A ridiculous amount of games release on Steam every week and basically none of them make any money. It only takes a cursory browse of Steam's unfiltered new release list to understand why this is true.

But which genre is most likely to make money or be a hit? Ichiro Lambe, Matt Martindale and Dr. Tim Ermilov have collaborated on a Steam revenue report on weloveit.io and, as the name implies, the purpose of the site is to estimate the earnings of all Steam games, or at least, those with a price tag and at least one review.

The trio doesn't have access to Valve's internal sales data, so they rely on the Boxleiter method to estimate that data, which assumes that a games' review count is "roughly proportional of its sales, so multiplying reviews by a constant gives an estimated unit count." For a standard estimate (rather than a conservative or generous one) the multiplier is 35 times the amount of user reviews.

This may not provide exact figures, but as the site notes, it's a technique used by analysts and publishers and there aren't very many better ways to arrive at a sales estimate. And so, in the style of all great data enthusiasts, they've used the technique to map the success (or lack thereof) of over 100,000 Steam games in handy graph form.

Baldur's Gate 3 is estimated to have made $1,795,480,003 since its early access launch in late 2020. On the other hand Free Solo, a physics climbing game released in March, has made an estimated $34.

Source link