Why is this written like some kind of hit piece.
Behold, it’s easy to make a game and hard to make a good one
I’d be more worried about most people buying from Amazon or communicating through services owned by Meta.
Too many games on Steam (and any other store) and too many people believing if something trends and/or has extensive marketing it must be great. Added to this is the fun fact that any live service multiplayer game that’s not part of the most played is considered “dead”. I miss the days when I’d visit someone, each would grab a controller and have a blast playing some weird ass game nobody talked about. Good stuff that can still be done over long distances when someone bothers to purchase local multiplayer games and stream them through Steam’s Remote Play Together or some other alternative like Parsec (or less common still, games with LAN multiplayer), but too many people are stuck on the loop of typical live service hooks.
There is a hell of a lot of shit and slop games on Steam, though,
gaben looking like a completely different person
When if true, why is this news? There’s a ton of games on Steam and gaming is totally saturated at this point. There’s just too many games.
/sigh
They admit the numbers are estimates.
This doesn’t seem to take into account “paid games” that are mangles of free assets smashed into a scene.
I’m not saying there isn’t going to be disparity, because there absolutely is. But these numbers are just grasping at straws and don’t control for obvious issues.
I’m surprised it’s not more extreme. There’s lots of trash on steam.
It only costs $100 to list your own game on Steam, and that money is refunded if you make $1000. That’s all there is. The rest is up to the dev or the publisher. That barrier to entry is absurdly low. If a game isn’t making sales, it’s not Steams fault, it’s advertising. ANYONE can list games, which means there is a lot of chaff on the market. What do you want them to do? Increase the listing price so that trash games don’t get listed as often? Then you cut out the good indie dev, too. Game dev is only half the battle. You still have to reach your market once you post your game.
Steam allows you to buy from whomever. Want to support an indie dev on their first title? Go for it. Steam won’t stop you. You can be the change you want to see in the world.
As always, discoverability could be better. But mostly that’s discoverability of recommendations and a smarter system for suggesting new games that would make a difference IMHO. Valve certainly isn’t the worst at finding things you like, although their search is a bit clunky
Yep. You either allow the garbage or block the upcoming indie dev. One person’s trash is another person’s Power Washer Simulator 2024.
Couldn’t stop playing it for days when I first got it.
Weirdly, other stores get bashed for this for allowing “shovelware” type games like this. Why does valve get the pass?
Probably because the algorithm steam uses to promote games doesn’t throw the crap stuff on the front page most of the time. So no one feels like they’re paging through tons of spam to find the game they’re looking for.
The flip side is that means if you’re new, and write a good game, you better advertise it yourself, or it will die in obscurity.
These things regularly come up, and people complain about the obvious garbage, that constantly fill their store pages (which doesn’t really happen to me).
They dont get a pass and they should absolutely be moderating it better.
Removed by mod
First off, that comes off as racist. Selling camels invokes the orientalist caricature of the people of the middle east. At best you sound like an edgy Twitch streamer. At worst you sound like a bigot. Neither of those is a good look.
Secondly, sure, I’ll admit that it’s not a great deal for people in poorer countries. Steam isn’t a public utility, though. You can post to itch.io for free, and there is a MASSIVE userbase there. Get that $100 there and then bring it to Steam. That isn’t a big ask. Is it another barrier to entry for someone from a poorer country? Yes, and that’s unfortunate. However, it’s not a high bar to clear. If you get popular on itch.io, Steam is a natural progression. And, again, that $100 is more like a deposit than a cost. It comes back after you make $1000 on the game. After that, it’s free to host that game. And with it, you get discussion channels, social channels, the Steam Workshop integration, multiplayer hosting, and a ton of other benefits. Steam isn’t the enemy you seem to want to make it out to be.
However, all of this is predicated on something that we haven’t talked about. Right now, the US has sanctions against Iran. So, no matter what, Steam is legally barred from servicing Iranian accounts. However, this itch.io to Steam pipeline still does work in other countries without sanctions. Places like Brazil, India, and the Philippines are able to do things like this without an issue. I’ll reiterate, it’s not great that there’s an extra step. Still, the extra step isn’t a huge one, and if anything, it can help by growing a base on itch.io for free and then bringing that passion over to Steam. There are plenty of games that have famously made that jump and come out better for it.
That barrier to entry is absurdly low. If a game isn’t making sales, it’s not Steams fault, it’s advertising. ANYONE can list games, which means there is a lot of chaff on the market.
I’ll admit that it’s not a great deal for people in poorer countries. Steam isn’t a public utility, though. You can post to itch.io for free, and there is a MASSIVE userbase there
Glad you admitted your mistake.
Continuing to sound like an edgelord
Yep. Conceding the weak part of your own argument so it can’t be used against you is a basic rhetorical move. You reaching for one liners instead of a rebuttal tells me it worked. I learned that from 8 Mile.
I asked a critical question. If you react this poorly to criticism, I am not the one reaching for “lines” on a billion dollar empire.
Now, why don’t you help those indies up, instead of salting your ego on threadiverse?
You didn’t ask a critical question, you gave me a snide remark. When you asked a critical question before, I gave you a very serious and honest answer.
And as far as helping the indies up… do you want to see my Steam Library? I’m just shy of 1900 games at this point, and a large portion of which is made up of indie games. I’m actually working on starting a YouTube channel where I play those indie games and show them on a platform where they don’t have a lot of representation, and they won’t have to pay me to play them, nor will I accept free games. I buy, and then I play, so I have skin in the game, just like the average gamer. That’s how I’m helping them up.
What are you doing to help, instead of stroking your ego on the threadiverse?
starting a YouTube channel
Try Peertube channel instead. That way even libre projects get represented as well.
What are you doing to help
Doing the actual liberation.
On the other hand, how many USD sales does it take to buy those camels back? The $100 isn’t localized, but neither is revenue… If affording the $100 is really an issue, and you have a game that will sell, you could start a Kickstarter for $150 to cover the submission cost and likely have no trouble getting the funds, no?
They seem to have a rabid hate boner for Steam, Epic shill maybe?
Reads like an absurdly high barrier to entry.
Itch io is free. If you can’t make $100 on itch then don’t bother submitting to steam.
Steam could invest more time curating and promoting indie content instead of the same games over and over and over. I can’t remember the last time I opened the Store and saw a new game I hadn’t heard of before.
I see new games literally all the time. The front page and discovery queue are very good at that.
It only shows me hentai games.
Then stop buying them or buy something different so steam thinks you like other content ;P
You can filter the store to hide certain genres or mature games all together
I like it like that.
Maybe I’m doing something wrong then.
It trailers to your catalog. What are you buying?
Huh?
They meant tailors. The recommendations are based on your previous play or purchase history.
They meant tailors
My Chucks!?
Literally a steam next fest promoting indies like every month or two? Idk what else you want?
They never said they pay attention or look around the page a little, they just said they open the store. So they likely see the first ad at the top and then close the store. Then they complain they cant find any games.
Then you haven’t been looking at the MANY indie sales, or the Next Fest they put on every quarter where you can play hundreds of demos for indie games and try before you buy.
Is ‘games that sell more copies make more money’ supposed to surprise me?
“Half of all paid games on Steam have earned less than an estimated $3,622 in their entire lifetime,” the report reads. “A game at the 90th percentile has earned about $236,184, and the 99th percentile starts at $15,872,031.”
10% making over $235k paints a very different picture tho…
Especially considering how 8/10 games seem to be utter slop lately.
Especially considering how 8/10 games seem to be utter slop lately.
‘Platformer’, ‘roguelike’, ‘survival’, ‘base building’
Four horsemen of steam slop.
roguelike is a pretty cool genre with so many good games. Some of the best indie games are roguelikes. I wouldn’t call the genre “slop”.
Recall, percentages are projections for masses that can only count to 100. It is, as this data demonstrates, a very limiting projection for logarithmic scales. When folks can see the cliff, they truly see the nepotistic curation Valve rerewards. There’s no «Surprise me!» like in spotify or bandcamp. «New indie titles to try!» «Indie of the week!» etc…
Try these:
Edit: There is also a Categories menu with lots of tags and game genres to click, to see games in that category for inspiration. Such as when you click
INDIE, the indie page opens: https://store.steampowered.com/tags/en/IndieScreenshot
Literally like…. 20 indie showcases and steam next fests and such a year which all promote indie games in their own preview/sale/etc?
Edit: literally a bowling and pinball showcase going on right now with plenty of niche indie games?
I dont think OP uses Steam. It even pops up with random games when you open it.
I think they want to just complain and feel smart
There’s literally a “discover queue”…
What are you even bitching about?
Everytime I open up steam I see at least 1 new indie game with 0 reviews on the front page
Most of my store page is games I have never heard of. TF is wrong with your store feed?
This is one of the reasons why the narrative is nonsense that renting games is better because you can easily own “too many games” if you keep buying them and then… oh no!!! You own too many digital games!!!
When you buy an indie game you are supporting art whether you get to the game or not, remember that, which isn’t to say buy random games but I think this statistic underlines how much it does matter to the smaller game developers to take a leap and buy their indie games. It helps that they usually cost 1/50th the cost of a AAA game lol…
The problem for all creators on the internet is discoverability. All the faults in the pre-internet publishing system, but those publishers did a huge amount of screening and reduced the choice paralysis on consumers. Now, we get the whole firehose of games, music, stories, movies, and who’s really got time for that? Who wants to spend the time installing 10 different, random games to give each of them a 10-minute test and uninstall? That’s 2 hours that could have gone into an actual good game, nevermind currency.
“They” used to solve discoverability by having “experts” decide where to spend advertising dollars. Algorithms try to solve discoverability by seeing what everyone else is playing, but that just amplifies the hyperbola distribution of plays & revenue. Most of those indie games will never even show up, unless you somehow search for them by exact name. And now with AI just flooding the zone…these statistics are only going to get more lopsided.
Their analysis comes with the usual Steam research caveat: Valve doesn’t publish revenue figures, so they’re instead reverse-engineered using user reviews as a base that’s then multiplied to estimate sales.
I didn’t know how unreliable and bad the usual Steam research was. I always thought there must be a bit more sophisticated method of estimating.
I pressume is bigger, ’cause there’s rather more private accounts, accounts that don’t make reviews, resellers, keys takedowns, gift card trading, etc…
Also, the more controversal and problematic a game is, the more reviews will be posted to inform others or to let out frustrations. Therefore some games or type of games will just get more reviews, which does not reflect the real number of sold games or generated money. So its not just about higher or lower numbers, the method of estimation is deeply flawed.
You get access to the largest game distribution platform in the world, but you end up being a single game in a sea of competitors. You gotta distinguish yourself from the lot, on top of being lucky that your stars are aligned.
