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How many copies did LISA: The Painful sell?

Estimated copies sold
≈ 849k–1.4M
$4.7M–$12.5M after Steam's cut $8.5M–$19.3M before the cut
from 15k 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 LISA: The Painful out and predicted the genre from its 8 similar games. Every figure here, including LISA: The Painful's, is estimated from Steam reviews, not self-reported sales.

Copies, estimated from reviews

typical (middle half) 1.5M–2.5M
best case 5.4M (South Park™: The Stick of Truth™)
Games like LISA: The Painful

The middle of these games

≈ 1.5M–2.5M copies

≈ $13.1M–$25.0M after Steam's cut

from ~39k 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 Comedy (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: South Park™: The Stick of Truth™ at ≈ 4.1M–6.7M copies, ≈ $33.9M–$91.1M after Steam's cut.

The genre you'd be entering
Your set
Your set clusters on Comedy (3 of 8) and Choices Matter (2 of 8).
The winners
Winners here lead with Comedy + Turn-Based, priced around $30.
The era
The games you compared span 2008 to 2023, 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).

Similar games

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SteamSpy 10M–20M
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South Park™: The Fractured But Whole™
2017
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SteamSpy 500k–1M
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Visual NovelChoices Matter
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≈ 1.7M–2.7M
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Bully: Scholarship Edition
2008
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≈ 2.7M–4.3M
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Open WorldAction
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≈ 1.3M–2.1M
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South Park™: The Stick of Truth™
2014
Est. copies
≈ 4.1M–6.7M
1.9x vs typical
SteamSpy 2M–5M
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2016
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≈ 1.5M–2.5M
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