The report itself is a good read, https://vginsights.com/assets/reports/VGI_Global_PC_Games_Market_Report_2024.pdf
The best performing games of 2023 tended to focus on quality, lack of microtransactions and creativity coming from small teams
this post was submitted on 05 Jan 2024
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take a very big fistful of salt when reading those data mining firms. They might have paid access to dbs from steamspy or steamdb but as we all know they are not accurate reflection of actual sales etc, only steam and the developers has those data from their analytics.
They are trying to sell you charts and predictions, they are not there to provide accurate information if you read the charts or * carefully.
LOL, most followed in a prediction chart, they don't even know you can buy follow/wishlist as marketing strategy.
Yeah you can no longer get accurate information data mining achievements. The most basic way I know to get this info is looking at reviews and calculating out how many people likely bought the game. This can be made more accurate with the score of the game and the genre/popularity. I bet some machine learning is involved along with leaked stats. It's still interesting neverless.
The basic "error" for these data mine company is not how they estimate, it's that their source data is already not accurate. Ie, when they determine revenue, they are using how many new games claimed during that period of time from source like steamdb/steamspy, probably have per region information. But steam are not the only platform that are selling steam keys, and use Steam figures "only" is significant but not accurate as there are still other platforms on PC that still takes significant chunk of the market. (ie. EGS, GOG, HumbleBundle, itch.io, key reseller: GMG, CDKEY, etc.) If your game published and selling on many platform, chance are about 5~15% could come from those secondary platforms depending on how they run seasonal sales. Thus, the key redeemed on steam does not mean it's always the steam price at the time.
That and revenue not including mtx or IAP is ridiculous in claiming recent gaming trend or consumer behavior. If you have access to some internal financial reports from company that publish wide variety of games, say EA or Sony's game division then you get a bigger picture and it's easier to extrapolate from those data. For example, The Final is smashing the F2P shooter currently and not even showing up in this report for the hit game in 2024, it's revenue is pretty much guaranteed to be top ranker for 2024.
Are you an r/games repost bot?
Yes, r/games and r/pcgaming and bluenews is where I get most of the articles. I don't have time to do anything more.
About 700 (5%) of 2023’s releases made over $100,000 in full game revenue.
That seems like a pretty damn healthy market to me.
100k is obviously fuckall for a AAA production, but that aren't really that many of those, and most of those that don't suck hard did fine.
Is it though? 100k isn't really a lot after Steam's cut and taxes (unless you live in a cheap CoL country). Even with a 1-person team it probably breaks down to about 50k a year after Steam/taxes and that's only if you make a top 5 percent game on your own.
Elsewhere in the report it mentions that games have become increasingly winner take all, where in 2016 top games only made up 37% of all revenue, now they take up 61%.
Making enough to live on as the 700th best PC game in a year is a lot. There weren't anywhere near 700 actually respectable games released last year.
Out of more than 14K.
The number of games that people published doesn't matter. There weren't more than 300 that weren't worse than dogshit.
Steam having no barrier to entry is not a bad thing. It's their obligation given their market share.
That's only enough to "live on" if it's 2-3 devs or if their spouses have good jobs. I don't think many $100k/yr games have solo devs.
That said, I do think those are good numbers for most teams, and especially new teams on their first or second game.
Lethal Company has literally one single person as the dev and Battlebit Remastered has 3. I don’t know why it’d be hard for game number 700 to also have a solo developer, or maybe two.
The 700th best game in a single year damn well better be a solo dev. Even saying there are half that released in a year that aren't shovelware is generous.
If you're a studio that can't do better than that you deserve to shut down.
It's really hard for small games to get noticed. Even if they are good.
Wow didn't expect Sons of the Forest to do so well. As someone who was disappointed in the state of the game when it launched in early access, having done another playthrough recently it is definitely in a significantly better state.
And with the full release coming next month, hopefully the last of my complaints will be dealt with
Simulation in general may be getting less popular but 2023-24 is looking really good for mil sim.
So many great games are in alpha/beta, like Ground Branch (great customization on loadout and positioning, smooth first person shooter, detailed roadmap and active dev community), and a lot of other promising projects looking to drop in ‘24 like Gray Zone and Pioneer