Call for Data: Steam Game Revenue Over Time

The primary objective of this initiative is to gather anonymized revenue data from Steam developers to analyze long-term sales trends and revenue scaling. By collecting data on how games perform from their initial launch week through their first, second, and third years, the project seeks to determine if there are predictable patterns in the "long tail" of game revenue or if these trends are shifting over time. This effort aims to provide developers with clearer benchmarks for financial planning and performance expectations.

The project builds upon previous industry surveys conducted by the same organization, which established benchmarks for Steam sales-to-reviews ratios and wishlist-to-sales conversion rates. Previous findings indicated that games released in 2020 averaged 41 sales per review, with a typical range of 20 to 60. Regarding wishlists, data showed an average of 0.36 sales per wishlist in the first week, though this metric has demonstrated significant volatility and a declining conversion rate—dropping from 10% in 2019 to 7.3% in 2020—prompting a need for updated analysis.

The scope of this data collection covers the Steam platform, focusing on the performance of premium PC games. The methodology relies on a crowdsourced survey of developers, who are asked to submit anonymized, abstracted revenue figures for one or more titles. By aggregating these individual data points, the project intends to produce public, free-to-access insights that help the broader development community better understand the relationship between launch-window performance and sustained long-term revenue. The survey was scheduled to remain open through early November 2020 to ensure a robust sample size for the final analysis.