Chart: how the price tag for new items on Steam has changed over the past six years

Indie game marketing specialist Logan Williams decided to find out if there was a “race of concessions” on Steam in 2015-2020. In other words, did the developers reduce the prices of new games because of competition with each other? We share the results.

In his research, Williams relied on data from the gaming analytics service GameDataCrunch. The resulting graph was published and commented on Twitter by the head of the service Lars Doucet.

As Doucet wrote, the schedule does not show what was happening behind the scenes of Steam. But one thing is for sure — there was no sharp drop in prices for new items.

Judging by Williams’ schedule, every year more and more games were released in the store. The number of new titles was growing in all price categories. The distribution of games with different prices also changed slightly. For example, the share of games with a price tag of more than $ 50 only after 2019 was 1%. At the same time, the share of free games or those whose price at the start of sales is less than $ 5 has increased by 7 percentage points in recent years.