New Tool Reveals Steam Sales

cherryghost

Steam Spy, a new web tool developed by blogger and podcaster Sergey Galyonkin, takes publicly available web data and uses it to extrapolate sales and ownership information for Steam games. Inspired by Ars Technica's Steam Gauge experiment, it relies on similar information but cuts the data differently. The result is a free, up-to-date listing of sales through Valve's online marketplace.

Galyonkin hopes the information will be useful for indie developers, journalists, students "and all parties interested in PC gaming and its current state of affairs."

Like the Steam Gauge, Steam Spy gathers data from a "limited number" of Steam's 125 million users' profiles every minute, and then updates its visualizations at night. Those visualizations allow anyone to dig into the sales history for a particular Steam game, including the price the game was purchased at and what country the purchaser logged in from.

Some interesting figures there. Cities Skylines almost 1 million in a month. Far Cry games sell on par with consoles. MW2 the biggest selling PC COD game. 'F2P' h1z1, 1 million sold.

Saints Row on PC has outsold all other platforms as well as Borderlands series. Skyrim over 8 million sold. Massive!

The_Valeyard

Really interesting stuff!! Cheers OP. A good find.

Skerries

link for the lazy

Dcully

But sure didnt PC gaming die atleast 10 times already.

gizmo

Definitely an interesting tool but there are certain numbers which need to be considered a little more carefully. It'll be more useful to see how it applies to new releases so that the price drops can be considered more accurately but in the meantime, comparing sales of X game on Y platform is meaningless without the actual sale price info.

As for the Far Cry comment. FC4 is coming up as having sold 374,442 whereas total multi-platform sales are currently at 7 million? Similarly, FC3 is showing up as 2,429,417 sales whereas the game to date has sold over 10m copies.

cherryghost

gizmo wrote: »

Definitely an interesting tool but there are certain numbers which need to be considered a little more carefully. It'll be more useful to see how it applies to new releases so that the price drops can be considered more accurately but in the meantime, comparing sales of X game on Y platform is meaningless without the actual sale price info.

As for the Far Cry comment. FC4 is coming up as having sold 374,442 whereas total multi-platform sales are currently at 7 million? Similarly, FC3 is showing up as 2,429,417 sales whereas the game to date has sold over 10m copies.

Far Cry series is also available on other sales platforms other than Steam. Its more accurate to consider games just available on steam (COD games, Skyrim etc)

dreamers75

http://steamsales.rhekua.com/


another tool that shows prices, if you could combine the 2 it would show a sweet spot price point that PC gamers are willing to pay.

For instance I obtained" skyrim" and played it a lot, then i bought GOTY at 15 or so.

Almost all the "AAA" games on the steam list that i own i got from g2play.

gizmo

cherryghost wrote: »

Far Cry series is also available on other sales platforms other than Steam. Its more accurate to consider games just available on steam (COD games, Skyrim etc)

I don't disagree however I'm not sure how that addresses my point that the numbers don't support the claim that the Far Cry games sell on par with consoles, even in terms of raw numbers?

jumbobreakfast

Elite: Dangerous shows owners as 12,018 ± 6,291 two days after release. It was 12,000~ ± 12,000~ yesterday so that's a huge margin of error but at least it's dropping. I wonder how long after a game releases do they get a more accurate result.

http://steamspy.com/app/359320

nesf

Fun to play with.

CruelCoin

Skerries wrote: »

link for the lazy

Thanks, needed that.

Almost couldn't be arsed to write this.