Behold, "the whole story of Steam's economy in one picture": the top 1% of games earn 84.5% of estimated revenue, and most games barely make anything

Yep. You either allow the garbage or block the upcoming indie dev. One person’s trash is another person’s Power Washer Simulator 2024.

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

Weirdly, other stores get bashed for this for allowing “shovelware” type games like this. Why does valve get the pass?

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.

Yah it feels targeted, I'd ask who paid this writer to make this.

Especially considering how 8/10 games seem to be utter slop lately.

'Platformer', 'roguelike', 'survival', 'base building'

Four horsemen of steam 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..

I'm surprised it's not more extreme. There's lots of trash on steam.

Yes, that happens if you have freedom. That is something I take, rather than having no freedom. At least the algorithm and how the store is organized handles this. Because, if not, who is to decide what slop is? Valve? Does that mean Valve has the power to decide what game is slop or not? Yes, it would prevent lot of slop, but then Valve would be in charge to decide this and that is not something I want to.

Edit: As an example, Nintendo seems to allow publishing a lot of games too without holding much back. The difference to Steam is, that Steam does an excellent job of organizing the games, with a good algorithm and user engaged reviews and tagging. That helps a lot, which Nintendo lacks. So yes, if you dig deeper in Steam or just list newest titles released, yes you will find a lot of slop. But going with the algorithm and looking through recommended games Steam does pretty good job hiding most slop.

I pressume is bigger, ’cause there’s rather more private accounts, accounts that don't make reviews, resellers, keys takedowns, gift card trading, etc..

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.

The ideas described in Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody and Chris Anderson's The Long Tail made the mid-2000s super optimistic about having fewer gatekeepers between those who would create something and those who would enjoy that thing: you no longer needed to convince an agent and publisher and distributor for the funds or approval to publish a book, or release an album, or even distribute a short film or movie, because you could just do those things and see if you could find an audience.

And it worked, because on the internet it became economically feasible to publish for a small audience, and it became economically feasible to aggregate a lot of small creators and small audiences into big content-agnostic platforms for the thing being distributed. And a few of them would make it big, too.

Yes, app stores still funnel the overwhelming majority of the money on the platform to a small handful of developers. But I'd argue that the recent moves towards consolidation and concentration is because the ecosystems have betrayed the democratic, decentralized, nondiscriminatory/content-neutral ideals that we built the user-created Web 2.0 on, and instead of descended into enshittified monetization of the platforms' algorithmic control, SEO-like strategies so that slop isn't filtered out, and our utterly hacked brains that can't resist clickbait and ragebait and hornybait to where it's mostly sorting through slop instead of organically finding the niches we enjoy.

And now instead of traditional gatekeepers, we have tech gatekeepers. It was a fun run, though, from 2005-2015.