Steamspy "data" is not particularly useful, imo. Firstly, it obviously leaves out a lot of other ways in which people may be buying their games. But even taking it to represent Steam sales data is highly flawed because Steam uses ranges of sales, 200k to 500k, 2m to 5m, etc. And then people conveniently latch on to the high end of the range and claim that is the sales number. So for BG3 EA, for example, if it falls in the 2 - 5 m range, BG3 fans of course want to claim the sales figure is 5 m which is quite ridiculous. At best I would say it is likely sitting right at 2 m.
Steamspy is very useful. The data from it is used by a lot of publishers as well as developers to make a case for whether or not there is a business sense in making a specific game. Considering that, last I checked, Steam makes up 90% of the sales on PC its very close to a monopoly and using sales data from Steam is probably fairly accurate. Those ranges are there to provide a (from memory) 95% confidence interval and the data is not provided by steam, it is extrapolated via things like achievements data. Its highly unlikely the sales figures exist outside of that range. Trying to make assumptions like, "BG 3 is at 2m and Solasta is at 500,000" is a misunderstanding of the methodology used to extrapolate that data to begin with. Its also misunderstanding the use case of this information.
No these are not margins of error. They are ranges. And saying a sales figure falls somewhere between 2 million and 5 million is the equivalent of saying nothing at all. It is completely useless information and does not qualify as data. You cannot input a range into a dataset. It makes no sense. In the case of BG3, is it 2 m? Is it 5 m? Is it something else? Who knows. And it makes a HUGE difference whether it is 2 m versus 5 m. And if Steamspy is saying "we don't know if it is 2 m or 5 m," then they are literally saying there is a margin of error of something like 95% to what they're saying, and anything with that huge a margin of error is useless information.
Originally Posted by Blackheifer
In terms of how many people signed up for the BG3 EA I think 2 Million is a safe number.
In terms of Solasta I am hoping that the number is 500k but you are right (or according to your logic) it could be as low as 200k. Which would mean 5 Million profit on a 250k investment. Still good but less promising.
Yes, exactly. My way of interpreting any numerical information provided to me in the form of a range is to use the lowest end of the range as my number. That is what is most honest. So for Solasta, a game I backed and love, that number (per Steamspy) is 200k.
