14 DAY TRIAL // Valve doesn’t share any kind of data about the games sold through Steam, but an independent analyst has made some estimates using a tool he developed.
Valve is a privately owned company, which means that they don’t answer to shareholders, and they are not obliged to share anything about their revenues or details about the games and applications that are being sold through Steam.
This data exists and it’s provided to all the developers, but it’s not meant for the public, and it’s very likely that publishers are not even allowed to use it for their promotion.
You’ve never seen Bethesda saying just how many millions of Fallout 4 copies were sold on Steam. It’s not that they don’t know, but they are probably not even allowed to. Since Fallout 4 is one of the best-sold games on Steam, they would have a lot to be proud of.
Steam sells more than you know
Sergey Galyonkin has been doing an independent analysis of Steam sales for a while now, and he seems to have quite a success. He uses a data mining technique named Steam Spy, and he came to some really interesting conclusions.
“The 2015 was the best year for Steam yet. It brought over 3000 new games (compared to 1900 in 2014), increased the number of concurrent users on Steam from 8M to 12M and helped over 350 million paid games find new owners,” Sergey wrote on his blog.
From the looks of it, Steam sold games for about $3.5 billion, and this doesn’t include the DLCs. The best-sold games were GTA V and Fallout 4, but there are quite a few others that also did very well.
Sergey Galyonkin explains that this data is most likely not all that accurate, but he assumes that all copies were sold at minimum advertised price during that period. So, in fact, the amount of money Steam is moving right now could be even higher.