So I Downloaded All the Game Reviews on Steam
100M reviews, 11k+ games, over 35GB of data
It turns out that Steam users leave a lot of game reviews and Steam shares a lot of data about the reviewers including:
AuthorID
Language
Playtime (at review, last 2 weeks, forever)
Whether the review has been updated
Whether a dev has responded
I’m going to spend the next month or so analyzing this data and posting here. I’m most excited about AuthorID which lets me create individual profiles of users based on games they like/dislike, what they own, and the amount of playtime they have in each game.
This is a series:
I’m going to do this for several games but I’m using Sins of a Solar Empire 2 here because their new GM Kevin is a cool, former Age of Empires guy and their game launched about 4 months ago.
Sins of a Solar Empire 2 Stats:
5,837 reviewers
86.6% of them are positive (Steam shows 85% positive, but they weight reviews)
Maybe 180k unit sold
Very rough estimate of 1 in 30 Steam users leave a review.
Players who reviewed Sins of a Solar Empire 2 played at least 180k hours of games over the last 2 weeks with Sins accounting for about 15k hours of that time. Here’s a graph:
So Path of Exile 2 is doing well. It has more playtime from Sins players than Sins does.
But lets pretend that we are Kevin for a moment and want to boost our game’s concurrency or run some targeted marketing in advance of their new DLC, Path to Power.
When you buy ads you can target them at specific user types based on things like geography and known likes and dislikes. So here are a few ways to determine which users we should be targeting:
Users playing games actively on Steam
Users that gave positive reviews.
For Sins 2, positive reviewers played an average of 60h to negative reviewers 34h. Thats 77% more playtime and as we saw in this post, Steam user reviews have a big impact on visibility and conversion.
Sins of a Solar Empire 2, Reviewer Engagement and % Positive User Reviews, by Title
Based on this, current Sins of a Solar Empire 2 players are the top target but it is also probably worth looking at Helldivers 2 and Total War: Warhammer 3 users. The 3k+ users that reviewed Sins 2 and those games gave Sins a 88% and 86% positive reviews vs Helldivers 74% and TW:W3’s 69%. They really like Sins 2 and there’s a good chance they will jump to the new content if they know about it.
*Note: If we were going off the first graph alone, we probably would have marketed to Path of Exile 2 players, but it turns out that is just 574 players that played a ton over the holiday break (36.7h in the past two week)
Another dimension to consider is geographic. For that we have a chart of relative gross revenue rankings for Steam’s major markets. How to read: Sins 2 is was #36 top grossing game in New Zealand on December 15.
The countries at the top are organized based on the strength of their relative ranking. Here’s a view of the past few months:
Daily Average Steam Revenue Ranking for Sins of a Solar Empire II (by country)
*Note: 101 means game wasn’t in the top 100 for a given market and day. Lower, greener numbers are better.
Based on this, we know that Sins 2 is relatively strongest on Steam in New Zealand followed by Switzerland, Austria, Singapore, and Australia. That’s not where it necessarily makes the most money because those are relatively small markets. If I were Kevin I would probably add Germany to the marketing effort.
Longer Term:
Back to the reviews, because we have the authorIDs, we can look at the # of hours played on average for any users that overlap between titles. Take the graphic below. I’ve filtered to just games that have 100+ review author overlaps and titles that have less than 100 hours of play. Our goal is to find Steam users that could be high value Sins 2 players.
I’m graphing to show the clear Frostpunk 2 outlier but you can also see the chart with raw data down below. The way to read this is that reviewers who reviewed both Sins of a Solar Empire 2 and Frostpunk 2, spent an average of 71 hours in Sins vs an 27 hours in Frostpunk. It’s a small group of just 280 user that we are measuring but, based on our review to units sold ratio, there’s a good chance there’s 5-10k gamers that have churned out of Frostpunk that would be highly engaged Sins 2 users.
Here’s the raw data with a bit more info:
