Booming since the early 21st century, the gaming industry has evolved into a highly competitive and dynamic market. It is now led by major companies such as Microsoft, Sony, Tencent, and Nintendo. These industry giants employ thousands of people and utilize their extensive resources and expertise in market analysis and game design.
In contrast, indie games (independent video games) are video games that are designed and developed by small teams or even individuals without major financial backing. They placed a greater emphasis on innovation, creative risks, and experimental gameplay mechanics.
What a crazy number of employees these global giants command!
Art, music, game mechanics, ... That game is all done by one single person! Incredible right?!
However, indie developers—often in teams of fewer than 10 people—face challenges such as
- promoting their games,
- limited budgets and others resources,
- conducting market analysis, and
- implementing data-driven strategies into designing their games.
Thankfully, digital platforms like Steam have become game-changers for indie developers. Steam offers global reach and significantly boosts the visibility of indie games published on its platform. It helps indie developers overcome promotional barriers and connect with audiences that would otherwise be very difficult to reach.
Now, sadly, as indie game lovers, we may not be able to do much about the financial challenges. But can we help with the other two?
The answer is YES!
By 2013, Steam controlled approximately 75% of the PC gaming digital distribution market. Undoubtedly, Steam has been pivotal to the indie game ecosystem. So, what about using data sourced from Steam to help these small teams identify key game characteristics that drive sales, popularity, reviews, and player retention?
In this project, we want to provide indie developers and smaller publishers with actionable strategies for designing games that resonate with their target audience. This website will serve as a centralized resource that helps them to compete in the broader market while preserving their innovation and creativity. That is, we will answer the question, "How can you make your game appealing? What factors or game characteristics matter most, and which are less critical?" With easy-to-understand guided visualizations and analyses of player engagement data, along with a set of free exploratory tools, we handle the heavy lifting of handling the data so you don’t have to!
This website is highly interactive! Feel free to play around by filtering or clicking on your desired genres, years, or practically anything to discover more details!
RPG games dominate the distribution, followed by Strategy and Adventure. Other notable genres include Action and Simulation. Casual, Racing, and Design occupy a much smaller portions.
This pie chart represents the playtime distribution of Indie games' top game types. A game can be Indie itself while being as other types.
We can see the that genres like Indie, Causal, Adventure, RPG and Action made up most of the publishing and selling games each year.
Take the year 2023 as example, the most released genre is indie game. Regarding the genre sales, indie game occupied a lot of sale. And just like Lethal Company, many of the indie games are multi-genres!
Therefore, when developing games, you may want to make you game characterized as having multiple genres!
The left stacked bar shows the number of released games by year, color differenced by the genres. We only kept the top 15 genres and year starting 2008 because the rest are too few to count.
The right tree map shows the game’s sales condition with respect to the game types. This would tell you the top popular games in the selected genre.
You can select the specific genres or years in the left bar that would reflect in the right map. Or if you have targeted selling number, feel free to change that filter!
Peak CCU: concurrent playing time, which usually shows a game's popularity and ability to attract players simultaneously.
It's always good to learn from your successful peers!
You can use this word cloud to find the best developers within different genre and maybe reach out to them to learn from their journeys and experiences!
This world cloud has its size of game companies' names scaled by the peak CCU. The color is the percentage of positive rates their games received. When selecting a developer, you can see their games' average reviews rate, and their games' peak CCU, and it will list the games from that company and their peak CCU to the right.
DLC: additional content gamers download for video games after their initial release.
It’s a clear sign that offering more content and updates make players see the game as more valuable, which will give developers the ability to charge more. So, it is vert important to have a good DLC strategy for boosting your price!
This scatterplot, with its fitted curve, shows a pretty clear connection between the number of DLCs a game has and its average selling price across different genres.
Short answer, no.
If a game has 1-5 rather than 0 DLCs, it is more likely to have a higher play time. However, having too many DLCs may not be very useful. More DLCs doesn't always make players want to play more, especially if that number goes above 5.
Notice that one game has 461 DLCs? It's playtime doesn’t increase much, compared to the others.
The left chart groups the collected data of average play time in a 14-days window and DLC counts of games, with each dot representing a game. The color represents the number of DLCs that game have (who clearly shows that special one). The pie chart on the right shows the playtime distribution for 0-10 hours and 10-200 hours when DLC count is 0 and 1-5.
Most awarded games have more than 0 DLCs in average, so the rule can be simplified to: try to have around 1 to 2 DLCs in developing the games if possible, which should possibly bring you more awards and positive reviews (obviously, you should see a trend that more awarded games tend to have a higher positive review).
This graph shows the average DLC counts versus the percentage of positive reviews each developer received. You can use the filters to select the range for the number of teams' published games. You can also select to see a specific genre or the awards condition. When clicking on one specific circle, you'll see the games it publish each year and the number of reviews of their top 10 games.
There is a consistent price drop from 2013 to 2018 while more and more games are released. Things changed a bit during the COVID time, that the game price increased a little bit back and eventually turned steady. More games are released during this period, which makes sense because more of us get to stay home and play games ;)
Considering this competitive condition the market is having, you should set the price according to the average, saying around $7, to match the possible trends of next year.
This graph shows combined bar graph of the number of released games by year and a line graph showing the change of average price of the games over the year.
The price does have some relationship with the total reviews: the lower-price game will have more players and thus lead to more reviews.
If you highlight the indie game only, you get to know a fact: you definitely want to have your price set below $30 to be good for both sales and reviews (unless you are super confident that your game is worth much more than that number).
So, think about your cost of the game carefully!
This graph shows the percent of positive reviews on the game versus its price. Different genres are represented with colors, and the owners count are the sizes.
You have the option to select the preferred genres, filter out the owners count, number of total reviews, or even type in a specific game name to see how the graph changes!
Now, if you are at the ending phrase of developing one game, you think: where should I put my games on, and do I need to support multi-platforms?
In fact, the count of games not supporting the Windows platform is 1/96000 of the count of Windows games. Among that number, games only support Windows takes the most proportion and is far more than games supporting multiple platforms.
So, focusing on the Windows platform is enough for your game to be popular, and save your time to develop better game contents themselves!
Words like "challenging," "beautiful," and "mysterious," and "relaxing" pop out in the result! You should see that players are looking for games that offer a visually appealing experience and something that makes them think or try.
For you as indie developers, this can be super helpful—it’s a clear signal to focus on these aspects when developing and, often ignored, promoting your games. You may highlight how your game could bring these qualities to gamers' life, which would grab the attention of us, the indie fans!
This word cloud gives us a glimpse into the adjectives players used the most often in their reviews of different game genres. This tells you what really matters to the players!
Metacritic score: reviews/scores aggregated in a website called Metacritic
Looking at this chart, it’s clear that the Metacritic scores have directly reflected a game’s quality overall. Make sure you have a good Metascore, it will boost a game’s visibility and credibility by drawing new players' attentions!
A higher Metascore acts as a seal of approval. It encourages more players to purchase and engage with the game, which then leads to better reviews, more recommendations, and sustained popularity!
So.... What Factors Are Important and What Are NOT?
Want to Start Your Steam Journey?
Whether you are interested in developing a game, playing games, or using data. Here're some useful sources that you may want to start with!
Credit to the sources:
Images: (including AI generated image)
https://shared.fastly.steamstatic.com/store_item_assets/steam/apps/413150/header.jpg
https://i.etsystatic.com/19063773/r/il/14b0ee/3851602189/il_570xN.3851602189_3rup.jpg
https://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steam/apps/373420/header.jpg?t=1589968419
https://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steam/apps/743860/header.jpg?t=1545343726
https://www.pcworld.com/article/1954972/biggest-steam-update-in-years-all-innovations-at-a-glance.html
Research:
Activision Blizzard - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Activision_Blizzard
Datasets:
The main source is linked to the right. We downloaded it and did some cleaning.
Other datasets: https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/kkhandekar/large-video-game-companies