Jacek Głowacki - Premium Steam Game Bizdev Evaluation – A Proper Execution

[Music] very much appreciate your presence because the topic that I will be presenting is really really extremely boring but it's fundamental and really essential in terms of making any conscious decision decisions regarding the projects that we work on or that we publish this is something very crucial but probably because it's so time consuming and work consuming and because it's so boring and because Exel is so much involved in this whole analysis not many developers actually go through a proper business

analysis first question from me does anyone actually know what bisf analysis might be right so there are a couple of people let's see if my definition is similar to yours let's start with table of contents first uh a few words about me not very important then description and purpose of busf analysis then we're going to see some 2023 stats from Steam and those stats are really tragic from the point of view of us Indie developers I assume uh because they show some really terrifying things that are happening on the biggest distribution platform and this these numbers are actually another reasons why busf analysis is growing more and more important nowadays for all of us then we're going to start with the basics we're going to go through couple

of first documents that you go through when you do business analysis so we'll see uh and learn about competition analysis pnl and competition ref estimates and move to the advanced which are your games ref estimates competition price history de teams and budgets and SWAT analysis as bonus and then we'll finish with summary and references so let's start this is me it's not very important what matters is that I do business analysis professionally for around 10 years now I started at tand I joined techland nearly 2016 uh to help launching Tan's International publishing and I was a game Scout and Analyst at the international publishing Branch at techland and then I was doing business representation and BSF analysis plus business intelligence for several game development studios here in Poland I also worked with other students Studios

as member of the supervisory board and basically as a consultant for several Indie studios here in Poland who needed business representation wanted to find a publisher or figure out some documents that are necessary for proper evaluation from the side of the publisher so this is busf analysis is what I do professionally for 10 years which might be probably the satis fact from my life but that's it yeah when it comes to the studio represent we are Roboto games we're located in waro working on our first game that is called Havoc Dimension break it's a third person single and multiplayer shooter with parkour flavor that hasn't been announced yet so we'll see how it goes and it's important to matter to mention that Roboto games was founded by Roboto Global and Roboto Global is a service provider that provides localization QA and Vos to Industry Giants for the last 23 years which means that we have some funding

which is good right now let's go through BS analysis what why how now BSF analysis in general is a set of documents that we do to try to position ourselves among our competition and by using different methodologies algorithms and other methods we are trying to estimate different business parameters but also different estimates in terms of revenues and sales figures that we can expect of the game that is being analyzed such datadriven decisions going through this process will give us a lot of information that are mostly estimates which is very important because even if you go through the best business analysis ever it will never guarantee your commercial success but at the same time it will definitely increase your chances to be able to

professionally evaluate whether your game has any chances for Success at all on the market and that's why this is so important so business analysis contains several documents I usually make five or six of them but we'll go through every single one of them individually basically to give you those informations that will give you sales estimates ref estimates you'll be able to do your own pnl which means profit profit and loss profit and loss is a very important document that will give you at least one super crucial information which is break even break even is the number of Revenue copies sold that you have to sell or money that you have to earn to be able to recoup your investment into the development of your game which means that you earned enough money to get to the zero point basically so all the money you've invested in the

development in the production in the marketing if you self-publish etc etc now are back so you'll be able to see how many copies or how much money you have to earn to be able to get to this point which we call break even now I mentioned that there are some terrifying steam stats coming from uh well 2023 happening in 2023 and you know we all know that on Steam every single year thousands of games appear the competition is fierce well comparing to you know app store for example or Amazon the competition on Steam is really small in general right comparing to the numbers of games that launch every single year on mobile distribution platforms or even you know different books on Amazon basically steam is small in terms of numbers of games but at the same time the competition is huge now in 2023

14,541 games launched on Steam which means that every single day no matter it's if it's Christmas Sunday whatever around 35 titles launched on Steam every single day now obviously we've heard maybe above I don't know 100 200 250 maybe because they had proper marketing because they had visibility and BSF analysis is important also because it will show you based on the data that you get from analyzing your competition the game's closest to you how they performed what are their weak spots what are their strengths as well what kind of mistakes we can avoid that those guys did to increase our chances to get this visibility the problem is here 9% of the revenue generated by 1,817 games so out of

14,541 games that launched on Steam in 2023 13,871 of them generated 9% of the revenue of all those games throughout the day year right so it sucks basically and that's why this is this is not new in general I mean if you guys were into steam reports if you were analyzing how games performance steam you could see you know some terrible terrible data even in 2017 right so how much money an indie game earned on Steam in 2017 by default anyone knows well less than $2 right that was the stat um now we are Gamers I assume we are all Gamers we know about the industry we work in the industry we are interested about what is happening in

the industry we track we add we follow we wish list etc etc but this is our bubble we have to remember about that like the other data even from 2017 but it's something that still stays in 2023 what was the number of games that people had in their steam libraries what was the the the most common name number of games that people had in their libraries in 2023 on Steam do you know want to try give me a number 50 100 it was one like the most steam users and we know how many users steam has right the most steam users had one game in their library and that was predominantly DOTA right so that's the thing so it's not something new that it's really

hard on Steam for Indie creators right but it never was so bad when it comes to those this number those proportions here usually the parto ratio if you know what it is the parto ratio was something that was valid for steam obviously there were small you know differences when it comes to the percentage proportions right but it was never that bad never than in 2023 is it going to get better in 2024 I have no idea I hope it will obviously in the first half we have several games that have achieved success that I think no one here thought they will achieve basically so in general from from Global Perspective from Global steam perspective the first half of 2023 is very successful right but will it be successful for us well well now 8% of

those games so 1,162 games out of those 14,541 earned more than 250k and that's gross dollars right it's bad it's really bad so yeah so now I hope you do believe that busf analysis is something that can at least maybe help all of us you know in increase our chances to earn a little more than you know $1,000 or have more than you know 2,000 wish lists because again those are default numbers for indie games on Steam let's start with competition analysis because it's the first and probably the easiest document that we do when we go with business analysis so competition analysis is the document that lets you position your game the game that you're working on or the game that you want to publish among

its direct competitors so what you have to do to make sure that you position your game right you have to analyze at least five key steam tags so you work on a game you go through the least list of steam tags so taxs that Steam support it's public no problem and you figure out up to five that describe your game the most then you go through Steam you put those five tags in Steam you filter the results EV voila you have the list so you have the list awesome this list can be you know 2,200 titles long right so you have to go with more filters of course you have to pay attention to price tax that is very important because if a game has similar price tag or SRP as we call it to your game to your planned game then you can assume that maybe maybe the scope of the game is pretty similar to your that maybe you have a similar budget

maybe you have a similar death team in terms of numbers in terms of positions in terms of salaries of the members of your Dev team right one of the biggest mistakes most Indie developers do in their pitches is show references to their games they pitch that were the most successful like when I work on top down hacken SL game I show Diablo 4 right and I tell people okay so this is a game that earned I don't know $65 million net right and because I do similar game hey there's a chance I'm going to earn the same no no you won't basically right but uh because those documents are usually internal um we have to be you know honest with ourselves right so let's add as many filters as possible to find the list of games that are really simple similar to what we are trying to do

right so as I mentioned pay attention to price tack take Brands and team sizes under consideration try to focus on the most contemporary games why because the market is changing obviously right the behavior behavioral patterns of players are changing the purchasing processes the purchasing decision decisions processes are changing there are new platforms new trends new stuff coming out etc etc so the more comp contemporary games we analyze the better for the analysis then use box lator method to estimate sales based on Steam Reviews for a start I don't know if you guys are familiar with different methodologies that allow you to estimate sales results based on statistics statistical data box later method is the way I see it the easiest one because it takes only two

factors under consideration really one factor is the number of reviews of a game that is being analyzed and this data is public you can find it on every steam page of every product the second one is the most probable statistically multiplier that is being used to get the outcome to get the final number now where this statistical multiplier comes from it's easily it's very easy to Google it first and foremost there are a pleora of of websites that will give you the most statistically probable multipliers that you can use per year right VG insights is the First Choice probably I would go to this is the easiest methodology because it uses only two factors you know there are methodologies that use like 43 but you won't be able rather to do

this at home right or at the office I'm not able to do this in general I'm trying but uh it doesn't work very well so box later method or box later ratio is the best for the start now this multiplier comes from um uh very different um researches that was done by different people basically um uh those people those analysts asked a lot of development Studios to give them real data um when it comes to sales when it comes to reviews and based on those statistics pops there is multiplier right is it correct no it's not but it's statistically the most probable so you have the estimate now when you do this for all the list of the games that are similar to your games after applying all the filters you can apply average results

and median results and thanks to this you'll be able to get estimated numbers of sales of games that are similar to yours so this is the first and very important information that you're getting plus you made yourself a beautiful Excel table awesome now pnl so profit and loss right there are different pnls basically I think every single company has its own template has its own way to create a p&l because different factors are taking taken under consideration depending whether it's a small publisher small developer big publisher big developer etc etc but we already have some some data right now based on the data we already have we can first and foremost determine the right SRP of our game this is very important because all the revenue estimates will start by multiplying your net SRP so the price of

the product that is seen on Steam page basically all of this analysis all those numbers all those estimates will start with this so you'll be multiplying by net price of your game so you have to determine it now you should know after analyzing other titles that are similar what are the most common price taxs prices of the games similar to yours right so it should be easier now it's very important to remember that you do not multiply you do not calculate with your gross price you do not calculate with SRP because between the SRP so the price that is seen on the steam page and the amount of money that you're actually getting is a huge difference and this difference is again statistically calculated it's usually between 51 and 50 7% so you can even you

can even make a couple of variants like the more positive variant more negative variant depending on what kind of percentage you apply where does it come from well obviously first of all it's the stores margin right in terms of steam it's 30% in terms of PlayStation 30% etc etc etc only epic game store has 12 right so potentially they are the most attractive in terms of their margin but then you you of course have taxes and I could do another very long talk about taxes in Game Dev basically but you have to trust me because we don't have much time so you have to trust me on this it's between 51 and 57% of gross SRP now we are analyzing the development budget of our game we're analyzing the marketing budget of our game and boom if you divide budget by net price you have break even so so you have the number of copies of your game that you

have to sell for this price this net price to be able to recoup your costs now you're clear every next copy you sell after this will be your income right so it's super important because then we're going to be analyzing the performance of the other games and we'll see right we already have the list of estimated sales of games similar to ours so we can see if this this our break even shows that we have to sell 120,000 copies for example and we can see even from the median from those 10 20 30 games that we analyzed that estimated sales of those games are I don't know less than 30,000 then we have a problem right because something is wrong with our

budget because the chances that we have to achieve this break even are statistically very small I'm not saying it's not going to happen I'm saying that the chances are low and the lower they are the bigger risk you take and the only question you have then and the only answer you have to give yourself are you ready to take this risk if you are that's fine it's perfectly fine but if you're not you at least have some solid data to consider when making this decision right you're not acting intuitively but you have some data so we have the break even which is important now from the competition analysis we are able to determine estimated sales variants because we have average and median values so we can create like in on the in the most basic way we can create at least three sales variants right so the positive will be always based on average the negative

will be always based on median right because it will be the lowest and then you have something in the middle something between median and average and based on this you can potentially uh estimate the number of of the game that uh of of the copies that you're able to sell here right so you can even compare different variants to see if you have any chance to achieve what others manage to achieve or if you have to go wiely over this then you at least know that okay it's going to be hard right now what what also matters is that then statistical algorithms and part of them are again public coming from Steam directly based on all this data you can determine the minimum numbers of reviews wish lists and followers you have to meet to achieve this break even and

start earning more right and again it's easy to Google those numbers are available you'll see what kind of algorithms there are to use in Excel file to be able to see those numbers and again you will see that for example in order to achieve your break even you have to have 800,000 wish lists is it reasonable for you are you able to achieve that many wish list what's your strategy for that what's your idea for that right maybe it's perfectly doable I don't know but this is something to think of and now you have data you have numbers that you can think of you're not just sitting in a circle look into your eyes and think can we do this can we not I don't know let's see let's see how Market will react you don't know that you have to minimize m at the risk as much as

possible now last but not least please don't forget to check different Roi levels this is especially important for Indie developers Roi do you know what Roi is return of investment right so you can create very easily you can create a table using very simple formulas that will show you how much money would a publisher invest in your game that would be potentially interested but taking under consideration the ROI that he wants to achieve right because no publisher makes his business in a way that he wants only to recoup his investment that wouldn't make sense right Publishers and investors invest money because they have exit strategies and those exit strategies take under consideration the fact that they earn more than they put

into their investment right and there are different levels o of Roi per company for example when I was working at techland years years ago our Roi was 400% so with every Euro invested in a game we expected four to earn back right and I was doing this analysis 100 times for different games that tand considered to publish and if everything was fine in general the numbers were fine and everything was beautiful and the game had quality and vertical slides was awesome if in this analysis the game did not achieve Roi as high as 400% that's it right we're not going to publish this game so that is very important and you can simulate different Roi levels to see right how much money would a potential investor or publisher invest in your

game if he's interested but he has his own Roi at the back of his head right now competition ref estimates So based on the data from competition analysis we can estimate um the sales of our competition remember that we work all the time on the same table so on the list of games that we've already chose we've already picked we've already filtered that are the most similar to to our games of course you we can use the the books later method or books later ratio again I think it's the it's the best methodology for a start just for a start but then when you you know you make more analysis you'll find mistakes you will figure out maybe better Solutions better things better methodologies you'll change that but for a start box later is probably the best now you have you have to remember that uh Pages like websites

like steamdb they give you for free a lot of public information that are easily available to everyone and every time and use steamdb determines steam followers alltime Peaks estimate wish lists estimate wish lists this is important steam followers is public data alltime Peaks are public is public data wish lists you can ask estimate by using the right algorithm to count to multiply the number of followers by the right multiplier again easily very easy to find online then we can of course count all the conversion rates which are also extremely important because different conversion rates out of which which one is the most important well obviously the conversion from wish lists to sales right this is definitely the most important so by using those model multipliers we can again see how our

competition did and you'll find some crazy results really you'll be able to see true unicorns through the layer of pure data right and this is this is really awesome because sometimes we just see a very successful game and we can see it successful but we don't know why we don't know how it is successful well we can always ass we can only assume that it's successful because we do not know the real operational costs of the studio that is actually making and supporting the game but we assume it's successful right that's why we have median just to cut them off right bastards so they were successful hopefully we can be twoo right right so then we measure average and median values and then we can finally find out how realistic are our business goals compared to others results at least estimated but it's still a number and a

pretty solid one if we use the the right algorithms right multipliers right methodology now it's time for some more advanced stuff maybe so let's start with our games ref estimate now if you'd see how does it look in my case how my Exel looks you would probably leave the room because it's just too big too complex too large it's very timec consuming it's extremely boring in general making this but I said that this at the very beginning of my talk so you're prepared right so unfortunately to be able to see what's the progress what are the kpis that we need to achieve what are the Dynamics that we are looking for when it comes to getting to this magical Break Even moment right we can now determine net price of our

game per month per platform per skew in several variants because we've already determined sales variants from competition analysis so this is what we have to do we take our game uh like the base version of the game let's call it skan we have net price of our game because we know it's going to be between 51 and 5 57% of the SRP and we can compare this to other game from our list which means that we know whether we should be closer to 51 or closer to 57 in general we take under consideration all the platforms that we want the game to launch on and then we just go with table after table column after column month per per month we take under consideration everything we take under consideration steam seasonal sales because those are the most natural

moments when we can count for sales Peaks right of course we take under consideration all dlc's that we want to implement as as separate SKS and we take it take this under consideration on every single platform that's why this Excel is so big that's why it's St it takes quite some time to be able to finish all this but it's worth it so uh yeah remember to consider steam seasonal sales of course don't forget onetime flat fees estimates humble Choice Game Pass Game Pass ps+ etc etc this is something that is definitely worth considering especially if we're thinking about working with a publisher as an indie developer because the Publishers by default use this flat fees use this money to recoup faster so usually if they pay for the development they recoup 100% of their investment before we start earning money this this is by default of course this is our

condition usual condition by default so if we're able to consider and act towards earning those flat fees some of them can be very significant in terms of our budget basically so if if we can pull it off then they can recoup quite faster or we can earn more if we self-publish and this is always significant amount of money that gets into our pocket it's flat fee I don't know what what are the rates right now but I don't know year two years ago I was able to take between 40 and $80,000 from Humble choice for example for a game when it comes to Game Pass India right now is between 50 to $100,000 probably something like that so yeah it's a it's an important money to to consider of course we have to count in Early Access in up purchases season

pass pre-orders dlc's if we have them planned because all of this matters if you're working on a game on UNR engine for example you probably know that if you go over $1 million in Revenue right per every transaction epic will take 5% it matters it's 5% less for you after of course you can say hey I don't care I mean I have 1 million in Revenue I really don't care anymore right but it still matters it matters for the analysis it matters for the professional attitude it matters for future projects everything matters in here right and we try to cover as big part of the games life cycle as possible you surely know that the games life cycle on Steam and other platforms is in general longer and longer it's because there is this Market transition very important right now genz and genz plus play players so younger

players are coming on the stage they dictate the Trends they come from mobile space very often they never paid for a game they expect a game with a lot of content thrown at them very often they expect to have the ability to generate their own content so ugc user generated content right they don't want to pay if they don't have to but they want to have a lot of options to choose to pay right and this is how it changes like one small Indie single player game and premium business model for four hours of gameplay it's not enough it's going to die with this new audience and we have to consider this this is something that game pass and Microsoft told us years ago guys think about your postlaunch support plan your postlaunch support think about your monetization strategy because it matters

and they showed us charts that people with post launch strategy post laun support earn more and that's true that's true it gives you more marketing beats also it gives you more opportunities for greater visibility to to prolong this life cycle of your game remember that right now we compete not for just money we compete for time we compete for Netflix time we compete for for Spotify time we compete for every subscription based service that is attractive to people who also like to play games and that is why it's so important we have to and their attention span is getting shorter and shorter right that's why try to cover as big part of the game's life cycle as possible plan ahead a plan is better than no plan even the even a bad plan maybe is better than no plan at all because a bad plan can

always be changed but if you have no plan then you just you know under competition price history estimating your games revenues is obviously easier said than done yes that's true because it's yeah because it's a big document and you have to consider a lot of factors as you could see so what helps studying discount strategies of your direct competitors good thing is this data is public again you go to steam Deb you go to a game you go to its price history you zoom out to see the whole history of the prices and then you're able to generate a column in Exel again Exel is my best friend sorry about that you put a column you go through intervals an interval might be seasonal sales the time between seasonal sales it can be a month it can be a week it can be everything that works in general and you can see if you have those 10 20 30

games and you do this for each of each and one each one of them you'll be you'll be able to see so many beautiful strategies so many different approaches to the way the games are discounted to the games that the price is changed for good and then changed for good again for example and then discounted so you'll see all those strategies and you can learn a lot for free from the experience of people who are in the same position couple of years ago or couple of months ago and they were going through the same processes and the same decisions with games that are really similar to yours right so it's really Priceless so as a result you're able to draw a graph of your direct competitors's discounts and compare them as well as again determin average discounts median discounts right etc etc you will see how truly valuable your net

price is you will be able to see what is the period of time I can count on that I will be selling my game for the net price statistically again but remember your break even is counted for this net price so the more copies of your game you'll be able to sell for this particular price the closer you get to break even if the game is discounted if the price is lower then with every copy you sell you're closer but just one smaller step right you could have done bigger step but you have to do the small ones too right so it all matters it all matters on the path to be able to earn money from your game by selling your game and thus getting to the healthiest of all business models to maintain sustain sustainability to be

able to live from the revenues that you're earning from selling your game this is something that is an achievement in itself and you can of course estimate several variants of your own right now competition de teams and budgets probably most time consuming part or document as if the previous ones were not right so determining your competition based on tax and SRP is not enough you have to make sure that you compare yourself to projects created by teams similar to yours and with comparable budgets it doesn't matter if the game cost $29.99 and your game is going to cost $29.99 please check if this game by $29.99 is not just one of four projects made simultaneously by team of 150 people that is part

of I don't know embracer if it was alive right for example so yeah so it matters so you can go through databases like mobas comom and or press kits together data it's pain in the ass that's true you have to go through this data sometimes you just have to watch credits in game or on YouTube or anywhere that is possible but this is what I do too to make sure sure that those games are really well picked for the list because comparing yourself to data that don't matter is pointless right treat your data well and they will give you a great outcome basically in the analysis so then we can estimate the dev budget based on the number of employees their positions and average salaries per country this is again uh a lot of this data is public again you can go through a lot of data bases that will give you this information this might be a little

bit too much I get it but still if you have the ability if you have the capability it's worth it now SWAT is a bonus as I mentioned are you guys familiar with SWAT analysis you are okay so we can skip this now of course I have to say a few words about that SW as you know strengths weaknesses opportunities and threats strengths and weaknesses are in internal um opportunities and threats are external so generated by the market that you're trying to position yourselves in this is important sometimes we as a as a development Studio not to mention the publisher we're in this position that we have couple of ideas that we maybe want to follow with in terms of our next game and SWAT helps after this whole analysis SW helps probably to make this final decision this is this Final Touch when we just have the board and we

compare several ideas together we can see the bigger picture and this is probably the last thing obviously for Publishers SWAT is uh an everyday tool basically because they have always several titles um to consider to invest in to support etc etc so when I was a publisher I was doing SWAT analysis well almost every day to be completely honest so just to sum up essential for decision making really this analysis helps a lot it's tough It's timec consuming it might be complex it might be confusing but if you learn it if you do it it obviously helps a lot data driven methodology combining several techniques and Universal algorithms and perfect for everyone in general references here's the list if you'd like of course I can share links to every single one of them you can always reach out to me and of

course discuss with me I know it's not easy especially if you've never done this before it might be a little bit too abstract it might be a little bit too overwhelming of course I get that but honestly I can help each and one each and every one of you to go through this process even after signing NDA I can share my own analysis that I do or I did so you'll have at least a template that you can work with for example so that's not a not a problem so thank you again to this small group of bold and brave people who survived this talk thank you very much thank you I wouldn't say it's such a small group and you make sound business analysis as something easy and we know it's not true so are there any questions from the audience thanks for the great talk not as boring

as you as you said really uh so I have a two questions uh first is a lot of this depends on one person data Gathering and Analysis and how you how do you catch mistakes in your data pool and the second one is um how do you compensate for all these all these tens of thousands of games coming out and constantly changing your data po right so uh when it comes to the first question I always try to give the analysis to somebody else of course I mean I I don't think we should as creators of such complex analysis you know go through them for a thousand time just looking for small mistakes usually from experience it's pretty easy to say that you know you can spend uh two or three weeks on an analysis like this because this is how much time it usually takes me to do such a document

basically and then you give it to somebody else who understands what you're trying to do here in Excel for example and 5 seconds after he immediately points you to your mistakes so I would say fresh eye of somebody else is definitely definitely interesting now when it comes to the waves of titles that are happening well unfortunately well fortunately for the analysis but unfortunately for for all of us a majority of them are never really noticed never really seen they never are a they are never able to go through this this wall right because you have to have some kind of marketing money marketing experience some kind of knowhow to just be able to generate you know I don't know hundreds couple of hundreds or a thousand followers at least but for so many games this is difficult

and I'm not saying this is because they are bad it's because well some of them obviously are they're terrible right but uh but for those games that are really good very often they're being created by you know one person two people three people right and those people they are developers they are artists they are creators they don't know anything about business marketing don't they don't want to know in general because it's not their job and I can perfectly understand that so how do I take them under consideration I look for Trends I look for Trends I try to anticipate anticipate trends of course it almost never works because the the our industry is is beautiful it's magical it's so hard to predict so hard to you know comprehend sometimes right I remember s series of articles about battle Royals right and I remember one

article on PC Gamer or IGN or something big in general that was titled something like we never saw this happening right we we didn't know we had no idea and I think this is this is part of the beauty but just to just to try to organize this whole chaos just a little bit BSF analysis is the answer really I mean you know it's all about tags it's all about a couple of numbers really so if if there are new games that have the same five steam tags that are really similar to yours in terms of how they look how they work how many people created them um what are the estimated budgets of those games then sure count them in I mean the the rule of a Thum is that the bigger the list of games that you compare compare your games your game to the

better because obviously the data is you know there is more data more numbers that you can analyze so the results should be more detailed right so this this is important yeah it should be better uh thanks so much for the talk um just a question so um of course it's may sound like a this magical number uh in terms of how much wish list should you have on Steam before launching so just bringing your personal uh experience what would you say usually it's I would say what I've seen it's like 5,000 wish list if you have last you shouldn't release but what would you say in this perspective just a number I mean every single number in an analysis without proper context doesn't matter it really depends I mean what is your game how much money you put

into it how many people work on it uh what's your salaries right etc etc what's your conversion rate your conversion rate might be very high it can be more than 100% basically which means that you can sell potentially and it it's it's happening you can sell more copies than the conversion rate from wish list would be right everything is possible this is what this analysis is for to exclude things that are least probable let's call it like that and unfortunately if you do a lot of analysis like this you can get depressed basically because well because statistically most of Steam games are not successful it means that the results that you're getting from each and every analysis is rather poor right so if you go through

this um again and again and again you can come to a conclusion that no matter what kind of game you're working on it's going to fail it's probably true that's it no sorry of course but you know statistically it it is how it is I mean we have to face it I mean we all dream of achieving a success we all love the games that we make those are our children right we treat them like this we love them we nurture them but the truth is that statistically you're probably going to fail right so we have to do everything in our power to minimize the the chance of failure right 5,000 wish lists statistically from Indie point of view it's a good number right it's a very good number number in general I've seen people celebrating

having 2,000 wish lists right but it's all it's all about context if you're a solo developer working on you know construct for example construct free for example for three months and your goal is to just see how it works right how how do I release game on Steam in three months for example right and uh you know you didn't spend any money on it really you just figure out construct on your own right uh spend couple of hours on the game well more than couple of course but you know what I mean and then you go through the evaluation process it's very quick on Steam you have your steam page you set it up and then you sale and uh try to make some marketing in social media with your friends stuff like this um on low budget basically or with no budget at all and then you get to 2,000 wish lists it's awesome right like 2,000 people is wish listing my game this is amazing right but obviously for other

companies you know 500,000 wish lists is something is a reason to kill the project right in the middle of develop of development right so it always needs context than