Steam’s 2010 revenue is nearly 1 billion dollars for 2010. Given that about 70-80% of the moneys go to publishers and developers, that’s a LOT of money coming from the “dying” PC platform. And that’s just one digital distribution outlet. There are several out there + MMO’s + Retail (which is down but still popular overseas).
Why didn’t I think up Steam in 2000? I could have been rich!
So how much of that money has been forked over by your wallets? Be honest! I can look up your gaming lists!
I would estimate at least $300-400 from me last year.
Yeah, probably a touch more actually…and I’m up to over a hundred bucks this year already (I pre-ordered the new DoWII expansion and the Total War Shogun II game and a couple other things as well).
Actually, some friends and I DID think of something like Steam back in the 90’s, but we never could figure out how to make it work, sadly. My part of the discussion was on the infrastructure side, but it was the distribution aspects that we couldn’t make work (I was only peripherally involved with that and the business parts).
I was also part of some brainstorming skull sessions and whiteboard/story board sessions talking about ways to make games that you could play interactively across large public networks (the story boards looked a lot like what Ultima Online eventually became). I’m actually glad that none of that took off, as MMO’s aren’t universal money makers and some of the aspects from a business model perspective turned out to be much more a pain in the ass then anyone on the team thought it would be.
Anyone play the Railworks 2 game? I’m close to purchasing it on Steam because it looks fantastic and seems really deep, especially the build mode, but I’m hesitant because it doesn’t look like there’s a “sit and watch” mode where I can design a layout and then just watch it operate without actually taking control myself. Does this game have such a feature? None of the reviews or game description seem to indicate so.
This again? PC gaming is dying. It is niche. The only hope you have is that Blizzard doesn’t release Diablo 3 on consoles. If they don’t then PCs will have another juggernaut along with WoW.
According to my records, $21.58. (Half Life 2, Amnesia, and Left 4 Dead 2). I haven’t quite gotten to playing the latter two (put in maybe an hour on Amnesia, and 2 minutes on Left 4 Dead.) I just don’t seem to have the attention span anymore for video games. I guess I’ve gone over into the “casual gamer” category.
If something has niche appeal, it is, by definition, not dying. As long as people have computers, they will want to game on them. It doesn’t matter if consoles do better.
Well apparently Steam is not all that is PC gaming. I definitely thought this was just the 20% they took in, not all sales revenue. But check it:
PC gaming is 53% of the entire US market. Even if you just count MMO’s + Downloads + retail you’re looking at 30% Vs consoles 43%. That’s ALL consoles COMBINED.
I though Steam’s slice of that pie would have been larger though. I’m surprised.
Oh, and Cubsfan, if PC gaming is niche, then console gaming must be non existent, eh?
Lol!
Also look at those figures for online game portals and social site games. I think that’s going to be the future of gaming. Which sucks, BTW.
Also, talk about niche, take a look at the small slice that is games on the ipad and iphone. The big publishers are hitting that market big time, even though it’s a relatively small market. Goes to show that a market will still thrive, as long as it produces decent returns.
Steam has definitely gotten some of my money last year. I think I bought like 10 or so games from them in 2010, many of those new or new-ish so a more premium price, too.
Whatever they’re doing to generate those estimates is wrong. There’s no way portal sold that much in 2010. More likely they somehow acquired a list of number of sales and assumed them to be of the retail price at the time they calculated them, rather than time purchased. Portal has a million+ units “sold” probably because it was free for a while, but they applied the normal $15 price to it. It’s also unclear, depending on how they got these estimates, if they’re counting steamworks activations (games activated through steam that weren’t purchased there) or just games actually purchased through steam. I wouldn’t take these numbers to be very meaningful without more information.
On the other hand, it also doesn’t express how much more per sale the original developer gets from steam sales than retail. If you buy a console game in a store, after microsoft/sony/nintendo licensing fees, publisher fees, selling them to a wholesaler, then retailer, etc. the original developers of the game might see $3 out of a $50 purchase. With steam, depending on publisher agreement (and steam gives them a totally viable way to self-publish), it could be more like $30 per $50 game, 10 times as much. That’s an idealized comparison but it happens. It’s possible for a $10 sale on steam to bring the developers more money than a $60 sale on consoles.
It’s also unfair to compare sales of “console gaming” to PC gaming in general. Why should the wii/xbox/ps3/psp/ds/etc. get combined into one huge blob of sales to compare to just one other platform? And depending on which numbers you use, sometimes this includes hardware sales whereas no sales comparisons ever use pc hardware sales.
Eh, don’t feel bad. Distribution only became practical with widepread, affordable broadband. Didn’t exist in the 90s.
Slight hijack, but: Good grief, Amnesia is scary. I’m still relatively early in the game, but already my gameplay style is pretty much “Ohshitohshitohshit what was that noise? Quick, run into that room, close the door, and hide! WHAT WAS THAT NOISE?!”
