Steam - Some things you should know about it

Sergey Galyonkin (Medium.com) with some insights about Steam. A snippet:

Sales and genres

I will start by saying that Steam’s own genre categories aren’t really useful because a lot of games have to be assigned to several genres and the list is limited. User tags, on the other hand, are a bit too vague to be used for analysis, but much more useful when you’re trying to find a game to play.

The average game on Steam does not sell really well, at least not since 2012. While we all heard about breakdown success of some big titles, it doesn’t apply to your average title. “The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim” has about 8.6 million users on Steam, “Grand Theft Auto V” sold about 2.2 million copies in less than a month, but how does the average game on Steam perform?

It is a bit better if you check the genre distribution with RPGs selling 55,000 copies on an average while Early Access games (that is a genre by Steam’s definition) only sell around 9,000 copies. And while free to play games look lucrative with 330,000 owners on an average, when you consider a rather optimistic conversion rate of 10 percent, you will end up with about 33,000 paying users – not really different from the average paid game on Steam.