How to market research games?

Greetings fellow gods,

This post is for everyone interested in how much money there is in game development and how to determine if there is enough interest in a genre or similar ideas before deciding to pursue them. It will also allow you to predict if a game, before its release, was marketed well enough to have a chance at success.

I'll show you step by step how I've made my predictions about Soulash sales numbers and income which allowed me to prepare my options after the release. You'll only need 3 publicly available tools for this, and it takes just a short moment to research any game in terms of potential sales and income.

Keep in mind that these tools can be somewhat inaccurate and are essentially making an educated guess. From my experience, these predictions are close enough for us to understand the market, and research the potential for our ideas.

Finding similar games

Let's get started, the first crucial tool for market research is Steam itself. Our first step to do market research is to determine similar games in the genre. If you're developing a game you probably know at least one game in the same genre, or if you're just interested in the market I'm sure you have a title in mind. Search for the game on Steam and prepare a list of games that would match the same genre. Using an example, we'll do research for Soulash, so we're interested mainly in the traditional roguelikes genre. Fortunately, there is a game tag for traditional roguelikes, so our job is very easy here, we go to the games listed under our tag and write down games that we want to research and compare.

The next tool will allow us to do a deep dive into the games that we've listed - SteamDB.

How many people are interested in this game?

SteamDB is an incredibly useful tool to determine how many players play the game, what's the deepest discount the game went on, how many people are interested in the game before or after the release, and more.

Let's say we would be interested in Soulash. We would like to know how on earth a single guy with a graphic designer made a financially successful traditional roguelike (and what does it mean) and it wasn't a flop like so many other indie games. Let's enter "Soulash" in the search bar and see for ourselves.

From the first screen, we'll select the "Charts" tab, where we can see how many players are in the game right now and how many played the game at its peak (usually the release day). The peak will tell us how well the game was known, and how many people were actually waiting to jump in as soon as possible. The values are obviously meaningless alone, so let's compare them with other games in the genre that were released not too long ago.

Soulash peak - 486 players
Rift Wizard peak - 339 players
Jupiter Hell - 666 players
Ultimate ADOM - 135 players
Rogue Fable 3 - 173 players
Shattered Pixel Dungeon - 336 players

From these numbers alone we can see that only Jupiter Hell had a better release day than Soulash in terms of players grabbing the game on day 1. Let's dive even deeper to understand it better and be able to predict if a game before its release, has a chance to do well or not.

Let's move to the bottom of the "Charts" tab for Soulash now.

We can see a lot of info here, but the crucial part is the chart at the bottom "Steam game hub followers chart". We don't know how many wishlists were in the game, but this followers chart is the closest we've got to taking a guess. Here, if you hover over the chart just before the release you can see that on the 1st of March just days before the release, Soulash had 2046 followers. This is a very important number that has a very high impact on the success or failure of the launch of a game, but before I'll explain this part, let's see the number on the 12th of March, 7 days after release, just as the release week ended - 4524, that's about 221% of what we had 11 days before.

Let's compare these numbers with two games that we checked in our previous step - Jupiter Hell and Rift Wizard, as these games had higher and slightly lower numbers of players on day 1 of their releases.

Jupiter Hell was released on the 5th of August, it had 5952 followers on the 4th of August, and 11007 on the 16th of August when the number increase started to slow down. That's a 184% increase.

Rift Wizard was released on the 1st of September, it had 1259 followers on the 29th of August and 2584 on the 14th of September when things started to slow down (although we can see it had a second spike on October). That's a 205% increase.

So what do these numbers tell us? A release of a game on Steam will increase these numbers by about 200% in a week or longer and it's not a flat number. So to have a successful release and make good use of this, we want to get that number as high as possible before the release. Let's see one more game that didn't do too well - Dawn of the Mexica just to make sure we can't rely on Steam alone to do a game developer's job in marketing.

Dawn of the Mexica was released on 26th November, 24th it had 71 followers and on the 10th of December, it had 110. That's a 154% increase and obviously, the numbers say everything here, barely anyone was interested in the game before release and there was no chance to have a successful launch.

As a bonus, since we're having so much fun, let's look at one more game that hasn't been released yet and make a prediction on its success - Dwarf Fortress.

Dwarf Fortress has not been released as of yet, but on the 1st of May 2022, according to SteamDB, it has almost 105k followers. That's another league from what we've been researching so far, right? It's a huge number and we can clearly predict it will be a game-changing success for what kind of success an indie developer can accomplish. The highest selling roguelike Stoneshard had "only" ~46k followers before release, and Elden Ring, a massive recent success had 375k.

How does it translate to income?

Followers, wishlists, player count - these are important values, but in the gaming industry, it takes years to build something just to see this interest for a month at best, before players move on to the next game. This means game developers see a big spike in income during the first month after release, and it drops down completely after that, while it has to be enough to build another game, or a paid DLC to sustain further work in game development. To determine the actual income from games, we'll use one more tool - Steam revenue calculator.

In SteamDB on the first page, but also on Steam, we can see the total review numbers and the base price of the game in USD. Let's write that down for games that we want to research (values are as of 02 May 2022):

Soulash - 14.99$, 257 reviews
Rift Wizard - 14.99$, 651 reviews
Jupiter Hell - 24.99$, 1238 reviews
Ultimate ADOM - 19.99$, 350 reviews
Rogue Fable 3 - 9.99$, 527 reviews
Shattered Pixel Dungeon - 9.99$, 348 reviews

Now, all we need to do is to input these numbers into the Steam revenue calculator and see what comes out.

Soulash - gross revenue $173,359.00, net revenue $57,161.00
Rift Wizard - gross revenue $439,132.00, net revenue $144,794.00
Jupiter Hell - gross revenue $1,392,193.00, net revenue $459,045.00
Ultimate ADOM - gross revenue $314,843.00, net revenue $103,812.00
Rogue Fable 3 - gross revenue $236,913.00, net revenue $78,117.00
Shattered Pixel Dungeon - gross revenue $156,443.00, net revenue $51,584.00

I have no way of knowing how correct are these numbers for other games, but for Soulash the gross revenue is a very good estimate, but net revenue even if I factor in Polish taxes, is a little bit higher (very likely due to discounts not going too deep yet and most copies being sold in the US). Now, knowing the numbers, it's possible to determine how much time you can spend on a game to make it profitable or sustainable, depending on needs.

One very important thing to note as we're looking at this is that releases are critical and that's where the majority of games income comes from. The diminishing returns as the time passes are very noticeable so it's very important to plan ahead with the budget that will come out of that first month.

We can use the same techniques to check on any game on Steam, some developers have multiple sources of income, like Patreon, Itch, and GOG, which can increase these revenue numbers but most will also find Steam as the major source, at least from what I'm able to see.

I hope you found this guide useful,
Artur