The Vanishing of Ethan Carter
Profile updated
Adventure indie game The Vanishing of Ethan Carter launched in 2014 from developer and publisher The Astronauts. It has 8,958 Steam reviews with 88% positive sentiment, and an initial price of $19.99.
Overview
The Vanishing of Ethan Carter is a 2014 Adventure game developed by The Astronauts and published by The Astronauts. On Steam it has gathered 6,856 player reviews, 88% of them positive, which counts as a very positive reception among indie titles in the Adventure category. The game is available on windows, and launched at $20. The pairing of developer The Astronauts with publisher The Astronauts is one of the studio-publisher relationships indielist tracks, letting players find comparable games and letting developers and investors study how Adventure projects reach the market. indielist's white-box method estimates its lifetime sales at roughly 411,000 to 960,000 units, with the full Boxleiter factor breakdown shown on this page rather than a single black-box figure. Within indielist's catalog of indie games mapped to their studios, publishers, and funding, The Vanishing of Ethan Carter can be compared against similar Adventure titles and benchmarked on review counts and estimated sales.
Reviews
6,856
Positive
88%
Steam appid
258520
Engine
Unknown
Players (snapshot)
Unavailable
Sales estimate
v1.0411K to 960K
units (median: 686K)
≈ $4.7M to $11.0M modeled net revenue (fixed store-cut, refund, and regional-price assumptions applied)
+ - How is this calculated?
| Factor | Adjustment |
|---|---|
| base | +50 |
| year_2014 | +30 |
| price_$20 | 0 |
| positive_88% | +10 |
| genre_Adventure | +10 |
| final NB | 100 |
Heuristic display range: median × [0.6, 1.4]. Boundary protection: NB ∈ [15, 150].
Methodology & limitations
Sales estimates use an additive Boxleiter-derived heuristic against public Steam review
counts. They are not authoritative sales data, and the fixed display range
is not a statistically validated confidence interval. Actual results may fall outside it,
especially for deeply discounted or bundle-heavy titles. Algorithm version
v1.0. Read the exact method and validation status.
indielist estimates lifetime unit sales for The Vanishing of Ethan Carter at roughly 411,000 to 960,000 copies, with a median around 686,000, derived from its 6,856 Steam reviews using a multi-factor Boxleiter method (version v1.0). That median maps to approximately $7.8M in net revenue after Steam's 30% cut, regional pricing, and refunds. Unlike black-box trackers, the full calculation is shown on this page: a base review-to-sales multiplier is adjusted for release year, launch price, review sentiment, studio size, and genre, and every adjustment is listed so developers, publishers, and investors can audit exactly how the figure was reached. The range itself reflects genuine uncertainty — review-to-sales ratios vary widely between games — so indielist publishes a low, median, and high band rather than a false-precision single number, and treats free-to-play, heavily discounted, and bundle-distributed titles as having wider error margins still.
Price history
29 observed days · window low $3.99Across 29 observed UTC days from 2026-06-24 to 2026-07-22, the daily lowest tracked USD price across stores ranged from $3.99 to $19.44. The tracked-window low was $3.99 on 2026-06-24.
Real store observations · daily lowest tracked USD price across stores · missing days are not filled.
Where to buy
Affiliate disclosure- GOG.com -80%$3.99 Buy
- Green Man Gaming -50%$9.99 Buy
- Fanatical -11%$19.38 Buy
- Steam reference$19.99 Buy
- Humble Store$19.99 Buy
Latest tracked store observations (2026-07-05 06:58 UTC to 2026-07-22 10:14 UTC), cheapest first. Prices may have changed since observation. Some are affiliate links — we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. Learn more.
Platforms
windows
Genres
AdventureIndie
Frequently asked questions
- How many copies has The Vanishing of Ethan Carter sold?
- indielist estimates The Vanishing of Ethan Carter has sold between 411,360 and 959,840 units (median 685,600), derived from its 6,856 Steam reviews with the white-box Boxleiter v1.0 method. The full breakdown is shown on the page.
- Who developed The Vanishing of Ethan Carter?
- The Vanishing of Ethan Carter was developed by The Astronauts and published by The Astronauts.
- Who published The Vanishing of Ethan Carter?
- The Vanishing of Ethan Carter was published by The Astronauts, developed by The Astronauts. See The Astronauts's full catalogue and submission status on indielist.
- When was The Vanishing of Ethan Carter released?
- The Vanishing of Ethan Carter was released in 2014.
- How many reviews does The Vanishing of Ethan Carter have on Steam?
- The Vanishing of Ethan Carter has 6,856 Steam reviews, of which 88% are positive.
- Is The Vanishing of Ethan Carter worth playing?
- Steam players rate The Vanishing of Ethan Carter 88% positive across 6,856 reviews. indielist doesn't score games editorially; it surfaces public review sentiment and a white-box sales estimate so you can judge reception and reach yourself.
Ecosystem
Players looking for games like The Vanishing of Ethan Carter can compare it on indielist against semantically similar Adventure titles such as Subnautica, Raft, Satisfactory, Human Fall Flat, ranked by shared tags and genre rather than by ad spend. On the developer side, The Astronauts's other releases and The Astronauts's wider catalog are one click away, letting developers benchmark where The Vanishing of Ethan Carter sits among a studio's body of work and how its publisher's portfolio performs. Because indielist maps studios, publishers, games, and funding into one connected graph, the same The Vanishing of Ethan Carter page serves three audiences at once: players hunting their next Adventure game, developers studying how comparable projects were positioned and what they sold, and investors tracing which teams and labels are active in the space. A machine-readable markdown mirror of this page is published at the same path with a .md suffix for AI assistants, and its review, price, and sales-estimate figures are refreshed on a schedule rather than frozen at launch.
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