One of the dev of the recently released "Monochroma" has published an article on Gamasutra on the visibility of his game on Steam. Although he doesn't reveal his sales numbers, he offers some good visibility numbers for new releases.
http://gamasutra.com/blogs/BurakTezateser/20140717/220624/Dynamics_of_Steam_as_a_Sales_Platform.php

Here is my summary if you have no time to read all the article:

Newly launched titles are taken into a pool of games which randomly appears on the "featured pc games" section of the homepage (it's apart of the "new titles" tab). After 1 million views (in 1-2 hour generally), if the game didn't sell well, it's "dropped" (on the contrary, successful titles gets more "features" opportunities on the frontpage).

The global conversion rate average for the "featured pc games" is 3.630 clicks for 1.055.275 => as you see, that's only 0.34%.
In the case of Monochroma, the game had a conversion rate of 0.25% with 2.628 clicks.

During 40 days, the gamepage in the store had 88.870 unique visitors. 80% of the traffic came from Steam (I guess "direct/none" means the steam client according to google analytics).

Steam offers a kind of "second chance" to low-sellers with 500.000 views and 5 "updates" visibility.

The game was made in 3 years, so its final cost was around 750.000$ so you can easily imagine the loss... There are also some thoughts about price-point and metacritic. BTW, link to the game, it looks really good but I don't like puzzle-platformers:
http://store.steampowered.com/app/265830

Meanwhile, at GOG, we get a constant reminder that Monster Bash is released :o)

So they released a mediocre game that didn't sell very well and that's all Steam's fault?
They could've tried a little harder IMO.
Also, you can't really compare the GOG frontpage to the Steam frontpage.
They have a different business model and the number of releases are also very different.

I'm not really comparing the storefront (to do so, we should get the average conversion rates on GOG as detailed as in this article), just that I find the two different approachs funny because they're completely opposed even if they're selling the same commodities.

Well they're both selling games, but their business model is so different.
Steam releases multiple games every day and don't really do much policing of what companies can sell.
GOG releases a couple of games a week and arbitrarily decides what companies may and may not sell.
If GOG released the same amount of games, people wouldn't get much visibility that way either.
And to be honest, relying on the visibility of a frontpage of a store is dumb to say the least.
Most people don't keep refreshing the frontpage to look for new games to buy.
They really should've spent more effort in promoting the game, especially if it took them as long and as much money as they claim.
Although I guess now they're doing the old 'negative publicity is still publicity' thing.

I did like his comments on the reviews later. How it's not to get as many reviews as possible, but a few hand-picked positive reviews early on. Him mentioning a few late reviews that pointed out fixed-right-after-release bugs that strongly hinted that the reviewer didn't even play the game (but instead just mixed other reviews) is pretty disheartening.

Steam is brutal for developers and publishers? well good, that should encourage a few more of them on to GOG.

I feel some sympathy for Nowhere Studios, mainly for the staff who worked on the game, but they also seem to have their heads up their asses. If you know the market is cut throat and the 'race to the bottom' is real, you shouldn't be setting an unrealistic price. Nor should you be releasing a broken game, very arrogant and in that sense they absolutely deserve the dose of reality. It doesn't help Nowhere either that they've released a game into a crowded genre, Monochroma's graphical style is also a very hard sell.

The article author is right, visibility is critical but that isn't anything new. It's the same for all new products of any type.

The emphasis on reviews and getting an early high score are interesting . It used to be the case that only 6%-8% of purchase decisions in specialist videogame stores were based on reviews. Good sales really required high visibility in store and you had to get your game into the major supermarkets to do serious numbers. I wonder how many purchase decisions actually are influenced by the metacritic score and reviews now? I can see it might be a much bigger factor on Steam compared against high street and supermarket purchasers. Far fewer elder relatives on Steam buying the games directly, rather they give money to children who choose for themselves.

Mixed feeling here: high quality, appealing games are going to earn higher visibility, it seems like a fair system. The only real problem I see is that high quality, interesting and unusual games might be unfairly marginalised for the lack of mainstream appealing graphical style.

I won't be blinded by an impaired perspective !

...

Ok, I'll go read it now. I am genuinely interested.

IanM has it right.

This reminds me a lot of the many, many people who decide that they want to start a restaurant. They find their location, build their menu, get everything setup and then open it, only to find that people don't suddenly flock through their doors. Most of these guys close up in a matter of a few months. Why? For some strange reason, they seem to believe that customers will just walk in their door, I don't know, just because they drove by and saw the place?

Part of the start-up costs of both a restaurant *and* of a game are marketing. You can't just expect people to buy your product just because they drove by it or because they saw a banner on the front page of Steam. If that's your marketing plan, you're destined for failure.

As big, bad and evil as publishers are, this is one of the most important reasons to have a good one. They will get people talking about your project with a good marketing plan: playable previews for critics, interviews, banners, videos, reviews, etc...

Steam is a distributor, so is GOG. It's not their responsibility to market a product. They may provide a little bit, but it's all incidental. If, as an indie dev, you want your game to succeed, you have to make it happen yourself.

I was about to come into the thread and post "inb4 the obligatory it's not Valve's fault it's the gamers and developers" but it seems I was a bit late. Every time someone reports of poor sales, the response is usually "well, it's a mediocre game, who cares" or something along those lines.

That being said, I'm not entirely unsympathetic to this view. The PC download market is entering a 'post-Steam' phase (that's post-Steam in the sense of diversification, not death), where neither developers nor gamers can afford to restrict themselves exclusively to Steam. Given the masses of games that get released on Steam and the competition you're facing with AAA titles as well as major AA titles, with Divinity: Original Sin ruling the roost right now), Steam is about as cut-throat as it gets.

Also, as Ian said, price expectations on Steam are a fuck-sight lower than most other platforms, and €20 is suicide.

I've said it once, I'll say it a thousand times - Steam is not an automatic guarantee of success.

That's a great point. After reading the article when you think of people not wanting to release their old games on gog seems so out of place.

Now, my opinion on the analysis after reading that dev is that :

- His 20$ price tag is clearly too high if he didn't build the marketing accordingly (a surprise release from nowhere won't attract people at that price). If people never heard of his game, his 'visibility' won't amount as much. Demos take time but I still think it's a great way to get a bit of fame (the best thing being a pro reviewer showcasing your product ..... conventions on the other hand, who outside the industry follow that ? )

- Bugs. You have to test things thoroughly. Add this to a high price tag and it results on a metascore dropping (edit: plummeting !).

- He speaks about community, but that need multiplayer, famous franchise or moddability. I don't think a cool story can bring the critical mass alone.

EDIT: I eat my words a bit, they released a demo on steam.

I just hope that more publishers and devs just drop the horrendous attitude of: "We are releasing our game on PC, oh what? you don't use steam, well FUCK YOU THEN"

When you release your game on PC it should be on every single possible online distributor, if it isn't, you have no right to complain about "low sales"

it is not difficult having visibility when you put up two new games every week. Not sure how people actually and feasibly want to do it when there is 10-20 releases in a week... Do you think that having the same amount of space for each game would make it all more visible? or should they focus on the latest released games? or the best selling ones? or the worst selling ones? How long should a game be on the front page?

Lets see how gOg does it if they had that number of releases, if not there is not really not much to compare with. It is better, maybe, to compare with something like Gamers Gate?

There's more to selling a game than just having it appear on the front page of Steam. Word of mouth is a big one and these days so are things like social media. If you game is already launching with bugs, well you've already lost because unless it has other things behind it to carry the day (like a license or big name developer), it's not going to make much. There is plenty of garbage on Steam and no one is going to be bothered with a small indie game that is broken to begin with. It's not any different here by the way. If the game gets featured on the front page here and is broken (and generally unfun), it's not going to sell here either.

You mean like Elias Viglione of Hero Siege fame?

To be fair to Nowhere Studios, Monochroma is available DRM-free on Desura.

But they've done such a piss-poor job of marketing it there that I didn't even know it existed until this post-mortem came up and I actively went searching for a DRM-free version. They have no GOG version. Their Humble Store widget STILL says "pre-order", and it's the first thing that appears when you google "Monochroma Humble Store".

Their website only has a direct link to the Steam version, when they should know full well that most people who go to the effort of actually looking outside of Steam will probably want a DRM-free copy.

Another problem: Steam is essentially broken down into two camps - the multiplayer camp and the AAA camp. If your game is not some mindblowing multiplayer shooter, survival game or MOBA, and if it is not a heavily hyped, heavily publicised triple-A or AA title, then chances are that very few people are actually going to give a fuck.

I disagree with you

http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/DavidGalindo/20140109/208337/How_much_do_indie_PC_devs_make_anyways_Part_V.php

[i]So the total so far for Steam? After the normal revenue share and such, I’ve made over $130,000 in just three months on Steam. Typing that number still makes me shake my head. That’s impossible! No way. No. Way.

The grand total of units sold across all platforms is 52,539. That’s so much larger than anything I could have imagined, and so far daily sales average around 40-60 copies sold per day across all platforms (excluding sales/major promotional days).

PC and iOS were the big winners for me, but Linux is by far the least, with only one copy sold on the Ubuntu store and a little more than a thousand on Steam. It will be interesting to see if the Steam Machines and Steam OS will help improve Linux penetration.[/i]

For a small indie, $130,000 is a lot of money