How much money can a Steam game make?

On the stage of planning a future game, before preparing a development budget, it’s important to at least approximately understand how much money your future game could make.

If you’re planning to publish a game to platforms other than Steam, it’s very important to know how much money have similar products made on the platform. If we’re talking about releasing on other platforms, it’s much more complicated. But, to simplify it, we can multiply an estimate of potential sales by the amount of other digital platforms and popularity coefficients in Steam’s relation to other platforms, where Steam is 1. That will be a rough estimate, but it will give you approximate numbers that you can rely on if you manage to replicate the success of other released games.

Example: on revenue Steam shows financial results similar to PlayStation™Store. Therefore, if game’s marketing wasn’t focused on a specific digital store, we can assume that income will be corresponding. It’s a very rough estimate and currently GameSensor isn’t able to predict sales on PlayStation™Store, but it’s just a matter of time:)

Using GameSensor service, you’ll be able to search for products that are very similar to your game, filtering by months and genres, and you’ll be able to look up statistics with player and sale numbers. Remember that it’s not enough to just develop the same game to get a similar financial result. Steam prefers to promote well-known games instead of projects by indie devlopers.

If you’ve ever heard about a game similar to your future project, that means someone did a good job to let you know about it and paid for your awareness of this game.

While developing your first product you should be prepared for the fact that your sales numbers will be well below those of similar released games, that you analyzed using GameSensor. It’s normal, expected and it makes sense.

GameSensor Man

Loyal fanbase of a game grows from year to year, from release to release. If you manage to stay within the game’s minimum budget, you’ll get a chance to get similar sales numbers after the release.

All reports on Steam games income are available here.

Previous articleNext article