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How many copies did Journey sell?

Estimated copies sold
≈ 950k–1.5M
$3.9M–$10.5M after Steam's cut $7.1M–$16.2M before the cut
from 38k 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 Journey out and predicted the genre from its 8 similar games. Every figure here, including Journey's, is estimated from Steam reviews, not self-reported sales.

Copies, estimated from reviews

typical (middle half) 6.1M–9.5M
best case 34.4M (Red Dead Redemption 2)
Games like Journey

The middle of these games

≈ 6.1M–9.5M copies

≈ $83.0M–$149.8M after Steam's cut

from ~200k 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 Story Rich (4 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: Red Dead Redemption 2 at ≈ 26.2M–42.6M copies, ≈ $432.5M–$1162.8M 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 23k reviews in their first month; the spread ran 953 to 69k.
The genre you'd be entering
Your set
Your set clusters on Story Rich (4 of 8) and First-Person (2 of 8).
The winners
Winners here lead with Open World + Story Rich, priced around $60. The breakout hits carry Western + Open World + Realistic; a typical game here doesn't.
The era
The games you compared span 2013 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).

Similar games

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≈ 26.2M–42.6M
4.6x vs typical
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Sizing up your own game? See what its genre can realistically do before you build it.