Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 appears to earn an estimated $30,000 on Steam per negative review
Here's an April Fool's treat that isn't built on outright lies. To commemorate the holiday, GameDiscoverCo (founded by former Game Developer publisher Simon Carless) has debuted an "Insights Lab" with some unconventional analysis of estimated sales data and total game reviews on Steam.
The portal displays data analyzed through irreverent lenses like "Human Lifetimes Consumed" (total player-hours converted to 80-year human lifetimes) and "Cost Per Minute of Fun" (a game's price divided by its median playtime).
According to GameDiscoverCo software engineer "Avi" (last name witheld), the data is pulled live from the company's analytics backend—then measured in an unconventional way. "It isn't fake like most April Fool's jokes," they explained in a message to Game Developer.
One unusual metric reveals an amusing fact: Activision's Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 appears to earn an estimated $30,000 in revenue for every negative review on Steam.
That's according to the "Revenue Per Negative Review" chart, which measures a game's estimated revenue against the number of negative reviews (the chart analyzes games that have sold over 500,000 units and counts every review lower than 50 percent as "negative"). Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 and Firaxis' Civilization VII sit in second and third place, with the former earning about $17,000 per negative review, and the latter earning about $4,000 per negative review.
What does that data mean? Not...anything really. Other than that for every player disappointed enough to leave a negative review on Black Ops 7, Microsoft-owned Activision earns roughly enough money to buy a used car. It's certainly an indicator that a divisive game can still be a revenue driver for an industry titan.
Other fascinating stats include:
Konami's efootball is officially the most divisive game on Steam, with almost exactly 50 percent positive and negative reviews
Free-to-play first-person-shooter (FPS) training software Aimlabs is the second-most "abandoned" game on Steam, with over 29 million downloads to date—but its average playtime is a mere 1.22 hours.
Valve's DOTA 2 has "consumed" almost 371,000 hours of human lifetimes, which is measured by dividing the total player-hours by an 80-year lifespan.
The most common word in the title of games on Steam is "Simulator."
Once again, are these statistics useful? Aside from having letting us have a small laugh at the Aimlabs users ready to go pro but who don't maintain their training regimen—probably not. But Avi said it's the kind of analysis the internet needs more of.
"I don't enjoy most April Fool's jokes, they are too over the top," they said. "My overall personality is 'serious business while keeping it funny and somewhat self-deprecating,' so when I thought about it, a dead-serious SaaS (Software as a Service) aesthetic with ridiculous charts was the obvious way to go."
"No one would even think about trying to pull this kind of data in a serious manner, and that's a shame," they continued. "The web needs more silly pages like this which tell stories by themselves—like how one-in-four free-to-play games have monetization complaints in review sentiment analysis, or how 65 percent of Steam games had zero players in the last 24 hours."
Those two data points do bely one fact—some of the "silly" data may actually be useful for analyzing player sentiment on Steam.
Multiplayer features and in-game monetization impact player reviewsGameDiscoverCo's April Fools analysis (again, derived on the company's real analytics and estimates) also includes a "Rage Index" that studies the Steam tags that generate the most negative reviews. The top-three most negatively-reviewed tags in descending order are "Multiplayer," "Free-to-Play" and "FPS." "Shooter," "Open World," "Action" and "Survival" are next down the list.
Games with these tags don't necessarily review poorly (each has an average review score of about 70-75 percent), but they do attract the most negative reviews by volume. That doesn't mean these genres are necessarily riskier to make, but given the importance of positive reviews for visibility on Steam, developers working on titles with these tags should keep that pattern in mind.
Meanwhile, for those keeping track of how many games find financial success on Steam—the "Steam Health Dashboard" estimates that about 28 percent of games on Steam have sold fewer than 100 copies, and only about 5 percent of games have sold more than 100,000 copies.
But let's close out our review of the data with an extremely silly statistic: in what type of game are players most likely to use swear words in their reviews?
The answer: 2D fighting games.
