How Steam Direct, PUBG and the rise of China affected the biggest PC gaming marketplace in 2017. — The following article is based on the presentation I gave at GDC 2018. The data was gathered during February 2018 and by now is probably slightly outdated. Obligatory Fine Print Steam Spy only tracks owners and players, not sales. Steam Spy doesn’t track DLCs or MTXs. It’s impossible to distinguish between games sold…

An average indie title these days is priced $8.72 on Steam. During the last Summer Sale the price went down to the mind-boggling $4.63 and yet the average sales are at their lowest at 21,000 copies. — Small indie titles usually have a smaller audience save for a few outliers. The problem with our approach is that people seem to normalize extremely successful breakout hits while assuming everything that didn’t sell north of a million copies is a complete failure.

You’ve heard this talk before: iPad was supposed to replace PC for the majority of casual users dragging us into the sci-fi future of thin and powerful devices that can do everything. Of course, it didn’t happen and is unlikely to happen shortly, but iPad can indeed replace PC in…

In 2016 there were 5,245 new games released on Steam — the biggest year yet for new releases. Yet, the overall sales and revenue from paid titles were roughly the same as the last year. Important note: The following data was gathered using Steam Spy service. Steam Spy estimates ownership…

Over 4000 games were released on Steam this year alone. Some of those games, to put it mildly, are of dubious quality and got bad reviews. So gamers started asking: “Why won’t Valve filter new games like it did before Greenlight”? I don’t work at Valve, so everything below is…

Recently there have been several reports about some AAA titles under performing in what considered to be a traditionally good season for big games. Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare and Watch Dogs 2 are two prime examples, although people seem to forget about Battlefield 1 that got double the audience of Battlefield 4 at launch. — Rob Fahey wrote an interesting article at GamesIndustry.biz about the transition our industry is going through, but his version of the future seems to be focused exclusively on console and maybe PC titles without taking into account all other gaming platforms and niches.

This was the first Steam Summer Sale without any daily or flash deals. And despite the perception of some of the core gamers, it ended up better than the previous one for both game developers and consumers: gamers bought more games, developers earned more money. …

As a person born in the Soviet Union and raised in Ukraine, I grew up in a bit different culture than most people reading this. The post-Soviet culture was patriarchal, favoring young and healthy over the people with disabilities. Despite that post-Soviet game developers were one of the first to…

Analytics for indies 101 — Along with marketing & PR, market research and analytics are still considered to be something reserved exclusively for “the big guys” — either major publishers or free-to-play behemoths. Some indie developers even go as far as to declare these tools “evil”, and stand by our ancestral ways of doing things…