You might have heard the news about Garry's Mod having sold 34,927 units in it's 8-day sale on Steam, when it was 50% OFF and sold $5 a pop. anyway, here's an article written by the GMod dev: http://www.garry.tv/?p=1136
"I forgot to post this blog, so thanks to the naggers in the comments for reminding me. For those that don’t know what this is – GMod was on sale a week or two ago. It was half price. So here’s how it went.
The guys at Valve sent me an email at the end of the sale with all the stats and graphs and stuff. It was pretty cool, and has made this blog post a lot easier to write since now I don’t have to go and work it all out for myself.
The 8 days before the sale GMod sold 2,975 units, in the 8 days during the sale GMod sold 34,927 units. Because it was 50% off, we kind of needed at least a 200% rise in sales for it to justifty itself.. The actual rise was 1074%.
Valve also released some graphs about the sales of GMod, informing us the sales of the game throughout it's entire lifetime so far:
The graphs show that Garry's Mod hasn't really decreased it's sale rate, still selling around the same as in 2006. But, back then GMod probably was one of the Top 5 Sellers on Steam, then Top 10 Seller in 2007, and Top 20 in late 2008. Now, even though sales haven't declined, it is no longer in Top 20, probably hovering around between 20th and 25th places.
This also shows that GMod has already reached 400k, and will probably reach 500k before the end of 2009!
Now let's get on to the tastier stuff. The Steam Bestsellers List is ordered by revenue, not units sold. So a $25 game only needs to sell more than a fifth of what a $5 game sells, in order to surpass it in the Top Sellers list. The September 13-19 was the week that covered most of the GMod Week Sale, and here's the Top 10 Sellers of that week:
- Aion Collector's Edition (Pre-Sale)
- Batman: Arkham Asylum
- Resident Evil 5
- Star Wars Jedi Knight Collection
- Garry's Mod
- Left 4 Dead
- Red Faction: Guerrilla
- Aion Standard Edition (Pre-Sale)
- Counter-Strike Source
- Champions Online
The Week Sale of GMod only started in the 14th September, so with some calculation I estimated that Gmod sold roughly 28k units in that week, reaching 6th place.
What we want to know though, is the sales of non-discounted games on Steam. Left 4 Dead was just below GMod in that week, and since it's by revenue it made slightly less money than Gmod. L4D was priced $25 then(and still is), so it sold less than a fifth (5.6k) of GMod. So Left 4 Dead must've sold around between 5k and 5.6k!
One would be tempted to just multiply 5.5k by 49 (Number of weeks L4D is out) to get the total L4D Steam sales, but that is totally wrong because:
- L4D dominated Steam for a few months. The first few months of the life of a game usually are the best selling ones.
- L4D was available on pre-order for an entire month. Valve announced L4D pre-orders topped Orange Box's pre-orders by 95%.
- L4D already had 3 Weekend Sales + 1 holiday Sale. Steam Sales drastically increase the sales of a game, one of which increased sales of L4D by 3000%.
From now on I will make alot of guess work, in order to very roughly get an idea of how L4D sold on Steam. I will divide the sales of L4D into 4 pieces: Pre-order time, Initial Months time, Regular Months time, and Steam Sale time.
Pre-orders
I seriously don't know how much do pre-orders give in sales, but I do know that Steam games peak right beforetheir release, and stay there for awhile after coming out. L4D's 4 weeks of pre-order might be something like 30k a week. Pre-orders = 120k.
Initial Months
Garry's Mod sold 5,7k in the first day, then sold around 350 per day a year later. If we reverse this for the 5.5k of L4D to roughly guess the launch day, we get around 90k! That is alot. So if first day is 90k, then the rest of the first week might've netted another 90k. Plus maybe some 140k up until the Holyday sale.
Initial Months = 320k.
Steam Sales
In the Holiday sale, L4D was 25%, a cut that gave a 245% increase in sales in the holiday sales. So let's say L4D got 65k from here.
The first weekend sales increased L4D sales by 3000%! Since it was only 3 days of sales, and the game was maybe selling 10k a week, we get 132k!
The second weekend was 40% Off, so 8k a week get's maybe a 550% increase which nets 23k.
This weekend sale, L4D was 50% Off, but it was probably only selling 5k a week. With 600% increase it gets 15k.
The rest of the months
We'll just assume it sold an average of 8k in 41 weeks (all weeks starting 2009, minus 2 weeks because of the weekend sales), for 328k.
Total Steam Sales of L4D = 1003k sold.
This reason of the thread was to show the order of magnitude that Steam games might be selling, nothing else.
