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.

More information.

The RPG genre is the most sold one on Steam - we know that…

Pretty cool and interesting article.

Nah. Hidden's post below it is cool.

Great article. I gotta admit at first I was very resistant to the idea of Steam but steadily I've used it more and more until now its almost the only place I buy games digitally, besides a few from Gamersgate and GoG. Its more convenient for me to just digitally buy all my games and it's huge library means I can find almost any game I want from them. Also the sales are usually pretty great, I never buy a game at full price.

I'm a fan of STEAM. It was released right when I started college and was my companion then, and continues to improve and impress me now. It's been a part of my life for awhile and is an accessible way to connect to other gamers.

Steam came along at the perfect time, IMO … I'd already digitized most of my music world by 2004, was reading 'ebooks' on PocketPC and other devices (pre-Kindle), had jumped right on Direct2Drive, and so on. So I was ready - and was always disappointed when I needed to use discs

Interesting read. I still remember how resistant folks were to Steam when it was in its infancy. The thing has come a really long way. In recent years, I've been making more of an effort to spread out and make more use of GOG as well. Anything retro or indie I'll get there when it's on sale, as I don't fancy one company becoming utterly dominant in a market, and the folks running GOG are pretty swell, so I don't mind giving them money.

Originally Posted by Kaspian
Interesting read. I still remember how resistant folks were to Steam when it was in its infancy.

With good reason. Do you remember how shitty it was for the first couple of years? Honestly, early days Steam was probably the biggest piece of shit software (right up there with the Dungeon Lords demo ) that I have ever had installed on my PC.
I don't remember which year it started to become at least acceptable (2006-ish?) but it wasn't like it was only bad right around launch in 2003.
It was incredibly bad for months and years. Plagued by extremely poor performance, crashes, laggy, "please try again later", "could not do this", "could not do that", and lots of completely nonsensical or nondescript error messages (numeric error codes).
Thank God it was only required for Valve's own games in the early days.

As you said, it has come a long way and we are almost smooth sailing now (there could still be a little less of that "please try again later" stuff and better performance at peak times) but it all started out on an uphill mud track in the middle of a monsoon shower .

I only got steam as I played a good deal of Team Fortress Classic and eventually had to install it to support multiplayer. I wasn't even aware of steam until that point although I think that it had been around for c. 2y by then.

It's also my goto for digital copies as outside of a few niche titles it has everything and the best sales. Today I mainly just check what's new and what the sales are.

That said their seasonal sales haven't had very good discounts over the last several.

The more niche games, I look to see ig gamersgate has it or gog, but I also tend to buy Witcher games from gog

Originally Posted by Moriendor
With good reason. Do you remember how shitty it was for the first couple of years? Honestly, early days Steam was probably the biggest piece of shit software (right up there with the Dungeon Lords demo ) that I have ever had installed on my PC.

IIRC those were years when 586 was named Pentium because the bug caused it to deserve a name 585.99999999.

Originally Posted by joxer
IIRC those were years when 586 was named Pentium because the bug caused it to deserve a name 585.99999999.

Suddenly I'm getting nostalgic for the old days of Pentium vs. Athlon discussions. =p

Steam "lost" my first account after a hack attack and all the games that were on it - fortunately nothing I'd really want to play now . But even so, it is incredibly convenient. And the level of DRM on steam, although hardly secure against hard core pirates, does discourage casual theft - and that seems to be revitalising the PC as a platform that game makers can envisage making money on.