Geography

Let me start by saying that there are a lot of stereotypes about what people from different countries are playing and what genres they do prefer. Most of those stereotypes, as it turns out, are true, at least when it comes to purchasing and usage patterns.

Shooting, shooting and more shooting. US, fuck yeah, A!

USA

For example, US is the biggest country on Steam with roughly 22.5 million users (18 percent of the Steam audience) and as you would expect, Americans love their open-world games and shooters. Or open-world shooters (like “Borderlands 2” or “Grand Theft Auto V”) — they’re the best.

That is not surprising and you wouldn’t discard USA as a market anyway — it is too big, too rich and too loud. But the US isn’t the only market and, sometimes, the US should not be your first choice of the markets at all.

Europe is the biggest region for Steam

Russia

Let’s talk about Russia. For a long time, Russia was infamous for piracy and Russians still pirate a lot of games. Russia has 13.6 million users on Steam (11 percent of the Steam audience), but you would not know it if your games are not localized. For a typical game that does not have Russian localization or at least Russian pricing, you would see only 1.7 percent of your sales coming from this country — negligible, right?

But if you do localize your game and offer a cheaper price (just as Valve suggests), you will see that the number of Russian players rises significantly, easily up to 6 percent. Add a viable multiplayer mode and you are looking at 15 percent of Russian users — they do love multiplayer games. Especially if the game is free to play — then Russians will play it like no other with up to 22 percent of players coming from Russia. “Dota 2” players know that, obviously.

When it comes to game themes, Russians love World War 2 and post-nuclear apocalypse, but other than that they’re not really different from your typical Western gamer.

Germany

I would state that Germans are more different when it comes to game themes. If you have a game with “Simulator” in its title, then expect a lot of people from Germany (up to 15 percent) to buy your game — and prepare by localizing your game and your website. It is not limited to weird games like “Farming Simulator” or “EuroTruck Simulator”, they also love simulations in other genres, like first-person shooters (e.g. “ArmA 3”) or city-building games (e.g. “Cities: Skylines”). Germans also are the most active users on Steam with 92 percent of the existing accounts from Germany being active since 2009.

United Kingdom

Never discount the United Kingdom: despite the UK being a small country, British users are playing and paying the most, with an average Steam user spending 734 hours and having 41 game in his library (twice as much as the average European Steam user or four times as much as average Steam user in general). So as a market for Steam games the UK is bigger than Russia despite having significantly fewer users. They also seem to love football, which is kind of obvious, right?

China is a hit-driven market, but it’s no longer free-to-play only

China

China, on the other hand, is our current number one when it comes to piracy, with an average gamer only having six games in his library and most of these games are free to play. But, like Russia about ten years ago, China is slowly turning into a viable market for paid games. “Grand Theft Auto V” was recently released on Steam with Chinese localization and special pricing (29.99 dollars versus the usual pricing of 59.99 dollars) and managed to gather 11 percent of its users from China — that means 225,000 copies of the game were sold through Steam in China alone making about 6.75 million dollars in gross sales.

Of course, as Russians before, Chinese gamers are unlikely to buy just any game — the market for paid games is still pretty much hit-driven and games should have a strong multiplayer component so users would have an incentive to buy it instead of pirating it. But it is possible to make money from the Chinese market without going free-to-play.

Japan

Japan is often regarded as a console market with PC games being just a niche. It’s true to some extent — only 1 percent of Steam gamers are coming from Japan. But add zombies into your game and suddenly you’re looking at 4.5 percent of Japanese players, even before proper localization! So if your game has zombies, don’t forget about a Japanese localization and some marketing there.

***

Anyway, what I’m trying to say is: do your research before announcing your game. You might find unexpected audiences for your game in some smaller countries. Never limit yourself to an English-speaking audience — while undoubtely large, it only accounts for less than a third of all Steam users.

Sales and genres

I will start by saying that Steam’s own genre categories aren’t really useful because a lot of games have to be assigned to several genres and the list is limited. User tags, on the other hand, are a bit too vague to be used for analysis, but much more useful when you’re trying to find a game to play.

The average game on Steam does not sell really well, at least not since 2012. While we all heard about breakdown success of some big titles, it doesn’t apply to your average title. “The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim” has about 8.6 million users on Steam, “Grand Theft Auto V” sold about 2.2 million copies in less than a month, but how does the average game on Steam perform?

The answer is 32,000 copies.

Let it sink in for a while.

Note: 32,000 is a median value. Meaning this is number of owners of an average game, not an average (mean) number of owners for all games.

Don’t mind f2p owners — 90% of them aren’t paying a dime

It is a bit better if you check the genre distribution with RPGs selling 55,000 copies on an average while Early Access games (that is a genre by Steam’s definition) only sell around 9,000 copies. And while free to play games look lucrative with 330,000 owners on an average, when you consider a rather optimistic conversion rate of 10 percent, you will end up with about 33,000 paying users – not really different from the average paid game on Steam.

Games in saturated genres cost less

This saturation also leads to a decrease for the average price for more popular genres. Indie games as the cheapest ones with an average price of 10 dollars, while paid MMOs manage to stay in the area of 20 dollars.

Of course it wasn’t always like this. Until 2012 Steam’s growth was matched with slowly growing catalog of games and that led to gradually increasing average sales. But it stopped when Valve introduced an easier way for indies — the snowballing quantity of games (some of them of dubious quality) led to dramatic decrease in average sales. It’s no longer enough to just launch your game on Steam to sell something. Now you have to do PR, marketing, support and all the other stuff that only big companies were paying attention to before.

Unfortunately. marketing and PR isn’t a guarantee for a success. While it will obviously amplify your game sales tenfolds, it won’t mean much if the game isn’t performing really well on the word-of-mouth alone.

Marketing does work. To an extent.

We’re also seeing that Kickstarter while being a really good way to fund original games, is not very useful for establishing a series. Most sequels of games from Kickstarter fail to achieve comparable sales despite receiving better scores from both gamers and press alike.

Common misconceptions