Learning From Steam Data
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 6 ก.พ. 2025
- I talk about a wonderful video about trends seen in current Steam game data and what my takeaways are about that data.
Videos I reference:
I Scraped the Entire Steam Catalog, Here’s the Data: • I Scraped the Entire S...
Discoverability: • Discoverability
I'm speechless. Seeing someone of your caliber engage with my work in such a thoughtful and respectful way is an absolute honor. I put a lot of effort into making sure I was simply sharing information without pushing my own interpretation, and you understood that perfectly. Thank you for that. And hearing you call me your "new favorite person"… well, you just made my week! Thank you for your kindness ❤
When I saw this video I went "Oh cool, I just saw an awesome video about this same thing by some unknown channel. What were they called again?" And here you are.
it was an instafollow for me
@NewbieIndieGameDev Thank you for your incredible data dive into Steam! I am so grateful you did that. And I hope more people engage with indie games.
Nice profile picture 🙏🔥
I'm off to go watch your video now! Always lovely to see interactions like this -- see, social media ain't all bad!
(Also very curious how you defined indie games, since some folks take that to mean low-budget (based purely on vibes, it seems), and some folks take that to mean independently-published, and some folks think the latter rules out any of the games helped out the door by those "indie publishers.")
That part where you talk spending less time complaining about games is so relatable. Recently I started unsubbing from a lot of overly negative channels because I realize getting any younger all those channels do is focus my limited time and energy on things that I don't enjoy. I don't mind criticism but there's a difference between that and farming outrage for clicks. Personally I prefer seeing people share games they enjoy that might have gone under the radar or been forgotten over the years.
It's my least favorite but about games coverage. The trend following dog pile. The fact that so many people complaining about certain games haven't even played them. That it's more profitable to follow a trend and bash a game to get views than it is to have a take that's more nuanced. The way everything has to be great or terrible, when if I compare games now to when I was younger there are a lot more good games. The way a game can be doomed before it's even launched because it's built up so much negativity around it when virtually nobody, or nobody at all outside of the studio, has even touched it.
I saw that video last week. Really really awesome
I stumbled upon the linked video earlier and immediately bookmarked it, super useful, such a great one. It changed how I approached tags for my game, RoadHouse Manager. I put less focus on the big, popular tags and now trying less common ones that apply to my game, such as sci-fi cooking combo, which applies and few can games can claim.
Hello Tim Cain, I've been watching your videos on/off for a while now. I find it interesting how most events in the past you have some sort of note or written evidence journalled. I think it would be be an interesting video to see how you organize and write notes. Cheers
Have you watched my video Note-Taking Best Practices
th-cam.com/video/kbHlwUS7d4k/w-d-xo.html
There are links in its description to more videos about my notes.
@@CainOnGames Oh, my bad, I didn't realize you already covered the topic. thank you very much!
I just want to add that the tags are a game of hitting the popular ones to maximize exposure. Most indie dev won't want to waste their tag space on "Puzzle" if they can get away with RPG or Action or whatever else they have in game, as the former just doesn't get as many views. It doesn't mean those games don't exist.
Not to mention that players tag games too, often incorrectly. An "immersive sim" isn't what people who apply that steam tag thinks it is..
@@EtherealHaunting That's a good example lol.
@@EtherealHaunting My favourite user-added tag is "rome wasn't patched in a day".
Its a really interesting video with intriguing data. Thanks for highlighting it, it was a great watch.
With the games in the top 50 thing I know its an unknowable thing but I wonder how that list would change if games that aren't available on Steam were all there so we could compare. Giant games like Fortnite aren't on there. Until recently PS5 exclusives wouldn't be either (although thats changing rapidly). I know Microsoft has joint Xbox/PC releases with Gamepass but I've honestly never really looked into whether they are also on Steam (If something is a Gamepass release I'll just use that on whichever, if its not I'll go straight to Steam). No Nintendo games would be there either. I'm not discounting the incredible work that's been put into this, more wondering about how, as games become more platform agnostic, things will change in the Steam ecosystem. Will Indies still be able to remain as visible in the rankings if all games were there at the same time.
I love the way Steam can really highlight strong indie games. It would be a shame if a side effect of all AAA and AA games being in the same place somehow demoted them just by sheer weight of marketing and reach of the big publishers.
There is at least one person who has looked at every game on Steam. They made a reddit post a while back. They also discluded VR-only games, but otherwise every game on Steam is either on this person’s wishlist or marked as “ignored” by them.
Tim does a reaction video. We have arrived.
I love how it's a reaction video but dosn't contain the video he is reacting too
Some awesome indie games I've checked out are from devs like Fading Club, emika, justtomcuck, and a few others. They all have really good games and they're small devs, usually just one person.
Hi Tim,
Big fan of your videos. I'm a solo developer venturing into the game industry after some time in web development and was wondering if there is a place for continuous integration and more importantly continuous deployments in games? It seems like a lot of games focus on patches on a weekly/monthly cycle and then content updates on a monthly/quarterly cycle. Is it advisable to instead release both fixes and contents as soon as possible, on a daily if not more cadence?
I think the reasons you don’t see faster patch/content update cycles include:
1. Testing. The game has to be tested on every platform, and for PC, every build configuration. That takes time.
2. Faster updates means fewer fixes and less content per update. This means fewer people are likely to download it. So you are working faster for fewer downloads.
3. Tracking. Having one update per month or quarter makes it easier to track which update contained any new bugs.
4. Team size. Often the update team is smaller than the main development team, who have probably moved on to new assignments. So the smaller team might not be able to maintain a fast update cycle.
5. Publishers. You need to get permission from your publisher for every update. That permission is not instant. I doubt I could have received daily or even weekly permission from any of the publishers I used.
@@CainOnGames Thanks Tim!
If you haven't see "How to Market a Game" (HTMAG) yet, he does a wonderful amount of data analysis on what games are popular on Steam and how Steam drives its front page:
www.youtube.com/@howtomarketagame
For a few years now in the gaming community we have pretty much agreed that AA is the new AAA, and indie games often provide a unique/interesting experience compared to AAA games. The most successful games in history are either indie or began as a mod, such as Minecraft, MOBA's (originally Dota), Counter Strike and many others.
4:13 Tags: Pokemon + Guns.
I bet no one thought of this money printing combination 😅😂😂
Jokes aside, ever since I was a kid, I dreamt about a Pokémon game where everything happened in real-time without the constraints of a battle map, and you could use the pokemon to interact with the environment. I guess Palworld was inevitable. There are probably other similar "inevitable" ideas out there waiting for folks to implement.
Not only do some channels spend so much time complaining about stuff they don't like but if they do happen to find one of these hidden gems they'll immediately use it as a way to complain about AAA studios.
Here's a tag couple we need more of -- platformer and story! The two sound diametrically opposed but Klonoa is proof they can work together! The games never took off when they were new, but the fact they sold 1m on Steam as soon as they launched says a lot.
An interesting Gaming study as well you might enjoy checking out if you don't know it already:
Motivations of Play in MMORPG : Results from a Factor Analytic Approach, by Nick Yee
Super interesting. I love data sets like this.
As i learned in my college business class, niches or differentiation are used more or should be used when making a good or services. I do agree with you that you could find other games that you could like, but I will say that now a days, you should not have to spend hours trying to find a game.
One element that's missing here: the Steam review system is a poor measure of a game's quality because it's an *extremely* reductive binary: either thumbs up or thumbs down. I'm not gonna sit here and say numeric scores would I prove things (lol) but more options *would* -- like a neutral, non-weighted option for reviews about technical issues that render the game unplayable (very common for older PC games on Steam); or, let's say, a yellow tilde icon for the equivalent of a shrug -- neither a thumbs up or down for those middle-of-the road games. And maybe some way to demonstrate *enthusiasm*.
Over the past few years, I've been trying to review every game in my library -- long road that keeps getting longer as I accumulate more games (2000+ and counting) -- and this lack of nuance *really sucks.* There are a lot of fantastic games that just don't work well on Steam, or worse, *didn't* work well be have since been patched, with very mid review averages. A "mixed" on Steam doesn't mean the same thing as a mediocre game. And, likewise, there are genuinely great games out there that dip into the negatives, overall, for various reasons outside the games themselves (DLC practices, review bombing, etc.) as well as extremely mediocre games ranked "very positive" overall simply for being functional and having high production values.
Basically, while I agree that there are a *ton* of fantastic games out there and it's hard to find them, I have to disagree that the Steam review system is even *remotely* helpful at ascertaining what those games are. If you read them, sure, but the whole do/don't recommend binary has very little utility.
You get 10 double Likes per year. Like. Neutral. Dislike. Technical issues.
3:09 I don't think that's necessarily a sign or proof of how hard it is to make a good game. What is hard is to get people interested in and most importantly to buy and play the new games. Good games, especially those of niche genres, can go under mainstream's radar. There's so many games coming out every year, every moth and every week that companies, both big and especially small indie companies with not as big marketing budges and fan bases, need to compete over players' attention and time.
I agree. Discoverability is its own separate issue.
Discoverability
th-cam.com/video/lmgJVUuS1I8/w-d-xo.html
I know this is a little different, but I feel like a lot of known or big gaming companies are really, more for money and or they are just copying a lot of other games. I think that video games should have little a small reboot as a hope.
we need digital demo discs like in the 90s, maybe have them split by genre, just to check less known releases. i cant follow new releases, all my game time is spent playting the games XD
Wait, does that mean I have to crack out my SPSS and G-Power software to find a game that I like?
The problem is still let the players that would like your game to find it.
The market is saturated, with generative AI that will increase.
When I look at the Steam store page, I do not get the impression that 70K games were added last year. When you remove the suggested (for some odd reason) soft-p0rn anime games that nobody buys, it's even fewer than that. There is obviously some gatekeeping going on even on Steam.
Bro missing out on the softpron games
Spoiler: if no one bought them, Steam wouldn't suggest them.
From what I hear, those games sell quite well.
could have grabbed that zoomer audience with a tim cain reacts title
Have you read Matthew Ball's State of Video Gaming 2025 report? It was a fascinating dive into industry trends and how things like TikTok have affected the mobile market.
Positive reviews dont equal positive economic outcomes unfortunately.
The AAA studios have destroyed the industry monetization.
Every AAA game has Battle passes and Loot boxes.
As soon as an Indy developer tries to monetize their games, they get DESTROYED
A game having a niche audience doesn't make it good. Just those people like it.
I have to disagree with the idea of “undiscovered gems” on Steam. In reality, it’s quite easy for an indie developer to earn positive reviews-even for a bad, boring, or unfinished game. The smaller the audience (and thus the number of reviews), the easier it is to skew them positively, whether because reviewers are friends, feel pity, or are simply more forgiving toward indie devs.
Of course, “good” is relative. Still, if you want to measure quality objectively, Valve seems to have the metrics to see which games people are actually willing to pay for. As for reviews, they don’t seem to weigh very heavily for Valve.
Strictly speaking, that's not necessarily true (regarding smaller communities/audiences leaning positive). There are many elements that can affect that, e.g. in my case, I never ask my friends for feedback (or share information with them at all, really), simply because their feedback will almost always be inspired by whatever game they've played recently - the differences between them, they'll see as negative. I've also seen that in smaller communities, it's common for people to feel more confident regarding their critique compared to a larger community, and thus being more open about what they believe to be a negative trait of the game.
That makes it much harder to get an idea off the ground. The real trick is finding a *fanbase* specifically to get the community off the ground (I have no advice regarding this. Seems to just be luck and hard work).
I feel like it leans positive, but that’s just my personal sense-I don’t have a solid argument to back it up. That said, I still think my point stands: positive reviews aren’t a reliable way to judge whether a game is good, given with a small sample size.
No Friday Fun? 😢
Data is fun! 🤓
@@UlissesSampaio
Neeeeeeerd... XD
@ 😂
Every video is a fun Friday
Funny number to put in perspective the "1m per game for 8h" to discover games. If you were to take a picture of every human and spend 1s to watch per human, it would take you 260 years to see the current population. There is no way in hell that you're not missing out something that would have rock youred world made by another human being currently alive. Let alone those that already passed away and created masterpieces for the ages.
So yeah, stop complaining, stop the drama, stop ruining your time with toxicity, go out there, explore. Or don't. But assume your choices.
I'm afraid my wallet can't quite handle your rate of exploration!
To your point about discoverability, perhaps Valve has six games on the top 50 precisely because they own Steam.
It's possible that Valve is manipulating the store ratings, but they could also just have made very popular games that are well-designed.
Well a good amount of those Valve games are free, or highly discounted for forever.
"Valve has 6 games in the top 50." So you're telling me that the company that controls which games get boosted by exposure made the most successful games? What a surprise.
I like how gamedevs are complaining about too many game releasing each day, and by many this means 2-3 dozens, while in music industry there are dozens of thousands tracks releasing each day, and 1/4 of them are indistinguishable AI copies😅
I used to value your opinion, but after that video where you blame gamers for the industry not making good games I just can't anymore.
Elaborate more.
Good game / Bad games are subjective
@@wesss9353 Go watch the video
@@wesss9353 Go watch the video. Basically he blames gamers for the state of the industry.
@dbbuchmann link to the video
@ It's literally a video on this channel. Sorry internet stranger, but you don't get to assign homework for me.
??? Why would you "learn" from Steam data? Don't you have marketing teams and ACTUAL DATA you can learn from?? We literally have a thing called the internet that your companies use to take player data and sell it. Completely speachless. Take a knee. Delete your account and videos. You're done.
steam data lie many plays offline and diffrent way thant steam.
Bruh says a smaller data pool means indie games are more popular. Lmao, math bro. Do math. Real math. If a million people buy a popular title and 20,000 people buy an indie title, its almost guaranteed the indie title will have a higher postive review ratio because the data pool is smaller and the game is much more targeted. Im sorry but i get almost no value from your videos. Just like i get no value from your recent projects. What in the actual crap was outerworlds besides a barely 40 hour scam. "Its really hard to make a good game" no it isnt lmao there is just 70 games being released a day, so obviously the top 50 will be hard to get into. Your analysis is like watching a 5 year old try and make excuses for bad work.
were you bullied by game devs as a child
There is one (1) actually good n viable build in the first fallout, that's bullying @@groalerable
Egads! A wild moron appeared!
Call of Duty is recycled year after year and millions buy it.
@@wesss9353 Wow! I thought you were wrong, but no, they have exactly one release per year - like clockwork!