Sandbox and FPS lead Steam's genre hit rates, new revenue report estimates Baldur's Gate 3 earnings at $1.8bn
A new analysis of over 100,000 Steam games has revealed which genres are most likely to turn a profit, with sandbox and first-person shooter titles leading the pack. The report, published by Ichiro Lambe, Matt Martindale and Dr. Tim Ermilov on the site weloveit.io, uses a well-known estimation technique to map the earnings of games that have a price and at least one user review.
The trio does not have access to Valve's internal sales data. Instead, they rely on the Boxleiter method, which assumes that a game's review count is roughly proportional to its sales. Multiplying the number of user reviews by a constant yields an estimated unit count. For a standard estimate, the multiplier used is 35 times the amount of user reviews. While this may not produce exact figures, the site notes that the technique is employed by analysts and publishers, and there are few better ways to arrive at a sales estimate.
The report's genre economics section uses user tags to rank genres on Steam. A game counts toward a genre only when the tag is among its six most popular tags, ensuring broad agreement among Steam users that the tag is accurate.
According to the data, sandbox games have the highest hit rate on Steam. Hit rate measures the proportion of games with a given tag that have earned more than $100,000. The sandbox tag boasts a 27.3 percent hit rate. However, the report acknowledges that "sandbox" is an unwieldy and impractical genre designation, as the most popular games with the tag are unhelpfully different: Terraria, Red Dead Redemption 2 and Project Zomboid. Still, it demonstrates that games promising some degree of freedom are preferred by Steam users, whether they are sloppy retail sims or $400 million cowboy adventures.
The next tag, FPS, is probably the "real" genre winner, according to the analysis. It has a 21.6 percent hit rate, though many games that are not strictly focused on shooting, such as Schedule I or Portal 2, are also tagged with FPS.
The report also provides striking individual examples of the disparity in Steam earnings. Baldur's Gate 3 is estimated to have made $1,795,480,003 since its early access launch in late 2020. At the other end of the spectrum, Free Solo, a physics climbing game released in March, has made an estimated $34.
The data, presented in graph form on weloveit.io, offers a stark picture of the platform's economics. A ridiculous number of games release on Steam every week, the report notes, and basically none of them make any money. A cursory browse of Steam's unfiltered new release list makes this clear.
The top 10 genres on Steam by hit rate, as determined by the study, place sandbox and FPS at the top, followed by other popular categories. The analysis underscores the challenges facing indie developers and the importance of genre selection in a crowded marketplace where most titles struggle to break even. The full graph and additional details are available on the weloveit.io site.