Giant PC Retail Valve Reduces New Methods of Estimating Sales Figures

How are video game sales counted when there is no data to back it up?

Unlike the world of film, music and television, the video game industry traditionally protects sales. Unless a specific game behaves remarkably well in terms of units sold, it can be quite difficult to determine exactly how well a game has worked in the market. Most companies choose to keep private sales figures, and some companies, such as Microsoft, do not even report how many hardware units they have shipped (all sales figures for Xbox One consoles are estimates ). there are not as many businesses and institutions that devote their time to monitoring video game sales. Movies, for example, are relatively easy to follow because ticket sales are reported by individual theaters. Video games are a bit more complicated. The NPD Group serves as a de facto source for game sales, but does not provide actual numbers, only monthly rankings. Even worse, the market research company does not have access to all digital sales numbers.

As you can imagine, this has made it particularly difficult to estimate the quality of PC games sold over the years. Almost all PC games are sold digitally, the game giant Valve dominates the market with its digital showcase, Steam.

For a brief moment, we really knew how many Steam games had sold. https://t.co/4mC1hXX6Hd pic.twitter.com/SdcHNdCvtS

– Polygon (@Polygon) July 6, 2018

Since 2015, the Steam Spy website has provided numbered estimates by querying user profiles to determine which software titles the users owned. From there, the data has been extrapolated to provide an approximate figure of sales on a given game. Unfortunately, this method was rendered unusable earlier this year, when Valve updated the confidentiality of data and disseminated user data, likely in response to the European Union's general data protection requirements (GDPR).

. , programmer and game designer Tyler Glaiel found a new method for estimating sales numbers by tracking the performance of a game. By checking the percentage of users who unlocked certain achievements, Glaiel has managed to reverse sales figures.

Glaiel detailed this process on Medium .

"This was evoked with a group of developers I I realized that if you get success data via the steam API, you get 16 precision digits instead! I started try to replicate the barter.vg algorithm based on the description of it on their site, & # 39; Calculated by finding the smallest number of players producing integer numbers of players for each achievement (percentage achieved * all players). "[19659003]" So I made it work, with a simple brute force. Check each possible whole number of sales up to a ceiling, and multiplied by the percentages of achievement. None of them has reached exactly one whole number, so I had to set a threshold for what counts as a "whole number". It has worked for most games with less than a million sales.

Unfortunately, Valve has already repressed Glaiel's method. Earlier this week, the company began rounding the completion data to the nearest whole numbers, as opposed to displaying 16-digit precision. Without this additional information, Glaiel's method is no longer accurate.

Fortunately, he was able to compile a list of the 1000 best selling games, which you can check for yourself on Ars Technica. function (f, b, e, v, n, t, s) {if (f.fbq) returns; n = f.fbq = function () {n.callMethod?
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