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/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.
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.
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....
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.
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.
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.
Maybe I'm doing something wrong then.
It trailers to your catalog. What are you buying?
Huh?
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.
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.
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.
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.
