Podcasts, music, film, paintings, novels...Linux distributions, ice cream flavor sales...literally everything.

What? You never played Monopoly before? What do you think the endgame is?

Would Pareto be ecstatic or rolling in his grave at this disparity?

For profit centralized economy perhaps

The top 10% of games make 98.80% of all revenue. Woof.

That’s basically how art and media have always worked.

No, that's how advertising has always work.

Also don't forget all the shovelware low effort games for farming "achievements" achievements

1 in 11 games released last year has 0 reviews.

https://steamdb.info/stats/releases/

~21.500 titles released in 2025, we've seen more than 16.000 games released this year so it will once again break a new record for titles released in a year.

So what?

So if you release a game on steam not only you are promoting a centralized closed platform owned by a billionare but there's a good chance you are not getting much in return.

A lot more than just the economy, it's like a law of nature. Even language itself obeys it

Yea the amount of shovelware and AI shit that's put on the platform is massive. Steam just does a really good job keeping that shit from taking over your front store page... unlike the playstore...dunno how it is on iOS...

It seems that's partially taken into account:

New analysis of 99,206 Steam games illustrates just how extreme the economics can be on Valve's PC gaming emporium

Over 8,000 paid games analyzed never received a single Steam review

This report also only looks at premium games, meaning free-to-play giants like Valve's Counter-Strike are left out, as are "non-game software, adult-only titles and unreleased entries." The list of 99,206 was selected from a base of 136,281.

The only caveat is that revenue is estimated, so there can be big swings in the data.

The standard multiplier here is 35, so this research assumes one Steam review is worth 35 sales at a game's current listed price, though you can also use a more "conservative" 20 or "generous" 50 in the report's impressive graphs.

Talking about statistics is not pointless, it's quite interesting sometimes even.

Games like Balatro or Stardew Valley are absolute unicorns. Most smaller teams and solo devs that have a constant stream of some revenue through Steam need to work on the side to earn a living.

But that's the thing. It's incredibly rare that a indie game becomes successful enough to sustain even a single developer. It's like with every other entertainment industry. YouTube, OF, Twitch, TikTok, you are competing with millions of other people in exactly the same situation as you. I think it's OF where you need to be in the top 25% to earn $1k per year.

Hard work and clever marketing can improve your chances of a success, but you still need to be extremely lucky to be noticed enough to make a living out of it.

I remember this talk about a developer making a living as a game dev. Not by making inspiring or "good" games, but by pretty much endlessly reskinning solitare games.

It's also on many people wanting to play AAA games and there not being many good AAA games so everyone plays the same few good ones

It's also just the fact that some games are better than others. For every Factorio and Hollow Knight, there are a hundred other games that aren't as good that significantly less people buy.

Really topics against Steam are getting ridiculous.

Less ridiculous than the people defending a corporation who makes money promoting gambling to kids and that is owned by a billionare with multiple private yachts

No solution, only angry >:(

I’m one of those that makes most of the money off a different platform. I’m not making it because the platform is helping me. It’s inertia. I’m the best in my category and so I dominate. Same for these games.

Name 5 things Valve could implement to change this that would not be to the detriment of indie devs.

Valve is a for profit company and their main goal is to boost their profits to the roof (valve ceo owns an entire fleet of megayachts). They work to boost their sales not to help other people, when their salesmen lay down 5 things they could implement on the platform their main objective is to do business. Anything you implement that benefit users and devs rather than the already full valve wallet would be a positive change.

The first thing you want to implement is a less greedy and profits drive mentality, the second thing they could implement is the source code of their platform. They could implement exact sales data for each game and transparency reports on their profits, they could implement a mastodon social page and they could implement disclaimers on AAA titles warning people they are buying games from evil corporations.

I don’t see how that is “steam” economy.

Valve is a for profit company that decides which games to advertise.

I agree. It’s not a platform issue it’s a market saturation issue. You see this in many fields where the product is frequently a passion project. (Mostly art, music etc.) Some people will keep creating regardless of the earnings and throw the stats. Not that the stats really matter. Not much you can do… aside from UBI.

I’m not sure how they started, but Brotato came from a very small studio, and rose up to top-played on Steam Deck and some other charts. It made their creators a lot of money, because they were lucky, sure, but also because they made a very good game and had a platform to sell it from.

As far as I know, Valve’s monetisation scheme for developers is also quite fair. I might be one of those fanboys, but I think they deserve it to some extent. There’s much worse players out there, and with the money Valve is making and the market share they have now, they could absolutely be one of the bad ones and not care.

If they’re making enough from the…let’s call them prestige titles…to be able to afford to give indie devs a place to host their passion projects and maybe get more eyes on it, than I see no problem with that.

Valve is a for profit company, you have to pay to upload your games there and they take a cut of any sale. The article literally say that most games don't make anything.

Maybe I’ve been lucky but I didn’t see AI garbage games in Steam yet.

However, ultra low quality copycats or “XYZ Simulator” with barebones scenarios and basic assets have been flooding Steam for years.

The adult category is even worse, very badly made games, some clearly being taken from a tutorial for learning the game engine, sparkled with some few hentai images in the background and sold by a very low price.

I think this is really where it's at. If this article was supposed to criticize Steam, the criticism should be that they will need to do better QA to fend off the waves of crappy AI (or otherwise low-quality) games in the future that are beginning to inflate the catalog, and not an economic one that makes this sound like some uneven distribution of wealth (which it really is not).

It's certainly not a good thing for startup indie devs putting months of work into a project.

It's a thing. If you're an inspiring indie dev, it's hard numbers to let you know if you can work with these numbers. If you're just a gamer, they probably don't matter at all.

The 1% numbers makes me question by there aren't more AA initiates out there. we don't get many 5-10m budget games these days, but the typical AA game is (conservatively) making 15m dollars. So if you can turnournd a game on the level of Claire Obscur (which IIRC had a 10m dollar budget) in 4 years, there should be openings for potential success.

Guess it comes down to the lack of investors who care at that level (who wouldn't just throw it at AI)

Considering valve is a for profit company and that steam is centralized and closed source third party software launcher with ads i would say these numbers are not entirely the result of "natural law" like many idiots are claiming but the result of corporations shady business practices.

Aka “80% of everything is shit”.

That's Sturgeon's law (originally 90%). If you want to condense Pareto, it's "80% of value is created in 20% of the time".

AAA titles made by corporations are the trashiest of them all

Okay, but explain how consumer preferences are somehow Steam’s fault?

Valve is a for profit company, they make money by advertising games and selling them, their website is literally an ad shelf.

doesn’t seem to be the case.

It seem the case to me that they are advertising the shit out of certain games with ads as big as the entire screen.

Pareto principle at work

Given the way they estimate sales numbers, it's probably too different a curve. I imagine there's both a lot of bottom of the barrel adult games that still manage to get some sales off (as opposed to none for most non-adult games) and there's a lower sales ceiling that still results in surprisingly strong revenue compared to a game with similar reviews.

Deponia is like the AOL disks of games. They give it out for free constantly

Valve is a for profit private company, the platform and the ads on steam are designed to boost their profits not to promote other people work. If you go on steam website right now you will see ads for 1% games as big as the entire page.

In a vacuum it sucks, but we’re grading on a curve here. The nice thing about valve is that it’s asleep at the wheel. Yes they’re making ridiculous amounts of money but they could be making more if they decided to “develop” their platform, and it would be bad for everyone. Cthulhu sleeps and I for one would prefer the situation continue.

As for the billionaire…. I have no strong opinion about him, but again we’re grading on a curve here, it’s amazing how few countries he’s ruined or pedos he’s been in photos with, I have limited hate to spread around and I don’t have sufficient justification to smear any on him.

Name one other company that's doing more for open source and open platforms than Valve.

They've helped push gaming on Linux from a very niche process to basically having Windows native games work better on Linux than on Windows. They do this via Proton which they upstream into WINE (all open source and free to use by anyone).

They've silently funded an x86 to ARM emulator for years and it's entirely open source (anyone can use it).

The Steam client is a 1st class citizen on Linux. It doesn't matter that their client is closed source, because all the tools they employ is open source. The client is mostly just the store portion of their stuff. The actual tools that run the games are open source.

They're also the only major games store that supports Linux natively (itch.io exists, and they're great, but Steam is so much bigger).

Name a company that does even half of that. Just one company.

Dont list your game on Steam then, sell it yourself.

While Steam isn't "doing nothing", I do think 30% cut of sales for the first $10M is a lot especially for indie and single developers that will never reach this target, and the larger/more known the publisher the easier it will be for them to hit the lesser % of sales tiers (reduced to 20% after $50M, but I can't remember the in-between tiers atm).

Itch.io, by comparison, takes 10% of sales as a default, but publishers can set it to whatever. Indie devs really should look more to using that as their store if they're cash strapped, and people should really get their indies off of there if possible.