How to Estimate how much MONEY a GAME made on Steam? (Revenue Sales Numbers Boxleiter Method)
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 8 พ.ค. 2022
- 💬 Learn how to estimate how much money a Steam game made!
✅ Full Video: Does a GOOD Game sell itself? • Does a GOOD Game sell ...
🌍 Get my Complete Courses! ✅ unitycodemonkey.com/courses
👍 Learn to make awesome games step-by-step from start to finish.
🎮 Get my Steam Games unitycodemonkey.com/gamebundle
🔴 RELATED VIDEOS 🔴
The MOST IMPORTANT Skill to be a Successful Game Developer • The MOST IMPORTANT Ski...
How to Launch a Game on Steam - Before Release • How to Launch a Game o...
How to Launch a Game on Steam - After Release • How to Launch a Game o...
💬 Learn how you can estimate how much money a Steam game made based on the public review count.
This involves the Boxleiter method where you multiple reviews by a certain number
Then with that you can multiply by the games price to get a estimate of gross revenue.
Then take away Refunds and Chargebacks
After that comes Steam's cut of 30%
Then take away taxes
And you end up with an estimated Net Revenue.
Although that's not profit, so by itself you can't really know if a game was profitable or not but you can get a rough estimate which can help you on getting an idea for how much money you game might make.
🌍 Get Code Monkey on Steam!
👍 Interactive Tutorials, Complete Games and More!
✅ store.steampowered.com/app/12...
If you have any questions post them in the comments and I'll do my best to answer them.
🔔 Subscribe for more Unity Tutorials / @codemonkeyunity
See you next time!
📍 Support on Patreon / unitycodemonkey
🎮 Grab the Game Bundle at unitycodemonkey.com/gameBundl...
📝 Get the Code Monkey Utilities at unitycodemonkey.com/utils.php
#gamedev #marketing #indiedev
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Hello and Welcome!
I'm your Code Monkey and here you will learn everything about Game Development in Unity using C#.
I've been developing games for several years with 8 published games on Steam and now I'm sharing my knowledge to help you on your own game development journey.
I do Unity Tutorials on just about every topic, Unity Tutorials for Beginners and Unity Tutorials for Advanced users.
You can see my games at www.endlessloopstudios.com
--------------------------------------------------------------------
- Other great Unity channels:
Unity - / unity3d
Brackeys - / brackeys
Dani - / @danidev
Jabrils - / @jabrils
BlackthornProd - / @blackthornprod
Sykoo - / sykootv
Jason Weimann - / @unity3dcollege
Jonas Tyroller - / @jonastyroller
--------------------------------------------------------------------
- Website: unitycodemonkey.com/
- Twitter: / unitycodemonkey
- Steam: store.steampowered.com/develo...
✅ Full Video: Does a GOOD Game sell itself? th-cam.com/video/YnVaK6boAgM/w-d-xo.html
🔴 RELATED VIDEOS 🔴
The MOST IMPORTANT Skill to be a Successful Game Developer th-cam.com/video/E6-FQwCECes/w-d-xo.html
How to Launch a Game on Steam - Before Release th-cam.com/video/CAQsIDxI7rU/w-d-xo.html
How to Launch a Game on Steam - After Release th-cam.com/video/riGE76RZVrQ/w-d-xo.html
better than videos who take take minutes of lecture and at the end they explain the topic of the video. This video is just straight to point
Extrapolating further. $11025 revenue/25 reviews = $441 revenue/review at $25 unit price; or a factor of 18 (ish). So, (price * review_count * 18) equals a wild rule-of-thumb at the money made. Very useful! (Assuming most games where not sold at periodic "discount sales".)
Yeah if the game has been out for longer you definitely need to tweak the estimate a bit to account for sales, but for the most part yup it's a pretty accurate estimate
If you're making the Revenue != Profit distinction, then one should be made aware that taxes are usually applied to AFTER expenses amount.
Using the example above: after Steam Cut leaves $15,750 in the bucket, the developer would minus their related business expenses from the bucket (let's say $5,000 in expenses), which would leave them with "profit" ($10,750). THEN from the PROFIT, you take taxes into account ($10,750 * 0.70 = $7525 left).
So, if the developer spent $15,000 instead of $5,000 to make their game, they are only taxed on the $750 left.... which is a mere $225 in taxes.
Now other "taxes" such as VAT/Sales Tax is not taken into account here. I don't know much about VAT, but I know Sales Tax runs the spectrum here depending on region, city, etc, and can be applied at different areas, depending on who does the collecting/calculating.
Yes good point about expenses although at least here in Portugal you have Company Taxes and then Personal Taxes.
Company Taxes are indeed paid only after expenses, but then in order to transfer the remaining for my own personal account I still need to pay Personal Taxes.
If those $15k company expenses were wages for myself I would have to pay tax on that, for that amount it would be about 20% so in the end I would personally receive $12k in my personal account and have $500 left over on the company account.
Steam handles all the VAT stuff so the dev never gets to touch that part, it varies quite a lot depending if a huge majority of your players are from a country with no VAT included in the price, like US, or a high VAT country, like Portugal.
But even without accounting for all those various factors the estimate here is pretty accurate, you can be very confident that if you do the math like this that the real number will be around that and won't be 10x bigger or smaller.
Thank you mr Code Monkey! This kind of videos are REALLY helpful to understand the full picture!
I feel like one thing is still missing there - VAT. Before Steam even gets its 30% cut, usually around 10% of the game's price goes towards paying VAT to the country the player is from.
In plenty of countries VAT is much higher, actually. 21% in my country. 9% for food, books, meds, etc. But videogames are 21%. Same goes for quite a bunch of European countries.
Is that different from taxes?
@@h.m.chuang0224 vat and taxes is basicly the same
There is no VAT in the USA and no sales tax in a lot of states. One of the very few good things about the USA's tax code...
Yup that's right, this is just a rough estimate, VAT varies greatly from country to country (in my own country Portugal it's actually 23%) and some countries, like US don't have VAT.
If you have a game like a hardcore simulation game and you assume most of your sales will come from Germany, then perhaps use a smaller multiplier.
However just doing the math like this will give you a pretty accurate estimate of revenue.
Really nice explanation! 👍
Very interesting video!
A good example of a great game Vampire Survivors. Made a good 3.7 million after all the cuts.
Definitely a rare monumental success!
So, if a developer gets only a half (rougly) and, on top of that, you have to give a cut to a publisher/investors, then you end up with virtually no money for your dev team?
You can easily end up in the red numbers actually....
Don't forget dev costs are either financed out of pocket directly via saving/other income, or by credit before the 1st sale occurs, so the company has to pay those costs upfront as well as costs on things like advertising, listing fees, certification via ESRB/other boards (some platforms require rating assignment for listing in the platform's store), etc... all of these costs have to be cleared before paying out to the dev team(s)
It's the dark-side of the industry a lot of people don't like to talk about, and it gets nasty quickly if you're unprepared.
Well if you work with a publisher/investor I would not go with such a model.. They should pay a certain amount to you but they take then all revenue ( and you maybe get a cut of the profit... If there is any)
@@Haladmer Yo, I had no idea devs had to pay for pointless crap like ESRB and the rest. Man, plus if you add all those other things you mentioned... The gaming industry looks more like an extortion racket or something very similar to it.
@@saskuac3591 Seems like publishers and investors operate similarly to mafia: extortion racket is the way to go with the little guys (developers). It's so sad :(
wait where's the "hello and welcome I'm your code monkey" opening?
Am I come too early??
oh nvm didn't notice the full video links
Heh yea this video is just an excerpt of a longer video I made previously, I'm currently hard at work on the course so I wasn't able to make something new
The boxleiter method algorithm changes every few years on Steam, if you look back 10-20 years.
Overall, it's usually right within a 50% margin, but it can be very deceptive/incorrect in some cases.
Most of the time it's close, but, as I said theres some rare exceptions.
@@NeoHCgbz Yes, that is obviously obvious.
I've studied hundreds of developer's data, personally, straight from them and not a 3rd party or guesses, so my understanding of the boxleiter method/algorithm is a bit more advanced than most.
I will say, it will change in the next 2-10 years slightly. In any case, get as many reviews as you can. :) thanks
Your understanding is nothing compared to mine. Mine is God like@@AngelStarStudios
Nice video thank you. I am very excited for 13th may for my steam game :-)
Best of luck with the release!
how did it go? :)
@@tdr7481 Hey! Thank you for asking. I sold ± 40 units in the first month and then again ± 5 and in summary this is around 500$. Remove 30 % steam, taxes and convertion and you have the final income. I am very proud of that result and I already have some positive reviews 🙂 it's still early access, so it still has the chance to grow up! Some people are really supporting such projects ❤
Any news bro@@freetimedevelopment
You didn't account for VAT, which will also get taken away and the fact that a lot of copies might have been sold during sales, the later is looked over like all the time whenever someone tries to come up with a calculation to estimate the revenue. I'm sadly not a maths person, so I don't have a clue how to account for possible sales.
Can we keep money in google play console or steam account for more than a year ?
Glad I'm part of a group that pretty much care about the games(art), knowing the outcome could be complete stinker and most likely will be.
Yup if you're making games just for fun and not for profit then you don't need to worry about any of this which does help lower stress
@@CodeMonkeyUnity Focusing on just the game and not marketing: Is the difference mainly polish ? crunching to a deadline? Forced to follow certain guidelines to your game due to standards.
What in your opinion are the main difference. because I know technically, the goal is the same at the end. To maximise the user experience.
can you make Sample of old game called Icy Tower
Não entendi esse vídeo. Ele não tem começo, nem fim. E eu tenho certeza que já vi essa sua análise antes, inclusive eu comprei o jogo por causa do seu vídeo. Agora fica a dúvida: você deu upload no vídeo certo?
ficou estranho mesmo...
Sim é uma parte do video que eu fiz à uns meses "Does a GOOD Game sell itself?" unitycodemonkey.com/video.php?v=YnVaK6boAgM
Eu tou a trabalhar imenso a tentar concluir o curso por isso não tive tempo para fazer um video novo.
Espero que o teu jogo GeSort esteja a correr bem!
@@CodeMonkeyUnity obrigado pela resposta. Eu estranhei porque a qualidade ficou um pouco abaixo da média, mas mesmo assim o conteúdo do vídeo é interessante. Obrigado pelo apoio com o GeSort :) e estou no aguardo do novo curso.
Review rate is actually closer to 8-12%.
Someone please explain this in a easier way, if I sell a game for 20$ with 1 milion million copies how much would that be?
what if you make the game free and instead you have pay 2 win kind of thing in the game? do they cut from these as well?
Microtransactions have to go through Steam so yes it still takes the 30% cut
The only thing I don't have to worry about. Since my game is going to be free.
Don't neglect doing some marketing though! Even if it's free and you don't care about money I assume you would like some people to play it
@@CodeMonkeyUnity Yep, I'm slowly learning marketing, even though I'm awful at it. If I can get a couple of hundred people play my game, I'll be happy.
@@wakajak8634 Marketing is rough. For my first game, I couldn't even get people to test my game for free for the whole year I was in final development. As a result, I ended up releasing a game that was literally only ever tested by me, so it was really lacking in fun factor - I just had no input. I was desperate.
@@SkeleTonHammer Wow, that's rough. I'm hope you're finding more success now. Tbh, I feel I'm being a bit too optimistic and I should probably adjust my expectations, but, nevertheless, I'm gonna try my best.
Owaahhhhh nicee, firsttt 🙌
Is this video truncated in some way?
It's an excerpt of a longer video I did previously, I'm currently super busy trying to get the course done so I didn't have time to make a brand new video.
I know (from playing Monopoly) that Income tax is bad and I should avoid it.
So...there's really no hope of supporting myself as a solo developer, is there?
Depends on how much you need to support yourself. For me I live in Portugal which has a relatively low cost of living and I don't spend much money, so I was able to live well on just €700 a month when I started making games.
If you live in San Francisco and you need to make $5000 per month just to survive then it's considerably harder.
So, you only get 7-10 days to sell a game and that's it forever? 1000 sales and you're finished? I find that rather hard to believe
Yes the game will sell more over time, but in most cases launch is the most important period.
Usually the estimate for Year 1 sales is 2-5 times Week 1 sales. So if you sell badly at launch it won't get much better after that.
This video was 5 months ago, since then the game has gathered 20 more reviews so possibly 400-1000 more sales, although likely most at a discount.
a little bit late in the game here, but, is the 25 reviews * 40 = 1.000 a real thing?
I mean, 25 reviews, my mind says that max 100 ppl bought the game, not 1k.
But I have never ever published anything, so I dont know.
anyone?
Yes, that number ranges from about 20 on the lower part of the range up to 100.
With very few reviews the estimate will be more inaccurate but yes that's a good estimate.
The recently released Punch A Bunch has 450 reviews and the dev just shared that it has about 10,000 copies sold for a multiplier of 23 unitycodemonkey.com/video.php?v=wlf9YsUA0Gc
@@CodeMonkeyUnity gotcha!!!! tnks for sharing it mate.
Wrong upload?
Yeah, seems like it is in the middle of a longer discussion.
Why do you say that? It is meant to be a short video which is an excerpt of the larger video that I made previously that is shown in the end.
All buyers are from usa :D
This is a lot of math
Refunds that low only apply to fairly good games though, not average or dare I say poorly received games... it can be much much higher for reasonably bad games. Also, the whole extrapolation of reviews to sales figures is utter nonsense. Some devs will actively encourage people to leave reviews. Others don't, but still have higher sales numbers (for example, they got lucky with a popular streamer playing the game and people don't hate it). Review *numbers* means nothing, even when getting decent amounts of reviews will put you in a better spot on Steam in terms of being found. And in fact, you can have a higher review to sales ratio when a game has just launched. There's no way a multiplication by 20 makes sense for the first hundreds of reviews for most games, let alone the first 24 hours a game it out. There's absolutely no way a $16.99 game, with like 390 reviews will have sold $300k in total revenue. Not to mention how _only 10 more reviews_ would increase that by $5K. That really just is complete nonsense. I genuinely doubt 1000 copies were sold of this game anyway, especially because it was severely overpriced at $25. Not trying to flame you, but it's nonsense.
Yes everything here is just an estimate with a wide range however it's a very good estimate that has been proven time and time again.
Like I mentioned in the full video I can highly recommend the GameDiscoverCo newsletter, they have done several case studies with hundreds of games and found those numbers make for some very good estimates.
I can also confirm by looking at the stats of my own 8 Steam games, doing the math like this leads to very accurate results.
I cannot guarantee that this game made exactly 11k but I'm extremely confident it did not make 100k
Why this obsession with wishlists? Clearly, you are good at coding but should be precise when you talk about marketing. The only things that drives sales on Steam are... sales. The more a product sells, the more Steam makes it visible. They clearly don't want to develop an artificial visibility and let the market decide and video games is a volatile, winner-takes-it-all market. So this is not wishlist = good, wishlist represents a probability to have more early sales, which will accelerate the leverage to get more visibility, then more sales due to this visibility. You can get the same leverage from other means, as long as you get those early sales which start the virtuous circle. This is not as simple as wishlists = more money.
Because that's how Steam works, more wishlists = more visibility at launch = more chances for sales = more sales
Which in turn (if the game is good) leads to more visibility and more sales, etc, etc.
It does assume the wishlists are people who are genuinely interested in the game. If you try to cheat the system and just pay people to wishlist your game then no it won't work since none of those wishlists will convert to sales.