictly focused on shooting, like Schedule I or Portal 2, are tagged with FPS.
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Here’s the top 10 genres on Steam according to their hit rate:
Swipe to scroll horizontally
Rank
Genre / Tag
Hit rate (amount that made more than $100k)
1
Sandbox
27.3%
2
FPS
21.6%
3
RPG
19.4%
4
Simulation
16.9%
5
Visual Novel
16.5%
6
Horror
16.1%
7
Strategy
16.1%
8
Racing
15.8%
9
Roguelite
15.3%
10
Sports
14.8%
There aren’t a huge amount of surprises in that list. I guess I’m surprised to see visual novels rank so highly, though they are ubiquitous on Steam. Sports probably ranks highly because there are fewer games to which it applies compared to, say, “puzzle”, a tag with a 9.5% hit rate.
The lowest ranking tags (according to report’s list, at least) are probably more telling. Hidden Object games have a 5.4% hit rate, while 2D platformers have a 5.5% hit rate. Developing a game in either of those genres is thus, according to the study, risky business. Though they may also be cheaper to develop, and thus more common, and thus less likely to be discovered.
The full study is well worth browsing because it’s full of great insights. For example: 2D platformers have severely dropped off in popularity since their heyday of 2016, but visual novels have remained almost consistently popular since 2014.
Top Steam games by revenue (August 18 – 25)
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Rank
Game
1
Counter-Strike 2
2
How to Fish
3
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4
4
Mortal Shell II
5
Wardogs
6
Apex Legends
7
Dota 2
8
Stalker 2
9
Helldivers 2
10
Marvel Rivals
First of all, its worth noting that Star Wars Zero Company released on the 28th, and its review embargo lifted on the 26th, so next week’s chart will better reflect its launch performance. It still came in at number 12, rising 12 positions for what must have been an eleventh hour rush on pre-orders (there were cosmetic pre-order incentives).
Based on the chart—which is, as always, a reflection of best performers by revenue and not necessarily by units sold—Mortal Shell 2 had a successful launch, but probably no where near as successful as How to Fish. The latter is a 1-4 player “physics-based fishing simulator, and while it looks like quintessential friendslop on the surface, it’s a whole lot more violent than normal. It looks very fun.
The Wardogs beta obviously paid off as a taster for the full game, which releases next month. As for Stalker 2, it got a massive 2.0 update last week and a steep discount, hence its reappearance on the list.
Last week’s Steam deep cuts
(Image credit: Ronesans Interactive)