Call for data: I want your Steam stats!

Not an unreasonable request?

[Hi, I’m Simon Carless, and you’re reading Game Discoverability Weekly, a regular look at how people find - and buy - your video games. Or don’t. You may know me from helping to run GDC & the Independent Games Festival, and advising indie publisher No More Robots, or from my other newsletter Video Game Deep Cuts.]

OK, so our last newsletter - analyzing Steam data for the game Aragami using some public stats put out on Twitter by David Leon - was very well received, and it got me thinking.

The idea: why can’t I ask devs reading this newsletter for similar public (or slightly anonymized, if you want!) Steam data, and then start featuring some of it in this newsletter? Nobody is currently doing this in bulk, and it would benefit the whole community. And I certainly don’t mind if you’ve sold 100 copies or 100,000.

As some Twitter commenters noted after the last article came out, many people haven’t spotted that the Steam publishing agreement was modified in November 2018 with the following comment:

“We’ve also made a change to the agreement regarding confidentiality of your sales data. We frequently get questions from partners who want to talk with other developers\third parties or publicly about the sales of their games on Steam. We've heard you, and we're updating the confidentiality provisions to make it clear that the partner can share sales data about their game as they see fit.”

So - at least on Steam - releasing data is completely legitimate. You can put out as much information in public as you like about sales, wishlists, country breakdowns, and so on and so forth.

What’s interesting is that I obviously have access to stats for No More Robots titles (being an advisor/investor), and there are some significant differences in longevity, wishlist additions or level-offs, regional sales, and sales volumes. (I’ll work on exposing some of that too.)

So it would be great to get more individual examples out there like Aragami. I’ll give you final sign-off on how your data is used, too.

Therefore - if you’re interested in sharing Steam sales data to be put out on the newsletter, please fill in this Google Form:

Game Discoverability Weekly - Steam sales info.

I’ll try to get back to you all reasonably swiftly, but depending on the volume of response (which I hope will be more than 0) it may be a little while.

Thanks, and sorry for anyone expecting a ‘full’ newsletter - we’ll be back with one soon!

Take care,
Simon.