![]() Just a few anecdotes about a game that miraculously beat the odds is not enough data to draw big conclusions from. Similarly whenever indies are making pitch decks to investors, or apply for government funding, they always pull the top performers in their game’s genre to prove that their game is going to make MILLIONS!īut come on, we are all good at math. Whenever I give a talk on genres and say stuff like “VR and platformers just don’t sell very well and are really hard to market.” I always get the question “Ya but what about Superhot? That is a VR game that has sold millions!” or “Ya but what about Celeste?” Despite there being a ton of Visual novels released (second most made genre) there are people buying them.The audience here seems insatiable and not enough devs are making purely roguelike deckbuilders. Roguelike Deckbuilder is by far the most popular tag and beats 4X for median sales! And there are only 99 games released in that genre over the last 3 years.Morally-wise? that is a different blog post. The tag with the most games was “Sexual Content.” There are a lot of nasty little games on Steam and they actually do alright sales wise.In general these are genres that indies love to make despite Steam just not buying them: What does this mean? Indie developers are still making way too many genres that don’t do that well on Steam: mostly platformers (of all varieties), puzzle games, and FPS despite fewer gamers buying them. The blue bars are the number of games with those tags released at the start of 2019 until today. So the games on the left earn more than the games on the right. The red line is the median estimated sales for each genre from Jan 2019-April 2022. With that said, let’s look at the following graph. For more on that see the “winner take all” section. They aren’t always into fast-twitch action / arcade games unless they are fast-twitch FPS games like Counter Strike GO or Call of Duty. In my mind the typical Steam PC player likes complex games they can spend hundreds or dozens of HOURS playing. Think 4X games like Civilization, builder games like Timberborn, Survival Craft games like Valheim, and Rogulike Deckbuilders like Slay The Spire. They hunger for very involved games that have a complex meta. Steam players still really like deep strategy and simulation games. For info as to why 10 reviews are so important see this blog post. Of those games, 18,563 of them earned over 10 reviews. What did you find?įrom 2019 to today, 32,202 indie games were released. In most graphs here I filtered out games that earned fewer than 10 reviews (This prevents Shovelware asset flips from mucking up the data.)Īgain for the full reasoning skip to the Appendix.I picked what genres to graph based on what ones indies typically make.I am only looking at “indie” games (I filter out AA and AAA data).I am looking only at games from 2019 – 2022.I used the data scraped and provided by VGI pro.So if you want to read the full recap you can find it in the section called “Appendix Deep dive on methodology” below. I want to cut to the chase and get into it but I also want to make sure that I cover my methodology because there is always that one guy (usually on reddit) who goes “well you weren’t crystal clear about whether you are using the boxleiter modified….” Today I am going to look at several genres that are popular with indie game developers and show you what you can expect if you pick them. Steam players really do have a preference. Unfortunately too many indies don’t spend enough time evaluating a genre and whether it has an audience on Steam. All this crap about “what day should I release on” or “how many hashtags should I use when tweeting” or “what sub reddits should I post on” is the relatively unimportant lanugo that coats the exterior of your infant game. Let me repeat: the type of game you make is the most important decision you will make when marketing your game. The choice has been made, your potential revenue largely decided. At that moment in the multiverse of potential outcomes for your game, hundreds of doors instantly slammed shut and a few remained open. The moment you say “We are going to make a game that is a with graphics” and commit to developing that game you have made about 90% of your marketing decisions for your game.
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