Steam Sales Data Deep Dive

A new post on Steam takes a "deep data dive" into the performance of new releases on Steam. This discusses the changes that took place in 2012 to enhance game discoverability after Valve launched the Steam Greenlight program and the 2017 launch of Steam Direct. This brings us to the point were they say "more new releases than ever are finding success." Word is: "Essentially an examination of how the growth of Steam affects new titles and what it means for developers, the post also includes an Appendix detailing how the results were put together as well as a collection of graphs charting the data." This digs into the numbers, so they offer the following short version:
The TL;DR

Here's a summary of what we found:

  • Over the years, there's been a continuous increase in the number of games achieving success on Steam. We'll dig into this in the first section below.
  • Earnings prospects for most - but not all - games improved in 2019. We'll dig into this in the second section below.