What's the country split for players of hit Steam games?

We researched some intriguing data. Also: Steam's upcoming Next Fest changes & more....

[The GameDiscoverCo game discovery newsletter is written by ‘how people find your game’ expert & company founder Simon Carless, and is a regular look at how people discover and buy video games in the 2020s.]

Continuing with our ‘relaxed’ summer schedule - just the one free newsletter per week - we’re determined not to get relaxed with the number crunching. Hence today’s lead story, looking at the geographic spread for players of Steam’s 4,300 top games.

Before we start: you modern Internet users have it easy with your TikToks. But does anyone remember when Unix .plan files were ‘social media’ for ‘90s game devs? Some folks just archived a bunch, including John Romero’s from 1994: “DOOM totally sucks in comparison to our next game, QUAKE: The Fight for Justice!”

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Which countries are hit Steam game players from?

We keep seeing this stilt-walker every time we look at the U.S. bar.

As we all know, the consumer base of PC games is international in nature. Perhaps they’re not as global as mobile games, but they are way more global than consoles*. (*Which are way more of a niche than some people realize.)

We’ve covered this area before - with a look at the self-selected countries of Steam account-holders, as well as checking out who is currently using the most Steam bandwidth. (And yes, we know Steam isn’t the whole global PC market, either. )

But we’ve discovered a new lens: rather than just looking at all accounts, we’re looking at all games with >100,000 lifetime Steam players, and seeing the (self-selected, optional!) public profile countries of players. The results are above.

Just for the record, here’s the Top 10: the U.S. at 20.8%, China at 8.4%, the Russian Federation at 5.7%, Germany at 5.3%, the UK at 4.5%, Canada at 3.8%, Brazil at 3%, France at 2.6%, Poland at 2.4%, and Australia at 2.3%.

This isn’t drastically different to what’s gone before: but it’s really good to have some kind of benchmark. For example, if your game has sold >100k copies (or had that many F2P downloads), and you have >20.8% U.S. players, then it’s overindexing.

The above data encapsulates the entire history of Steam, though. Can’t we look at just newer games, to see how the country mix is shifting? We can, for games launched in Jan. 2021 or later, and that’s super interesting:

You’ll notice that for games with >100k players launched since 2021, there are a few major differences:

• China is on the rise - up from 8.4% of median players to 11.45%: and we’re pretty sure this is an undercount, for two reasons. One: putting your country in your Steam profile is optional, and with Steam International being ‘gray market’, some may keep a low profile. Also, we can see China outpacing the U.S. in bandwidth.

• Other Western countries are on the way ‘down’ - as a relative percentage: just because the U.K. (down 0.69%), Canada (down 0.31%) and Italy (down 0.13%) have a lower overall percentage of the pie, it doesn’t mean they have less players. (Just that other countries - and the overall pie size - are growing quicker.)

• Japan and Korea are also notable success stories for Steam: we can see Japan going up from #11 to #10 (up 0.07%) and Korea from #19 to #18 (up 0.06%) in a busy market, and Japan’s increased interest in Steam was mentioned by Valve. (Since many new Steam profiles are private by default, Asia’s rise may be higher still.)

There’s a lot of other nuance in here, some of a cultural bent. For example, the Top 10 Chinese games with >100k units sold have more than 88% Chinese players (wow!), showing some big ‘only in China’ hits like Nobody: The Turnaround.

This kind of cultural specificity happens on occasion in the U.S., too, with 10 titles at >55% U.S. players - including three Madden NFL games and Wizard101 (!). And the U.K. has 10 titles at >15% U.K. players, with Cricket ‘19 being the oddest (but logical) regional split we’ve seen - 19.5% UK, but 11% Australia and… wait for it… 46% India.

Finally, we tried to sub-segment by >100k user free to play games launched since 2021. And we saw some other interesting trends - which we included in this Google Docs spreadsheet that also includes the Top 50 countries for the above data.

Specifically, Brazil is a big Steam F2P hub (2.31% median of 2021-2024 launches, but 6.4% of 2021-2024’s free to play games), and the Russian Federation (3.88% all, 6.7% F2P), Poland (1.95% all, 2.64% F2P), and Thailand & The Philippines (both ~double the F2P rate compared to ‘all’!) are also areas that seem to like playing F2P titles on PC.

What’s next for Steam Next Fest? Valve has hints..

Next: if you’re preparing for an upcoming Next Fest demo showcase with your unreleased Steam game, you may have got a message from Valve about a couple of changes. We saw a copy of that message, and we’re telling you what it said!

Firstly, Steam says it that starting with October 2024’s Next Fest“we’re changing the role of [Next Fest page] livestreams to better reflect the variety of games and ways that developers engage with the event.” And these changes appear to include:

• Developer livestreams “will no longer have slots for front page visibility”: and that’s because livestreams will not be on the front page at all. They’ll be on “a separate ‘Livestream’ tab” within Next Fest - much less important, we reckon.

• Valve is discontinuing its own official Next Fest livestream as a result: it used to kick off the first day of Next Fest, and you can see June 2024’s here. But since livestreams won’t be front and center any more, it makes sense to not do it.

• There are unspecified ‘new visibility features’ coming: October Next Fest participants have been told that the event’s page will be changing, as, per Valve, “our continued aim is to give every participating game a chance to reach its audience, and to match players with games they are most likely interested in.”

There’s no specific reason for these changes. But we know there’s been issues with bots falsely elevating stream numbers for certain games, and the livestream schedule got very crowded. (Also: much livestreaming isn’t ‘live’, anyhow.)

So Valve - ever logical - seems to be shifting from something that doesn’t really move the needle (a lot of CCUs for livestreams on Steam are just people scrolling the store page, while the stream plays at the top) to something that might help - a much deeper personalization of the Next Fest homepage. We’ll see what it looks like…

And while we’re here, Valve’s Steamworks blog has revealed (dev login needed) all of its specific focused, quarterly and Next Fest dates for the first half of 2025. And it’s only July 2024! Nice going, there, ‘plan ahead’ task force…

We won’t quote all the smaller sales, which range from idle game and visual novel to fishing fests. But SteamDB now has all of the H1 2025 sales listed, and the 2025 Next Fests (Feb. 24-March 3, June 9-16) and Spring & Summer sales (March 13-20, June 26-July 10) are the biggest events to write into your Hello Kitty diary immediately.

The game platform & discovery news round-up…

We’re finishing up today’s newsletter with a look at the platform and discovery news of the last few days. Of which there are, we won’t sugarcoat things, ‘a lot’:

• After those Game Pass changes, WindowsCentral is reporting that Xbox is working on “a cloud-only version of its subscription that would be cheaper and more approachable to buy than Xbox Game Pass Ultimate”, and also: “very tentative rumors that the Xbox Game Pass Friends and Family Plan experiment isn't dead.” Hm.

• The publisher of minimal citybuilder Dystopika (above, $7) put out a newsletter talking about not undercharging for your game - that’s ‘undercharging’ vs. $5 price point competitors like Summerhouse, for anyone popping their monocle. (He concluded that having a clear roadmap helped justify the slightly higher price.)

• Former Steam contractor Ichiro Lambe is doing some clever things with Steam tags, using Claude 3 Haiku AI to discover Steam sub-sub-genres we never knew existed. (The AI “came up with Fishing Creature Collecting, Anime Magic Girls, Backrooms Horror Games, Microscopic Animal Saviors, Toilet-Themed Games.”)

• Matthew Ball sat down with both Epic’s Tim Sweeney and Snow Crash’s Neal Stephenson, and the results are intriguing, with Sweeney declaiming on the metaverse: “What's been rejected is a particular vision of the Metaverse, which is people putting on VR headsets and going to the office.” But not Fortnite, luckily!

• Here’s a good ‘how we did it’ for decent-sized hit & extraction shooter-adjacent Gray Zone Warfare: “Despite a $34.99 price tag, more than 50% of players have also purchased a special edition of the game that includes some bonus in-game perks. These start at $57.99 and run all the way to $99.99.”

• Microlinks: Meta reportedly plans two Quest 4 variants for 2026, then Quest Pro 2 in 2027; HTMAG on what types of games are selling on Steam in Q2 2024; European game sales were down ‘just’ 1.6% during the first half of 2024, according to GSD.

• ‘UGC on big platforms’ news: Roblox looked at ‘up and coming’ genres to explore using its own data, highlighting “open world action, social co-opetition, driving and racing, and arcade sports”; how rebumping a Fortnite Creative game with a name change and goofier thumbnail made it pop.

• If you’re willing to Pepe Silvia it up, we’ve got a Switch 2 conspiracy: “Nintendo puzzled the internet on Thursday by unveiling… a new official accessory for Switch… the Joy-Con Charging Stand… In April, it was reported that Switch 2’s new Joy-Cons would attach to the console magnetically.” So: a stealthy way to still charge your Switch 1 Joy-Cons, so you can use them with Switch 2?

• A good op-ed from Kotaku points out that “In 2023 we saw an increase in the number of [AAA-ish] games offering ‘early access’ for a price”, and lists a whole bunch more 2024 titles - from Assassin’s Creed Shadows to Concord & beyond - doing ‘Advanced Access’ on their deluxe game versions. (It’s def. a trend, folks.)

• Microlinks: sales of physical video games in the UK dropped 40% to £112 million ($145m USD) in H1 2024; Comscore has a new ‘State Of Gaming’ report, inc. that “82% of gamers have made an in-game purchase in a freemium game”; the monthly audience for WeChat Mini Games in China (context) reached 500 million.

• Some brief Game Pass x FTC contretemps: the FTC complained of the new Game Pass deal: “Product degradation… combined with price increases for existing users, is exactly the sort of consumer harm from the [Activision] merger the FTC has alleged.” Microsoft pushed back, saying that “the FTC is wrong to call Game Pass Standard a ‘degraded’ version because it includes multiplayer.” More of this, then.

• Netflix things: the company’s earnings said that “[existing] games are big, like [Grand Theft Auto]”, but launching games using Netflix IP is "very appealing". It’s bolstered by Netflix co-CEO Greg Peters: "One [thing] that is working is connecting our members with games based on specific Netflix IP that they love." New direction?

• Microlinks: the top downloads on the Japanese Switch eShop for the first half of 2024 were led by Suika Game & Monster Hunter Rise; Microsoft has integrated Nvidia’s GeForce Now cloud gaming into its Xbox game pages; Q2 2024 game biz deal stats “saw 166 closed deals totaling $4.1B” - here’s more analysis of the numbers.

Finally, another ‘finally’ feature for Black Mirror creator and genuine curmudgeon Charlie Brooker - formerly a game journalist - who chatted to BAFTA about why inverted controls make sense and those who disagree are stupid, really stupid.

When asked about his ‘ideal game that doesn’t exist’, let’s note Brooker’s off the cuff rant: "I wish Portal 3 existed. Why did they stop at Portal 2? What's the matter with them? They made so much money out of Steam! That's what's the matter with them!" Harsh, man:

[We’re GameDiscoverCo, an agency based around one simple issue: how do players find, buy and enjoy your PC or console game? We run the newsletter you’re reading, and provide consulting services for publishers, funds, and other smart game industry folks.]