Steam in 2017

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 The data was gathered during February 2018 and by now is probably slightly outdated.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 on Steam, sold elsewhere and given away for free. For the purposes of this article we’re measuring the market Steam controls, not the sales coming directly through Steam.

Steam Spy uses 98% confidence range and is very inaccurate for small games, especially the ones below 30K owners.

Geography on Steam Spy relies on self-reported data. Only engaged users fill out the country field in their profiles, therefore the geo-data is inevitably skewed.

Steam Spy tracks users playing games, not idling in the Steam client or botting trading cards.

Steam Spy is very inaccurate as a method of tracking refunds. I do have a small sample of data on refunds from a dozen of developers, but I don’t feel confident about it to include it here.

The site uses 3-day samplings. For this article I used a 10-day sampling, so it’s a bit more accurate than the site.

Steam Spy only uses public profiles to gather and estimate the data. 99.9% profiles on Steam are public.

Steam Spy is always lagging by at least 4 days, and is completely inaccurate for new titles.

The market

2017 was the best year for Valve so far. Every single metric you can imagine grew: the overall number of games sold, the audience, the total revenue and so on.