Session Name: | Analyzing the Steam Marketplace Using Publicly Derived Sales Estimates |
Speaker(s): | Kyle Orland |
Company Name(s): | Ars Technica |
Track / Format: | Business, Marketing & Management |
Overview: | While Steam represents a huge chunk of the overall PC games market, there hasn't been a public, NPD-style service providing detailed overall sales estimates for the entirety of the service - until now. The "Steam Gauge" project samples tens of thousands of public Steam Community profiles to generate accurate enough estimates of aggregate sales and gameplay hours for every game on the service. This session will provide an in-depth analysis of that data, and what it tells us about the state of today's PC gaming market. We'll show how things like Metacritic rankings and discounts affect game sales, and look at which games are played more (or less) than their raw sales numbers would suggest, and much more. After this session, Steam will no longer be an opaque box in which sales and gameplay data is forever hidden, but an open glass case ready to reveal its secrets. |