In general, I see a lot of comments that developers/publishers give GOG no love. I have to agree, mainly.

Right now I'm struggling with one of my rare day one purchases (Arcade Paradise). Brilliant, but glitchy (expected on day one). The GOG forum for the game has a few nice people hanging out, a few unanswered questions, and the sound of crickets. The Steam page has hundreds of threads and participants.

Both games released the same day on both platforms at the same price. GOG has at least *less* DRM than Steam.

So...back to my question, is there any way to track a particular game's sales? How many on GOG, how many on Steam, etc. Because if Steam sold 3,000, and GOG sold 30, it would make sense that devs hang out on Steam. It would be nice info to have.

Hmmm, i know a third party site watches sales for steam to track general trends. But unless GoG releases that information, we'd have to do a survey on a specific game, get 30-100 responses, assume that's 1% or so and multiply the result by 100 to get a rough estimate of how many copies have probably sold for a game.

But that's still an estimate at best.

Mind pointing me to that site? I'm an old man that gets curious about shit. :)

https://steamdb.info/app/1388870/graphs/

SteamDB has some rough estimations.

For GoG you can get an approximate of sold copies on the basis of the first couple positions on the all-time bestsellers list:
gog.com/games?order=desc:bestselling

Officially confirmed are a couple million sold copies of Cyberpunk 2077 (2nd place) as well as the main 3 installments in the Witcher franchise (3rd, 4th and 5th place respectively). Starting from there and provided that the decline is not too steep the further back in the list you go, you could, still very roughly of course, extrapolate sold copies for the other games on the list.

There is no real way to track game sales by platform in an accurate way.

The best chance would be to ask the devs directly on a game by game basis, but that probably won't work either, since most devs don't seem to want to give out concrete numbers for exactly how many copies they sold on GOG, even if they are willing to complain that the sales on GOG were too low in a vague and nebulous way.

Thanks, all. My question goes unanswered, but maybe because it's unanswerable.

As far as I know there is no conclusive info, even for Steam or other stores
Because they report/publish to the public the numbers they want when they want...
The best estimates are for Steam (thanks to steam_db, not to Valv_e)
but are based on indirect calculation methods (numbers of wishlists & reviews)
Something similar to what Swedrami suggests above

Honestly, surprises me how long this secrecy has been held.
Only once in a while some dev/pub throws some numbers as result
of their success/failure on a very specific title,
most of them indies (of course).
But solid direct numbers from the e-stores, no.
I wonder why not even the small e-stores give numbers for struts sake or shake...

Please, if you find a source, let me know!
I like your way to think in this particular matter with Arcade Paradise,
it could be easily applied to a significant portion of the catalog. But... black boxes win.
I hope those glitches get solved soon

Older the game industry gets, less info we gamers get. Atm game industry is controlled by major publishers.

Tried to answer last night but internet went down.


I've probably spent more time on this than most.

There is no central database, there's only badgering dev/pubs for figures or hope that someone posts them up.

Unfortunately most my findings were done when Epic had just started and its effect hadn't hit GoG.

https://www.pcgamer.com/divinity-original-sin-2-has-sold-one-million-copies/

Now this was good sales for gog, about 8%. But they were upfront and clear from day 1 its getting a GoG release. Now a lot of devs, all that were upfront and open about a GoG release, that replied to my queries put their PC sales on GoG at about the same mark. For some games, such as Leisure Suit Larry it was as high as 15%

On the flip Side, Not Tonight got a day 1 Stealth Release. No More Robots (the Pubs) made no announcement, even saying a few days before release, there was no plans for a gog release. It Sold less than 2%

The effort vs reward was so poor No More Robots will no longer release via GoG. Personally I would say a large part of the issue lies with them. Mike has a highly tuned marketing system and can create a lot of engagement prior to release, but it is absolutely and solely focused on Steam and manipulating steams Algorithms to their best advantage. I was constantly replying to his Tweets with "Also on GoG" when he was pushing the after sales on Not Tonight and Hyperspace.

As far as I'm concerned at 8% GoG does have a significant user base, unfortunately it doesn't translate into 8% extra sales because the majority will use Steam if there is no other option.

Yeah, all game developers keep their numbers vague. Makes it hard to tell which games are successful and which games not so much, even among the publishers. Sony's Bend Studio expressed frustration that Sony was very against a Days Gone sequel despite the fact that Days was the best game they published and may have had good numbers.

It would also be very interesting to see exactly what games are heavily bought vs others. How many Madden players are there vs COD for example.