Steam sales in 2015
The 2015 was the best year for Steam yet.
It brought over 3000 new games (compared to 1900 in 2014), increased the number of concurrent users on Steam from 8M to 12M and helped over 350 million paid games find new owners.
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!
The number of monthly releases on Steam stopped growing
Remember the graph with growing number of monthly releases on Steam that scared every indie? Well, this number stopped growing.
Indiepocalypse is cancelled, you can stop worrying now.
December is the biggest month for Steam, but April was the second biggest month by revenue
While Steam undoubtedly makes a lot of money during sales, this is a marketplace for paid games and it is hit-driven. Several big releases in April (including GTA V) made this month the second best for Steam.
Important note: For the purpose of this article I’ve assumed all copies were sold at minimum advertised price during that period. It obviously not always the case, so the actual revenue is probably lower.
Summer and Winter Sales are the best periods to buy games on Steam
As if you were still unsure about that.
Paid Steam games market was worth over $3.5B in 2015
Not every dollar is going through Valve though, as some developers are selling their Steam games off Steam.
And remember — this figure doesn’t include free-to-play titles or DLC!
PC worldwide core games market is estimated to be around $27B in 2015 (Newzoo). So, including Dota 2 and Team Fortress 2 revenue, Valve is controlling around 15% of it. Pretty impressive!
Important note: Not all copies redeemed on Steam were sold through Steam and vice versa (GTA V, The Witcher 3). Some publishers report receiving up to third of their revenue from Steam games through third-party stores.
Monthly top charts are dominated by a small number of big expensive games
Not actually surprising when you think about it.
Important note: I did my best to account for free weekends and giveaways, but there might be some mistakes left.
GTA V and Fallout 4 were the biggest games this year
This time I’ve decided to provide you with two lists: one sorted by estimated revenue for all games sold in 2015 and one sorted by number of copies sold for games released in 2015.
As you can see Grand Theft Auto V and Fallout 4 are on top of both lists. And there is only a handful of indie games or PC exclusives in top grossing list, as it’s mostly comprised of multi-platform hits.
UPDATE: Original version of this table stated incorrect data for Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. It’s fixed now. I’m sorry for this.
BTW, check out my previous post to get sales stats by country.
Do you want to know more?
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