Making Your Game Successful On
Background
Large Gaming Companies & Indie Developers

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.

If that's not intuitive enough. What about....

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?

Introduction

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!

aspect 1: Genre
What Genres Are Most Played?

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.

What Genres Are Published And Sold the Most Yearly?

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!

Which Are the Popular Developers in Each Genre?

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!

aspect 2: DLC
Are DLCs Actually Needed?

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!

Does More Always Means Better?

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.

What's that Good Number?

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).

aspect 3: Price
How To Set Your Price?

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.

What's the Upper Bound?

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!

aspect 4: Platform
Are There Differences Among Platforms?

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!

aspect 5: Reviews
What Can We Learn From These Reviews?

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!

A Comparison!

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!

Conclusion

So.... What Factors Are Important and What Are NOT?

MORE

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

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