Steam Games Statistics and Trends
Recently I was made aware of the website SteamSpy. SteamSpy scrubs info from Steam and provides some incredible information and statistics of the number of games on Steam, as well as many other statistics. I am a huge fan of data of this kind, and I found it extremely interesting. So I did some digging, and I came up with some very interesting facts.
Steam has been the dominant PC gaming platform for many years now. Since it's launch in 2004 it has evolved into a platform that provides PC gamers with an unmatched games library and various services. This platform has shaped the very industry it lives in.
So how many games are being added on Steam? Well, the first chart shows a monthly trend of all the games added to Steam since it's inception way back in 2004:
It is interesting to note that Steam started it's Early Access process in March 2013. From the graph it's clear to see that this caused an absolute explosion of games being released on the platform. It is perhaps not just the fault of Early Access that there has been an astronomical increase in the number of games added to Steam each month, but it's interesting to note that this huge increase happened just a few months after it's introduction.
Has this increase of games had an effect on the quality of games? To find out, we trend the average user scores on Steam of all these games released each month:
The trend is surely showing the impact of the abundance of games, and the old adage of "more is not always better" is pretty much proven in this graph. Gamers have been steadily scoring games lower and lower as time passes, and the trend proves that today we are probably faced with the worst group of games being released on a monthly basis.
Does the critics agree with these scores? Well, here we trend what Metacritic scores games have received as they release on Steam:
From the user scores it can be argued that the hotchpotch of Early Access games and small Steam games have been dragging the industry down. But Metacritic usually covers only bigger profile AAA titles and Indie games. It's interesting to see that it's trend almost matches that of the user scores, except for the last few month, where games seem to be getting higher scores. Does it point to the fact that developers are making better games? The graph surely points to that, but ultimately is something that will be debated on internet forums for years to come.
And what about price? Surely games have been getting more and more expensive throughout the years...
Well, no. In fact, the average price that Steam games are sold at is decreasing in the last few years. This most definitely is very real evidence of how the Steam Sales impacts gamers purchases, as more games are being sold at a price point close to $10 than any other price point. Although, the huge number of smaller games also hover at the $10 mark, so that will have an effect as well
So there you have it, some interesting facts and trends of games on Steam.
SOURCE - SteamSpy
