State of Steam 2017 developer survey

In the past, PC Gamer has interviewed developers about what it's like to release a game on Steam as a small team, and written about what we think Valve needs to do to make Steam a better store for PC gamers. We're publishing the results of this developer survey to give you more insight into the business of releasing games on Steam, and how developers feel about the biggest PC game distributor.

The following is a survey of more than 200 registered Steam developers, concerning their opinions about the platform in 2017 and what they would most like to see improved. It comes out to nearly 100 pages, including quotes and survey results about Steam reviews, the volume of games on Steam, and more. For a breakdown of the major issues—including why only 39 percent of the surveyed developers believe Valve currently earns its cut of sales on Steam—check out our article here.

The report is divided into several sections: the Executive Summary gives a quick overview, and the various appendices provide more detail.

Appendix A: Methodology - This section describes how the survey itself was designed and carried out.

Appendix B: Issues - This is a detailed list of all the issues the participants voted on. If you want more information on what is meant by the issues in the Executive Summary, this provides a full explanation of each, as well as a vote breakdown.

Appendix C: Demographics - Some participants volunteered anonymized information about their companies/studios, such as how many games they’ve released, when they first joined steam, and even how much gross revenue they’ve made overall. You can find that information here and compare how the various surveyed groups differ.

Appendices D & E: Surveys - The original surveys that participants took are reproduced here.

Appendices F & G: Survey Results - The raw results of the two surveys are presented here in spreadsheet form: Survey 1 and Survey 2. This might be of interest to data nerds and anyone who wants to check/reproduce my results.

Appendix H: Comments - Participants were able to leave general comments in each section of the survey, which are collected here.

Appendix I: Issue Scores - This spreadsheet puts the overall voting results for all the issues from both surveys in one handy table for easy comparison / number crunching.

The full, compiled results of the survey are embedded below. You can also click here to download the PDF.

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