steam player decay 30d
What it checks
If a new game loses more than half its players in the first 30 days, the publisher's upcoming earnings will likely miss. We track day-1 vs day-30 concurrent-player counts and short the publisher when a title fails to hold its launch audience.
Mechanism
A new game's 30-day retention curve is the cleanest read on product quality and monetization runway. CCU(d+30)/CCU(d+0) much below 0.5 means the title isn't holding its launch audience — DLC/season-pass attach will miss, and near-term revenue guidance is at risk. We short the publisher 10/20 trading days after observing the steep-decay event.
Signal rule
For each game in steam_publisher_ticker_map: day1_ccu = MAX(current_players) over first 3 snapshots; day30_ccu = MAX over snapshots in offset [30,37] days; retention_30 = day30/day1; fire -1 SHORT when retention<0.5; 10/20d holds; lag-1 trading day.
Data dependencies
daily_pricesAdjusted-close OHLCV for every US-listed ticker; primary price feed.
steam_top_games_concurrentWorker data table — see services/worker schema.
steam_publisher_ticker_mapWorker data table — see services/worker schema.
Expected edge
- Paper alpha
- untested — internal
- Paper window
- T+0 to T+20d
Untested — internal. Target -50 to -150 bps annualized on the gaming-publisher subset; ~2-5 steep-decay events per publisher per year.
Example tickers where this is likely to fire
Illustrative only — the signal fires based on the live data, not a fixed list.
Related families
steam publisher concurrency momentumAlt-dataLive-service games (GTA Online, Apex Legends, Call of Duty: Warzone, EA Sports FC) monetize on per-day active player counts. A 30/90 concurrency ratio surge across a publisher's portfolio of linked Steam games predicts revenue beats 1-2 quarters out. We rank cross-sectionally across US-listed gaming publishers and trade the top / bottom deciles.
product review velocityAlt-DataAmazon review-count 7d acceleration z > +1 → consumer-discretionary outperformance via revenue-surprise channel.
mobile app dau panelAlt-DataApp-store rank improvement (lower = better) leads app-revenue surprise 1-month.
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