About Steam Winter Sale
Unsurprisingly Steam Winter Sale was bigger than Steam Summer Sale — it’s expected, of course, as people tend to buy more during Winter holidays, especially when they actually have time to play videogames.
Important note: The following data was gathered using Steam Spy service. Steam Spy estimates ownership of games on Steam using statistical analysis and is not 100% accurate!
Sales volume
At least 46 million copies of games found their new owners during Steam Winter Sale. And it only includes those games that sold over 1,000 copies, as smaller changes are barely detectable by Steam Spy. That’s 50% more compared to Steam Summer Sale.
If we assume that all of those games were sold on Steam (it’s probably not the case because of bundles and third-party stores) and account for regional pricing, we can conclude that Steam Winter Sale brought at least $270M in revenue.
That’s almost twice as much as Steam Summer Sale did.
One of the reasons here is that both Fallout 4 and Grand Theft Auto V were discounted (unlike the last time, when GTA V was force-bundled and then “discounted” to $59.99). Fallout 4 and GTA V are the biggest games on Steam this year in terms of revenue, so both obviously helped.
We also obviously saw many people playing the games, especially the ones outside of top 20.
Discounts
Steam Winter Sales didn’t have flash sales or any other discounts gamification. Some might argue it was a bad decision as people had too many options to choose from. Others think it takes away the pressure of getting a bad deal by buying a game at a “wrong” discount.
Anyways, an average discount was lower this time — 57.52% vs 66.63% during Summer Sale.
Most games’ discounts were either 50–59% or 70–79%. That’s why you should never trust an average.
And here is a distribution of average sales compared to an average revenue. Unsurprisingly, the more you discount, the less money you actually make.
But don’t rush to conclusions yet! As I said, you can’t really trust an average value and I don’t trust median value here either. So I’ve made a graph comparing revenues of 10-th best selling games in each discount bracket.
And here we can clearly see the sweet spot for a good game — 50 to 79% discount seems to be the most profitable option.
The reason this is not visible on the previous graph is that games aren’t distributed evenly between discount brackets. 40–49% range for example looks quite orphaned.
Summary
- With 46M games sold and $270M in revenue Steam Winter Sale was bigger than Summer Sale.
- People are actually playing more during Winter Sale. Probably the games they’ve bought on it.
- The most popular discounts are 75% and 50% off. The most lucrative are 75%, 66% and 50% off.
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