Steam is a global games platform, with its core audience spread across multiple regions (usually radically different from consoles). GameDiscoverCo recently analyzed geographical data to find the distribution of hit games by country.
As Simon Carless explained in his newsletter last month, GameDiscoverCo looked at owners of games with over 100k lifetime Steam players. In total, there are 4,300 such titles on the platform. It is also worth noting that the data doesn’t cover all users, as it only takes into account countries optionally displayed on public profiles.
Below are the top 10 countries on Steam (for hit games) and their all-time median share:
- United States — 20.79%
- China — 8.41%
- Russian Federation — 5.66%
- Germany — 5.29%
- United Kingdom — 4.54%
- Canada — 3.81%
- Brazil — 3.05%
- France — 2.57%
- Poland — 2.36%
- Australia — 2.31%
Japan, which is one of the biggest games markets (especially for consoles), only ranks 11th on Steam. Further down the list are Turkey (#12), Argentine (#14), Ukraine (#17), and South Korea (#19), with Czech Republic rounding out the top 20.
“This isn’t drastically different to what’s gone before: but it’s really good to have some kind of benchmark,” Carless noted. “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.”
Interestingly, the median owner share changes when looking only at games with over 100k players launched since January 2021. The US and China remain the leaders, increasing their shares to 21.53% and 11.45%, respectively. However, Germany now ranks 3rd (5.42%), with Russia dropping to 4th place (3.88%)
We think the latter may be due to some Russian users changing their profile country following the 2022 sanctions and after many major companies pulled their titles from sale in the region. Local players can use various “gray” schemes to buy thousands of games that are still available in Russia (and even those from publishers like Sony or Capcom) without “moving” to other countries, but it also seems that the country’s share is now a bit scattered across other regions.
Carless also believes that China’s median share is undercounted because the global version of Steam operates in a “gray” zone there, and the country also outpaces the US in bandwidth on the platform.
The share of Japanese and South Korean players has also increased since 2021. Japan now ranks 10th (1.97%) among games wtih over 100k owners. Earlier this year, Valve also mentioned that the number of players from this country has increased by more than 150% since 2019.
More data, including the median for free-to-play games and the top 50 countries, can be found in the full GameDiscoverCo post.