As part of his speech at GDC 2018, Sergey Galenkin, director of publishing strategy at Epic Games and author of the SteamSpy service, said that 2017 was a record year in terms of financial indicators for Steam. The digital store of desktop games earned $4.3 billion during this period.
Is it more than in 2016?
Yes, and significantly. Recall that in 2016, Steam games earned $3.5 billion. Both figures, by the way, excluding DLC and micropayments.
However, a year earlier, the number of titles released on the platform was less. In 2017, the platform’s library was replenished by 7.6 thousand games.
However, a significant increase occurred not due to the quantitative, but qualitative addition of titles. As elsewhere, most of the money comes from a small number of projects.
Which games turned out to be the highest-grossing?
Of the indicated amount of $4.3 billion, half came from the Top 100 games on the market. Only one PUBG earned $600 million on the site. The top twenty best – selling games looks like this:
Photo: PC Gamer
Please note that first- and third-person action movies predominate among the games. There are few exceptions. The most striking is Divinity: Original Sin 2, a turn—based role-playing game of the “old school”.
What is the main problem of the market?
Galenkin insists that the problem of visibility (or, literally, findability) remains the main one for Steam. 30 new games are released every day. That’s more than one game per hour.
“For the user, it’s not that it’s impossible to buy them all, he can’t just scroll through them,” Sergey said.
Also on the topic: