DDM Games Investment Review – Aug 31, 2017

A Quick Look at Survival-Tagged Games on Steam

Survival games have been in the headlines lately: SuperData estimated the survival and horror games market to be $398 million, and PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds has reportedly sold an eye-catching 8 million copies even though it is still in Early Access. We pulled survival-tagged games from Steam first and then matched these with SteamSpy data. Eliminating games that have yet to be released and bundles/compilations, we found 601 games being offered on Steam, including 160 in Early Access (EA).

A sizeable number of survival-tagged games are released each year: 114 games have been released in 2017, and by this time in 2016, there had been 110 games released. Currently, 21 games excluded from this sample have listed potential 2017 release dates, and the actual number could increase depending on the user-tagging of games released through the rest of the year.

Since the number of owners is not an accurate measure of a game’s revenue and can be vastly affected by games that offer free weekend deals, we looked at the top games by the number of players as reported by SteamSpy in descending order:

  • Unturned – 25,834,775
  • Left 4 Dead 2 – 16,235,295
  • Terraria – 8,999,205
  • PLAYERUNKNOWN’S BATTLEGROUNDS – 7,724,573 (EA)
  • H1Z1: King of the Kill – 6,008,259 (EA)
  • Rust – 5,643,566 (EA)
  • No More Room in Hell – 5,411,546
  • Don’t Starve Together – 5,317,473
  • ARK: Survival Evolved – 5,195,346 (EA)
  • Evolve Stage 2 – 4,108,016

In looking at games with 30,000 owners or more (374 titles), SteamSpy’s threshold for more accurate data, the top games by average lifetime playtime in descending order:

  • Wurm Unlimited – 136:56
  • ARK: Survival Evolved – 131:13 (EA)
  • Rust – 111:12 (EA)
  • Tom Clancy’s The Division™ – 85:34
  • H1Z1: King of the Kill – 83:36 (EA)
  • DayZ – 83:28 (EA)
  • Terraria – 80:48
  • VEGA Conflict – 80:09
  • PLAYERUNKNOWN’S BATTLEGROUNDS – 77:41 (EA)
  • RimWorld – 77:14 (EA)

Additionally, the average price point for this subset is $13.79 with the median price point $14.97.

Generally understood to apply to games whereby the player begins with few tools, weapons, and resources and must overcome a hostile environment, the survival tag was found to be applied across a broad spectrum of games including RPG, simulation, platformer, and strategy games. For our quick look, we pulled some characteristics based on price points $9.99+ in the following chart. We list the highest and lowest number of players reported for a game title across all titles and the top ten in the same price point as well as the average and the median number of players for all games and top ten in the same price point.

As a demonstration of how one outlier hit can affect a category, if we remove PLAYERUNKNOWN’S BATTLEGROUNDS (PUBG) which adds Homefront: The Revolution to the top ten, the number of player stats for the $29.99 price bracket are as follows:

  • Highest No. Players: 1,437,679 (PUBG increased this by 437%)
  • Lowest No. Players Overall / Top 10: 48,103  /  259,368
  • Average No. Players Overall / Top 10: 507,047 (PUBG increased by 84%)  /  733,372 (PUBG increased by 102%)
  • Median No. Players Overall / Top 10: 349,196  (PUBG increased by 20%)  /  684,142 (PUBG increased by 26%)

We also pulled the top ten titles based on single-player games (not tagged multiplayer) and multiplayer-tagged games and found sizeable differences in the number of players.

For survival-tagged games, the sweet spot is first-person perspective games that appeal to the indie market, priced at $19.99 if a premium business model, and offers features that include multiplayer, open world/sandbox, and crafting elements with higher price-points more action-oriented.

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