Fw: [新聞] Steam 8成遊戲發售頭2週收入不到五千美金

[wizardfizban (瘋法師)]

Ars analysis: ~80% of Steam games earn under $5K in first two weeks
https://tinyurl.com/thehvlt

It has been roughly two years now since Valve shut off the source of Steam
Spy's huge, randomly sampled sales estimates and promised a "more accurate
and more useful" replacement to come. We got our first glimpse of what that
replacement might entail today, as Valve gave a rare glimpse into its
treasure trove of aggregate sales data across thousands of PC games.
The blog post sharing that data correctly points out that the raw number of
games finding some minimum level of sales success on Steam has increased
vastly since 2012 (when Valve launched Steam Greenlight and loosened its
tight control of what games could appear on the storefront). But Valve's
selective view of the data leaves out a huge mass of games that make less
than $5,000 in their first two weeks on Steam's virtual shelves. An Ars
analysis finds those titles have made up the vast majority of Steam releases
for the last five years.

Filling in the holes
To get at that data for the charts above, we started with the graphs Valve
itself provided in its blog post today. These lay out the number of games
making over $5,000, $10,000, $50,000, $100,000, and $250,000 in their first
two weeks, respectively, by release year. I used photo editing software to
measure and convert the bars in those graphs into raw numbers, but the actual
numbers may be off by a fraction of a percentage point from Valve's internal
benchmarks (we didn't decipher the graphs for 2005 and 2006, when the total
number of Steam releases was too small to draw much meaningful data).

We then compared those numbers to the total number of Steam releases for each
year, as collected by Steam Spy (I removed non-game software and free-to-play
games from consideration, as Valve did in its data). Using that, we were able
to figure out the one number that Valve pointedly failed to mention for all
of these years: the games making less than $5,000 in that two-week launch
period.

As you can see in Fig. 3, this lowest tier of sales made up well under half
of all Steam releases through 2014, a year when Steam still saw less than
1,400 total games hit the storefront. By 2015, though, the raw number of
releases had ballooned to over 2,300, and our data shows that increase came
almost entirely from games that were struggling to make any significant sales
impact at launch.

Aurich Lawson
Since 2015, both the annual growth rate in Steam releases and the proportion
of those releases that struggled at launch continued to increase
exponentially, before leveling off in 2019. At this point, though, the ratio
of Steam releases that can't hit $5,000 in initial sales has hovered around
80 percent for the last three years.

As Valve acknowledges in its blog post, these launch window revenue cutoffs
are somewhat arbitrary. A game that makes $4,000 in a couple of weeks could
be considered a huge success for a hobbyist programmer just getting their
solo start. Initial sales also don't always capture the full picture for
games that may find success long after launch, as well.

But Valve also points out that "most recent games earning around $10,000 in
the first two weeks earned between $20,000 and $60,000 over the course of 12
months following release." Convert that to an annual revenue number for a
struggling indie developer, and you can see how launch window sales of under
$5,000 can easily be considered a commercial failure (though the calculus
changes if a developer can crank out multiple games per year or keep sales
steady for a multi-year period).

What does it mean?
There are two ways to look at these numbers. The first, which Valve focuses
on in its blog post, is the raw number of games in those "high initial
revenue" groupings (i.e. above $5,000). As you can see in Fig. 2 (and below),
the number of such titles generally rose slowly after Steam launched,
absolutely exploded in 2014 amid looser Steam Greenlight standards, and
continued to rise from that expanded number since then. Many more total games
are quickly finding a significant audience on Steam than ever before, and
Valve can rightly feel good about that.

But even as the number of successes on Steam has increased, the number of
failures has increased even more, both on an absolute and relative basis. For
developers, that means just getting a game on Steam isn't anything close to a
guarantee of being able to find a significant audience these days. For
players, that means sifting through Steam storefront listings full of a lot
of crap that apparently very few people want to buy.

Valve is constantly tinkering with its "discovery" algorithms to help with
both sides of this equation, and those algorithms do the best they can to
direct deserving games to their deserving audiences. But on a platform with
increasingly hands-off submission guidelines and dozens of games launching
every day, there are inevitably going to be a lot of losers in Steam's sales
lottery.

There are signs that things are improving, though. As Valve points out in its
blog post, the proportion of games reaching that $10,000 initial sales
milestone ticked up 11 percent from 2018 to 2019, slightly reducing the
"failure rate" for a generic Steam release in the last year. And the average
initial earnings for Steam games increased from 2018 to 2019 at all but the
lowest percentile levels.

Those numbers suggest that quality games are starting to find even larger
audiences on Steam these days, while weaker titles are proving even less
lucrative. That doesn't mean we'll be getting back to the relative "all
killer no filler" world of early Steam any time soon, but maybe we're
starting to get a little closer with each passing year.

Listing image by Getty / Aurich Lawson

====

這數據說真的完全不讓人意外。

這只是再次證明了以前有人討論過的幾個論點。

一、Steam的主要收入來自3A級大作的抽成，其它的能給Steam的收益不高。

二、遊戲業的競爭越來越激烈，而Steam能給於的幫助也很有限。遊戲數量越來越多，不可
能每個都能被玩家注意到，Steam的廣告位也就那些。

另外這新聞其實也忽視了一件事。

那就是Steam上其實不少低成本的簡單遊戲，這些遊戲能賣到五千美金都能回本了。

--
「把已經倒下的人們的願望，還有未來的人們的希望，把這二種心情全都織入雙重螺旋
        之中，挖出通往明天的道路。那就是天元突破，那就是Gurren-Lagann，
                  我的鑽頭．．．．是用來開天闢地的鑽頭啊！！」
                      ── 西蒙　《天元突破　紅蓮之眼》

--
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※ 編輯: wizardfizban (36.233.146.52 臺灣), 04/09/2020 11:29:29
推 mercuries2: 就是獨立遊戲太多了，不是每款都能得到關愛的眼光
→ mercuries2: 獨立遊戲普遍又單價低
推 Korsechi: 以前一堆爛製小遊戲上架 現在有條件管制有好一點
推 hduek153: 有一堆跟以前網頁遊戲87%像的 正常吧
推 symeng: 不少獨立遊戲要靠口耳相傳或網路評價，像overcooked也不是
→ symeng: 一上市立刻熱賣
推 horard: 太多遊戲基本上沒有名氣都很難賣
→ AricFeng: 一堆隨便做做放上去的game，這數量很正常吧
推 yuehxian: 有些還沒完成就拿出來賣
推 ab4daa: 正常 現在門檻低了  我隔壁阿媽的狗都在做遊戲
→ ab4daa: 只是最後的產品品質還是要靠真功夫 or $$$$$
推 WuDhar: 大家時間都嘛有限，沒人推薦誰這麼無聊去踩雷
→ tindy: 太多糞game也會壓縮到普作
推 leo19981: 大家都在等特價再買
→ CW4: 藝術品跟音樂還不是這樣
推 katana89: 沒steam 那些遊戲也只能做成網頁遊戲給平台去賺廣告流量
→ katana89: 87%只會賺更少
推 Allenk: 正常啊 像我這種沒打折就不買的 他發售前兩週怎賺錢
推 MEVIUS: 獨立遊戲粗製濫造的太多
推 bearching: 雖然說大家在等特價，但像是隻狼沒有太多特價的遊戲，
→ bearching: 已經全破的人也不在少數
→ cul287: 糞game太多....
推 becausemusic: 帕累托法則 2成的人掌控世界8成的財富  8成的收入來
→ becausemusic: 自2成的消費者  8成的總銷量來自2成的商品
推 enthpzd: 還敢講，一堆3A結果推出半成品縮水品玩家還是照買，真香
→ bestpika: 然後 Steam 上面超過八成都是低成本的便宜遊戲
→ bestpika: 便宜遊戲要賣到 5000 鎂難度很高啊 XD
→ bestpika: 他還不如去算每款遊戲在首兩週可以賣出多少
→ bestpika: 然後這也沒計有在其他平台賣的吧
推 r85270607: 數量變多了 首兩周就容易被分掉
→ r85270607: 加上不少遊走爭議的操作手法 比如以前常有一直霸佔近
→ r85270607: 期上市
→ r85270607: 但 玩家社群之間口耳相傳  好的獨立作品依然有出頭的
→ r85270607: 機會
推 chenpfu0394: 平常看到那些本來就是冰山一角啊 不過連那些比較知名
→ chenpfu0394: 的買了都不一定會想玩了..
推 THKLuga: 這不廢話，我自己做的APP上架，兩周才11人安裝，不是什麼
→ THKLuga: 遊戲都是大作廣告打很多的
推 SecondRun: 拿來送都不想裝的糞G那麼多 不意外吧
推 wow1991512: 太多半成品 就丟出來 讓買的人抓漏洞 工作室再去修改
→ cress0128: .............拼圖是能賺多少
推 haseo00: 一堆糞G，能賣出去就偷笑了
→ felixr0123: 太多雲玩家啊
→ tindy: 手遊有統計,9成以上的資金掌握在前5%的公司
→ tindy: 糞game太多應該就不符合82了
→ ddavid: 目前有不少跟電腦相關的數據會偏離80/20 rule，變成90/10
→ ddavid: 甚至95/5，像Youtube影片前3%頻道就佔有90%左右的觀看數量
→ ddavid: ，以影片為單位則是前5%就佔有95%觀看數量
→ ddavid: 因為牽扯到電腦科技，快速傳播、複製跟低成本仿造都比實體
→ ddavid: 世界簡單，分母很容易就衝高而脫離80/20 rule
推 ddavid: 一堆低成本小遊戲（未必不好玩或沒價值，只論製作成本）換
→ ddavid: 套圖片就當作一個低價新遊戲又上架，總遊戲量就衝高了
→ lpdpCossette: 那些遊戲就沒有想要大賣的意圖啊 加減作爽的而已xd
→ lpdpCossette: 然後獨立本來就拼長銷
→ lpdpCossette: 要拼短銷要付出很大的宣傳成本