Large-Scale Cross-Country Analysis of Steam Popularity

Steam is a large digital distribution multiplayer and communication platform for PC games and industry standard software. In ever competitive and expanding business markets, data-driven analysis is becoming an essential tool for analyzing consumers. This is especially true for e-markets that exist entirely online, including the video game market. Game data analysis has mainly been confined to work on single games. However, when considering the increasing number of available online platforms that offer multiple games, the large-scale analysis of game popularity on cross-games is getting important for game industry. This study aims to discover interesting relationship patterns among game ownership, genre and geographical region from a very large Steam database. Heat map analysis is used for this purpose. This paper reports the analysis result and explains in depth the implications of patterns discovered.