This post comes out of a discussion I had with another gaming industry expert a few weeks ago. Their observation was that more coop games and live service games were being released recently. Observational bias or not?
Here is what the data tells us.
Coop games
770 games were released on Steam with the coop tag by the end of November this year, as I first wrote this article. Out of 13,095 total released games to date on Steam this year, that amounts to 5.8%.
Same period last year in 2022, 597 out of 10816 or 5.5%. Same period in 2021, 527 out of 9696, or 5.4%.
So we do not seem to be really skewing towards coop games overall, or if so, very slowly.
That being said, if you only look at games that sold over 10,000 copies lifetime, the numbers look a bit different.
In 2021: 13.1% were tagged with coop, 2022: 12.2%. And 2023? 16%. So indeed there is a jump in the more popular titles, and as such, the titles one hears about, likely explaining the initial observation.
Live service games
To simplify the study, I am only looking at the top 50 games by Steam revenue for 2021, 2022, 2023 according to Gamalytic.
I am using a broad definition of live service here and am considering any title with a sizable post-launch support (i.e. more than just 1st month patches but rather either an active Early Access period, regular DLCs or updates). As we are considering overall trends across genres, this seems appropriate.
Results for 2021: 18% of the top 50 were not live service, 20% in 2022, and 2023: 18%. So, fairly stable. 2022 was a bit higher due to a number of Sony first-party, single-player tent-pole titles being released that year.
Conclusion
In short, coop games are not growing in overall share of games released on Steam, but they are definitely more represented in the higher selling games (over 10,000 copies lifetime), and their share of those higher selling games has increased this year in 2023.
My prediction here is that this increase will slow down but that the overall numbers will not start decreasing in the foreseeable future.
Live service games (again, on a very broad definition), are on the other hand remaining pretty stable in their share of the top 50 grossing games in the last three years.
My prediction is that they will start decreasing late next year as the ripples from recent failed live service games start impacting new projects leaving the developers and publishers pipelines.
And what about you? What observations have you had recently on the trend of game releases?
Considerations and caveats
Here are some considerations when looking at the data presented in this article.
First, the data only concerns titles released on PC on Steam for the first 11 months of the previous years (that’s to say year to date for 2023 and the corresponding period for the previous year). The reason was to have comparable period for each year, although I do not expect December to behave differently from the rest of the year.
I limited the study to the “coop" tag as it is very prevalent when compared to the “coop campaign" tag on Steam.
The live service study was limited to the top 50 titles simply as the tagging had to be done manually.
An important consideration for the data on live service games is that it is quite tempting for a developer or a publisher to keep supporting and monetizing very successful titles even if that wasn’t planned at first. As a result, looking only at top-selling titles might skew even harder towards live service than the general population.
However, looking at the actual titles, my take is that the vast majority of those titles had a live service thought through as part of the game from the moment of release. I excluded for instance games like Dredge and Hi-Fi Rush. Although these games did have some DLCs and/or sizable but sporadic updates, these seemed to me to be a reaction to their initial success (good for these games) and perhaps not as something originally planned. I may be wrong in this.
Source of data: Gamalytic and my own efforts which I hope to make public soon. Curious? Reach out on LinkedIn!