steamforecast/steam-launch-lever-panel-2026

Steam Launch Lever Panel — 2026

10,403 Steam launches with public-source-derived week-1 revenue, plus the storefront features used to estimate causal lever effects (demos, co-op/multiplayer, localization).

License: CC BY 4.0 · Compiled by SteamForecast Canonical analysis: https://steamforecast.app/reports/steam-launch-lever-benchmarks Methodology: https://steamforecast.app/methodology

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⚠️ Read this before using the revenue column

This panel is survivorship-biased, and the bias is large. Games that sold almost nothing leave little owner-count or review trace, so no revenue can be derived for them and they silently drop out of the denominator. What remains is the subset of Steam launches with measurable revenue.

The practical consequence: the median y_week1_cents in this file is ~$189,600, and that is emphatically NOT "the median Steam game." The median Steam release earns a small fraction of that. This file's median describes the median measurable launch, which is a very different population.

Do not quote an absolute median-revenue figure from this dataset without carrying that caveat in the same breath. The dataset is built for relative comparisons — how much a lever moves revenue, holding other features constant — which is where survivorship bias largely cancels. It is not built to answer "what does a typical Steam game make."

Longer treatment of why most published Steam benchmarks share this flaw: https://steamforecast.app/reports/steam-wishlist-benchmarks-reality-check (that report uses a differently-filtered n=10,416 for its own question — the two counts are both correct for their respective filters, not a discrepancy).

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Files

File	Rows	Notes
steam-launch-lever-panel-2026.csv	10,403	UTF-8, header row
steam-launch-lever-panel-2026.parquet	10,403	identical content, typed

Columns (19)

Identity

Column	Type	Description
appid	int	Steam application ID
name	str	Store title at extraction
release_date	date	Steam release date (1997-06-30 → 2026-05-01)
release_year	int	Convenience split of release_date

Outcome (derived — see provenance)

Column	Type	Description
y_week1_cents	int	Estimated week-1 gross revenue, USD cents
y_log_week1	float	log10 of the above; the modeling target

Treatments (the levers under study)

Column	Type	Description
T_has_demo	0/1	Demo shipped at launch (13.7% of rows)
T_supports_coop	0/1	Co-op or multiplayer (14.8%)
T_languages_high	0/1	≥10 supported languages (23.8%)
T_price_bin	str	0_under_5 / 1_5_to_10 / 2_10_to_20 / 3_20_to_30 / 4_30_plus
T_release_month	int	1–12, seasonality control

Controls

Column	Type	Description
recommendations_total	int	Total reviews at extraction
num_genres	int	Store genre count
genre_cluster	str	action_arcade / strategy_sim / rpg_adventure / casual_puzzle / other
has_metacritic_score	0/1	Metacritic present (26.1%)
is_mature_content	0/1	Mature flag (0.3%)
platform_mac / platform_linux	0/1	Additional platform support (35.8% / 25.2%)

Provenance

Column	Type	Description
source_quality	str	How the revenue estimate was derived — B / C / D, see below

No nulls, and no all-constant columns — two fields (follower_count, store tags) existed in our internal panel but were never populated for this corpus, so they are excluded rather than shipped as columns of zeros. Consequence worth knowing for replication: the published lever estimates do not control for community-follower counts or store tags.

How y_week1_cents is derived — and its limits

These are estimates from public signals, not reported sales. No sales figures were licensed, purchased, or obtained from any storefront partner or private analytics feed. The chain is:

1. Lifetime owners estimated by one of two public paths, recorded per row in source_quality:

   Tier	n	Method
   C	7,652	SteamSpy owners range → geometric mean
   B	2,734	Boxleiter (reviews × NB multiplier) capped by the SteamSpy upper bound — the most constrained path
   D	17	Boxleiter alone (reviews × 63, the 2025 multiplier), no SteamSpy cross-check — weakest tier

2. Lifetime revenue = estimated owners × price.

3. Week-1 share applied by ownership tier, calibrated from public postmortems and industry write-ups (How To Market A Game, GameDiscoverCo, Steam Discovery Update notes): AAA (≥1M owners) 0.12 · mid-major (200k–999k) 0.20 · mid-tier (50k–199k) 0.30 · small indie (<50k) 0.40. A flat ratio badly over-derives mega-hit targets, which is why the tiering exists.

Known limitations, stated plainly:

• Every revenue figure carries compounding error from three estimated stages. Treat individual rows as indicative, not authoritative. If a specific game's number looks wrong to someone who knows the real figure, it may well be — that is inherent to review-proxy estimation, and source_quality tells you how much to trust each row.
• Gross revenue before Steam's cut, refunds, regional pricing, discounts, taxes, and chargebacks.
• Free-to-play titles are excluded entirely (is_free = FALSE); revenue proxies do not work for them.
• Only launches with derivable revenue appear — the survivorship point above.
• release_date spans 1997–2026; older entries reflect a very different Steam.

Filters applied

week1_revenue > 0 · price > 0 · not free-to-play · release_date present.

Suggested citation

SteamForecast (2026). Steam Launch Lever Panel — 2026 (n=10,403). CC BY 4.0. https://steamforecast.app/reports/steam-launch-lever-benchmarks

What is NOT in this dataset

Wishlist counts are not included and never will be in this file. Pre-launch wishlist data is not public, and our wishlist-aware modeling is trained on a separately licensed feed that we cannot redistribute. Every column here derives from public Steam storefront data, public community data, SteamSpy, or public review counts.