Indie shmup sales numbers

[DarkSlayer]

Hi guys!

Having a discussion with someone about how many copies indie Shmups/modern Shmups in general. Does anyone have a rough feel for what a top end/mid range /small success sales numbers are?

I play some REALLY good indie Shmups and think wow this must of sold well, but then look at the leader board and there are maybe only 100 entries. I know different platforms will have seperate leader boards sometimes but still I was surprised quite often I played a good shmup with low leaderboard numbers.

Or maybe a lot of Shmups get bought but stick in people’s library without being played.

Is itch.io worth talking about as well? No idea how well things sell on there

Cheers!

[Light1000]

If you're interested, there was a leak of steam sales data back in 2018 ( https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2018/07/ ... -of-games/ <- csv file in this article ) so you can take a look at the numbers of all shmups in general released back then. The highest (indie) sellers from back then were Crimzon Clover and Astebreed both in the 70k-100k range. As a general rule, you can't expect ANY shmup (even a euroshmup) to get more than 100k sales. As a small indie developer without a publisher or any marketing campaign, you probably would only get a few hundred to a few thousand at most.
A few of the numbers I've written down: (all from 2018 leak)
Ikaruga - 128k
Astebreed - 99k
Crimzon Clover WI - 78k
Satazius - 32k
Mushihimesama - 41k
Star Of Providence - 10k
Blue Revolver - 8k
Eschatos - 4k

Going by review numbers (not that reliable but its the best next thing) best selling recent indie shmups would be Star Of Providence (2.7k reviews) thanks to dunkey publishing and Zero Ranger (1.7k reviews) thanks to word of mouth + 1 dunkey shoutout

[DarkSlayer]

Wow this is perfect dude!

Going to have some fun with that csv.

Would never has guessed satazius would be so high, I tried the steam version but the input lag was insane

Surprised Zero Ranger sales are not higher, pretty much everyone was talking about it at a point.

Thanks man

[pieslice]

Itch.io sales are basically nonexistent compared to Steam, you should not rely on it financially; just to keep an option for hardcore fans.
Itch ecosystem is totally unfeasible for shmups as it's algorithms are flooded by Ps1 styled horror stuff.

To have an estimate of sales per review counts in steam multiply the reviews by 40.