“Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 Generates $30K on Steam Per Negative Review”
GameDiscoverCo has launched an Insights Lab for April Fool’s Day. The project uses real analytics, but presents them in playful, unconventional ways.
The company was founded by former Filmogaz.com publisher Simon Carless. A software engineer known only as “Avi” said the figures come from a live analytics backend.
Revenue per negative review
The site includes a “Revenue Per Negative Review” chart. It compares estimated revenue to the count of negative Steam reviews.
That chart only analyzes games that sold more than 500,000 units. Reviews below 50 percent are classified as negative.
According to the chart, Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 brings roughly $30,000 on Steam for every negative review. Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 earns about $17,000 per negative review.
Firaxis’ Civilization VII appears around $4,000 per negative review. The metrics indicate divisive titles can still generate large sums.
Notable metrics and oddities
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Konami’s eFootball is the most divided game on Steam. Its positive and negative reviews sit at almost a 50/50 split.
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Aimlabs ranks as the second-most “abandoned” app on Steam. It has over 29 million downloads and an average playtime of 1.22 hours.
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Valve’s DOTA 2 has consumed nearly 371,000 human lifetimes when player-hours are divided by an 80-year lifespan.
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The most common word in Steam game titles is “Simulator.” It appears more than any other single word.
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One-in-four free-to-play games show monetization complaints in sentiment analysis. That speaks to ongoing player frustration.
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About 65 percent of Steam games had zero players in the previous 24 hours. Many titles see no recent activity.
Rage Index and genre risk
GameDiscoverCo also published a “Rage Index” based on Steam tags that drive negative reviews. The analysis looks at tag-associated review volume and sentiment.
The top three tags generating the most negative reviews are, in order: Multiplayer, Free-to-Play and FPS. Shooter, Open World, Action, and Survival follow them.
Titles with those tags do not necessarily score poorly overall. Their average review scores still hover around 70 to 75 percent.
However, these genres attract larger volumes of negative reviews. Developers should note this when designing features and monetization.
Steam health and other takeaways
The Steam Health Dashboard estimates that about 28 percent of games have sold fewer than 100 copies. Only around 5 percent of games have sold more than 100,000 copies.
Finally, a quirky stat: 2D fighting games are the most likely to include swear words in reviews. The Insights Lab mixes useful signals with absurd observations.
Avi told Filmogaz.com they preferred a dead-serious aesthetic paired with ridiculous charts. They argued the web needs more playful data that still tells stories.
