Over 5,000 games released on Steam this year didn't make enough money to recover the $100 fee to put a game on Valve's store, research estimates
https://www.gamesradar.com/games/over-5-000-games-released-on-steam-this-year-didnt-make-enough-money-to-recover-the-usd100-fee-to-put-a-game-on-valves-store-research-estimates/
256 points · 38 comments · view on lemmy.world
38 Comments
jqubed@lemmy.world · 97 pts · 310d
This sounds like too many games are being made. I suppose a lot of these are hobby/passion projects or learning exercises people have made, but that has to be more games than there is any viable market for.
traches@sh.itjust.works · 127 pts · 310d
Just knowing how the internet be, I bet it’s 98% shovelware garbage looking for whales
BeardedGingerWonder@feddit.uk · 19 pts · 310d
Ah man, I used to buy whole magazine because of the shovelware CDs on the front. Countless hours were spent installing credit card validators and odd scientific calculators.
FauxLiving@lemmy.world · 5 pts · 310d
Oh hey, this random CD I got from the mail has a screensaver in it!
ILikeBoobies@lemmy.ca · 2 pts · 309d
Just knowing Steam, it’s shovelware.
mkwt@lemmy.world · 66 pts · 310d
There's a lot of complete trash. Multiple reskins of the same puzzle game with randomly generated names. Bare bones minesweeper clone written entirely by AI, and advertised as such. That sort of thing.
greybeard@feddit.online · 17 pts · 310d
Don't forget the Unity Asset Store free example gamemodes packed with free assets and shoved onto Steam.
Mangoguana@lemmy.world · 30 pts · 310d
Its also that it takes time building an audience, and some devs are awful at setting up their store page.
KoboldCoterie@pawb.social · 48 pts · 310d
It's also a marketing problem. I find games all the time on Steam that are a year+ old that I would have bought long ago if I'd even known they existed. It's a problem with small indie developers - they either don't know how to or don't have the money to market their game and just hope putting it on Steam will get it visibility.
yakko@feddit.uk · 10 pts · 310d
It's not necessarily a marketing problem because it's not necessarily an economic question. Steam and a few small other platforms like it are the reigning paradigm for indie game distribution, but games aren't necessarily an economic endeavour. Ars gratia artis is still a thing for a non-zero contingency of creatives.
snooggums@piefed.world · 5 pts · 310d
While the page is important, there is also the need to get enough attention for the game so that people even visit the store page.
Coelacanth@feddit.nu · 13 pts · 310d
It's the same as in any art field I think. Inevitable side effect of the internet and modern technology. I listened to a podcast a while back that had one of my favourite small indie bands as guests, and they were discussing how the same thing applies for music. The market is simply way, way oversaturated.
thingsiplay@beehaw.org · 74 pts · 310d
How many of them were good games and original?
Ok_imagination@lemmy.world · 51 pts · 310d
Listen best I can do is ai slop.
Cevilia@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 4 pts · 309d
Lfrith@lemmy.ca · 60 pts · 310d
chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world · 27 pts · 310d
Yeah. The same thing has happened in the music world, the book world, and even the movie world.
YouTube lowered the barrier to entry to basically nothing if you want to publish your own movie. Getting millions of people to watch it, even completely for free, is very difficult. Almost all of the videos out there with millions of views were published by people who were already well known (even if they grew their fanbase directly on YouTube).
Music is probably fairly similar to movies in that you can publish easy on YouTube and then direct everyone to your Bandcamp site to buy music from you.
The book world is probably hardest to crack. There are so many authors out there and it’s very easy (from a technical standpoint) to publish your own book. Writing a book a lot of people want to read and getting people to read it is a totally different matter!
Airowird@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 7 pts · 309d
I think the book part is solved through ebook portals. There's a LOT of books on the Kindle store with shitty stories, grammar mistakes and AI cover pics (if not completely wwritten by AI nowadays)
What the all have in common is they're digital products. There is a fixed overhead cost to host on a platform, but almost no cost per sale/visit/download, so you don't need to worry about scaling production and distribution.
chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world · 5 pts · 309d
The deeper thing they have in common is that they’re all products which follow power law distributions based on popularity. Popular items get more exposure by word of mouth than unpopular or unknown items. That exposure leads to even more popularity which results in exponential takeoff.
Thus you can have a music industry where Taylor Swift can make a billion dollars on one tour while millions of other musicians languish in total obscurity.
pennomi@lemmy.world · 43 pts · 310d
Echofox@lemmy.ca · 24 pts · 310d
Maybe. Quickly looking at games that don't really sell:
https://steamdb.info/sales/?max_reviews=10&min_discount=0&min_rating=0&min_reviews=0
Mostly it just looks like games nobody asked for. Definitely some A.I. and asset flips included, but some look like effort was put into them ... however they don't look fun to me. Like, at all.
DannyMac@sh.itjust.works · 3 pts · 309d
idk, "Dildo Catcher" sounds like it may be fun
Gullible@sh.itjust.works · 10 pts · 310d
To release something for free on steam, does it cost $100?
OwlPaste@lemmy.world · 8 pts · 310d
Is that 100 per game or per developer account?
justdaveisfine@piefed.social · 18 pts · 310d
Per game.
OwlPaste@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 310d
😲
Gullible@sh.itjust.works · 0 pts · 310d
Oof. Forking over a hundred dollars as a dev just out of college looking to get broader critiques kinda sucks
4am@lemmy.zip · 30 pts · 310d
Steam refunds the fee if you make over $1000 in Gross Adjusted Revenue.
It’s supposed to be a tactic to discourage shovelware.
CookieOfFortune@lemmy.world · 22 pts · 310d
$100 is nothing compared to how long a game costs to make. Hundreds of development hours is tens of thousands of dollars. And if you’re making a game for less than a hundred development hours… maybe it’s not a very good game?
Gullible@sh.itjust.works · 2 pts · 310d
Most student projects I found weren't particularly good, you’re right. They seemed to be looking for perspective on a specific thread they were winding through. Whether it be visuals or a basic gameplay loop. It’s just funny to look back and see thousands of dollars and hours spent to receive responses like “I couldn’t get past the first page because the menu was broken.”
CookieOfFortune@lemmy.world · 20 pts · 310d
It doesn’t seem like Steam is the right venue for a student project. It’s not a place to receive basic feedback which students or novices would need to improve.
justdaveisfine@piefed.social · 18 pts · 310d
Depending on what you're looking for in critique, Steam may not be a great place to get feedback. If you're looking for just a handful of focus users, you're better off uploading a game to itch.io and then asking people to try it via whatever relevant channels you're looking at.
Steam is better for reviews. Though reviews are not aimed at the dev but aimed at potential buyers which is very different looking.
Truscape@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 13 pts · 310d
I would distribute on Github, make a Flatpack, or use itch.io or similar for a hobby project.
Iceblade02@lemmy.world · 11 pts · 309d
If you're just looking for critiques there's plenty of other spaces to post your product. 100USD for the outreach & services steam provide a developer is actually quite cheap in western countries. I could see it being more difficult in parts of the world with lower purchasing power though unless they have some regional pricing scheme.
AnUnusualRelic@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 309d
Come on, what can a hundred dollars be anyway? Five bananas?
Echofox@lemmy.ca · 4 pts · 310d
yes
IronBird@lemmy.world · 4 pts · 309d
you a pay deposit to publish on steam, you get it back after enough sales
Gbagginsthe3rd@aussie.zone · 8 pts · 310d
Is there a search filter for hardly bought games?
Echofox@lemmy.ca · 13 pts · 310d
You could filter for very low reviews <10 on SteamDB
https://steamdb.info/sales/?max_reviews=10&min_discount=0&min_rating=0&min_reviews=0
radix@lemmy.world · 8 pts · 310d
I'm not sure if steamdb can search the entire catalog, but at https://steamdb.info/sales/ you can put a filter on the maximum number of reviews.
Not exactly the same thing, but may be a decent proxy.
popcornpizza@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 6 pts · 310d
Lfrith@lemmy.ca · 10 pts · 310d
Sam_Bass@lemmy.world · 4 pts · 310d
With the economy tanking like it is, they likely won't recover soon either