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I need to evaluate a marketing perspective for a videogame in order to predict its income, sold units, etc. Since this sounds like quite a bit of an impossible task, I thought I could collect some statistic for similar games in order to have an idea.

Is there a way which I could figure out selling statistics about games on specific platform? For example collect statistic for game xyz available on Steam platform or game abc available on HumbleBundle.

I think that could be a good practice to achieve this goal.

EDIT: recently was published SteamSpy, which offers a lot of statistics about games on Steam platform.

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    \$\begingroup\$ There is a site called vgchartz.com which updates hardware and software sales each week based on platform and region. \$\endgroup\$
    – Josh
    Dec 3, 2014 at 17:32

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You generally need to pay the market research corporations for this information. Often quite a lot of money, as well. Even then what you'll get is generally the perspective of retail markets, and not the perspective of the individual studios responsible for the games.

Some basic, high-level information is usually available (for example, news outlets will report on the NPD charts). But often you have to purchase the detailed reports. Sales breakdowns from individual companies, such as Valve, may not be available at all. If they are you'll likely need to either dig through lots of random news reports to assemble the data, read investor reports if available, or (again) pay somebody to do this for you.

What you are trying to do (predict the sales of a game based on previous data) is a hard problem even with good data (past performance is no guarantee of future results, just like with the stock market). It's going to be very hard to do on the cheap.

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  • \$\begingroup\$ Great answer Josh. I was wandering if this affects indie company as well as AAA ones. Maybe indie companies could be more available in telling you what are their numbers? \$\endgroup\$
    – Leggy7
    Dec 3, 2014 at 17:05
  • \$\begingroup\$ Perhaps, but you'll have to go ask them individually. It's quite rare that anybody is going to be proactively forthcoming with that kind of data. \$\endgroup\$
    – user1430
    Dec 3, 2014 at 17:08
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    \$\begingroup\$ A couple indies have blogged about their financials. I can't remember which off the top of my head, but I'm thinking someone like the Towerfall guy? \$\endgroup\$
    – jhocking
    Dec 3, 2014 at 17:11
  • \$\begingroup\$ @JoshPetrie as for your suggestion i started to search some indie game (hoping not to have committed mistakes) and found out some result. I thought it would have been good to update my question with them \$\endgroup\$
    – Leggy7
    Dec 5, 2014 at 13:55
  • \$\begingroup\$ @Leggy7 I think it would be better for you to put all those links into an answer, actually. \$\endgroup\$
    – user1430
    Dec 5, 2014 at 16:45
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As to complete what Josh already said, here I'm posting some data I was able to fast gather on the web. They are related to some of the most famous indie games released in the last years.

and here's a take from a game that did well but didn't hit the lottery: Cardinal Quest

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    \$\begingroup\$ fyi just keep in mind that these results are heavily skewed toward super successful games. The majority of indie games don't sell anywhere close to, like, a million copies. \$\endgroup\$
    – jhocking
    Dec 5, 2014 at 22:26
  • \$\begingroup\$ @jhocking Yes, that's true. what's in your opinion an average number of sold copies for a good indie title? \$\endgroup\$
    – Leggy7
    Dec 6, 2014 at 13:21
  • \$\begingroup\$ Well in my opinion the average is probably really low, like 100 copies. However 3 points: that's an average from the vast majority of indie games barely sell anything, that does depend on how exactly you define "indie game released for sale", and that's my guess not empirical data. \$\endgroup\$
    – jhocking
    Dec 6, 2014 at 15:51
  • \$\begingroup\$ Average for good titles. I was trying to guess how their visibility is going to work. Like they sell mainly if shared on platforms like steam, humblebundle, etc? Or there are other vehicles? \$\endgroup\$
    – Leggy7
    Dec 6, 2014 at 17:07
  • \$\begingroup\$ @jhocking: i would say the same thing. \$\endgroup\$
    – v.oddou
    Dec 18, 2014 at 9:15

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