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How many copies did Archean sell?

Estimated copies sold
≈ 6k–10k
$34k–$91k after Steam's cut $61k–$140k before the cut
from 248 reviews (Very 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 Archean out and predicted the genre from its 8 similar games. Every figure here, including Archean's, is estimated from Steam reviews, not self-reported sales.

Copies, estimated from reviews

typical (middle half) 195k–293k
best case 1.9M (Stormworks: Build and Rescue)
Games like Archean

The middle of these games

≈ 195k–293k copies

≈ $1.4M–$2.3M after Steam's cut

from ~6k 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.

Best case: Stormworks: Build and Rescue at ≈ 1.5M–2.4M copies, ≈ $10.2M–$27.4M after Steam's cut. A breakout hit, far above a typical game.

What it took to get here
About half the games that made it here had over 4k reviews in their first month; the spread ran 251 to 11k.
The genre you'd be entering
Your set
Your set clusters on Simulation (7 of 8) and Automation (6 of 8).
The winners
Winners here lead with Sandbox + Base-Building, priced around $25. The breakout hits carry Immersive Sim + Flight + Physics; a typical game here doesn't.
The era
The games you compared span 2015 to 2021, 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 61 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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2020
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9.7x vs typical
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ProgrammingLogic
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too small to compare
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