So, if you haven’t heard of the latest steam leak, basically you could see the total copies sold of any game with achievements on July 1st. It’s now patched, but arstechnica had a helpful spreadsheet with 13,000 games. Well, I fucking love spreadsheets so I hooked it into my (a little outdated) spreadsheet of the top 50 crowdfunded games. Here’s what I found:
Only 30 games fit the criteria. Some were still in development, some had no achievements. Of those games, only one had less steam copies than backers. For some reason, people didn’t want Muv-Luv, a visual novel with nudity, on their steam account. Huh.
The average game had 13.6 customers per each backer, and the median 6.7. That largely says that the kickstarter model succeeds. By far the most successful games on this metric was Divinity Original Sin, with 60 customers per backer. Then the next four were Friday 13th: the game, D:OS 2, Satellite Reign, and Banner Saga. The least successful at generating new customers were Mighty No. 9 and Shroud of the Avatar. Both of them had less than one new customer for each backer.
Interestingly enough, there’s almost no correlation between metacritic score and generating new backers. I just used a correlation function, someone who knows stats better can correct me, but it was just a .19 between change in metacritic and new customers. There were games with metacritic scores of 60 in both the top and bottom new customer list. There’s a slightly higher correlation between average development time and new customers (-.3), but not appreciable. I’ll continue playing around and seeing if I find any more.
