If you love weird trivia about the business of selling games, good news: game dev Tim Garbos (Keyboard Shorts) spent some time on Twitter this week sharing a bunch of fun facts he learned from culling a bunch of SteamSpy data.
It’s a neat little project that sheds light on a bunch of potentially intriguing trends in Steam games over time. It’s also a good excuse to look at fun graphs of weird Steam data (see below).
For example, Garbos surveyed the screenshots posted to Steam and found that, on average, the most popular colors were red (29.6 percent) and yellow (25.1 percent), presumably because so many video game screenshots contain skin tones, explosions, and other reddish-orangish-yellowish things.
He also claims that, based on a survey of Steam games back through 2004 (Steam itself only launched in 2003), game names have actually grown shorter over time. According to Garbos, the average game titles has fallen from 25.7 characters in 2004 to 16.6 characters in 2017, while the longest game name on Steam clocks in at 94 characters.
While all of this should be taken with a grain of salt since neither SteamSpy nor Garbos claim to model Steam’s marketplace with 100 percent accuracy, it makes for interesting reading over on Garbos’ Twitter page.