For the median Steam game, launch week delivers roughly 22% to 38% of first-year gross revenue, depending on which dataset you trust and when the games in it shipped. Put the other way: the median game earns about 2.6x to 4.5x its week-one revenue over the full first year. That is the answer. The rest of this post shows where those numbers come from, why they disagree, which games break the pattern in both directions, and how to turn your own week-one number into a year-one forecast you can plan cash flow around.
One framing note before the data: every figure here is community-collected or reverse-engineered from platform estimates. Valve publishes nothing about revenue curves. The sources below are developer surveys and large-scale sales estimates, and I will flag the limitations of each as we go.
Launch week revenue share: what the datasets say
I know of three serious attempts to measure the week-one-to-year-one ratio, made years apart on different kinds of data. Here is the full picture:
| Source | Year | Data | Median year-1 multiple | Implied week-one share |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jake Birkett dev survey | 2018 | ~30 developer-reported games | 4.5x | ~22% |
| GameDiscoverCo dev survey | 2020 | ~100 developer-reported games, 2015-2020 releases | 4.0x | ~25% |
| GameDiscoverCo 2023 cohort | 2025 | Estimated sales for the full 2023 Steam release cohort | 2.64x | ~38% |
Birkett’s mean was higher, 5.1x, dragged up by a few outliers. The 4-5x rule of thumb that still circulates in indie dev talks comes from this generation of data.
Two more numbers from those studies are worth keeping. The GameDiscoverCo survey found the median game earns 1.47x its week-one revenue by the end of month one. Against that survey’s own 4x year-one multiple, the launch month is about 37% of the year; against the leaner 2.64x tail of the 2023 cohort, it is more than half. And the 2023-cohort analysis found that among games priced above $4.99 that sold at least 100 copies in week one, there is a 50% chance of reaching 2.47x week-one sales in year one and only a 5% chance of exceeding 9.67x.
That 5% figure is the one to internalize. The dream scenario where the long tail quietly out-earns your launch is real, but it happens to roughly one game in twenty.
Why the newer data shows a fatter launch week
The 2018 and 2020 numbers say week one is about a quarter of year one. The 2023-cohort number says closer to two fifths. Both can be right, because they measure different things.
The surveys were self-selected: developers who track their numbers and read industry newsletters, reporting on games from 2015-2020 that were still worth talking about. That skews toward games with functioning marketing and healthy tails. The 2023 analysis instead estimated sales for essentially every qualifying release in a year when more than 19,000 games shipped on Steam, and it wasn’t run until the cohort had a full year on the market.
There is also a real market shift underneath the methodology gap. With more releases competing for the same discovery surfaces, the passive tail a game picks up from browse traffic and seasonal sale visibility has thinned. The launch spike still works the same way — wishlist emails, the New and Trending list, streamer coverage all concentrate in week one — so the spike’s share of the total has grown.
All of these multipliers are gross revenue, with discounts baked in. GameDiscoverCo’s unit-sold multipliers for the 2023 cohort run slightly higher (2.68x-3.77x depending on first-week volume), because tail copies mostly sell at a discount. If you think in units, your tail looks slightly better than your bank account says it is.
My honest read for a 2026 planning baseline: assume week one is 35-40% of year one unless you have a specific reason to expect a long tail, and treat anything better as upside.
Spike games vs long-tail games
The median hides a real split in revenue shapes. The 2023-cohort data breaks down by first-week volume:
| First-week scale | Median year-1 multiple | Week-one share | Typical profile |
|---|---|---|---|
| 100+ copies (all qualifying) | 2.47x | ~40% | The baseline indie release |
| 10,000-50,000 copies | 3.6-3.77x | ~27% | Mid-size hits with word-of-mouth room to grow |
| 100,000+ copies | 2.61x | ~38% | Big launches, often pre-order heavy |
The mid-size band has the best tails. Those games proved demand at launch but had not yet saturated their audience, so reviews, streamer coverage, and discount events kept finding new buyers all year. The biggest launches concentrate revenue up front partly because pre-orders and day-one marketing pull future sales into week one.
The extreme long-tail cases share a pattern: co-op and multiplayer games that streamers keep alive. Lethal Company earned an absurd 507x its first week over year one, and Class of '09: The Re-Up hit 106x, per the same GameDiscoverCo analysis. Virality after launch is the only force that reliably produces those shapes, and you cannot schedule it.
The opposite shape exists too. Games that disappoint their audience at launch — the analysis calls out Redfall and Payday 3 — see the tail collapse, because the launch-week review score becomes a wall in front of every future visitor. If your first hundred reviews land below the 70% line, the tail math in this post stops applying to you; our review score thresholds guide covers exactly where those cliffs sit.
What a median year one actually looks like
Here is an illustrative month-by-month shape for a median-ish 2023-style release. The assumptions are stated in the chart source, and I want to be explicit that this is a model, not a measured game: total year one is set at 2.64x week one (the 2023-cohort median), month one at 1.47x week one (the GameDiscoverCo survey median), and the remaining tail is spread across the year with bumps where seasonal sales land.
Read the shape, not the exact bars. Three things generalize:
- The launch month is more than half the year. 38% in week one plus 18% in the following three weeks is 56% of year one gone before your first cooldown-eligible discount is even allowed.
- The tail is not smooth. Months 2-12 revenue arrives in steps: mostly flat baseline weeks punctuated by discount spikes. In the raw weekly data, a good seasonal sale week can out-earn the two months around it.
- Q4 bends upward. The Autumn and Winter sales are the biggest discount events on the calendar, so a game launched in the first half of the year gets a second visible hump at the end. Our sales events calendar has the dates.
The discount cadence that builds the tail
Almost everything in months 2-12 that is not organic word-of-mouth is discount-driven, so the tail is substantially a scheduling exercise. The current rules, from the Steamworks discounting documentation (I checked it on July 2):
- A product cannot be discounted within 30 days of a previous discount. Steam’s own seasonal sales are exempt from this cooldown in both directions.
- No discounts for 30 days after launch (your optional launch discount is the exception: 10-40% off, running 7-14 days).
- A price increase in any currency blocks discounting for 30 days.
- Custom discounts run at minimum 10%, maximum 95%.
The practical cadence most successful indies run, per Chris Zukowski’s discount playbook: discount at nearly every seasonal sale, at 20% or more (his floor for a discount deep enough to convert the wishlist-sale emails Steam sends), and stairstep the depth over time — 20% in the first six months, then 25-30%, saving 50%+ for year-two events and daily deals. Skipping steps burns future discount news; a game that hits -50% in month four has nothing left to announce.
This is also why your wishlist backlog at launch matters beyond launch. Wishlists that do not convert in week one (the median day-one conversion is around 12%) become the fuel every future discount email draws on. A game entering month two with 40,000 unconverted wishlists has a materially different tail ahead of it than one with 4,000, even at identical week-one revenue.
Forecasting your year one from a week-one number
Once your launch week closes, you have the most predictive number you will get about this game. Here is how I would turn it into a forecast.
Say your game grosses $20,000 in week one. Apply the multipliers:
| Scenario | Multiplier | Year-one gross | When to use it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Conservative / cash-flow planning | 2.5x | $50,000 | Budgeting, deciding whether to start the next project |
| Baseline expectation | 3x | $60,000 | The number you tell your team |
| Healthy tail | 4x | $80,000 | Reviews 85%+, wishlist backlog still growing |
| Breakout tail | 9x+ | $180,000+ | The ~5% case; plan for it only after it starts happening |
Jake Birkett’s advice from his original dataset still holds: plan your finances at 3x or below. Most of his reported results fell between 2x and 10x, and the games that hit the high end could not have been identified in advance from week-one revenue alone.
Remember these are gross figures. Steam takes its 30% cut, refunds claw back a few percent, regional pricing dilutes the average, and VAT comes out before any of that. Run your week-one gross through our revenue calculator to see the net number that actually lands in your account, and see how much a Steam game makes for the full gross-to-net breakdown.
Two early-warning adjustments to the baseline:
- Check the week-two decay. Most launches I have watched drop to somewhere around 15-25% of launch-week revenue in week two; treat that as a rough benchmark, not a measured stat. Holding above 30% suggests word-of-mouth is working and you can lean toward the 4x scenario. Falling below 10% suggests you pulled your whole audience forward and 2.5x is your realistic ceiling.
- Check the review trajectory. Year one runs through four seasonal sales, and every one of them sends new visitors to a page whose most prominent element is your review label. A launch that ends week one below 80% positive should budget for weaker discount-event conversion all year.
Planning rules worth writing down
The share-of-year-one question usually hides a practical one: how hard should I bet on launch versus the tail? Decision rules I would actually use:
- Spend your marketing on the spike. If 40-56% of year one happens in the first month, the launch beats every post-launch beat for leverage. Wishlist building, launch-day execution, and press timing all pay off at the moment of maximum traffic.
- Do not judge year one before the first seasonal sale. A quiet month two is normal. The tail arrives in discount steps, and your first big step is the first seasonal sale after your 30-day cooldown clears.
- Map your discount calendar before launch. Count the seasonal sales in your first year, decide your stairstep depths, and never skip a step. The gap between a game that works every seasonal sale and one that sits them out shows up directly in the tail multiple.
- Forecast at 3x week one, spend at 2.5x. Upside scenarios are for revising upward later, not for payroll.
- If you get the viral tail, feed it. Multiplayer and streamer-friendly games that catch fire post-launch are the one case where post-launch spend beats launch spend. Content updates and creator outreach extend exactly the loop that is already working.
- Benchmark against the cohort, not the headlines. The median outcome across all of Steam is a few hundred dollars in lifetime revenue. If week one cleared four figures, you are already in the upper tiers, and the multipliers in this post are the realistic map of what comes next.
Before launch week arrives, run your store page through the free Steam Page Analyzer — the spike only converts if the page traffic lands on does its job, and week one is the one week you cannot rerun.