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How many copies did Carto sell?

Estimated copies sold
≈ 232k–377k
$1.3M–$3.4M after Steam's cut $2.3M–$5.3M before the cut
from 9k reviews (Overwhelmingly Positive)

A labeled estimate from the public review count (adjusted for release year), not exact sales. Owner data cross-checked with SteamSpy.

Does this actually work?

We left Carto out and predicted the genre from its 8 similar games. Every figure here, including Carto's, is estimated from Steam reviews, not self-reported sales.

Copies, estimated from reviews

typical (middle half) 4.5M–5.4M
best case 5.8M (Stray)
Games like Carto

The middle of these games

≈ 4.5M–5.4M copies

≈ $13.0M–$51.5M after Steam's cut

from ~135k reviews

Only the top fifth of 2019’s Steam releases earned about $34k gross, so plan for that or less.

All 8 of your similar games are hits.

No genre covers most of your similar games. The closest is Puzzle (3 of 8), so the genre you lead with is still undecided.

Of the 416 indie games that passed 1,000 reviews in 2022, 11.8% were novel genre mixes and 88.2% stuck to an established genre. Published indie market research.

Best case: Stray at ≈ 4.4M–7.2M copies, ≈ $36.3M–$97.6M after Steam's cut.

What it took to get here
About half the games that made it here had over 22k reviews in their first month; the spread ran 4k to 69k.
The genre you'd be entering
Your set
Your set clusters on Puzzle (3 of 8) and Anime (2 of 8).
The winners
Winners here lead with Cats + Cyberpunk, priced around $30.
The era
The games you compared span 2009 to 2022, and none of them shipped in the last two years.
How these numbers were worked out

A hit here: 1,000+ reviews, roughly $150k+ before Steam's cut (a standard indie benchmark).

Copies come from each game's reviews times a sales-per-review rate that falls with release age, from about 31 for the most recent game here to about 79 for the oldest, then widened into a range; revenue rides on that estimate times price. Source: GameDiscoverCo (2020) and VG Insights (2021).

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Sizing up your own game? See what its genre can realistically do before you build it.