I was pretty interested in all this, so I decided to see if I could go and find some numbers that would help me understand it better.
Unfortunately sales data per country is just not a thing that's publicly available. The best I could do was locate this list of Steam users by country. Number of users isn't a perfect metric to understand revenue percentages, but it's the best we've got.
I stuck all of this in a spreadsheet and then went about highlighting the PSN countries to separate them out using this list (the same site has a corresponding list of non-PSN countries). Note that the numbers don't fully jive here. This site lists 70 PSN countries and 121 non-PSN countries, for a total of 191 Steam countries overall, whereas the site where I got the user numbers shows 226 countries. And all the articles are saying it was 170 countries in which one can no longer buy Helldivers 2 or Ghost of Tsushima, and yet when I separated out the PSN countries I was left with only 156 non-PSN. I'm too lazy to compare it against the SteamDB change list, but suffice it to say that the data I found isn't all complete.
With that being understood, here's the top-line summary I came up with:
- There are a total of 97.25 million Steam users worldwide.
- 86.39 million users are in the 70 countries with PSN, or 88.8% of all Steam users. The average number of Steam users for PSN countries is 1.23 million.
- 10.85 million users are in the 156 countries without PSN, or 11.2% of all Steam users. The average number of Steam users for non-PSN countries is 70,000.
- This means that, on average, countries with PSN have about 17.5x the number of Steam users as non-PSN countries.
- The country with the most Steam users that does not have PSN (by far) is the Philippines with 2.1 million. Runners-up are Vietnam, Belarus, and Kazakhstan, each with between 550k and 600k Steam users.
- The four countries with the least Steam users that do have PSN are Nicaragua, Malta, Bahrain, and Oman, each with between 20k and 27k Steam users.
So there's the data, imperfect as it may be. Make of it what you will. As I noted at the outset, number of users is hardly a perfect metric for revenue, as I'd expect that on average the PSN countries are wealthier and hence spend more money per user on games, so the 11.2% number is probably still high compared to actual revenue share.
Log in to comment