5 ms·
As far as I know we users cannot see how many sales a game has from steam, so I very much appreciate the creator telling us. I often try to judge from the numbe
by Tarsul 5y ago
As far as I know we users cannot see how many sales a game has from steam, so I very much appreciate the creator telling us. I often try to judge from the number of reviews if a game has made at least a few thousand bucks. This game here has 19 reviews with 420 sales, which means that 4,5% of all people have reviewed the game, which is more than I expected (I expected a ratio of about 1%). But this means that probably other games that have only a few dozen reviews have sold comparably (poorly).
As an aside, me personally, I don't like early access games; I'd rather wait till the game is finished. I'm probably not the only one thinking like that. So I find it difficult to guess how different the sales projectory would be if it didn't have the "early access" status, but with any luck the creator will tell us once he has released V1.0 :)
- jonshariat 5y agoWhen I wrote my book, they did an early access thing at it was terrible. I was still understanding where to take my book and iterate and I was getting people telling me it sucked. Uh ya, its not finished at all yet, just v1! Not a fan. I mean I get Betas and access to things say a month or so before launch. But not during active development.
- Hammershaft 5y agoI mean, a book is a predefined narrative that you experience once sequentially! Much less suited to open iterative development than a game.
- Godel_unicode 5y agoThere are other kinds of book than fiction.
- bavell 5y agoWhy did you agree to try early access with a book? It only really makes sense for games... and sometimes not even then...
- dave84 5y agoA lot of the big tech book publishers seem to have early access as a feature now. I'd be surprised if the author has that much control over it.
- bavell 5y agoHuh, had no idea this was a more widespread thing. I don't really see it working out but maybe there's something there.
- jonshariat 5y agoI was a first time author and they were a big publisher, should have pushed back on it. Mentally it knocked me off my horse for a bit in making good progress on the book.
- DrJokepu 5y agoIf it’s a game I’m excited about, I sometimes buy the early access to support the developers pre-release and only play it once it’s done.
- paulryanrogers 5y agoI'm afraid of doing this since so many games never leave early access, or even improve significantly after first appearing
- chills 5y agoSteamdb[1] gives some info on concurrent players, but only estimates for owners. Looks like they estimate number of reviewers between 5-15%. [1]: https://steamdb.info/app/1404560/graphs/ https://steamdb.info/app/1404560/graphs/
- codetrotter 5y ago5-15% is in line with for example anecdotally observed view count vs votes on videos on YouTube. So based on that I am not surprised that video games on Steam can be expected to have a similar number of reviews relative to number of owners. Typically I expect a video on YouTube to have about 10% votes and about 1% comments. Do all reviews on Steam need to include text or can simple thumbs up/down be given without any text? Haven't used Steam in a while so I don't remember.
- Tarsul 5y agoyes, you have to write a text for the review to count. I just looked into the reviews for this game and there are actually 30 reviews, but apparently not every review counts towards the statline on the main page (not exactly sure which).
- tpxl 5y agoYou have to write text, but you can hide your review (friends only I think).
- aroman 5y ago> Typically I expect a video on YouTube to have about 10% votes and about 1% comments. this is known as the 90-9-1 rule: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture)
- Karliss 5y agoSteamdb uses 1.5-5% not 5-15%.
- hesdeadjim 5y agoI forget where I read it, but you usually won’t be too far off the mark if you multiply review count by 100. This won’t tell you revenue of course, but it gives you an idea. My game sold about 20k units on Steam and has 165 reviews, so there’s one anecdotal point of data.