Zrevnur: Where did you get this number ("millions") from? I would be quite interested in real numbers if anybody has them.
Edit: typo
elgonzo: Do you really believe that the world-largest platform for selling PC games online has just a couple of tens of thousand customers/users? Really? This is a level of naivete where i find saying "Google it" is actually being appropriate. With regard to real numbers, it is estimated that Steam had reached a number of 75mio customers/users by 2014. Don't know how much of them being active and unique customers/users, though (but even when pessimistically assuming only 10% are active and every Steam user has 5 accounts then this would still still be 1.5mio unique and active users). (Source: not my grandma)
Steam has about 135 million active users, but since users are not the same as customers, that figure ends up being deceptive. Steam Spy helped set the record straight in terms of how large of a market Steam actually represents:
And here is the interesting thing — there is a market and audience for smaller games, otherwise Steam wouldn’t exist. Many people are trying many new games. They don’t spend hundreds of hours in one title, they’re, you know, your average gamers, you used to hear about a lot.
But there is a catch: There aren’t many of them.
Classic “core gamers” — the ones that play most major hits or jump from indie game to indie game — are relatively rare when compared to overall gaming audience.
In fact, 1% of Steam gamers own 33% of all copies of games on Steam. 20% of Steam gamers own 88% of games. That’s even more than Pareto principle suggests.
So, to be a member of the “1% group” of Steam gamers you have to own 107 games or more. That’s not much considering how Steam is selling games at discount prices and how easy it is to obtain games in bundles.
We’re talking about 1.3M PC gamers that could fall into definition of “core gamer that buys several games per year”. And that’s including discounted games as well.
Of course we could extend it to, I don’t know, “softcore gamers” — the 20% that own 88% games. To be included you’d have to own 4 (FOUR) games or more on Steam — not exactly a huge number, right?
Let me repeat it once more, because it’s really important.
Various studies suggest that there are 700–800 million of PC gamers. It’s probably true, but it doesn’t mean much for your game. Because if you’re developing a downloadable game for Steam you’re not even fighting for 135M of its active users, you’re fighting for the attention of 1.3 million gamers that are actually buying lots of games.
The 1% group.
Source:
https://medium.com/steam-spy/your-target-audience-doesn-t-exist-999b78aa77ae#.xuhxuuuag The funny thing is that the figures he provides are arguably
still not representative of Steam's actual market, since the data he uses doesn't (and probably can't) account for how the games were acquired.
Alas, being the 'the world-largest platform for selling PC games online' isn't as impressive as it sounds, since the market as a whole is fairly niche.
