With the new year upon us, both Steam and Epic have been sharing some staggering numbers from 2023. While the folks making the games they sell have been having a hard go of it lately, the storefronts have seen no shortage of people buying and playing games.
Steam saw their revenue on full games jump nearly 18% to $9bn. This was the biggest increase year over year since the start of the pandemic saw revenues jump nearly 61%, which has been mostly flat in the time since. Breaking that number down further we see that 61% of those revenues come from the top ten games, but only about 20% come from new releases (Baldur's Gate 3, Hogwarts Legacy, etc.). So it continues to be a small number of games contributing the massive sales on Steam, and even harder for new games to compete with games that have been building rock solid foundations with their communities for years. That being said, money can still be made on Steam, with them also reporting that over 500 games made at least $3 million in revenue. Which, if you're an smaller developer with a manageable budget, is encouraging. Scary if you're a larger developer or publisher with ballooning budgets.
Meanwhile, Epic is seeing its user base climb to 270 million users and 36 million daily active users. It's revenue also saw a comparable growth of 16% reaching just shy of $1bn in revenues. My Epic account used almost exclusively for snagging the weekly free game or two, barring the occasional timed exclusive game. Though the money for those appears to be harder to come by with competition for those dollars becoming fierce in my experience.
Brick and mortar stores have not been so fortunate.
So what storefronts should teams look to release their game on? My experience has seen that porting your Steam game to Epic using their tools is relatively straightforward. Makes sense to me to release on both if your team can manage it in the schedule. Maybe throw in GOG as well to keep your Brand team happy.