Intro

AAA vs Indie: Game analysis of 2020-2025 period

Background

Background

Background stats

Steam’s stats - THE PC digital game store

• Games on Steam: 30K+ and growing
• Operates worldwide in over 230 countries and terrorities
• ~132 million monthly active users
• Sales revenue of $10.8 billion as of March 2026
• In US, 75% market share

Epic’s stats - who is 2nd place in PC digital game store

• ~6,000 titles
• Operates over 190 countries and over 30 terrorities
• 78 million average monthly active users
• ~$1.16 billion as of Feb 2026
• 8% market share

Research Problem

2020-2025 is a very atypical period of time with many world events

• Pandemic
• Cryptocurrency
• Logistics
• Tech Layoffs
• AI

How much does this affect gamer’s perceptions of their games?

Specifically AAA games ie Call of Duty, Cyberpunk 2077, GTA V and Indie games ie Among Us, Hi-Fi Rush, Hades, Balatro

Global Model

Research Model

Hypothesis

Using linear regression, H0 is AAA review score drops from 2020 to 2025 and H1 is indie review score increases within the same time.

Dataset

Gamalytics

Variables

                       column      type
steamId               steamId   integer
id                         id   integer
name                     name character
copiesSold         copiesSold   integer
releaseDate       releaseDate      Date
price                   price   numeric
developers         developers      list
publishers         publishers      list
publisherClass publisherClass character
reviewScore       reviewScore   integer
genres                 genres      list

Data cleaning

Data cleaning

Research Findings

The median review scores are similar but Indie games scores higher than AAA.

Research Findings #2

Research Findings #3

Research Findings #4

Hypothesis

Call:
lm(formula = reviewScore ~ releaseDate, data = aaa_data)

Residuals:
    Min      1Q  Median      3Q     Max 
-74.457  -8.682   3.340  11.890  22.543 

Coefficients:
              Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(>|t|)    
(Intercept) 132.428817  20.459274   6.473 2.18e-10 ***
releaseDate  -0.002877   0.001051  -2.736  0.00642 ** 
---
Signif. codes:  0 '***' 0.001 '**' 0.01 '*' 0.05 '.' 0.1 ' ' 1

Residual standard error: 15.53 on 533 degrees of freedom
Multiple R-squared:  0.01385,   Adjusted R-squared:  0.012 
F-statistic: 7.487 on 1 and 533 DF,  p-value: 0.006421

Call:
lm(formula = reviewScore ~ releaseDate, data = indie_data)

Residuals:
    Min      1Q  Median      3Q     Max 
-79.504  -8.596   4.863  14.619  25.715 

Coefficients:
             Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(>|t|)    
(Intercept) 3.079e+01  3.667e+00   8.395   <2e-16 ***
releaseDate 2.382e-03  1.881e-04  12.664   <2e-16 ***
---
Signif. codes:  0 '***' 0.001 '**' 0.01 '*' 0.05 '.' 0.1 ' ' 1

Residual standard error: 20.36 on 29612 degrees of freedom
Multiple R-squared:  0.005387,  Adjusted R-squared:  0.005353 
F-statistic: 160.4 on 1 and 29612 DF,  p-value: < 2.2e-16

Conclusion

Conclusion

H0 is AAA review score drops from 2020 to 2025

H1 is indie review score increases within the same time.

Further Research

Further Research

1. Publisher Class Indie is very ambiguous now as there is different definitions ie solo developer ie Stardew Valley who was self funded, or studio with independent funding ie Clair Obscura who maybe closer to AA. So using budget size in consideration to help distinguish between indies


2. Genre wasn’t broken down enough. ie Action and Adventure is most common genre because it’s most used one. But there is better genre labels and multi-genre considerations ie Action RPG or Strategy RPG, etc.


3. Epic games store comparison. See if the user base score games similarly.

Q&A

Q&A

Questions?