The article references a study about games earning a median revenue of 10k.
https://gamalytic.com/blog/steam-revenue-infographic
But reading between the lines I think it’s driven by porn and visual novels
https://gamalytic.com/blog/steam-revenue-infographic
But reading between the lines I think it’s driven by porn and visual novels
12,653 games were released on Steam in 2022[1]. I don't even want to know how many are released on Android/iOS. This is not 1992 where you need a assembly wizard to even make a game, and while the author tried to address this, the fact that any middle game will almost certainly be crowded out seems like an unavoidable elephant in the room.
eBay and Amazon sellers have a trick for this: listing zillions of variations or combinations. Not sure if game devs already figured that out. Probably some of them did because 12k looks a lot.
I think straight up relisting would be harder on Steam, at least at this point in time. It's not quite to the point where there is so much sludge that Valve staff can't even handle community reports.
Note that their chart doesn’t seem to show most game types.I presume this is because they do much worse. If I do a quick check for games since 2022, games with sexual content made a median of $1.6k whereas non sex games made $296.
If we use their advice to only check games that cost at least $10: sex games make $17k and non sex games make $11k. So maybe not so bad. Most of these games are selling about a thousand copies it seems.
Of the games released since 2022 that made at least 10k (4260 games) only A third were sex and dating sim games
Unless you're doing a very unusual city builder I guess.
To be honest, "erotic city builder" is such a novel concept that now I want someone to tackle it.