Steam Game Revenue Calculator
Steam Game Revenue Calculator allows you to get a rough number of the game profit and revenue the developer earned.
You can use it to predict your game's revenue or overall market research to create a rough business plan.
Enter the game's number of reviews and price from its Steam page to calculate the rough revenue and profit numbers.
Total Revenue is the total amount of money the game earned without accounting for expenses. So just the number of sales multiplied by the game's price.
And Net Profits is the amount left after deducting all expenses, the amount of money the developer would actually make.
What Affects Games Profits
The best way to get a rough estimate of the total earnings and profitability is to get game ratings and multiply by some factor. But you should also consider other spendings i.e. the platform cut.
The calculated numbers will probably be less accurate for games with a low amount of reviews. And also for very popular or big AAA games, as they may have unique deals with the platform holder.
So let's look at how the calculations are made and what influences the final profits number.
Reviews To Sales
Here is the formula I use to calculate the total amount of sales:
Yep, that's it.
And to get the total revenue, we just need to multiply the sales by the pricing. It's a bit trickier than that, but I'll go into more detail later.
But why 40? Well, it's an updated Boxleiter number based on surveys. Some years ago this number was closer to a 100 but more recently steam started to ask for reviews after you've played the game for 2-3 hours, and so a higher percentage of game owners started rating games.
You can think of it like this: on average, 1 in 40 people who bought the game leaves a rating. And previously, this number was 50 or even 100.
Because this "Would you recommend this game to other players?" block wasn't always there, the ratings to sales coefficient is probably different for older games that didn't have as many sales lately. This also means that with new changes Steam can introduce, the Boxleiter number can change again.
But now, let's see what else should be considered to get from the total revenue number to a much smaller profit one the developer would actually make.
Steam Cut
Steam takes its 30% cut, although some developers may have negotiated a smaller cut, for example for exclusivity. But this number is probably the standard for indie game developers.
Steam also has a 100$ fee per game, which may be more relevant for lower numbers.
For Epic Games Store it would have been roughlity 12%, but this whole method relies on the number of reviews, which are not available on Epic at the moment.
Game Refunds
Steam has a refund policy so that if you've played the game for less than two hours, you can return it.
This may also result in a lot higher return rates for short games that you can complete in that time window.
But the average number is probably around 5%.
People can't write a review after they've returned the game, but it is possible to write a review first and then refund the game, and it is even displayed in the review itself:
Maybe we need to deduct less than 5% because people that return games leave reviews less often, but I'll leave it at 5% for now and you can modify this number in the 'settings' as there may also be games with a lot higher return rates.
Steam Seasonal Sales and Discounts
They are hard to account for and the longer the game was around, the more discounts it probably had.
Aside from discounting the game itself on the steam games festival there are also different types of bundles - developer, publisher, or just themed cross-publisher ones.
This can be highly dependent on the game, but let's take a rough number of 15% average price deduction.
Regional Popularity
Steam advises you to use regional prices, so possibly the price that you see on the game's Steam page is not the price that most people pay. SteamDB allows you to check any game regional prices and the percentage of the discount the game has.
Some games can have a regional discount of more than 90% of their price in the US, and there is a possibility that the game is mostly popular in low-income countries. For example, China gets a ~20% discount and Chineese became the most popular language on Steam a few years ago.
Publishers / Outside Capital
If the game has a publisher or any way of outside capital, even something like the Indie Fund, means that developers will probably not get all the money that remains after everything we've discussed above, and the contracts here may be vastly different: ranging from a constant cut, to a higher percentage cut until a multiple of the investment is recouped and then changing to a lower percentage for a few years.
In a sense, the company gets some of the game's profits before the release, so even if you knew the terms, maybe you shouldn't deduct all of the money that goes to the publisher.
Taxes
Developers may be based in different countries and pay income taxes based on a myriad of circumstances
There is also VAT, that is included in the price in a lot of countries, and can be 5% to 25% depending on the country.
So I've just picked a rough number of 30% as the default, and I will add the ability to fine-tune it in the future.
Examples
Here is just a quick example of an indie game steam store page, and revenue/profit calculation based on the page's data.
Aside from calculating the current amount of revenue and profits the game has gotten, there are also ways to calculate future revenue based on expected long tail earnings.
I hope that my steam game revenue and profit calculator will be useful to you. I've also added the ability to modify the percentages and esimates used by the estimator, so that you could fine-tune the calculation when you know more information for a specific steam game. Also, if you have ideas for improvements or want to share your own numbers, please leave them in the comments or email me: contact{at}letsmakeagame.net
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