Statistics developers need to know about Steam

[TheVampire100]

I will look into it.
The story elements of the expansions aren't even that important at the moment, a translated UI would be much more profitable.
I know from a friend that he avoids AI War because it's English.

[eRe4s3r]

I guess the idea that making a game exclusively targeted towards women is less financially sound

http://www.forbes.com/sites/maseenaziegler/2014/07/16/why-kim-kardashian-hollywood-is-a-200-million-hit-app/


Is that so?    Even if you and I think this game is crap, seems to be doing well.


You can make games for men and women. Let's not leave anyone out of playing games. I think that is what we should strive for. Remember that game developers have families too, and I guarantee you that includes women.

What part of "Steam" and "PC Gaming" was not clear in my post and my link though? 18% of steam users (likely much less due to false profile data) (which is pretty much representative to PC Gaming as whole) are female. This is irrefutable statistical fact. I just pointed that out because I heard nonsense statistics before that 50% of women are PC gamers. They are not and that is all I wanted to say

So if you make a PC game, you should be aware what your audience is and isn't going to be. Especially with GG vs FemFreq nonsense going on. PC gamers are predominantly male. A sad fact where one can wonder about reasons, but a fact nonetheless. And if you are a indy dev looking at average of 30k sales at best, 18% vs 82% mean profit or bankruptcy.

Chauvinist stat abuse. Again, 18% of 10 million users. Statistics are an incredibly deep field, and I think you are just taking a number at face value. Your math is wrong, and your attitude is wrong.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Her_Interactive
"Her Interactive's Nancy Drew games have sold more than 10 million copies worldwide."
Available on steam.

http://steamspy.com/search.php?s=nancy+drew

On Steam there is no market for Nancy Drew games, ALL of them sold 20k units under statistical average for indy games on Steam and since it's recurring series most of the owners of 1 own ALL/MOST of them. And hence I wrote what you think is so chauvinist when it is a sound advice for indy devs. If you make a game targeted at females then don't think you can earn money on Steam with it. Instead look for alternatives, but whatever you do, do not just focus on STEAM. I've got no idea where Nancy Drew games sell, but they don't sell 10 million on Steam Not even remotely

So what exactly is your point and why do you think a personal insult is going to help it? You are projecting meaning in my words that is not there.

[Coppermantis]

I guess the idea that making a game exclusively targeted towards women is less financially sound

http://www.forbes.com/sites/maseenaziegler/2014/07/16/why-kim-kardashian-hollywood-is-a-200-million-hit-app/


Is that so?    Even if you and I think this game is crap, seems to be doing well.


You can make games for men and women. Let's not leave anyone out of playing games. I think that is what we should strive for. Remember that game developers have families too, and I guarantee you that includes women.

Devil's advocate, man, I didn't say it was true. I still stand by what I said that making a game that only targets one demographic isn't a sound strategy, but that doesn't mean that it won't pay off once in a while.

You can make games for men and women. Let's not leave anyone out of playing games. I think that is what we should strive for. Remember that game developers have families too, and I guarantee you that includes women.

That was, like, the entire point of my post. Games are largely gender neutral. I'm agreeing with what you're saying.

[TheVampire100]

I think people should just stop saying "Games for men - games for women" because something like this does not exist.
Of course there are games that appeal more to one gender but that does not mean that a game is entirely made for that gender. Of there is a game for "girls" I could still play and enjoy it.
And there are a lot girly like games on Steam because that genre get's currently more popular. Those Visual Novel/Dating Sim games? Mostly for girls but boys enjoy them as well.
There are some good examples about this penomenon. Know "My little Pony" the television show? The target audience was actually girls but it got popular by male people as well. Seems odd at first but in my youth for example I liked also Sailor Moon, a show for girls. And so did all of the boys in my neighbourhood.
So why do people nowadays wonder about something like that? Genderspecific stuff is more of a cliché than a fact.
If I look in my Steam library I have Magical Diary (which is also some kind of Visual Novel/Dating Sim), 100% girly. Actually not my type of games but I liked that one a little.
My girlfriend plays also not the typical "girly" games. She played with me Tf2 and L4D but she is not really good in shooter games, she reacts too slowly. Hoever, she also played Sanctum and she loves that game like hell. The game is a shooter/ZD hybrid and while the shooter parts give her soem troubles (but less as in other games) she likes the planning and building phase of the game. Most of the time she is the one that designs the labyrinth and I plan the defences while another friend of us taks the shooting part of the game.
It should be also noted that Sanctum has mainly a female cast with only one male character (and one gender-neutral robot but said robot has a female voice).
So the gameplay seems more like typical male design but the characters are oriented around female players. Is it now a game for male or female players?

[eRe4s3r]

Nekopara (18+) for example, or HuniePop (18+) are imo clearly targeted at adult male audiences. As far as I know you'd be hard pressed to find ANY female audience focused game on Steam. That is maybe confusing the statistics giving us a false base data.

I agree that with VN's things are different altogether though, there the gender lines are blurred entirely nowadays for most of them, that are not harem romance novels. That is good, in fact it's great. But VN's and dating sims are also brand new on Steam, until barely a year ago there was none of it. And if we'd go by most popular VN's this is a very jaded picture, as ALL good old ones are not on Steam and GoG doesn't carry them either. (NSFW Links!) https://vndb.org/v17 | https://vndb.org/v97 | https://vndb.org/v211 | https://vndb.org/v11 come to mind 4 most popular VN's. Don't think you could all of these "gender neutral" but I don't think they are all sexist either. Ever17 is imo the absolute best VN ever produced for example. So take that how you will

Maybe in a year from now we have better statistics for VN's in particular. Also with many VN's you cross over into Anime too.. so it becomes even more diffuse there.

[Cyborg]

On Steam there is no market for Nancy Drew games, ALL of them sold 20k units under statistical average for indy games on Steam and since it's recurring series most of the owners of 1 own ALL/MOST of them. And hence I wrote what you think is so chauvinist when it is a sound advice for indy devs. If you make a game targeted at females then don't think you can earn money on Steam with it. Instead look for alternatives, but whatever you do, do not just focus on STEAM. I've got no idea where Nancy Drew games sell, but they don't sell 10 million on Steam Not even remotely

So what exactly is your point and why do you think a personal insult is going to help it? You are projecting meaning in my words that is not there.

I don't know if there is a language barrier here, but who said Nancy Drew sells 10 million on steam? Let's not make straw man arguments. You said that 18% of steam is female. I am countering that 18% of 10 million users on steam (a number from the steam active user graph) is a viable target audience. I'm also saying you don't know what you're talking about when it comes to statistics. And I'm saying that your hypothesis- don't make games for girls on steam- is chauvinist. The average price: $4.21 187,000+ copies. And that's just on steam after their initial releases. If that doesn't count, for some reason   , Magical diary 78,000 copies. So maybe you should better define what a girl game actually is, because there are plenty of examples of games that appeal to girls (anime counts, visual novel counts) that sell well.

I think it's important to call bullshit when people try to use stats to exclude audiences without really knowing what they are talking about. For some reason , women are often on this list. You might say that indie developers should more inclusive to sell to 10 million*.18. if you make any demographic narrow enough, you could make the same comments. Let's not find reasons to exclude people.

[eRe4s3r]

On Steam there is no market for Nancy Drew games, ALL of them sold 20k units under statistical average for indy games on Steam and since it's recurring series most of the owners of 1 own ALL/MOST of them. And hence I wrote what you think is so chauvinist when it is a sound advice for indy devs. If you make a game targeted at females then don't think you can earn money on Steam with it. Instead look for alternatives, but whatever you do, do not just focus on STEAM. I've got no idea where Nancy Drew games sell, but they don't sell 10 million on Steam Not even remotely

So what exactly is your point and why do you think a personal insult is going to help it? You are projecting meaning in my words that is not there.

I don't know if there is a language barrier here, but who said Nancy Drew sells 10 million on steam? Let's not make straw man arguments. You said that 18% of steam is female. I am countering that 18% of 10 million users on steam (a number from the steam active user graph) is a viable target audience.

The point was that you quoted wikipedia impossible to proof numbers vs I showed you actual ownership numbers on Steam for *all* Nancy Drew games Maybe I should have said "It's far less impressive when you consider there are tons of these games, and their alleged median sale stat per game globally is 350k , of which only 10k per game are on Steam) leaving 340k outside of steam. That remaining 340K average sales per game is an audience you do not reach when you put your game on Steam and market the game like Nancy Drew is marketed."

To me there is no question that as dev you have to make your game at the very least gender neutral... would it be better if I said that instead of "make no game for women" in first post bullet point list ? Doesn't that mean the same thing? Of all the choices you have when making games, the one I picked out is the *worst possible one* according to the sales stats.... the other choices are gender neutral and marketed towards males.

Either way, since you started off by insulting me you forced me to enter into argumentative mode

Also Steam has 128 million accounts, 30 million unique active users the past 2 weeks. At the very least 53 million active accounts of some kind. So 10k or 70k sales is REALLY bad for a game on steam. Even AI War, an absolute niche hardcore RTS title, has 260,414 owners ! (just to put numbers of Nancy drew and Magical Diary into perspective). Even Huniepop has 129,855. For some reason SteamSpy is filtering out data for Nekopara... wonder why.

Either way, you seriously interpreted ill intention in my post where there was none. I will change my first post to word that one line less misleading.

[Cyborg]

Also Steam has 128 million accounts, 30 million unique active users the past 2 weeks. At the very least 53 million active accounts of some kind. So 10k or 70k sales is REALLY bad for a game on steam.

I don't think it's bad at all, depending on the sales and development costs. You started your post with something controversial and divisive, and now appear to be shocked at the result. Saying that game developers should not develop games for women because your statistical brilliance noticed 18% in the steam profile. Your math is bad, and you don't know what you're talking about, and you're presenting it in a way that's designed to marginalize people- saying that developers should not develop games for women. Given a statistic about a female detective series on steam, you tried your best to discredit that. That's what I don't like. I'm perfectly willing to consider the matter closed, I think I have said enough on it. For me, I want to see all kinds of backgrounds and ways of life represented. I don't buy the hype that creating artificial homogeneity moves games. Good games move games.

[eRe4s3r]

I will look into it.
The story elements of the expansions aren't even that important at the moment, a translated UI would be much more profitable.
I know from a friend that he avoids AI War because it's English.

More important than this is that Stars Beyond Reach releases with full translations for all major languages. That 4x in particular seems to be closer to a city building Sim with 4x elements than even AI War ever could be... it basically begs for language support. And there isn't a story there, is there? And even if there is, that is not hard to translate But it needs to be part of release it seems. Anything post release is not relevant to your potential extra sales. You lost them if you release English only essentially ;/

This is particularly pressing as the German language version of AI war was physical disc only (released by "the games company") never received any translated updates nor translated DLC ^^ And something like that should never repeat.

Also I am going to admit that I misinterpreted the numbers for female/male completely. I thought this was based on the 52~ million active users or even on the 1 million scanned profiles. It was not, it was based on Alexa website data for steam website itself (not even the steam client store front ) and we all know what that means.... So I am sorry for taking that at face value and extrapolating that to Steam or PC Gaming. It seems the gender spread on Steam is 60/40 at worst. Not unlike entirety of PC gaming I assume.

Other notable information gained from the statistics is that very few games gain a true "2nd spike" when they come out of Early Access or re-release a fancy version (like a part2 or episode 2) and Kickstarter success does not translate to sequel sales. Like, at all. Broken Age in particular noticed this the hard-way... and I think Pillars of Eternity too will notice this.. with their expansion sales

[wwwhhattt]

- Word of mouth (TB and other big Youtubers) makes all the difference in the world but not as large as big magazine coverage.

Do big Youtubers count as word of mouth? I'd have thought that TB etc. would be classed with magazines/websites in terms of exposure (RPS level, for example) - by the time developers are going out of their way to get you specifically to cover their games then you're probably big enough to qualify as a brand than as a person (a terrible way of putting it, but I can't think of any better just now).

Just to be clear, I'm not disagreeing - it just seemed an odd way of talking about youtube.

[TheVampire100]

I will look into it.
The story elements of the expansions aren't even that important at the moment, a translated UI would be much more profitable.
I know from a friend that he avoids AI War because it's English.

More important than this is that Stars Beyond Reach releases with full translations for all major languages. That 4x in particular seems to be closer to a city building Sim with 4x elements than even AI War ever could be... it basically begs for language support. And there isn't a story there, is there? And even if there is, that is not hard to translate But it needs to be part of release it seems. Anything post release is not relevant to your potential extra sales. You lost them if you release English only essentially ;/

Not at the moment but there WILL be a story with different endings (similiar to what Last Federation did). And I don't know if this is still planned but at sime point there were plans for talking to the planet mind.

[eRe4s3r]

- Word of mouth (TB and other big Youtubers) makes all the difference in the world but not as large as big magazine coverage.

Do big Youtubers count as word of mouth? I'd have thought that TB etc. would be classed with magazines/websites in terms of exposure (RPS level, for example) - by the time developers are going out of their way to get you specifically to cover their games then you're probably big enough to qualify as a brand than as a person (a terrible way of putting it, but I can't think of any better just now).

Just to be clear, I'm not disagreeing - it just seemed an odd way of talking about youtube.

I would have thought the same actually, to me TB is independent media, youtube, blogs and podcasts apparently classify as "word of mouth" in marketing language since no marketing money or specific direction is behind most of these things... hence TB for example putting out "opinions" not "reviews", but apparently in cases where comparisons can be made, being covered by TB can gain you on average 1 million sales. but being covered by mainstream online and paper media gives you on average 5 million sales (remember, these numbers are very weird because a few AAA titles have INSANE sale numbers on steam, Skyrim and a few others in particular). (Would be nice if we'd knew the marketing budgets too) but youtubers and podcasts / blogs cover you for essentially free (or the price of a game key).. then yeah. That is not as bad it sounds really.

I think the differences in numbers are really mainly because big AAA titles with huge marketing budgets skew the numbers towards mainstream media and AAA. For an indy dev, youtube, blogs and podcasts are the only available exposure to begin with... and as Indy dev more than a million sales, that is extreme success. Remember, the average sale volume for indy devs is 30000 units. And you can assume games TB liked are not below that average ;p

The worst enemy of an indy dev is obscurity it seems. And only tons of marketing money or mainstream appeal (Fez/Bastion) can offset this "random luck" (being picked up by one of the big youtubers or for your game genre relevant main niche podcast/blog)

Btw, with youtube I mean all video sites, not just youtube. It's just the one I know most

[Cyborg]

I'm still of the opinion that a good game will move copies. Free marketing helps, but if you make a good game, people are going to play it. And then total biscuit and whomever else will want to cover it because people are playing it.