When looking at games in attempts to learn a thing or two, I've found it incredibly useful to know whether or not the game was financially successful.

For example, when I first played Game of War on the iOS (which looks like a Casino threw up all over yet another Kingdoms of Camelot clone) I was content to write it off. The fact that it's spent over a month in the 10 top-grossing has taught me some very different lessons.

So it's one thing to just flip through the app-store. But what about older games, or PC games?

Of course this is difficult information to come by, but I was wondering what resources are available to us? Here's what I've found so far. Hopefully someone has a good resource they are willing to share :)

AppData.com

This seems to be exactly what I'm looking for. But it costs $1,000 per month, so, yeah...

AppShopper

Nice, though it only shows the last 30 days.

MetaCritic

This could potentially yield some information. But it's more about popularity and is hardly objective. EA's latest Dungeon Keeper for iOS has a 46, but is currently #73 top-grossing (so what, $50K per day?) and I remember it being higher earlier this week.

SteamCharts

SteamGraphs

These are great, though of course only apply to games on Steam.

My goto for apps

http://www.appannie.com/

Thanks for App Annie, that's a great one

I'm wondering if anyone knows a good multiplier for Steam's "peak players" and total unique players?

For example according to this article there are 5 million Dota Players, and their peak on SteamCharts is 738K concurrent players. But just one data point doesn't do much... Does anyone know a total # of players for any other game on Steam and we could work out some averages?

Each game has a players stats page if it's a multiplayer game I believe. There is the general rule of thumb that your peak player count is about 10% of your total player base, this comes from MMO which probably have different peak loads as a % of their base but u can use that to get the ballpark figure.

vgchartz is good for traditional boxed copy sales numbers (they'll give you a rough idea, but do take the numbers with a pinch of salt), appannie for apps.