Welcome to GameDataCrunch.com!
This site is a data-analysis project by Lars Doucet and Level Up Labs, LLC.
Collecting public games industry information
There's a lot of
3rd Party sites out there that track and interpret the public data emitted by major game stores like Steam, Epic, GOG, and the various consoles. Each of them typically does one thing, and does it well. GameDataCrunch.com aims to collect data from
all these public sources, and then
contextualize the most relevant information so we can answer important business and design questions.
Who is this for?
Anyone who's interested in learning more about the games industry by looking at data! That said, I specifically designed this website with developers, publishers, PR agencies, curators, influencers, researchers, and journalists in mind.
Focus on the facts
You might have heard of the popular "Boxleiter method" used to estimate sales on Steam (multiply the number of reviews by some figure). We don't really do that here. Nor do we sample a bunch of user profiles and use that to guess total ownership stats, nor do we ask a machine learning algorithm to take its best guess. To be sure, there's nothing wrong with these approaches -- we just want to try things a different way.
We collect all the publicly available facts that we know correlate with success -- however loosely -- and present them to you all in one place. Stats like -- how many reviews does a game have? How many concurrent users? What's it's most recent position in the top sellers chart? We can measure these stats directly and report them accurately. But how many sales has game X made based on these stats? That we can't say. But we
can say this: if you look at game X's performance stats, the game is ranked in the top 250 games on Steam. That starts to paint a picture.
How reliable is this data?
Once we've worked out all the bugs, all this data will be very reliable, because we're just presenting easily verifiable public facts. We gather all our data from storefronts like Steam directly, as well as from various 3rd party sites. We'll post a methodology section in a bit to go into further details.