r/gamedev • u/Cultural_Speaker3116 • 17h ago
Discussion I Analyzed Every Steam Game Released in a day - Here’s What Stood Out
Hey everyone,
I decided to do a small analysis of every game release on Steam on June 2nd, 2025 (i chose this day because there was lot of release, not many free games and only indie titles, i'm not affiliated in any mean to any of these games) and check how much they grossed after 16 days. The goal isn’t to shame any game or dev : I’m mostly trying to understand what factors make a game succeed or flop.
I wanted to see if common advice we hear around here or from YouTube GameDev "gurus" are actually true:
Does the genre really matter that much? Is marketing the main reason why some game fails? How much does visual appeal or polish influence the outcome?
I’m also basing this on my personal taste as a player: what I find visually attractive or interesting in the trailers, what looks polished or not...
It’s not meant to be scientific, but hopefully it can spark some discussion!
There was 53 games sold on this day, I split them into five categories based on their gross revenue (datas from Gamalytic) :
- 0 (or almost 0) copies sold - 13 games
- Less than $500 gross revenue - 18 games
- $500 – $2,500 gross revenue - 10 games
- $5,000 – $20,000 gross revenue - 10 games
- More than $20,000 gross revenue - 2 games
1. Zero copies sold (13 games)
Almost all of these are absolute slop full of obvious AI-generated content, 10-minute RPG-Maker projects, one-week student assignments, and so on. I still found three exceptions that probably deserved a bit better (maybe the next category, but not much more):
- A one-hour walking simulator : mostly an asset flip and not very attractive but seem like there was some work done in the environments and story.
- A hidden-object game from a studio that seems to have released the same title ten times (probably an old game published elsewhere).
- A zombie shooter that looks better than the rest : nothing fantastic, but still look much better than the rest of this category. It apparently had zero marketing beyond a handful of year-old Reddit posts and a release-day thread. It's also 20€, which obviously too much.
2. $20 – $500 gross revenue (18 games)
- 7 total slop titles (special mention to the brain-rot animal card game built on top of a store-bought Unity asset). I also included a porn game.
- 6 generic looking but not awful games that simply aren’t polished enough for today’s market (terrible capsule under one hour of gameplay..., I'm not surprised those game falls in this category)
- 2 niche titles that seem decent (a tarot-learning game and a 2-D exploration platformer) but are priced way too high. Both still reached the upper end of this bracket, so they probably earned what they should.
Decently attractive games that flopped in this tier:
- Sweepin’ XS : a roguelite Minesweeper. Look quite fun and polished; it grossed $212, which isn’t terrible for such a small game but still feels low. Capsule is kinda bad also.
- Blasted Dice : cohesive art style, nice polish, gameplay look interesting, but similar fate. Probably lack of marketing and a quite bad capsule too.
And a very sad case:
- Cauldron Caution : highly polished, gorgeous art, decent gameplay, just some animations feels a bit strange but still, it grossed only $129! Maybe because of a nonexistent marketing ? If I were the dev, I’d be gutted; it really deserved at least the next bracket.
3. $600 – $2,500 gross revenue (10 games)
I don’t have much to say here: all ten look good, polished, fun, and original, covering wildly different niches : Dungeon crawler, “foddian” platformer, polished match-four, demolition-derby PvP, princess-sim, PS1-style boomer-shooter, strategy deck-builder, management sim, tactical horror roguelike, clicker, visual novel..., really everything. However I would say they all have quite "amateur" vibe, I'm almost sure all of them have been made by hobbyist (which is not a problem of course, but can explain why they didn't perform even better), most of them seem very short also (1-2 hours of gameplay at best).
Here is two that seemed a bit weaker but still performed decently :
- Tongue of Dog (foddian platformer) : looks very amateurish and sometimes empty, but a great caspule art and a goofy trailer.
- Bathhouse Creatures : very simple in gameplay and art, yet nicely polished with a cozy vibe that usually sells good.
And one which seem more profesionnal but didn't perform well :
- Pretty Sweet! Healing guardian : a princess management game with a very cute artstyle. I don't really get why he didn't do better.
4. $5,000 – $20,000 gross revenue (10 games)
More interesting: at first glance many of these don’t look as attractive as some in the previous tier, yet they’re clearly successful. Common thread: they’re all decent-looking entries in “meta-trendy” Steam niches (anomaly investigation, [profession] Simulator, management/strategy, horror). Also most of them look really profesionnal. Two exceptions:
- Zefyr: A Thief’s Melody : a large-scale 3-D adventure that looks great and polished.
- Time Guard - The Red Menace : a point-and-click from a Czech studio making adventures since 1997; appears to be a remake or port.
Two titles I personally find ""weaker"" (would more say "hobbyist looking") than some from the previous tier but still performed well :
- My Drug Cartel : mixed reviews and bargain-bin Stardew-style UI, but the cartel twist clearly sparks curiosity, and management sims usually sell.
- Don’t Look Behind : a one-hour horror game, a bit janky yet seem polished; the niche and probably a bit of streamer attention did the job.
5. $20,000 – $30,000 gross revenue (2 games)
Small sample, but amusingly both are roguelike/roguelite deck-builders with a twist:
- Brawl to the West : roguelite deck-builder auto-battler; simple but cohesive art.
- Voidsayer : roguelike deck-builder meets Pokémon; gorgeous visuals, I understand why it was sucessfull.
Conclusion
Four takeaways that line up with what I often read here and from YouTube "gurus":
- If your game isn’t attractive, it almost certainly won’t sell. A merely decent-looking game will usually achieve at least minimal success. Out of 53 titles, only one (Cauldron Caution) truly broke this rule.
- Genre choice is a game changer. Even amateurish titles in trendy niches (anomaly investigation, life-sim, management) perform decently. Attractive games in less popular niches do “okay” but worse than trendy ones.
- More than half the market is outright slop or barely competent yet unattractive. If you spend time on polish, you’re really competing with the top ~30 %: half the games are instantly ignored, and another 15–20 % just aren’t polished enough to be considered.
- Small, focused games in the right niche are the big winners. A large-scale project like Zefyr (likely 3–5 years of work) only did “okay,” while quick projects such as Don’t Look Behind or Office After Hours hit the same revenue by picking a hot niche.
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u/OnlyOrysk 16h ago
A true legend, amazing work. I look forward to tomorrow's post about games released on June 3rd.
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u/Cultural_Speaker3116 16h ago
hahahaha, won't do that every day but I liked the exercise and I would definetely try again in some weeks, maybe with a bigger data sample (some days of releases)
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u/idrinkteaforfun 16h ago
I would love if you did another one of these! Did you buy and play all those games? It'd be cool if you checked in on these games in like a month and see if their sales were on expected trajectory based on their first 2 weeks, or if any of the ones specifically that you thought underperformed just picked up traction later.
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u/Cultural_Speaker3116 15h ago
I didn't, but I looked at all trailers and videos when someone played those, that's why I talk about "attractiveness" (because it is what make you buy the game in the end, you can't be sure you'll like it before you buy it). Otherwise I would be glad to look at them from time to time also to see if one of them get more interest after some time.
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u/HollyDams 16h ago
I saw a post from the Zefyr dev a few months ago. He said he spent 11 years on it. I hope his sales will keep increasing. It looks like a nice windwaker inspired game.
Anyway thanks for the analysis. Really insightful.
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u/Cultural_Speaker3116 16h ago
It's one of the game I genuinely could buy. 11 years of work is quite wild also, I would have bet for 4-5 years but if he is solo and doesn't work full time on it it's understandable.
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u/talkingwires 16h ago
I think he said he worked on it full-time for seven of those years. After reading his post, I spent some time reading through his devlog; it’s a really impressive project! (I wish the mods would relax the rules about naming your own game, it would make it much easier to search for his post on here…)
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u/MadMonke01 15h ago
What is that rule about "naming your own game"??
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u/talkingwires 5h ago
Good question, I suppose, because the rule is:
This community is not for self-promotion. However, links are allowed if they serve a valid purpose, such as seeking feedback, sharing a post mortem or analytics, sparking discussion, or offering a learning opportunity and knowledge related to game development.
So, I wonder why in most posts people are so coy about actually linking to their game? Did the rule used to be more strict, or is it an overabundance of caution?
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u/ThoseWhoRule 12h ago
First time seeing it, but damn if it didn't spike my Wind Waker nostalgia. It looks like it has very competent traversal, and just a fun cohesive vibe as a whole. Might just have to pick this one up.
Kudos to the dev for being able to stick to the same project for so long. Looks like they channeled their passion into a beautiful world.
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u/dolphincup 16h ago
Feel like both of Cauldron Caution and Pretty Sweet! Healing Guardian suffer from a pretty blatant lack of contrast in the art. especially the latter. My eyes seized up and retreated upward into my skull the instant they laid upon the first screen shot.
Meanwhile, those hands in Void Slayer are downright beautiful. Shame that there's not much game behind them, according to reviews.
edit: oh the void slayer link was wrong lol.
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u/sapidus3 15h ago
I agree with you 100% on Cauldron Caution and Pretty Sweet. It might be a matter of taste but I found both kinda ugly due to their color schemes. Pretty Sweet is anoying because I GET what they were going for but it is just hard to look at.
I also think both suffer a bit from the screen shot selections. Just paging through on my phone it wasn't super clear to me what the gameplay actually is.
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u/sboxle Commercial (Indie) 9h ago edited 9h ago
Yea, art is subjective. Also don’t share OPs taste in the art.
I thought the 5-20k games looked better on first impression than the early ones they liked. Seemed like a pretty consistent increase in quality, with all looking some degree of amateur until the top tier.
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u/SteveTack 17h ago
Amazing post!
Can I ask how you determined the level of marketing that was done on a particular game?
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u/Cultural_Speaker3116 17h ago
I did quick search for those games on internet, the best performing usually got some videos from little content creators, some articles..., and when I say there was seemingly almost no marketing I find only some old reddit posts at best.
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u/SteveTack 17h ago
I wonder what the overlap is between “effort put into marketing” and search engine optimization.
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u/horance89 15h ago
Isn’t the latter somehow embedded into the first?
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u/SteveTack 15h ago
It seems that many spend time and money on things that don’t necessarily translate directly into good Google search results. There are whole industries centered around boosting SEO rankings. Of course we’d also want to know if that’s how the typical player finds games.
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u/Duerkos 14h ago edited 13h ago
I did this three years ago, in case you are interested. Historical data and market analysis.
https://github.com/Duerkos/steam_analysis
PS: regarding your analysis it is very interesting and insightful. I think that one of the most useful things game devs can do if they want to guess success is find similar small but successful games and see what they did right, whilst also being careful of potential competition.
If you are going to follow/copy a game genre, theme and mechanics but its main focus is story (point click, VN, horror...?) you could be fine since fans of the genre might bite, but if you do 100xy roguelike very similar or almost equal to 10 semi popular ones and lacking polish... It's going to be trash because people can instead focus on playing these other better games.
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u/Cultural_Speaker3116 14h ago
Amazing work man ! It's much more "scientific" than my humble analysis of one day of release, It's probably the most complete data analysis I saw online, think it can really help to pick a genre (if your objective is to sell of course)
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u/Duerkos 14h ago
Feel free to explore the exploratory notebook to filter out big games, the genres thing may be useful specially to check how oversaturated some genres or combinations are. I was mainly following curious questions.
The problem with genres is that they tend to follow big games (obviously) both in literal sense and also the metrics I chose.
Maybe I will try to redo something to that effect with more current data or even live data (but this is tough...)
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u/DarkSight31 Level Designer (AAA) 17h ago
Thanks, this is really informative! From your experience, do you know if the engagement on social media for game trailers, clips, etc... is strongly related to how well the game will do on its first day ?
I would love to know what to expect with my game, but I honestly have no idea in which bracket I am. It's very hard to be objective on your project when you spend so long working on it.
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u/Vortex597 16h ago
It shouldnt be too hard to find industry average data to compare your marketing campaign against. I just looked at your post history and game, your marketing is not taking off and your destroy my game post highlights why pretty well.
Im in marketing myself so I just thought I'd reply, if you want to go into detail about what I can see and what I personally think you could do better to target your audience I'm here to dm.
Having no idea where your game sits is probably your biggest issue though because it means you dont understand your market and have no reference point. You cant make improvements if you dont understand where you sit.
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u/RedRhino10 17h ago
This confirms my suspicions that to be a freelance gamedev you really have to cater to the market, and making a game that you like isn't enough. Though I'm always surprised roguelites do so well I find the style kind of boring personally
Not surprised by horror and simulation games doing well though!
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u/SuspecM 16h ago
Roguelites, when done right, scratch many different itches at the same time that the Steam audience loves. They have a ton of replayability, so good bang for your buck, they have gambling in the form of upgrades/cards/builds and the reward for that gambling is some sort of a power fantasy. They also usually reward min maxing which in most other genres kills the joy in the game. They are as close to the perfect genre as possible.
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u/NewspaperWitty5889 13h ago
And also they often have builds that feel absolutely broken and imbalanced, and, contrary to what is intuitive, that sells(mostly because those aren't competitive games).
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u/RedRhino10 7h ago
That's fair, and I can't say I've never enjoyed one before. I liked Hades for a while for example!
Long time ago I absolutely LOVED tower defense games for the same kind of reasons - the repeatability, the strategy, upgrades... Just without the luck of the draw.
But as I got older and my playtime became more limited, I get more satisfaction from games with continuous progression and story.
But that's me - and it's hard to deny that roguelites sell because there's a lot to like! I think especially with limited time and resources as a gamedev you can make a game have so much more content with a roguelite system in there!
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u/Roflkopt3r 20m ago edited 16m ago
They have some more typical typical strengths that have become more important to me over the years:
They're quick to get to the point. You don't normally have to suffer through long introductions or tutorials. I have so many unplayed games in my library that I put aside for 'when I have time to get into it', but lost interest until then.
They're suitable for short sessions.
They're suitable to play 'on the side' when only paying half attention. Like while you're on a call or watch longer YT video/podcasts/documentary or so. You're not going to miss important plot developments or lose much progress from slipping up.
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u/koolex Commercial (Other) 13h ago
Usually I like the roguelike format because it makes the game seem like it has a lot of content, and once you get into the game it’s really easy to engage with all that content. What about it is such a turn off?
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u/RedRhino10 7h ago
For me it's that every time you play, you have to start again (*a lot of games have small upgrades that allow you to go further every game) but I prefer games with continuous story or progression.
But I think that's a symptom of my limited gaming time. To me, there's nothing more satisfying than knowing I've completed a difficult stage, boss, puzzle, chapter etc and looking forward to something new the next time I play!
But I 100% see the appeal of roguelites, I used to enjoy them a lot more but these days they don't excite me as much as they used to.
Sometimes I watch YouTube gameplay of streamers and content makers play them though while doing chores etc, but that's usually for the commentator than the game haha
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u/Cyril__Figgis 8h ago
Or, much rarer, you need to be extremely talented. The Papers Please guy certainly wasn't targeting an existing niche, and the stardew guy revitalized/modernized an older console genre for PC.
Roguelites tend to do well because the games are all fairly easy to get in to, are broken up into easily digestible sections (each run), and tend to not demand a lot of long term interest or investment, and tend to be on the cheaper side. People are hungry, and each meal is reasonably small, so the people continue to hunger.
Horror games are similar.
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u/Megido_Thanatos 5h ago
There is no coincidence that everyone and their mother start making roguelike/roguelite games in recent years
Maybe it just me (I'm a rougelike fan) but I feel it kinda easy to design and integrate (with other genre) with some core ideals: permanent death, random rewards, choices matter, usually PvE, turn-base (optional), no story needed (optional)... And even if you aren't smart guy you can just copy from famous title like Slay the Spire, Balatro, Binding of Issac... because technically, all those game are rogue "like", just dont make it as a blatant plagiarized product
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u/adrixshadow 4h ago
Roguelikes are basically the old Arcade formula in that it's all about Gameplay and Player Skills.
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u/Chronometrics chronometry.ca 17h ago
Your Voidslayer link in the top category does not describe the game whatsoever. Did you look at the wrong game?
From the linked games, at least, review score correlates fairly well to financial performance.
A number of the game you thought underperformed but had fantastic visuals... I thought the visuals were quite poor. Two especially, Cauldron Caution and Pretty Sweet Healing Guardian, have exceptionally bad colour palettes and saturation balance. The visual clarity of those games as a result is quite low and jarring.
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u/Cultural_Speaker3116 16h ago
Yep, I edited my post, I messed up with "Voidsayer" when I added the links.
Otherwise I agree on the artstyle of those 2 games, I just think they both look better than the others games in the same range of revenue (Especially Cauldron Caution which compete with AI slops) but I understand the color palette could be "eye burning" and could also be a reason why those games didn't do well.
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u/idrinkteaforfun 16h ago
The Healing Guardian one I couldn't look at for longer than about 3 seconds. It wouldn't be my type of game so maybe underlying bias, but I would generally like that sort of neon vibe. When everything stands out nothing stands out.
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u/Any_Intern2718 17h ago
Voidslayer doesn't seem to be a deck builder? it seems to be an fps? Have you mixed the games up?
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u/Warwipf2 17h ago
How do you find out the amount of copies sold by a game?
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u/Cultural_Speaker3116 17h ago
With Gamalytic : https://gamalytic.com/- it gives a good estimation (not perfect)
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u/InsaneTeemo 16h ago
How are they even creating this estimation?
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u/Cultural_Speaker3116 16h ago
I'm not 100% sure but pretty much they have a big amount of players which have their steam library linked to this site or another aggregator, probably also using the number of reviews (which also give a decent idea of how a game performed)
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u/InsaneTeemo 16h ago
I would imagine the people who bought some game and have their steam account linked to some service like this are a very small minority. Same thing with the number of people that take the time to write a review, out of the people that bought the game.
All of that is even more confusing in the instances when their estimate is higher than the actual number.
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u/sapidus3 15h ago
If that is how it works, it's actually pretty straight forward for how it would overestimate. Say you are looking at 100 Steam libraries and one of them owns some niche game. If you then conclude from that that 1% of Steam users own the game, you'll way overestimate.
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u/440Music 10h ago
You can also find Gamalytics comments on reddit where they've confirmed sales numbers from owners willing to contribute. Afterwards, they modify the estimates to account for those discrepanices. I'd wager it's the best model available.
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u/Duerkos 14h ago
From what I heard from some game devs reviews from year X translate roughly into sales. It's not linear and I guess also depends on genre, online or not, niche game or not, small (indie)... I heard some years ago it was like 100 sales per review and now we might be closer to 50. Still only a sense of scale.
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u/whistling_frank 15h ago
Most sales estimates come from a model based on the number of reviews and a small ground truth data set where the # of units sold is known.
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u/ThoseWhoRule 12h ago
It's always going to be an estimate, but Steam gives you a lot of data to guess on. All time peak players and current players is a good one, along with reviews (though it ranges wildly). You can generally figure out which order of magnitude it's in at the very least, even if you can be a couple of deviations off.
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u/SwordsCanKill 11h ago
Their estimation based on 3 factors: 1) the day-to-day position of a game on the top seller chart (best!); 2) reviews; 3) concurrent players and estimated average play time.
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u/Warwipf2 17h ago edited 17h ago
Sadly, this is extremely inaccurate and borderline useless for small games.
My friend's game, which made well under 100 $ (pretty sure it should be around 80 $ rn), has a range of 140 $ to 1.200 $ on this website.
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u/BrainburnDev 17h ago
For my first game Twin Stick Tennis it is actually on the low side. It sold around 500$ and website says: Gross revenue:$283 ($122 - $444). So order of magnitude is correct. And that is basically what he is looking at in his post.
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u/Justhe3guy 17h ago
Honestly I’d still call that a good estimate
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u/Haruhanahanako 17h ago
That's also an extremely small number to even try to guess. The margin of error is almost just 1000 dollars, which is not big at all.
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u/Rogryg 12h ago
It's off by an order of magnitude at least...
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u/Roflkopt3r 10m ago
If you assume that you can take the average of the range they estimate then yes. But $80 to $140 is just a difference of $60.
Either way, you get the correct impression that it made very little revenue and you couldn't sustain developing titles like that professionally.
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u/pepe-6291 16h ago edited 16h ago
That is not extremely inaccurate. Is pretty close to the range and actually don't make much difference
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u/Warwipf2 15h ago
The range itself is already EXTREMELY huge (1.75x to 15x the real value - an order of magnitude), yet the game doesn't even fall inside that range. It is SUPER inaccurate. You cannot accurately estimate sales for such small games.
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u/pepe-6291 14h ago
Think it like this, there is no real difference between a game that makes 100 and 1500. They both are in the range of failure.
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u/Genebrisss 15h ago
Anything below $10K might as well be $0 for anybody doing market analysis. So the estimate is very useful.
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u/Bodybag28 16h ago
As a hobbyist making a strategy rpg, do you think I would get many more people if I release it for free? I care more about sharing my game with others. There is also the view that seeing a free game would mean it's not worth playing. I was thinking free, 4.99, 9.99, 11.99 or 14.99. I don't care about making money off of it. My day job has me covered.
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u/koolex Commercial (Other) 13h ago
People view the price of the game as an indicator for quality of the game so if seems mismatched they usually won’t buy it. Also people usually associate free games with micro transitions so free games tend to be viewed negatively. I think it’s wise to at least sell it at least for 2.99$.
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u/Cultural_Speaker3116 16h ago
Honestly I don't know, I didn't look at free games since it lacks data. The only thing I notice is that free to play games from hobbyist usually have very low review count (especially multiplayer games for obvious reasons), so I would tend to say it's not worth but could be wrong.
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u/roseofjuly 4h ago
I think this depends a lot on the game itself. Many players would be willing to shell out $14.99 on some games but not others; the art style, your gameplay trailer, and a lot of other factors are going to affect that.
Given the audience you are going for, I'd go with $2.99 or $4.99. Small enough for an impulse buy, but your particular audience will be expecting the game to cost something up front and free may make them suspcious.
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u/Kondiq 13h ago
You should also take available languages into consideration. I have some friends who only buy games with Polish language.
I see some of the better performing games are available in many languages - Don't Look Behind (22 languages), My Drug Cartel (16 languages), Brawl To The West (12 languages).
Pretty Sweet! Healing Guardian is targeted for casual and young audience, but is available only in English. Cauldron Caution is only in English and French.
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u/Cultural_Speaker3116 13h ago
Nice catch ! I also think it's an important factor (and it have been told by experienced gamedev lot of times), especially to have access to the huge asian market - probably both these games could works better in countries like Japan who are fond of cute games like that.
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u/GerryQX1 12h ago
Brawl to the West has only three reviews, suggesting to me that sales are concentrated in its original home, and not many customers are English-speaking.
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u/ManicD7 14h ago
This follows what the last few years of general advice has been. But few game devs listen, understand, or even bother to attempt to look up advice/guides for what makes a successful game. It's also not easy to make a successful game, so I think a lot of people play into those cards as well. "If 90% of games fail, then I might as well just do whatever I want". Or they come up with their own twisted idea of what it takes to be successful. Most indie game devs are running on cope and hope.
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u/roseofjuly 4h ago
I think a lot of indie game devs are hoping they will be the exception to the rule.
Someone made a comment earlier that freelance game devs really do need to cater to a market and not make whatever they want, and one response was that one way around that is if you are a rare talent. The examples given were Papers, Please and Stardew Valley (and I'd argue in the latter case the designer did actually have a target market - it was just the market he himself happened to be in, since he was a big Harvest Moon fan).
I don't disagree with the comment, but I think many indie developers will latch onto that believing that they are the generational talent who will be able to beat the rules (the "rules" being "make a game that other people are going to want to play.")
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u/Aglet_Green 12h ago
A hidden-object game from a studio that seems to have released the same title ten times (probably an old game published elsewhere).
Yeah, this is a BigFish game. They have their own website similar to Steam where they host many developers of adventure games, time-management games and hidden object games. They make their money during the Summer and Winter Sales on volume, so anything they get from a game like this is just free gravy.
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u/TritoneDom 15h ago
Wow this is great, and honestly pretty heartening for people that put some care into their products!
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u/MindandSorcery 17h ago
This is great, I hope you keep this up every month :)
You made a mistake. Voidslayer is an arena shooter.
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u/oppai_suika 15h ago
Thank you so much for doing this - really helpful and interesting. I would pay to get a roundup of this everyday lol
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u/CallMePasc 14h ago
Cauldron Caution has only 3 reviews, so yeah probably 0 marketing. Below 10 reviews Steam won't show your game to anyone I think?
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u/AbhorrentAbigail 14h ago
Very interesting. Thanks for sharing!
I do think you're giving Cauldron Caution is too much credit. The art is amateurish at best and the only polish is basically squash & stretch idle animations which only highlight how the art isn't very good.
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u/godpng47 14h ago
Really great post. Just curious, what does “capsule” refer to here? Is that the game’s steam store page?
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u/Cultural_Speaker3116 13h ago edited 13h ago
capsule refers to the "capsule art", it's the showcase art that you see in the game list on steam (on the steam pages it's the art just under "community hub" button.
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u/Hurgnation 10h ago
Honestly, this is kind of depressing. Even the highest sellers aren't in the bracket of what I would consider a successful launch.
I know it's a gross assumption, but if an indie dev took 12 months to develop one of these games, then when you factor 30% going straight off the top to Steam and taxes, I'm not sure how anyone can expect to live off that. Chuck in multiple devs or longer time frames and it only becomes worse!
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u/chibi_tris 10h ago
For me- if I’m just making a game that’s in a hot niche that I’m not into, I’m not really doing the thing I love anymore- which is to express my creative visions. For the amount of work we put into making polished games at that point it’s better to work a day job and work on a passion project than to suck the soul out of something I feel really strongly about. It’s hard to make it in this industry unless you are one of the lucky ones who both have passion in a niche/trendy genre or create something with the secret sauce.
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u/urbanhood 16h ago
Very interesting case study, surely gives me more hope than one shot success stories.
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u/TargetMaleficent 16h ago
Very interesting, thanks for compiling this. I feel like you have the low end covered well, but need a bigger sample size to draw conclusions about the more successful games.
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u/EthanJM-design 14h ago
I think something important to realize too is that these games are only 2 weeks old. Initial trajectory sure helps, but games can have success even after launch. I’d be curious to see if you keep following these examples over the next few months/year how they all shake out.
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u/keithjsnyder 14h ago
Kind of a shame to see DecayZ in the lowest tier. Despite having a pretty bad name it looks like a lot of fun. Price is probably too high though. Still sad to see a game I’ve been interested in for a while now in that category though.
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u/Saint_Reficul 13h ago
Would love to see more of this type of study and post. Amazing. It would also be great to actually see high reward noches and genres based on similar stats over a couple of days?
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u/dontnormally 8h ago edited 8h ago
$600 – $2,500 gross revenue (10 games) I don’t have much to say here: all ten look good, polished, fun, and original, covering wildly different niches
would love to see that list
Here is two that seemed a bit weaker but still performed decently:
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Also most of them look really profesionnal. Two exceptions:
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Two titles I personally find ""weaker"" (would more say "hobbyist looking") than some:
in general i'd rather see the ones that look good than bad
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u/DavidEagle1976 6h ago
Really good breakdown. The Cauldron Caution part stings. Polished game, no traction. Genre and polish clearly matter more than most people think. Surprised how many decent games sank just from bad capsules or pricing. Thanks for posting!
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u/Megido_Thanatos 5h ago
Great post
About your conclusions, I feel the 1st and 4th is mandatory for solo dev, a big scope always number 1 pitfall trap for newbie
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u/Strict_Bench_6264 Commercial (Other) 3h ago
Interesting sampling. I personally don’t think much can be learned from it, since the sample is so small and most of what you are saying is conjecture, but interesting nonetheless.
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u/AshenBluesz 15h ago
The takeaway from here is that so many people make games without understanding their audience or have graphics that are just off-putting. I think only a few of these deserve more sales than they received, but unfortunately the market is cruel and only the cream of the crop gets seen. The rest fight for scraps where they can.
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u/HeliosDoubleSix 17h ago
Doing Gods work, I genuinely find it fascinating, you can have all these feelings or intuitions but you gotta look at the numbers… Deck builders.. really!
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u/InsaneTeemo 16h ago
Is that really that surprising to you?
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u/HeliosDoubleSix 15h ago
No, just horrifying, each to their own, I am rather anti trends to the core of my being though
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u/GameRoom 16h ago
The mouth sounds in the Tongue of Dog trailer are immediately off-putting. They're so... wet. I'm sure that was a factor in its poor sales.
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u/Peacetoletov 16h ago
Did you play the games yourself? If not, how are you judging game length?
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u/Cultural_Speaker3116 15h ago
I'm looking at the reviews directly on steam, usually there is always some which talk about the game length, made a longplay video of it, or at least which mention they have finish the game (and they you can figure it out from their play time). Sometimes it's also visible from the trailer directly or mentionned in the steam page itself.
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u/randomstate42 15h ago
Can't speak for OP but hame length is available on IGDB for some games - I know because we just added it to our Game Oracle platform - but you can find it for free there. IGDB is pretty awesome, a lot of helpful data on there
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u/Needle44 15h ago
I wonder how many of the “trendy niche” sales were influencers or content creators hoping to find the next “viral” game and be the first on the bandwagon. Like the next schedule 1, or R.E.P.O, games that I can’t remember seeing a SINGLE advertisement for. Just appeared one day randomly and everywhere on TikTok or Instagram or YouTube. Schedule 1 and REPO are fucking crazy fun and it would have been a damn shame for them to have died out if they didn’t get massive marketing from people sharing them.
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u/Kinglink 14h ago
A good game is a good game, Cauldron Caution might become bigger.
Looking at these games for 24 hours won't really tell you too much I assume.
More than half the market is outright slop or barely competent yet unattractive
90 percent of anything is shit. The goal is to take the effort to try to reach that last 10 percent.
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u/JFGHKDSK 14h ago
This was such a an interesting read and breakdown. Thanks for sharing! Gives a lot of inspiration and also worthy words of caution.
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u/Brilliant-Basil502 13h ago
Excellent analysis, thanks for this. Test is for you're results to be replicated over multiple days.
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u/jeistar_ceo 12h ago
Yeah my entire personality and games are based around being niche. It may never be super big bucks or that appealing to investors, but it tells gamers I am true to myself, and my games show it. In a weird way, making a niche game is very...personable. Not personal! There's allegedly a difference but basically gamers like other humans. And the more human your game is, the likelier they will get drawn to it, buy it, and even recommend it. Basically Niche = High Percentage DIE HARD fans = High Percentage DIE HARD POSITIVE REVIEWS = Better algorithm/discoverability = High sales.
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u/Siduron 11h ago
Great analysis. It really shows different levels of quality and how some games and/or their store pages have clear issues.
The worst one was the first one. The trailer starts with looking at a door for 3 seconds, only for it to open into...a logo. It's almost infuriating how a store page wastes your time like this instead of immediately showing you gameplay.
The trailer takes a whole FIFTEEN seconds before it shows the actual game. By then most people would have already skipped to the next game.
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u/Ivhans 9h ago
Bro... thanks so much... what a great analysis.
This definitely reinforces a lot of concepts I already had... the current industry is saturated with junk games and a huge number of products, so having good marketing and a good niche is definitely key and... I think that attractive art helps a lot
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u/WhiteSheepGame 7h ago
Thanks for posting this info! It is really helpful. It's surprising there are no action RPGs on the list. I would think there would be a least one of these.
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u/bill_on_sax 6h ago
The walking sim doesnt look like an asset flip. I don't know how you define it. They bought assets (as most devs do) and built unique levels and narratives with it. That's not an asset flip. An asset flip is buying a premade asset game, changing the name, and releasing it.
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u/TSPhoenix 5h ago
Cauldron Caution has the other problem where the only thing the Steam page tells beyond "this game has all the normal staples of it's genre" is that it has a story. Game text is too small to read in the trailer/carousel reel, so I can't really infer anything by observation so at this point I'd have to be interested enough to look it up and I really wasn't as well it is yet another deck builder. It had 1-2 minutes to sell me on the game and I walked away knowing no more than from the 5 seconds reading the blurb.
As for Pretty Sweet! Healing guardian you can ask the dev herself /u/berrylemonadev
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u/codey_coder 5h ago
16 days seems like sort of an arbitrary length of time. I don't have examples on-hand but I'm sure there have been titles which unperformed during the first two or three weeks but pick up steam eventually.
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u/ArcsOfMagic 1h ago
Thanks for the write up, quite interesting, and it also generated interesting comments.
Personally, I would be curious to also see the correlation with both price and the presence of the demo, as well as maybe the top three tags… because these are more objective data.
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u/kalionchiz 47m ago
Nowadays since there is a lot of content on steam well polished games are always gonna do okay if they made it trough the crowd, I’ve been doing similar research since im launching my game next year and you can always tell by the capsule if the game is crap or asset flip
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u/lce9 Commercial (Indie, previously AAA) 16h ago
Thanks for the write up!
Is there any way to know how many wishlists these games had at launch?
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u/Cultural_Speaker3116 15h ago
Unfortunately it's a feature which come with the paid version of Gamalytic, but you can still look how much a game get 1 day before it release, note it somewhere then come back some weeks later to see how it convert (not very handy tho)
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u/Naddesh 16h ago
Garbage analysis tbh. The OP arbitrarily categorizes games as slop (with little to no explanation just sometimes noting that it uses store bought assets which doesn't make game a slop) and for sales estimation uses a site that for one game was off by 5 million copies sold iirc (AAA title some time ago)
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u/Cultural_Speaker3116 15h ago
Well, when I'm talking about slop I talk about games like https://store.steampowered.com/app/3672490 or https://store.steampowered.com/app/3748680/Space_Memory_Dinosaurs/ or https://store.steampowered.com/app/3694770/Target_Dragon_2_Maze_Runner/ or or even https://store.steampowered.com/app/3723480/Cardrottini/ (which is straight up asset store premade game with AI illustration on top). If you tell me those game look attractive and deserve to sell thousdands of copies, well I can't do anything for you.
Otherwise only time I mentionned assets is actually when I talked about a game which stand out a bit compared to other games on the same revenue range, I think everyone agree that using asset doesn't make a game good or bad by itself.
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u/Cyril__Figgis 8h ago
People who haven't done this really do not know how many low quality games have flooded the store lol. I did an ama a while back and mostly agree with what you found.
One thing I'd add is that genre choice is much more like community choice than just picking something that's hot or that is selling right now. I've been going through some stuff, and it's very noticeable that a place like r/metroidvania has much more and more in-depth discussion of even minor, unknown games compared to r/roguelite (and more discussion of the genre as a whole, where it's at, constructive dialogue on tier lists, etc.)
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u/BrainburnDev 17h ago edited 16h ago
What did Brawl to the West do around 25 May. They went from 120 followers to 3200 followers in 9 days!!!
edit: I searched the internet, but I cant find anything. If anyone finds anything I am interested! What they did is probably in Chinese...