Steam: What Sells - What Steam's Player Numbers Tell Us About Game Genres - Extra Credits

for a few short glorious days in July there was a way to accurately estimates team player numbers and since we've got the full list the total players numbers for nearly every game played we here at extra credits thought it would be fun to dig into that data and talk about some of the tidbits we found this episode is brought to you by compass news a journalism app that makes it easy to be well-informed about the world use the code extra credits at the link below to get a 7 day free trial well the first and most important thing to know about all these numbers is that therefore the number of players who have played the game over its lifetime which means older games have an advantage also anyone who's thrown a free weekend has another big advantage since those players count lastly the method for getting this data relied on steam achievements so any game without those most notably dota 2 we have no data for so with all those

caveats out of the way let's dive in first the thing I know that most people will probably want to know the top 11 list yes that's right 11 not 10 because I know how many anguished cries there would be if I didn't get to that number 11 spot you'll see just trust me the list goes like this one Team Fortress 2 - Counter Strike global Offensive 3 player unknowns battlegrounds for unturned 5 left 4 dead 2 6 payday 2 7 Garry's Mod eight warframe 9 counter-strike source 10 paladin's and the coveted number 11 spot the elderscrolls v skyrim so what does this list tell us well a couple of things right off the bat first off that steam really does love multiplayer shooters I mean nine out of the top 10 fall into that category

second that free-to-play really isn't dominant on Steam only three of the top 10 are free to play but eventually dropping your game under $20 helps a ton if you're trying to crack this top 10 list DLC and microtransactions don't seem to be too much of a deterrent though also in what I'm sure will be a shock to everyone valve games do well on Valve's platform oh and I knew paladin's was popular but I had no idea it was that popular remember though this is all about the number of players who have played a game it says nothing about revenue so Skyrim probably made more money than some of these games even though they had a few million more players and some of these games millions of people probably played for five minutes and then set it down still it's eye-opening but on to the interesting and weird facts first off we're gonna talk James's favorite civilization he loves the Civilization games but everyone knows that they don't really get good until all of the expansions are

out and for Civ 6 people really seem to be taking that lesson to the bank Civ 5 is the 14th most played game on Steam sip 6 the ninetieth with about 9 million less players sure Civ 5 has been around a lot longer but almost nowhere else in this chart will you see a sequel get trounced that badly here's another one I enjoy you thought stardew valley was popular well do you know it has it beat by a million players Euro Truck Simulator 2 interestingly hardcore Sims seem to have a fairly solid fan base with a surprising number of them clocking in between 750,000 and a million and a half players now that's not top and triple-a numbers but a lot of those games seem fairly cheap to make and so probably provide solid returns for their small teams heck even really specific really tiny Sims like fernbus simulator' basically an advert game for one particular line of German buses clocks in at around a hundred thousand

units either the fernbus IP is worth a lot more than I thought or there's a pretty big niche of people who just love driving weird vehicles in the most accurate way possible and I don't know how exactly you reach those fans just beyond making some kind of complex sim but they're out there and they seem hungry for content similarly there seems to be concentric rings of survival fans wherever you see a survival game you'll usually see one or two or within a slot or to arc and Ruster right next to each other seven days to die and space engineers are right next to each other subnautica and this war of mine are only a stone's throw away for a while in the game industry the common perception was that survival games were like MMOs people only really played one but this sort of game grouping implies to me though this is admittedly a wild assumption that this isn't quite true a large number of these players at least try a few different survival games which means there's still a bit more room here for the next big thing than in something

like say mobis oh and before anyone says that strategy is dead civilization 5 Age of Empires 2 - total wars and Crusader Kings - all have been played more by people on Steam than any of the Call of Duty's except modern warfare - adventure games on the other hand don't seem to fare as well life is strange is the only adventure game to even crack the top 100 even telltale games seem to have been slipping with everything outside of the walking dead and the wolf among us below a million players and their later entries like batman and guardians of the galaxy not even cracking a hundred thousand players on Steam see RPGs seem to have a cap around a million and a half players with divinity divinity - and pillars of eternity all somewhere in that range that's a little sad for those of us who love such things but the good news for C RPG devs is that if you do manage to put out a high production value well-reviewed C RPG it looks like most

of that audience will buy it anything below an 85 on Metacritic though and it looks like the numbers drop a lot action RPGs fare better though with things like path of Exile around 7 million players and torchlight 2 closing in around 5 million even without being free-to-play a good walking simulator can clear a few hundred thousand copies but not much more so if that's your indie dream just know what your cap is at least for PC Firewatch was the most successful I could find with nearly a million players gone home had half a million and Edith Finch was at about a hundred and eighty thousand after that the numbers get pretty low okay let's finish this off with a few silly ones for you less people have played undertale on Steam than goat simulator but more people have played csgo then live in Spain roughly the same amount of people have tried wallpaper engine which yes apparently has achievements as have ever played any of the Resident Evil's on Steam and more people have played no man's sky on steam

than near automata and last but not least if you earned a dollar for every game with achievements that someone had played on Steam you'd be a billionaire so minus 30% for Valve's cut and checking my math here nope still not enough to make half-life 3 zing you knew a halflife3 joke was coming once again thank you to compass news for sponsoring this episode they're awesome journalism app makes it easy to be well-informed about the world no matter how busy you are or how much money you have you get articles from sites like the New York Times The Economist the Financial Times and many more all summarized without the ads and without the expensive paywalls so if that sounds up your alley use the code extra credits at the link below to get a 7 day free trial [Music] you

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