{"id":115248,"date":"2020-07-10T20:08:00","date_gmt":"2020-07-10T20:08:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gamasutra.com\/view\/news\/366239"},"modified":"2020-07-10T20:08:00","modified_gmt":"2020-07-10T20:08:00","slug":"analyzing-those-satisfactory-sales-numbers-more","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/2020\/07\/10\/analyzing-those-satisfactory-sales-numbers-more\/","title":{"rendered":"Analyzing those Satisfactory sales numbers (& more!)"},"content":{"rendered":"

The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra\u0092s community.
The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company. <\/small><\/i><\/strong> <\/p>\n

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[Hi, I\u2019m \u2018how people find your game\u2019 expert Simon Carless<\/a>, and you\u2019re reading the Game Discoverability Now! newsletter<\/a>, which you can subscribe to now<\/a><\/strong>, a regular look at how people discover and buy video games in the 2020s.]<\/em><\/p>\n

Welcome to the latest Game Discoverabilityland round-up, a compendium of the week\u2019s top news\/links in the space. As happens a bit recently, I started this yesterday and ended up getting so deep into a subject that it\u2019s become a standalone newsletter for next week (hah!)<\/p>\n

So here\u2019s the \u2018real\u2019 roundup newsletter, starting with\u2026 this:<\/p>\n

Epic Satisfactory (& Steam!) Sales<\/h2>\n

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The folks at Coffee Stain Studios were kind enough to go public with their game sales for standout first-person factory building game (think Factorio, but hella 3D!) Satisfactory<\/a>, and yep, they\u2019re good:<\/p>\n

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Impressive! (That’s about 39 sales for each review on Steam – the game has 9,400 reviews right now.) https:\/\/t.co\/gtW5NxY6ni<\/a><\/p>\n

\u2014 Simon Carless (@simoncarless) July 5, 2020<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This is notable because it\u2019s one of the few Epic Games Store sales numbers ever released. It comes as EGS announced 61 million monthly active users<\/a> on PC (and peak concurrent users of 13 million.)<\/p>\n

Since you have to log in to EGS to access Fortnite, those MAU\/PCU numbers aren\u2019t necessarily that helpful in themselves. But we do know that third-party games had $251 million spent on them<\/a> in 2019 (out of $680 million total spending, including Epic titles.) And it appears that Satisfactory was the #2 selling EGS title last year, according to that 2019 infographic<\/a>. So those sales numbers are high-end for EGS.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s guesstimate 8 to 10 million copies of third-party games sold on EGS in 2019. That\u2019s not nothing, if still a fraction of Steam. And Epic\u2019s aggressive \u2018free games\u2019 program must be bringing more users to the platform.<\/p>\n

For devs, I still think EGS is a great move if you get an offer, especially with the current model of guaranteed advances, the 88% royalty rate, and lack of games on the store. My only comment: you do lack a little discoverability with an EGS launch, just because Steam is the more established ecosystem with the average streamer, etc.<\/p>\n

(But you can still debut on Steam later and pick up \u2018Steam or bust\u2019 gamers, as Satisfactory did. Having a Steam page up to capture wishlists while on EGS is a great way to pick up latent demand, and Epic haters seem less prevalent nowadays.)<\/p>\n

A Mobile Discoverability Follow-Up<\/h2>\n

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Thanks to everyone who followed up on my mobile discoverability post<\/a> from earlier this week. Here\u2019s some extra detail from my follow-up discussions, especially since mobile games are now generating 1 billion downloads per week<\/a>:<\/p>\n