How we estimate revenue — and how accurate it is

Steam reviews are roughly proportional to sales. We estimate copies sold as reviews × a sales-per-review multiplier, then adjust for the factors that shift that ratio: release era (older games were reviewed less per sale), genre (a simulation or strategy audience reviews far less per copy than an action one), price band, and review volume (blockbusters get reviewed more per sale, so their multiplier compresses). Where a game has enough concurrent-player history, peak CCU is blended in as a second, review-independent demand signal.

Every input comes straight from Steam — review counts, price, and concurrent players — with no third-party owner estimates in the loop. The result is always a low / mid / high range, never a single number.

We tune the model against public, developer-reported sales — the only ground truth that exists. Below is how our current live estimates compare to those reported figures, landing within a median of 20%. In fairness: these are the calibration anchors the model was tuned on, so this is a sanity check that the tuning holds, not an out-of-sample accuracy claim — treat it as a floor, not proof. Still, no competing tool publishes even this. As more studios disclose sales we hold a subset back for true out-of-sample validation.

Harder categories vary more: live-service co-op titles (shared/gifted copies) and review-bombed launches skew the review-to-sale ratio, and games sold heavily on GOG or Epic sit below their all-PC total here because we estimate Steam only. Full method and sources are documented internally.

Revenue = estimated sales × an effective average selling price. That price is below the sticker price because games sell at a discount over their lifetime — and the discount deepens with age. A launch-year game realises ~95% of list; a five-year-old one closer to 60–65%.

For games we've tracked long enough, we refine this into a time integral: monthly units sold × the actual price that month, reconstructed from Steam's review histogram and our price history. This is gross revenue before Steam's platform cut and refunds.

Every estimate carries high / medium / low confidence, driven mostly by review volume. Under ~50 reviews the signal is thin and the range widens sharply — treat low-confidence figures as order-of-magnitude only.

GOG & Xbox expose review/rating counts, so they use the same Steam-calibrated model (treat as rougher). Epic exposes no public reviews — catalog and prices only, no revenue estimate. Apple & Google Play are IAP-driven and asymmetric: Apple publishes no install counts, so App Store games show no revenue estimate at all — ratings and rankings only. Google Play does publish install counts, so its revenue is modeled as installs × genre ARPD (average revenue per download) with an intentionally wide band and low confidence — still a rough estimate, not a reported figure. PlayStation uses rating counts where available.

Followers come from a game's Steam community group member count (the same source SteamDB uses). Steam never publishes wishlists, so "Est. wishlists" is a followers × 10 industry heuristic — a rough proxy, clearly labelled as such.

These figures are excellent for relative comparison and market sizing — which games, genres and studios earn more, and the shape of a title's trajectory. They are not accounting-grade and should not be cited as fact. When we can measure something exactly (price, review count, followers), we show the measured value; everything labelled "est." is modeled.

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