Steam demo games show median of 12 followers, developer's analysis finds

A solo developer named Dream_Ep, who makes the Steam marketing tool NextWishlist, posted an analysis to the r/gamemarketing subreddit on October 13 examining the follower counts of unreleased Steam games that have playable demos. The median number of Steam followers for those titles was only 12, according to the post, which was reported by automaton-media.com.

The analysis covered about 8,000 unreleased games, excluding titles from major publishers. Games with 100 or more followers made up about 14.3% of the analysed titles, meaning 100 followers was enough to place a game in roughly the top 15%.

Larger follower counts were rarer. Games with 1,000 or more followers were about 3% of the total, and games with over 10,000 followers about 0.3%.

Visibility outside Steam also appeared limited: 42% of the analysed games linked no social media account at all. In a separate measurement across 1,200 games over more than one week, the top 10% gained 74% of all new followers.

Earlier Next Fest research

In February, marketing research firm GameDiscoverCo analysed over 3,500 games that took part in that month's Steam Next Fest, finding a median follower gain of 11. It said 154 followers placed a game in the top 10%, 353 in the top 5% and 1,511 in the top 1%. GameDiscoverCo later corrected its Next Fest figures, noting the wishlist-to-follower multiplier was especially large and that for some games the estimate understated actual wishlist growth.