Lars A. Doucet, co-founder of indie studio Level Up Labs (Defender’s Quest I and II), has launched a new website called GameDataCrunch.
The website collects and contextualizes various public data about every game on Steam. In the future, it will also cover other platforms.
The data is pulled from Steam and a number of sites that track and interpret the public data about games. While these specialized sites typically focus on a particular kind of data, GameDataCrunch combines all the relevant metrics and puts them into context enabling users to make informed business and design decisions. The stats are updated every 24 hours.
Instead of trying to take one figure and multiply it by some constant, I just gather as many independently verifiable public facts as I can and list them all together.
Lars A. Doucet
Not only can you learn about a game’s metrics such as ranking in the genre, number of reviewers and so on, you can also see how a title compares to similar games.
The website won’t tell you how many copies DOOM (2016) has sold. But you can learn that it’s near the top of almost every category it’s in (Action, Shooter, FPS, Horror). You can also categorize similar games by moods and themes or use tags refecting visual properties such as dimension and art style, and game features. Moreover, you can look at “similar games” that have a lot of players in common.
When looking at various pieces of information, it’s important not to make conclusions about, for example, your future game’s genre based on metrics alone. “Let’s be real – most indie devs already have a good idea of what kind of games they want to and are able to make, and picking some random genre that your heart really isn’t into, simply on the basis of sabermetrics, is a recipe for failure. What I do think is important is going in with your eyes open.”
That is, you can now look at your competion and start asking questions like “Has this title been around for a long time and only recently updated its tags?” or “Did it have a big crowdfunding push?” and so on. Doucet hopes that at some point this information might become available on GameDataCrunch.
The website might provide valuable insights to developers, researchers, and data analysts.
A more detailed introduction to the website is available here. You can support the creator on Patreon.