Backpack Battles has become one of the surprise indie hits of 2024. In its first month, the inventory management auto battler reached an impressive milestone of 640k units sold on Steam.

Summerhouse is a very minimalistic and relaxing town builder. Its simple formul and the lack of strict rules has resonated in the hearts of the players, becoming a huge success for German solo developer Friedemann.

It is no secret that Steam is flooded with tens of thousands of games. But here is how its catalog size compared to consoles and how the number of games on each platform changed over time.

Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader has been another success for Owlcat Games. According to GameDiscoverCo’s estimates, it became the highest-grossing new release on Steam last month.

GameDiscoverCo has ranked the top-grossing and best-selling new game releases of 2023 across Steam, PlayStation, Xbox, and Nintendo Switch. And as Simon Carless noted, the results are “part predictable, part intriguing.”

In a world where more than 1,000 games are released every month, even quality titles run the risk of not recouping their development costs. Here are the lessons indie studio Pixelsplit learned from the launch of its theme park sim Indoorlands.

Unlike the mobile market, tracking downloads and revenue of free-to-play games on PC is nearly impossible due to a lack of data. But discoverability expert Simon Carless has tried to analyze the current state of the F2P segment on Steam.

The problem with Steam Deck is that Valve has never reported official sales figures since starting shipping its portable PC in February 2022. However, there is still some indirect data that can be used to estimate the number of owners.

The number of games on Steam is steadily increasing every year, but most of them earn less than $1,000 in lifetime revenue. While the overall picture may seem grim, the situation is not all that bad if you take a closer look at the data.

Discoverability expert Simon Carless has shared some interesting insights into why some games, even quality ones, fail commercially in today’s market. It might be due to the oversaturation of certain genres, but the issue seems to be much more complex.

Nintendo Switch is one of the most closed and mysterious platforms when it comes to the amount of sales data available. However, discoverability expert Simon Carless has tried to analyze the state of the platform and chances of finding success in this oversaturated market.

It is hard to guess how many wishlists a game has on Steam since this metric is only available to game developers. But there is a way to estimate the number by applying a certain multiplier to the follower count.

Developers sometimes think of Early Access as an opportunity to warm up the audience and complete the game before the release of the 1.0 version. As discoverability expert Simon Carless points out, this mindset usually doesn’t work in practice.