Steam reviews to sales

This repository contains Python code to study the relationship between review numbers and sales for Steam games.

Requirements

• Install the latest version of Python 3.X.
• Install the required packages:

pip install -r requirements.txt
pip install git+https://github.com/google/pwlfit.git

Usage

• To download review numbers as they were on July 1, 2018 for 13,275 games of interest, run:

python download_data.py

Data is downloaded to data/review_stats.json.

• To filter extreme values and display a scatter plot of the data, run:

python analyze_data.py

• To fit a model to the data, run:

python fit_model.py

References

Data leak for sales

• Ars Technica's article: Valve leaks Steam game player counts; we have the numbers, July 2018
• Ars Technica's supplemental data: snapshot of "players estimate" for 13,281 games

Data download for reviews

• Steam API's appreviews endpoint, to get a dump of reviews on an application in Steam
• steamreviews: a PyPI package to download Steam reviews

Regression tools and documentation

• mapie: Model-Agnostic Prediction Interval Estimator (MAPIE),
• pwlfit: Google's library to fit piece-wise linear functions,
• statsmodels: econometric and statistical modeling,
• tidfit: a wrapper around SciPy's curve_fit for 1D signals.
• lmfit: a wrapper around SciPy's leastsq,
• Some documentation by scipy and sklearn:
  • supervised learning
  • common pitfalls with linear regression
  • losses for robust fitting

Blog posts

• Jake Birkett, How to estimate how many sales a Steam game has made, March 2015
• Jake Birkett, Using Steam reviews to estimate sales, May 2018
• Simon Carless, How that game sold on Steam, using the 'NB number', August 2020
• VG Insights, How to Estimate Steam Video Game Sales?, August 2021
• Simon Carless, Epic advances, Steam reviews, oh my!, August 2021
• VG Insights, Further analysis into Steam Reviews to Sales ratio, October 2021
• VG Insights, Steam sales estimation methodology and accuracy, June 2022
• Gamalytic, How to accurately estimate Steam game sales, May 2023
• Gamalytic, What makes people review your game? A deep dive into the Steam's sales/review ratio, July 2023
• Simon Carless, What 'Steam review count' tells us about your game, August 2023

Other repositories of mine

• AmongUs-DAU: compute "Daily Active Users" (DAU) of Among Us from "Concurrent Connected Users" (CCU)