New feature: Player Overlap

We have officially released a long requested feature – Player Overlap. You will now be able to see what other games players play for majority of games on Steam.

Example: NBA 2K23

Using the example of NBA 2K23, we can now see that NBA 2K players are more likely to also play other NBA 2K games (not surprising). But they’re also 20x more likely to play PGA Tour 2K23 (because there was a bundle c. 1 year ago). Interestingly, they are also much more likely to play Madden than your typical Steam player. That is mostly due to US focused playerbases for both games.

What do these metrics mean and what do I do with them?

Firstly, we’re showing overlap metrics for both lifetime sales (LTD) as well as last month’s active users (MAU).

LTD units sold overlap shows any Steam player who owns both games.
MAU overlap shows any Steam player who has played both games in the last 30 days.

Overlap itself shows actual # of people who own both games. Eg 394k people on Steam have both NBA 2K23 and 2K24.
Overlap % shows what % of all NBA 2K23 players own other games. Eg 18.4% of NBA 2K23 players have also bought NBA 2K24.
Overlap Index, perhaps most important of the 3, shows how many times more or less likely an owner of a game is to play other games. For example, an average NBA 2K23 player is 30x more likely to own NBA 2K24 VS your typical Steam player.

Methodology and Caveats

This is a new feature and still in its Beta phase. We’ve tested it extensively, however, there might still be edge cases to iron out. We’re confident that it is directionally right for majority of games, but we will continue to monitor it and tweak where needed. Note that all of these metrics are estimates based on sample sizes and therefore should never be treated as 100% accurate.

Methodology

Overlap % – We look at a large sample size of Steam players to see what games they play. In the NBA 2K23 example. we look at what % of players of NBA 2K23 in our sample play, for example, NBA 2K24. This is used to calculate the overlap %s.

Overlap – We then apply the overlap % to particular game’s (in this case, NBA 2K23’s) lifetime sales.

NOTE that because of that, the absolute overlap # for NBA 2K23 with NBA 2K24 does not match NBA 2K24’s overlap # with NBA 2K23. However, they are in the same ballpark and directionally similar. This is a fluke of this methodology and we will be looking to improve this going forward.

Overlap index – We take the NBA 2K23 overlap % with NBA 2K24 and divide it with Global NBA 2K24 owners %. In this instance, we know that 18.4% of NBA 2K23 owners own 2K24, but only 0.61% of all Steam players own NBA 2K24.

The Overlap Index is therefore 18.4%/0.61%=30.2

Example 2: Helldivers 2

In this example, we can see that these overlaps also work for very new games. The MAU overlap also exposes how popular games tend to overlap with other recently more popular games. For example, Fallout 4 is the 3rd most popular game to be played by Helldivers 2 players in May 2024 as a result of the recent Fallout TV show success. Other recent release, Content Warning also makes it to the top 10.

Who is this for?

This is a feature currently only for our Business Subscribers.

It’s designed to help larger studios and publishers to better understand their own playerbase. It can be used to optimize marketing targeting, to understand cannibalization and relative market shares between competitive games and to see what type of game elements and features your players might enjoy more.

Reach out to us at sales@vginsights.com to learn more!