Steam sales in 2016
In 2016 there were 5,245 new games released on Steam — the biggest year yet for new releases. Yet, the overall sales and revenue from paid titles were roughly the same as the last year.
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!
More games every month
After a slight drop in the beginning of the year the number of new releases on Steam continues to climb, reaching whopping 588 new titles in December alone.
Overall, sales followed the last year’s pattern with the end of the year being the most profitable period for Steam.
Here are the numbers in a more readable format:
As you can see, around 370M games got new owners in 2016. Of course, that includes the sales outside of Steam, bundles, giveaways and free promotions. I did my best to account for the largest of them, but I’m sure I’ve missed some.
Median stats are based on 8,996 games that I have sales stats for 2016. I don’t have data for every game for every month, that’s why yearly median sales are lower than the sum of total monthly median sales.
An average game on Steam got median sales of 6,640 copies in 2016 with $25,245 in revenue.
The actual numbers are probably lower due to off-Steam sales and giveaways.
Overall paid Steam market size comes up at whopping $3.5B!
It’s not the overall volume of sales through Steam, of course, as there are many ways to obtain a game on Steam. But it is the size of the market of paid games that Valve controls.
And, while the actual sales of paid games on Steam are lower than indicated here, please remember, that this number doesn’t include DLC sales or free-to-play revenue.
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 a third of their revenue from Steam games through third-party stores.
While $3.5B is a lot of money, you can notice, that this is not a big change compared to 2015 when I estimated the same market at the same $3.5B.
Important note: The margin of error on this particular number is quite high. I used three different methods to estimate the revenue and ended up with numbers ranging from $3.3B to $3.6B.
The reason for this is fairly simple. While Steam indeed got way more new games compared to 2015, the amount of truly big titles released this time around was lower. The combination of GTA V, Fallout 4 and The Witcher 3 is hard to beat.
Besides, Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare performed way worse than Black Ops III, and two other biggest shooters of the year (Overwatch and Battlefield 1) aren’t on Steam at all.
This stagnation could also be attributed to slower growth for Steam in the US and Western Europe. While Steam is expanding its audience in China and other Asian countries, the purchasing power of gamers there cannot match that of gamers from richer countries.
Plus, Asian gamers tend to favor online games a bit more than paid single-player products. So while CS:GO, GTA V and other online titles are clearly winning from this expansion, it still yet to help traditional paid titles.
Judging by explosive CS:GO growth overall Valve’s business is growing as well even as Steam paid titles sales and Dota 2 active user base stayed at roughly the same level as last year.
Important note: in February 2016 I’ve changed the algorithm for counting users. Because of that, February stats on Steam Spy became inflated as they include “lost” users and sales from October 2015 to January 2016. I’ve fixed that for this particular article manually, however the problem persists on the site.
And the winners are…
I did my best to filter out noise from the following tables, and to account for the difference in regional pricing.
For example, in my first pass GTA V came on top of this table. But a significant share of GTA V users on Steam come from China and Russia where the game is sold cheaper. Therefore, I adjusted its revenue to account for the price difference.
Another interesting example is Football Manager 2017. The game has significant retail presence in Europe, and especially in UK, so we’re probably seeing only a tip of an iceberg.
Steam’s own top sellers list is more reliable, as Valve can clearly distinguish between the sales on Steam and elsewhere.
I’m still baffled by some games in the right table, namely by Jet Set Radio. I suspect it either was bundled, given away or a part of some promotion but can’t find enough evidence to adjust the numbers.
UPD: Jet Set Radio was given away, so I removed it from the list.
Monthly sales
Again, I did my best to remove giveaways and bundles from this list, but take it (as everything in life) with a grain of salt.
As you can see, GTA V, Fallout 4 and The Witcher 3 still sold really well in 2016 despite being released in 2015. And CS:GO is a beast, bringing almost 7M new users this year.
What about indie games?
People do play indie games on Steam. In fact, this Winter sale showed the highest total playtime for all the games tagged “Indie”.
It’s a bit worrying that the spikes are becoming a bit shorter compared to the Summer Sale of 2015, but they do grow higher, so people do engage with indie games at higher intensity around sales (more people spending more time with the game) they just don’t play them as much after the sale is finished.
Early Access titles also perform quite well at user engagement, but at consistent level that is less depended on sales.
Indie strategy games displace survivalcrafts
One interesting thing I noticed this year is the lack of new successful “survivalcraft” titles from small developers in the top. We’re mostly seeing well established and supported games (ARK, Rust, Subnautica, H1Z1) in the top 100. Though, both The Culling and Astroneer seem to be doing quite ok.
On the other hand, there is a bunch of great and pretty successful indie strategy and management titles in the list: Stardew Valley, RimWorld, Factorio, Planet Coaster, Slim Rancher, Scrap Mechanic, Youtubers Life. That’s in addition to the new games from well-established developers: Civilization VI, XCOM 2, Stellaris, Total War: Warhammer, Football Manager 2017, Master of Orion.
So, while we could call 2015 the year of survivalcraft, 2016 was more of a year of strategy games. I wonder what genre 2017 is going to bring?
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