Steam Summer Sale 2016
This was the first Steam Summer Sale without any daily or flash deals. And despite the perception of some of the core gamers, it ended up better than the previous one for both game developers and consumers: gamers bought more games, developers earned more money. And that’s what makes a sale great, right?
Caveats
When estimating revenue and number of copies sold I’m doing my best to filter out free giveaways, new titles without any discounts, and account for the regional difference in pricing.
For example, Limbo was free on Steam for a limited time, and therefore I assumed that all of its new 1.9M owners are coming from that promotion. Of course, in reality, some people bought the game after the giveaway, but it’s hard to tell just how many.
I’ve also removed a bunch of full-priced games like Total War: Warhammer (why isn’t it called Total Warhammer, again?). Technically, they were sold during Steam Summer Sale but weren’t a part of the promotion.
It’s also important to note that I’ve only included games that shifted over 5,000 copies during Steam Summer Sale. My algorithm isn’t precise enough to reliably account for the games with lower sales.
Overall, 1,592 games managed to sell over 5,000 copies — it’s a 50% increase over the last year’s number (1,050).
That constitutes 22% out of 7,156 individual games that were discounted this time — not a big difference compared to 24% of last year.
This is also the reason why I can’t calculate the median sales of the game during Steam Summer Sale — it’s way below my margin of error, unfortunately.
Numbers
Let’s start with the overall number of game copies sold:
These 1,592 games moved 36.8 million copies!
Last year this number was 33 millions, a 12% growth! Of course, this increase could be explained by Steam’s growing user base: it jumped from 130M users to 175M users (35%). However, a significant chunk of these new users are coming for the free-to-play titles published on Steam and, therefore, are less likely to purchase new games.
Besides, the increase in concurrent users on Steam was more modest: 12.2M vs. 9.7M (26%).
But let’s get back to the most interesting stat: the revenue!
This year Steam Summer Sale generated $223.2M in revenue.
That’s huge! In 2015 Steam Summer Sale netted developers $160M, so this year saw a 40% increase regarding estimated revenue!
Wait, but why?
Let’s talk about what might’ve contributed to such a sharp increase.
One thing that comes to mind is the removal of flash and daily deals. While sounding exciting, these deals incentivized people to wait for the best deal possible instead of buying already discounted games. While in theory the whole point of any sale it to, well, promote sales, not waiting.
Typical Steam Sales guide of yesteryear, courtesy of /r/pcmasterrace
Last year the sales were spiking around the first and the last day of the sale. This year they were a bit more evenly distributed across the whole sale period with a spike around the first weekend.
The removal of daily and flash deals also made developers more cautious with their discounts. An average discount this year was50%, instead of the 66.67% from last year.
While one could argue that this is a bad deal for consumers, I’d say consumers will be better off if the game developers don’t go bankrupt in the long run.
The median revenue for the games with a 75% discount was $33.5K this year ($40K last year), $40K for 66% ($75K), $60K for 50% ($90K), $106K for 33% ($90K) and $120K for 25% ($90K last year). There was only a handful of games discounted by 10%, most of them being recent releases.
It seems like discounting less was the winning tactics this year. Although, of course, it always depends on the game.
And, just like the last time around, people are playing their newly bought games — the games outside of the top 20 jumped at least by a 50% in total playtime after the sale.
Summary
- Steam Summer Sale made 40% more money this year.
- An average discount was 50% and less discounted titles seem to have brought more revenue.
- The removal of flash and daily deals might be the reason for the increase in sales and the decrease in discounts.
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