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Marketing strategist and Steam analyst Chris Zukowski discussed some of the inner workings of Valve's PC gaming platform at GDC earlier this year. The session was packed, and the focus was on "Real Steam," a term Zukowski coined as shorthand for the estimated thresholds – around 250 reviews in a month and $150,000 in sales within six to nine months, in his experience – where Steam tools and algorithms like new and trending, top upcoming, tagging recommendations, daily deals, and banner promotions tend to recognize a game's popularity and really start putting it in front of more players.
Focusing on his analysis of Steam and trends among games, I wanted to pick Zukowski's brain a bit more. In an interview with GamesRadar+, he discussed his first-quarter analysis of standout (1,000+ user review) games released on Steam this year, and his findings touched on a commonly overlooked but interesting reality of game development.
Interest, like news, gravitates towards extremes. Extreme successes like Balatro and extreme failures like Concord get attention in part because they are extreme. At the same time, tons of games fail quietly. Zukowski stresses that it's incredibly possible, and even dangerously easy, for a game to just make "no money" on Steam, which is no grand surprise.
Games are a risky business, visibility is hard, players can be unpredictable, and a lot of things can go wrong. Making a good game is hard, and no guarantee of success. I follow a lot of indie dev communities, and it's illuminating how regularly folks bemoan how their passion project just brutally cratered after launch.
But there's also a huge gradient of success within games. A drop in the bucket to a big publisher might be life-changing money for a small team, enough to fund their operations for years. And even just among indies, there are different grades. Fields of Mistria, a delightful retro anime-styled farming life sim, is a stone-cold hit with over 18,000 glowing Steam reviews; it doesn't need to be as big as Stardew Valley, a game which seems to have partly inspired the folks at Mistria developer NPC Studio, to be a hit.
It's in this vast and understated middle ground that Zukowski sees some of the most encouraging evidence that Steam is second to none not just for discoverability among gaming storefronts, but for its ability to sustain a range of games of varying scale, nature, and quality. And this is the space where you'll find many wild games that are quietly making a stable-but-not-rockstar living for some wild devs.
To begin, Zukowski reiterates that "Real Steam" is just a loose framework he uses to explain the point where Steam's discoverability and promotional tools really start working for a game, not an actual threshold in Valve's system.
"There's no hard line where it's programmed into the Valve algorithm code, [$150,000], there's never that," he says. "But it's like they're kind of using averages, and they're looking at competitiveness against all games releasing at the time. But if you look at it, it typically comes out to these numbers, is what I'm saying. So anytime I give you a firm number, that just means, in the median, when I've looked at thousands and thousands of games, that's where it comes out to."
"A number of them, nobody's ever written about them," Zukowski says of the odd middle ground games he's dug up. "They're not the talk of indies. You know, they're not in the scene. They're kind of janky looking, some of them are janky games, and they're not mega hits. They may have made, like, maybe half a million dollars, maybe a million dollars, but nobody's talking about these games. They're just quietly making a decent living on Steam ... You'll find some really weird games. You're like, this is selling well? Okay."
I looked up a few examples from part three of Zukowski's analysis series, and sure enough, I'd never heard of these games despite the thousands of generally positive, sometimes very positive reviews they've amassed. Cheaters Cheetah is a bizarre shooter where you and humanoid cheetahs cheat at shooting. Garten of Banban 0 is the latest in a shockingly long horror series from the prolific Euphoric Brothers. Aneurism IV is a dystopian sandbox sim that actually looks right up my alley, and the only mention of it that I could find is this piece from our friends at PC Gamer, which is specifically about overlooked games.
"And that's kind of what I like about Steam," Zukowski says. "If you dig deep enough – because if you just go to Steam, your filters and all that tagging will hide a lot of these games. You only see these games if you just brute force download the data off of some sites that scrape data from every game on Steam. That's how you identify these kinds of hidden gems that are just quietly making hundreds of thousands of dollars for small devs, one or two team members and that kind of stuff. So that's what always makes me feel confident that Steam is doing okay, these kinds of niche stories."
