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WELCOME!

THIS SITE IS CURRENTLY IN ALPHA!

Please let me know of any weird bugs or issues or ideas for improvement in my
discord. Join Our Discord!

IF YOU'RE TRYING TO MAKE AND SELL A VIDEOGAME FOR PROFIT IT'S IMPORTANT TO
UNDERSTAND THE MARKET YOU'RE TRYING TO SELL TO!

Every week hundreds of games release on Steam. We can determine rough estimates
of how well they perform by using things like the review/sales ratio. This ratio
changes over time, and changes based on how popular a game is, but we can use it
to estimate approximately how well a game has sold (source [1]).

This website lets you predict how many reviews you think a game will have at the
end of its first four weeks on sale and then measures and displays the result
once those four weeks have passed. By gamifying it and simplifying the work
necessary to keep track I hope to make it more fun and easier to keep an eye on
the Steam releases and the state of the store! I'm also adding more review count
analysis and (extremely) rough sales estimates that you can view for released
games. Hopefully you'll be able to use what you learn here to inform your
decisions and help you reach your game development goals.

HOW DOES IT WORK:

Every week on Saturday the list of games to predict will be updated with the
next week's releases (sometimes games that are delayed or have uncertain release
dates will still show up, I'm working on filtering those out!). At any point in
the week you can go over the list of games and predict how many reviews a game
will get. You can predict what range the review count will fall into or predict
the exact count (or both!) as well as record how certain you are about the
prediction and any additional thoughts you may have. As soon as you click the
radio button or out of the textbox your prediction is saved. This is currently a
grabbag of options since this site is still under development and may change!

The median review count/game sale ratio is 30x, meaning for each review a game
has sold approximately 30 copies. From the current publicly available statistics
this ratio is generally lower for lower performing games (20x for games selling
under 1k copies, source [1]) and higher for higher performing games. It's
totally okay to start out having no clue how many reviews a game will sell, but
you can also look at the results page to get a sense of how games perform even
if you don't have any previous predictions yet.

You don't need an account to make predictions and have it evaluate your
predictions four weeks later, but if you don't make an account it can only save
your predictions on the computer you make them on. Making an account is totally
free and also gives you access to other options and features so I recommend it!
If you decide to make an account later it's able to import all your old
predictions.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS:

This site is a recreation (with permission) of the concepts behind the site
Steam Prophet by Lars Ducet (explained here). I enjoyed using the website while
it was up, although I didn't use it as much as I should have! Steam Prophet shut
down because Steam made it harder to determine how many sales a game recieved,
but I think it's still useful even if the estimations are less accurate. I would
never have made this site without using and enjoying Steam Prophet so thank you!

CAVEATS AND ADDITIONAL INFO:

Currently we're in alpha so the site may have bugs, the privacy policy and terms
of service are uncertain and will change, and the prediction ranges are
estimates of what will be vaguely useful!

I picked the ranges based on useful divides for very small indies but I may be
adjusting them or make a way for you to adjust them. Currently 0-10 reviews
means a game hasn't yet reached Steam's threshold for additional promotion, and
presumably several of the reviews are by friends and family members so the
review ratio is going to be less accurate. The next steps are based on rough
estimates of United States minimum wage salaries. Here are my assumptions:
Please let me know if I made a silly math error somewhere!

 * Game is priced at $15 USD
 * a review count/sales ratio of 20x
 * as a rule of thumb I estimate half of a games price goes to Steam's cut,
   returns, and taxes. This will vary depending on where you live and any
   conversion rates!
 * Using a generic online calculator if you work 35 hours a week at $13 an hour
   after taxes you'll take home (very roughly) about $1.8k.
 * That is VERY ROUGHLY equivalent to 240 sales, i.e. having ~12 reviews on your
   game.

That means that 75 reviews is roughly 6 months of minimum wage, and 150 reviews
would be about a year of minimum wage salary. We can continue to do rough back
of the napkin math (with statistics based in 2020 source [2]) and say that a
game will make about 2.7x it's first month of sales in its first year, but the
numbers are still very scary!



For many developers (myself included) I think it's useful to consider the
development time necessary to create each of these games and how they stack up
to the apparent sales they're receiving. This isn't to say give up on dreams of
full time indie development, it's to help you determine the best way to
accomplish them! Look at what genres are selling well, at what aesthetics are
selling well, and try to project those trends into the future. Hopefully as this
website gets more developed I'll be adding more graphs and tools to help you
visualize trends in the market and better figure out ways for us all to be
sucessful!


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