Cologne (Germany) (AFP) – The video game industry is notoriously tight-lipped about its numbers, filled with members-only metrics like wishlists, pre-orders, and player numbers. This opacity makes it hard to know which games have proven popular and turned a profit. Industry associations, such as France’s SELL, periodically release sales figures based on data from game publishers. Private research firms also make their own estimates based on publisher or public data as well as their own user panels and rankings.
However, publishers and studios often highlight indicators that favor their messaging, which can vary depending on the type of game. Experts provided insight to AFP ahead of the Gamescom trade show now underway in Cologne, Germany. Here is a look at some of the proffered gauges and how to read them.
**- Wishlists**
Online stores operated by console makers, as well as gaming platforms like Steam or Epic, open “wishlists” for players to register their interest before a game is available to play. Some publishers tout wishlist numbers when they pass an impressive threshold, usually at least a million. But Rhys Elliott of Alinea Analytics, a consulting firm, told AFP that this indicator usually has remarkably little correlation with actual sales, particularly for big-budget releases known as AAA in industry parlance.
“Never, ever, ever kind of look at wishlists as a reflection of the sales,” Elliott said. “For some very lucky indie games or something like that with lower price points, maybe they can convert 40 percent of their wishlist at launch,” he said. “But for an AAA game, usually it’s under 10 percent or even under five percent.”
**- Pre-orders**
Pre-orders are a more reliable indicator, Elliott said, but he warned against simply converting sales volume into a definitive amount of revenue. “Regional pricing and discounts mean that a huge unit count can actually be a small amount of revenue or the other way around,” he explained. “A game might cost $70 in the US and then cost the equivalent of $30 in China. And a million copies sold for $10 each will, of course, not generate the same revenue as a game sold for $70.”
Drilling down into the sources of the units sold is essential, Elliott noted.
**- Number of players**
A publisher reporting a game’s number of players rather than its sales is often seeking to disguise a game’s true performance, Elliott explained, particularly if the game comes bundled with a subscription service. This practice can inflate the number of players without correlating to sales. “I’m not going to say ‘sneaky’, but you’re obfuscating how well your game is doing when you do that,” Elliott commented.
Many users on social media track the “concurrent users” figure provided by Steam, which is one of the few statistics available online. “Concurrent is very helpful,” said Joost van Dreunen, a professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business and a specialist in video game economics. “That’s where the audience attention is right now. But it doesn’t say anything directionally about where they came from or where they’re going next,” van Dreunen added. Additionally, Steam’s figures only cover users on its own platform, not those on other providers or consoles.
**- Playing time**
Playing time is a key metric, particularly for free-to-play titles such as “Fortnite” and “Roblox.” These games, which offer add-ons for purchase, see developers contesting for players’ attention. “If it’s free-to-play, you look for retention,” van Dreunen said.
**- The buzz**
Fan groups, YouTube previews, and social media chatter have become increasingly important for understanding how much of a splash a game has made or might make. “In the last year or two, my attention has really gone towards what’s the organic groundswell?” von Dreunen commented. “That tends to be a strong indicator for success once the game gets to the store.”
The number of views on YouTube and Twitch related to a title after a few weeks, along with streamers sticking with particular games for a while, can also serve as indicators of success. For Elliott at Alinea Analytics, however, such data provides only a general picture. “It’s better than nothing,” he said, but “there’s a lot of noise in that data.”
© 2024 AFP
