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I'd drop the max reviews down by quite a lot. Sales:reviews tend to be around 60:1. So a game with 1000 reviews has sold tens of thousands of copies. We can loo

I'd drop the max reviews down by quite a lot. Sales:reviews tend to be around 60:1. So a game with 1000 reviews has sold tens of thousands of copies. We can look at something like the PS2 for some reality checks. It sold 1.5 billion games through 4000 titles. So an average of 350k sales. And of course that's going to follow something like a typical 80/20 ratio, which would leave us with a median sales in the ballpark of 70k! Of course Steam has far more players, but also way more games. The PS2 was a ring-fenced minimal competition domain with an attentive and [relatively] content starved audience! I decided to look up Tandis first. First off the game has been featured on Ars Technica [1], Rocker Paper Shotgun [2], and lots of other places. So it's definitely not like nobody heard of it. But it just doesn't really seem to drag people in. The reviews, positive as they are, all seem to stop playing after an average of around 3 hours. In fact a huge number of the positive written reviews have less than 1 hour of lifetime gameplay, which is pretty weird for a game that comes at a relatively premium price. And the peak players, a month after release was 7. [3] I'm guessing the players that moved on after such short timeframes probably weren't actively recommending this game outside of those reviews. Would you have actively recommended it, outside just filtering your library and seeing it there? [1] - https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2022/04/tandis-review-the-ultimate-geometry-based-puzzle-game/ https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2022/04/tandis-review-the-ult... [2] - https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/geometry-puzzle-game-tandis-bends-shapes-and-minds https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/geometry-puzzle-game-tandis... [3] - https://steamcharts.com/app/1297210 https://steamcharts.com/app/1297210

Hammershaft 2y ago
The only source I can find for a 1:60 review to sale ratio is this: https://gameworldobserver.com/2022/11/15/how-to-count-game-sales-steam-2022-review-multiplier https://gameworldobserver.com/2022/11/15/how-to-count-game-s... This article explicitly mentions that that ratio only holds for hit games, and mentions that the ratio for smaller games is roughly 1:20, which is still a high ratio compared to figures I've heard in post mortems. Assuming a game with 1,000 reviews that takes ~3 years for 1 developer to make and support that sells for $15 at a 1:20x ratio. We're looking at 210,000 after steam's cut and before taxes, this developer at top of our review range is making ~70k a year before taxes that are calculated on one year of income. Many small indie developers lose ~35% of their income to taxes alone on game sales and so even under nearly ideal conditions for this 1000 review max constraint we have a developer earning <$50,000. Note that many of the games I listed are highly rated but have less than 200 reviews EDIT: I often reccomend Tandis to people, it's a great puzzle game that builds geometric intuition, and it's designed to distill that intuition into a roughly 5 hour play time.
- somenameforme 2y ago
  Here's a search for you with about a zillion results. [1] It's definitely way above 20:1. Your link references that number only for games with less than 1000 sales, and provides the data - which is super biased towards games with very near 0 sales, but tons of reviews. It could just be the games were terrible, but another potential issue is shilling. Many developers buy fake positive reviews. To my knowledge nobody has ever been banned for this (though devs have been banned for naively writing fake reviews themselves), but I expect these games end up getting some sort of a deranking or soft shadow ban, because it'd be absurdly easy to detect on Steam's side, and the games that do it seem to often end up buried after what's presumably an extremely low sales:review ratio. Here's an article that also includes some of the games that are hiring shills. [2] [1] - https://search.brave.com/search?q=steam+reviews+to+sales+ratio https://search.brave.com/search?q=steam+reviews+to+sales+rat... [2] - https://steamcommunity.com/groups/Sentinels_of_the_Store/announcements/detail/4222762959836264571 https://steamcommunity.com/groups/Sentinels_of_the_Store/ann...
  - Hammershaft 2y ago
    Do you specific recent sources that back that up? The source I originally linked as well as this writeup[1] suggests that the review to sale ratio has shrunk over the years and is shrinking for games with lower sales. The sales & owner estimates that steamDB offers also generally pegs the games I listed has having a 10:1 - 30:1 ratio. Here's deadeye deepfake simulacrum as an example: https://steamdb.info/app/1545990/charts/ https://steamdb.info/app/1545990/charts/ Note that many of the highly rated games I shared had sub 300 reviews, so even if you were to have a great 60:1 ratio for a game with 300 reviews priced at $15 you're looking at a $185k gross after steams cut and before taxes for potentially 3+ years of development and support. I really hope I'm wrong here because I would love a meritocratic indie game scene to keep flourishing, but the greater trend I see is a bifurcation between indie games that synergize with streaming and social media to become breakout hits and excellent games that prove more difficult to market that struggle to tread water. [1] - https://vginsights.com/insights/article/further-analysis-into-steam-reviews-to-sales-ratio-how-to-estimate-video-game-sales https://vginsights.com/insights/article/further-analysis-int...

Hammershaft 2y ago

The only source I can find for a 1:60 review to sale ratio is this: https://gameworldobserver.com/2022/11/15/how-to-count-game-sales-steam-2022-review-multiplier https://gameworldobserver.com/2022/11/15/how-to-count-game-s... This article explicitly mentions that that ratio only holds for hit games, and mentions that the ratio for smaller games is roughly 1:20, which is still a high ratio compared to figures I've heard in post mortems. Assuming a game with 1,000 reviews that takes ~3 years for 1 developer to make and support that sells for $15 at a 1:20x ratio. We're looking at 210,000 after steam's cut and before taxes, this developer at top of our review range is making ~70k a year before taxes that are calculated on one year of income. Many small indie developers lose ~35% of their income to taxes alone on game sales and so even under nearly ideal conditions for this 1000 review max constraint we have a developer earning <$50,000. Note that many of the games I listed are highly rated but have less than 200 reviews EDIT: I often reccomend Tandis to people, it's a great puzzle game that builds geometric intuition, and it's designed to distill that intuition into a roughly 5 hour play time.

somenameforme 2y ago
Here's a search for you with about a zillion results. [1] It's definitely way above 20:1. Your link references that number only for games with less than 1000 sales, and provides the data - which is super biased towards games with very near 0 sales, but tons of reviews. It could just be the games were terrible, but another potential issue is shilling. Many developers buy fake positive reviews. To my knowledge nobody has ever been banned for this (though devs have been banned for naively writing fake reviews themselves), but I expect these games end up getting some sort of a deranking or soft shadow ban, because it'd be absurdly easy to detect on Steam's side, and the games that do it seem to often end up buried after what's presumably an extremely low sales:review ratio. Here's an article that also includes some of the games that are hiring shills. [2] [1] - https://search.brave.com/search?q=steam+reviews+to+sales+ratio https://search.brave.com/search?q=steam+reviews+to+sales+rat... [2] - https://steamcommunity.com/groups/Sentinels_of_the_Store/announcements/detail/4222762959836264571 https://steamcommunity.com/groups/Sentinels_of_the_Store/ann...
- Hammershaft 2y ago
  Do you specific recent sources that back that up? The source I originally linked as well as this writeup[1] suggests that the review to sale ratio has shrunk over the years and is shrinking for games with lower sales. The sales & owner estimates that steamDB offers also generally pegs the games I listed has having a 10:1 - 30:1 ratio. Here's deadeye deepfake simulacrum as an example: https://steamdb.info/app/1545990/charts/ https://steamdb.info/app/1545990/charts/ Note that many of the highly rated games I shared had sub 300 reviews, so even if you were to have a great 60:1 ratio for a game with 300 reviews priced at $15 you're looking at a $185k gross after steams cut and before taxes for potentially 3+ years of development and support. I really hope I'm wrong here because I would love a meritocratic indie game scene to keep flourishing, but the greater trend I see is a bifurcation between indie games that synergize with streaming and social media to become breakout hits and excellent games that prove more difficult to market that struggle to tread water. [1] - https://vginsights.com/insights/article/further-analysis-into-steam-reviews-to-sales-ratio-how-to-estimate-video-game-sales https://vginsights.com/insights/article/further-analysis-int...