Adventure Gamers - Forums

I thought this was interesting - a web service that collects Steam stats and extrapolates number of owners with a margin error

http://steamspy.com/

Steam Spy is Steam stats service based on Web API provided by Valve and cool idea of Kyle Orland from Ars Technica. Steam Spy automatically gathers data from Steam user profiles, analyzes it and presents in simple, yet beautiful, manner.

Steam Spy is designed to be helpful for indie developers, journalists, students and all parties interested in PC gaming and its current state of affairs.

Please note that Steam Spy extrapolates data from limited number of user profiles and thus isn’t 100% correct.

Have no idea how accurate it is but here are some numbers for adventure games. It’s not just games sold on Steam but also registered from bundles, etc. and I don’t think it’s very precise when numbers are small. Maybe developers can say if the numbers are close to being correct.

Some examples:

Portal of course is hugely popular:
Portal - 8,198,330 ± 153,068
Portal 2 - 6,349,088 ± 135,270

Telltale stuff:
Walking Dead - Season 1 - 1,748,781 ± 71,728
Walking Dead - Season 2 - 778,953 ± 47,974
The Wolf Among Us - 569,532 ± 41,040
Game of Thrones - 149,918 ± 21,075
Tales From the Borderlands - 111,279 ± 18,159
Back to The Future - 349,293 ± 32,155
Jurassic Park - 73,413 ± 14,750

Wadjet Eye:
Gemini Rue: 238,014 ± 26,550
Blackwell Legacy - 123,643 ± 19,141
Primordia - 59,503 ± 13,280
A Golden Wake - 13,910 ± 6,421
Resonance - 47,139 ± 11,820

Book of Unwritten Tales - 187,011 ± 23,537
Book of Unwritten Tales 2 - 11,592 ± 5,862
The Raven - 56,412 ± 12,931

Deponia - 392,568 ± 34,086
Whispered World - 146,827 ± 20,857
Night of the Rabbit - 77,277 ± 15,133
Edna & Harvey The Breakout - 73,413 ± 14,750

Gabriel Knight remake - 8,500 ± 5,020
Quest for Infamy - 17,001 ± 7,099
Cognition - 55,640 ± 12,842

Dreamfall Chapters - 69,549 ± 14,357
Talos Principle - 88,096 ± 16,158
The Vanishing of Ethan Carter - 185,465 ± 23,439
Broken Age - 244,196 ± 26,892

Tesla Effect - 327,655 ± 31,145 - great number!, (even if it’s in part due to having been part of a humble bundle)

Interesting that Gemini Rue has a bigger install base than Game of Thrones and Tales from the Borderlands….

Those stats also make me hopeful for a Back to the Future sequel from Telltale (I might be the only one here but I actually really enjoyed that game)

giom - 04 April 2015 07:04 PM

Interesting that Gemini Rue has a bigger install base than Game of Thrones and Tales from the Borderlands….

Those stats also make me hopeful for a Back to the Future sequel from Telltale (I might be the only one here but I actually really enjoyed that game)

have to consider that once those tales seasons finish and go on sale they’ll jump up a good deal more.

Interesting stuff.
People are really missing out with primordia.
And some of these numbers are very surprising, have to wonder about the accuracy.

I was looking at that site earlier today, and the numbers are interesting. The methodology, as far as it’s explained (here and here), seems sound.

However I do wonder about accounts that are set to private or for which the Steam Community part of the account was not even activated (yeah, that’s actually possible, I have family members in that situation). The piece at Ars Technica just decides that there’s no reason why those profiles would have different purchasing patterns (but wouldn’t it make sense for those people to be mainly people not interested in multiplayer games?), and that it’s a small number anyway (except that even 6% of 170 million users – the numbers given in the AT piece – is 10 million users, i.e. more than the total number of sales for almost any game). I do think the numbers are generally valid, but probably with larger margins of error than announced, especially for niche genres.

Also, I think it’s important to look at the number of people who’ve actually played the game rather than people who just have the game in their account. When you have huge discrepancies between the two figures (e.g. Tesla Effect, Gemini Rue), you can be pretty sure that those are people who got the game as part of a bundle, paid peanuts for it and have no interest in playing a sequel or a similar game – i.e. not particularly “interesting” sales from a developer’s perspective.

Anyway, some interesting numbers, and I’ve been having fun going through them (man, Moebius really did tank!).

The number of players does put the Tesla Effect and Gemini Rue numbers in a different perspective. Bundles do wonders for the owners number.

One game that seems to be a different is Deponia since it is higher than any other Daedalic game but also as a solid number and percentage of actual players (58%). I wonder why?

Grim Fandango Remastered seems to be performing very well for a game that (I think) has not been on sale or part of any bundle yet.

It’s also possible no see for each game where are players from. Result for adventure seems to be usually United States first followed by Germany, Russia or United Kingdom depending on the game or publisher. Games from Daedalic or King Arts usually have more players from Germany.

Karlok - 05 April 2015 09:05 AM

Interesting link, Wilco!

I’ll add a couple.
High:
Botanicula - 348,970 - less than I expected, but still good.
To the Moon - 768,626 - wow! must have struck a chord, but not with me.
Trauma - 252,175 - I find this number hard to believe for such an obscure game.
Stanley Parable - first time I looked it was 1,206,177. second time 1.166.630. ??
Dear Esther - 802,376. 

Trauma was part of a popular Humble Bundle that sold around 230.000, that might be part of the reason it’s so high. Not a lot of players. Botanicula, for example, was also part of bundles put has a better percentage of players.

I think it might be interesting to see in the future how the bundles and promotions afect these numbers.

About the decrease in Stanley Parable numbers, there is an explanation in the site for possible variaton in numbers:

Why the number of owners for a game is decreasing?

If the decrease is small, it’s just the margin of error in action. Don’t worry, it’s still probably somewhere on that interval. Also, first day results for every game are often botched, so don’t pay them too much attention.

But if decrease is huge that’s because the game had a free weekend sometime ago. It seems that if user doesn’t log in, Steam revokes the license for the game only after quite some time. That’s why Steam Spy will see the game as ‘owned’ even if the user technically never bought it.

Stanley Parable seems to be hugely popular I don’t think it was part of any bundle or big promos - and 90% of the owners played it! (deserved)

Thanks for the input, Dave, interesting read. (can’t wait for Technobabylon!)

One game that seems to be doing very well is Life is Strange (230,524 ± 23,716), it’s a completely new IP and still with only 2 episodes released and no promotions, so it seems like good numbers.