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Valve: Steam games making $10k or more on launch rose by 18% in 2019

Valve: Steam games making $10k or more on launch rose by 18% in 2019

The company behind PC games platform Steam Valve has said that more games are finding success on its storefront.

That's according to new data from the company, which shows that during 2019 the earnings prospects for most games improved on the service. Valve claims that last year, just under 1,200 projects brought in at least $10,000 in the first two weeks after their launch, an increase on the 1,000 or so that made that watermark during 2018. That's an 18 per cent increase, with the proportion of games making this milestone rising by 11 per cent.

Valve also reports that in 2019 there were more than three times as many games making $10,000 on launch than during 2013. That would be when Steam launched Early Access, which opened up the number of games coming to the platform. The company also shows that the number of projects earning more than $10,000 in their first fortnight is higher than the trend up until 2014.

The Steam firm also compared the median title launched in 2019 to the same the year before, finding that the game made 24 per cent more revenue in its first two weeks than the median for the previous 12 months.

More than 8,000 titles were released on Steam during 2019 according to third-party data firm SteamSpy, meaning that there were in excess of 34,000 games on the platform as we went into 2020.


PCGamesInsider Contributing Editor

Alex Calvin is a freelance journalist who writes about the business of games. He started out at UK trade paper MCV in 2013 and left as deputy editor over three years later. In June 2017, he joined Steel Media as the editor for new site PCGamesInsider.biz. In October 2019 he left this full-time position at the company but still contributes to the site on a daily basis. He has also written for GamesIndustry.biz, VGC, Games London, The Observer/Guardian and Esquire UK.