VISUALIZING STEAM: PERSPECTIVES ON WHAT MAKES A GAME POPULAR

The games industry is continually growing, representing a big portion of media production nowadays. In Brazil, one of the biggest gaming markets, approximately 75% of the population plays games, be it through their smartphones, personal computers or gaming consoles. Valve officially launched Steam in 2003 and now it’s one of the biggest platforms for buying and playing video games on the computer, presenting a huge database with a diverse set of information and metrics from each game launched on the platform.

Our visualization aims to present an interactive analytics dashboard that builds on Steam’s data on games and general player metrics collected through open-source APIs to offer an insightful look at recent trends in the gaming industry.

We start with an overview of the games launched by year. You can select specific time periods by clicking and dragging on the visualization space.

We conducted a sampling process to curate a dataset comprising the 250 most reviewed games released until 2019 , ensuring that each selected game possesses at least five active years. This criterion not only allows a diverse representation of the gaming landscape but also helps identify titles that have withstood the test of time.

To guide the development of the visualizations presented in this dashboard, a set of questions where defined. Throughout the text, the link between visualizations and the questions proposed will be marked with brackets ([]). The questions are as follows:

1. What are the most popular genres and tags on Steam?
2. What games are more popular right now?
3. What is the relation of popularity and reviews?
4. What is the relation of price and reviews?
5. What platforms are more popular right now
6. What countries have more gamer developers?

The pie chart on the left side compares the proportion of games launched by genre [1]. Note that a single game can have multiple genres (e.g. Grand Theft Auto V is both Action and Adventure), in that case, each genre is considered.

The line chart on the right side displays player activity trends for different game genres over the years. Each line represents a genre and compares the popularity of a genre in the community from January 2019 to September 2023 [2].

On Steam, tags serve as descriptive keywords for the Steam community collectively. Unlike genres, tags are added by the players and are based on user input and votes.

This freedom of input allows more specific descriptions and often brings rich information about the game.

For example, Grand Theft Auto V is classified as with "action” and “adventure" genres only, while the community added "open world”, “action”, “automobile sim”, “multiplayer”, “crime”, “third person” and many other tags, giving much more detail to Steam’s classification system.

Below there is a word cloud where we highlight Steam’s most frequently used tags [1].

The following graph shows the top 10 most popular games on Steam, the games are ordered by the mean quantity of playes between the years of 2019 and 2023 [2].

Steam games reviews are binary, each player can only give one positive or negative review. To analyse these reviews, we present a scatter plot with the review rate (positive reviews / total reviews) and popularity (average number of players between January 2019 and September 2023) [3].

One interesting comparation is the proportion of free and paid games [4]. We present this data on the pie chart on the right.

We consider the initial price (price of the game on the release). To analyse the relationship between price and popularity, below we present a scatter plot with the price and popularity (average number of players between January 2019 and September 2023) [4].

We are also interested in understanding the Steam's developer community. We first analise the supported plaforms of the games on the pie chart on the right [5]. There are tree possible platforms: Windows, Linux and Mac, and since Steam was primarily released on Windows (becoming available to MacOS in 2010 and Linux systems in 2012), all games support Windows..

We also analyze the relationship between developers and games using a network graph. The red circles represent games while the blue circles represent the developers. Also, developer nodes have different sizes based on the sum of all of their games’ popularity.

To visualize which countries are producing more games, we present a world choropleth map, where each country is colored in different shades to show the number of game development companies [6].