7 ms·

The coda to this fascinating saga is that today - in a post publisher, open distribution marketplace - STEAM, the predominate game distribution gateway, allows

The coda to this fascinating saga is that today - in a post publisher, open distribution marketplace - STEAM, the predominate game distribution gateway, allows anyone to publish just about anything for a $100 deposit and a 30% commission per sale. The predictable end result is that 19,000 new games were uploaded to STEAM last year alone, and over 100,000 titles are available for purchase on the platform. The predictable result is that unless a studio has a lottery-win statistically equivalent outlier or a $50m marketing budget, a new game is swallowed up by the shear volume of titles. 1 in 5 games on STEAM never even earn back the $100 deposit.

iteria 1y ago
$100 is pretty cheap for this kind of lottery ticket. You have to pay way more to get a start in other marketplaces. This is also the social media game. Building a following is the name of the game and the long tail can substant many
- dtagames 1y ago
  It definitely isn't a lottery ticket. Steam doesn't award people anything. It's up to you to make your game great and then make it popular.
boxed 1y ago
Another code might be that Nintendo is still selling super well, producing great games and consoles, and just crushing it even with that kind of competition.
- bluefirebrand 1y ago
  Broadly speaking Nintendo is competing with all forms of entertainment for people's time and money, certainty But in terms of selling game consoles and games? I actually don't think anyone is really competing with Nintendo While Sony and Microsoft have chased hardware power and "next-gen" consoles, Nintendo is exploring and solidifying different niches. You can see this really strongly nowadays. Every game Sony releases eventually winds up with a PC port, and many of them are even released on Xbox. Meanwhile Nintendo has an incredibly strong library of games for Switch, many of which cannot be purchased for other platforms. Not just first-party titles either. Other studios make games that can only be played on Switch hardware It really is impressive that Nintendo has managed to design game consoles that have maintained its individual identity, while Sony and Microsoft have both basically settled on "just a mid range PC with a custom OS" more or less
  - Keyframe 1y ago
    You buy Nintendo for Nintendo games, as in first-party games. Everything else is just a plus. That has been the case since I'd say N64 days. Before that it was still a toss up, especially with Sega. After that, Nintendo drifted wholly into its own world, supporting its own worldview, and others were competing for third party titles and using specs in the marketing as if it mattered - which it did if same game was available on multiple target platforms and you were buying for that.
    - bluefirebrand 1y ago
      > You buy Nintendo for Nintendo games, as in first-party games There are still Nintendo console exclusive third-party games, too. They often don't stay exclusive if they are successful enough, but they do happen But largely you are correct The truly impressive part is just how large the First Party Nintendo ecosystem is. They have a ton of IPs that you can only get on Nintendo systems. Pokemon alone is the most valuable franchise in the world
      - Keyframe 1y ago
        Technically there are also second-party games, which are independent companies exclusive to them like those from HAL Laboratory (Kirby), Intelligent Systems (Metroid), Game Freak (Pokemon).. maybe things have changed, but yeah.
      - hedora 1y ago
        I’d argue their last two custom hardware competitors were xbox 360 arcade (the indie store) and cell phone games. (I’m counting competitors as “the game mechanics are more important than production values”) In a massive self-own, Microsoft killed arcade at xbone launch (worst. console. ever.), and cell phone games were ruined by pay to win (most games) and lack of first party physical controllers (the other games, e.g., Apple Arcade). These days, it’s just steam, abandonware and nintendo. I used to pay for nintendo online to get the emulation games, but the library kind of sucked, and (more importantly) if you pay for it, there’s no way to turn off in-game ads for online play in stuff like mario, making the entire system inappropriate for kids. I’m curious to see how the switch 2 does. The lock screen on our switch is wall-to-wall ads for it, but nothing looks compelling so far. The kids are more excited about an old switch 1 port of a wii game...
- toast0 1y ago
  Nintendo has a digital store with all sorts of cruft on it, too. They're not curating or limiting releases in the same way as they did on the NES with the seal of quality. Hell, they let Night Trap release on the Switch.
klaussilveira 1y ago
That is a good thing. It allows for niches to be filled. Less generic games, more organic-made ones.
- RajT88 1y ago
  In praise of niches: Some of my favorite games were widely hated, and for reasons which I largely agree with. Not everyone values the same things.
- Keyframe 1y ago
  On one hand it absolutely does allow for niches to be filled, but on another it's a dumpster full of trash with gold in-between. There's a danger of either fatigue or slump sales over time. Maybe another Nintendo Seal of Quality on the horizon will emerge.
  - shadowgovt 1y ago
    While Steam could do that, there's no incentive for them to. They can lay out $0 into such a project and let third parties sift the trash for them and do journalism on letting potential customers know what games are good. Win-win.
    - EncomLab 1y ago
      Hence the demise of the Greenlight program...
  - izacus 1y ago
    Why? Steam already does a very good job surfacing good games and front page of their store shows way less garbage than Nintendo Store on Switch.
- BoorishBears 1y ago
  It's not a good thing: if it was a good thing Steam would have done it at launch. Steam only got traction because they were curating. There were loads of places you could dump games: people were installing Steam because games they cared about were on Steam. And getting on Steam in the early years was a guaranteed boost in distribution because they were hand picking quality games. Somehow they managed to drastically reduce the value proposition twice (first with Greenlight, then with Direct) and keep the same cut, while the value-adds like Steamworks have gotten commoditized (see EGS)
YesBox 1y ago
The majority of games released on steam are not serious games. There are tons of amateur, ugly, content-lacking games that are people’s first (toy) game. Marketing (both the product part and the promotion part) are required, but in most cases all you (indie) need is a quality product (by far the hardest part) and some a small chunk of time or money devoted to marketing. Indie marketing mostly consists of social media posts, streamers playing their game, and trailer reveals (ign et al) Steam then does its own thing and will promote your game internally after around 300 sales, and will continue to boost if it converts
- EncomLab 1y ago
  This is true - but the scale is beyond what most people imagine. STEAM revenue last year was nearly $11B - while the median revenue for a game that makes it into the top 8% is estimated at $799. So 17.5k releases earned less than $800, with something like 10k making less than $100.
  - pdw 1y ago
    Those statistics won't be a surprise to anybody who has ever tried a "random Steam game" picker.
    - noobermin 1y ago
      I hate to be so mean, but I'm surprised a crash hasn't happened yet because this situation of saturation right now is far far worse than 1983. As a gamer, there are just way too many games now, a slow down would be nice because may be then only passion projects or ones with actual investment can rise to the top. I sort of understand the difference though...essentially steam's income stream is somewhat from gamers but you also make money from developers, and so there's no real incentive for devs to try too hard. That's why the "crash" hasn't happened yet.
      - hakfoo 1y ago
        Part of the reason for a crash was that the deluge of low-quality games hit a wall of limited retail space. The retailer had to be much more of a curator. I'd be unsurprised if plenty of them lacked the knowledge and foresight to pick winners, so they ended up with racks full of lemons (like the famously bad 2600 Pac-Man) that eventually had to be flogged off at clearance prices. This also made it hard to have a breakout hit-- even if you did everything technically right, was it going to be in the right stores in the right quantity when lightning struck? Part of it was also, of course, that the 2600 was running out of gas as a platform, it was going to be harder and harder to keep interest up, but that could have been more of a gradual fizzle (like how 8-track tapes or pre-revivial vinyl faded from the market) instead of a dramatic pop. With digital distribution and a "pay on purchase" selling model, Valve can stock 170,000 titles without any real risk on their part. At worst, the search tools get a bit clumsier, but it's easy enough to put "trending/popular/liked by friends" features in place, and "Lamia Princess Dating Sim XVI" is still there waiting for the 6 people who want it... until it goes viral and sells six hundred thousand copies.
thrance 1y ago
I feel like quality games usually get decent sales. I've rarely, if ever, seen a genuinely great game getting burried for too long among the trash. Maybe it's just bias though.
- EncomLab 1y ago
  It would be pretty hard to review 52 games every day of 2024 to determine if any great games are being lost among the trash. The scale is just too large for most people to really understand - imagine the size of a physical store it would take to display 19,000 game boxes just in "new release" - much less the 100,000+ titles available in STEAM.
  - seventhtiger 1y ago
    Reddit: I've seen and wishlisted or ignore every game on steam. https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/1dm3gxh/ive_seen_a https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/1dm3gxh/ive_seen_a... It turns that there are actually not that many hidden gems. The indie game dev community has a lot of discussion about hidden gems, and the prevailing opinion is there are very very few, especially in the avalanche of crappy games that is today's landscape.
  - BlueTemplar 1y ago
    When "reviewing every single game that came out" (rather than focusing on (sub)genres) by a single person was even still feasible ??
- seventhtiger 1y ago
  Reddit: I've seen and wishlisted or ignore every game on steam. https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/1dm3gxh/ive_seen_and_wishlisted_or_ignored_every_game_on/ https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/1dm3gxh/ive_seen_a... It turns that there are actually not that many hidden gems. The indie game dev community has a lot of discussion about hidden gems, and the prevailing opinion is there are very very few, especially in the avalanche of crappy games that is today's landscape.
mystified5016 1y ago
Steam is not capitalized.
- EncomLab 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - shadowgovt 1y ago
    It's whatever color Wikipedia says it is most of the time, but this is a bit of a silly argument to have anyway. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_(service) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_(service)
shadowgovt 1y ago
And in contrast to Atari, this works for Steam because Steam isn't paying a giant pile of resources per title. The fractions-of-a-cent-per-GB raw cost of digital distribution means they don't risk getting sunk over-hyping an E.T... They can let a thousand indies make a thousand E.T.s, and it doesn't matter because they're also the place you download Helldivers 2 or Monster Hunter Wilds.
dtagames 1y ago
This may be true but shouldn't be read as an indicator of any shady business on Valve's part. Steam makes most of their money from commissions, not developer sign up fees. Steam sells a lot of games and the game market as a whole is over 70% PC (and about 40% console with overlap).
- EncomLab 1y ago
  I agree - it's not an indicator at all of shady business by Valve. If anything, Valve is the least shady and most transparent player in the game industry.
  - kmeisthax 1y ago
    Valve is shady, but their shadiness comes from things like Counter-Strike loot boxes rather than milking developers.
    - ranguna 1y ago
      Valve forbids developers from selling their game on a different store at a lower price than steam, that's a bit shady. Not too bad, but not amazing either.
      - BlueTemplar 1y ago
        Huh, wouldn't this be illegal in at least some jurisdictions ?!?
- BlueTemplar 1y ago
  Wait, not that I personally have much hope left for the worthiness of touchscreen gaming, but I doubt it's negligible ?!? (Web gaming might be ?)

iteria 1y ago

$100 is pretty cheap for this kind of lottery ticket. You have to pay way more to get a start in other marketplaces. This is also the social media game. Building a following is the name of the game and the long tail can substant many

dtagames 1y ago
It definitely isn't a lottery ticket. Steam doesn't award people anything. It's up to you to make your game great and then make it popular.

boxed 1y ago

Another code might be that Nintendo is still selling super well, producing great games and consoles, and just crushing it even with that kind of competition.

bluefirebrand 1y ago
Broadly speaking Nintendo is competing with all forms of entertainment for people's time and money, certainty But in terms of selling game consoles and games? I actually don't think anyone is really competing with Nintendo While Sony and Microsoft have chased hardware power and "next-gen" consoles, Nintendo is exploring and solidifying different niches. You can see this really strongly nowadays. Every game Sony releases eventually winds up with a PC port, and many of them are even released on Xbox. Meanwhile Nintendo has an incredibly strong library of games for Switch, many of which cannot be purchased for other platforms. Not just first-party titles either. Other studios make games that can only be played on Switch hardware It really is impressive that Nintendo has managed to design game consoles that have maintained its individual identity, while Sony and Microsoft have both basically settled on "just a mid range PC with a custom OS" more or less
- Keyframe 1y ago
  You buy Nintendo for Nintendo games, as in first-party games. Everything else is just a plus. That has been the case since I'd say N64 days. Before that it was still a toss up, especially with Sega. After that, Nintendo drifted wholly into its own world, supporting its own worldview, and others were competing for third party titles and using specs in the marketing as if it mattered - which it did if same game was available on multiple target platforms and you were buying for that.
  - bluefirebrand 1y ago
    > You buy Nintendo for Nintendo games, as in first-party games There are still Nintendo console exclusive third-party games, too. They often don't stay exclusive if they are successful enough, but they do happen But largely you are correct The truly impressive part is just how large the First Party Nintendo ecosystem is. They have a ton of IPs that you can only get on Nintendo systems. Pokemon alone is the most valuable franchise in the world
    - Keyframe 1y ago
      Technically there are also second-party games, which are independent companies exclusive to them like those from HAL Laboratory (Kirby), Intelligent Systems (Metroid), Game Freak (Pokemon).. maybe things have changed, but yeah.
    - hedora 1y ago
      I’d argue their last two custom hardware competitors were xbox 360 arcade (the indie store) and cell phone games. (I’m counting competitors as “the game mechanics are more important than production values”) In a massive self-own, Microsoft killed arcade at xbone launch (worst. console. ever.), and cell phone games were ruined by pay to win (most games) and lack of first party physical controllers (the other games, e.g., Apple Arcade). These days, it’s just steam, abandonware and nintendo. I used to pay for nintendo online to get the emulation games, but the library kind of sucked, and (more importantly) if you pay for it, there’s no way to turn off in-game ads for online play in stuff like mario, making the entire system inappropriate for kids. I’m curious to see how the switch 2 does. The lock screen on our switch is wall-to-wall ads for it, but nothing looks compelling so far. The kids are more excited about an old switch 1 port of a wii game...
toast0 1y ago
Nintendo has a digital store with all sorts of cruft on it, too. They're not curating or limiting releases in the same way as they did on the NES with the seal of quality. Hell, they let Night Trap release on the Switch.

klaussilveira 1y ago

That is a good thing. It allows for niches to be filled. Less generic games, more organic-made ones.

RajT88 1y ago
In praise of niches: Some of my favorite games were widely hated, and for reasons which I largely agree with. Not everyone values the same things.
Keyframe 1y ago
On one hand it absolutely does allow for niches to be filled, but on another it's a dumpster full of trash with gold in-between. There's a danger of either fatigue or slump sales over time. Maybe another Nintendo Seal of Quality on the horizon will emerge.
- shadowgovt 1y ago
  While Steam could do that, there's no incentive for them to. They can lay out $0 into such a project and let third parties sift the trash for them and do journalism on letting potential customers know what games are good. Win-win.
  - EncomLab 1y ago
    Hence the demise of the Greenlight program...
- izacus 1y ago
  Why? Steam already does a very good job surfacing good games and front page of their store shows way less garbage than Nintendo Store on Switch.
BoorishBears 1y ago
It's not a good thing: if it was a good thing Steam would have done it at launch. Steam only got traction because they were curating. There were loads of places you could dump games: people were installing Steam because games they cared about were on Steam. And getting on Steam in the early years was a guaranteed boost in distribution because they were hand picking quality games. Somehow they managed to drastically reduce the value proposition twice (first with Greenlight, then with Direct) and keep the same cut, while the value-adds like Steamworks have gotten commoditized (see EGS)

YesBox 1y ago

The majority of games released on steam are not serious games. There are tons of amateur, ugly, content-lacking games that are people’s first (toy) game. Marketing (both the product part and the promotion part) are required, but in most cases all you (indie) need is a quality product (by far the hardest part) and some a small chunk of time or money devoted to marketing. Indie marketing mostly consists of social media posts, streamers playing their game, and trailer reveals (ign et al) Steam then does its own thing and will promote your game internally after around 300 sales, and will continue to boost if it converts

EncomLab 1y ago
This is true - but the scale is beyond what most people imagine. STEAM revenue last year was nearly $11B - while the median revenue for a game that makes it into the top 8% is estimated at $799. So 17.5k releases earned less than $800, with something like 10k making less than $100.
- pdw 1y ago
  Those statistics won't be a surprise to anybody who has ever tried a "random Steam game" picker.
  - noobermin 1y ago
    I hate to be so mean, but I'm surprised a crash hasn't happened yet because this situation of saturation right now is far far worse than 1983. As a gamer, there are just way too many games now, a slow down would be nice because may be then only passion projects or ones with actual investment can rise to the top. I sort of understand the difference though...essentially steam's income stream is somewhat from gamers but you also make money from developers, and so there's no real incentive for devs to try too hard. That's why the "crash" hasn't happened yet.
    - hakfoo 1y ago
      Part of the reason for a crash was that the deluge of low-quality games hit a wall of limited retail space. The retailer had to be much more of a curator. I'd be unsurprised if plenty of them lacked the knowledge and foresight to pick winners, so they ended up with racks full of lemons (like the famously bad 2600 Pac-Man) that eventually had to be flogged off at clearance prices. This also made it hard to have a breakout hit-- even if you did everything technically right, was it going to be in the right stores in the right quantity when lightning struck? Part of it was also, of course, that the 2600 was running out of gas as a platform, it was going to be harder and harder to keep interest up, but that could have been more of a gradual fizzle (like how 8-track tapes or pre-revivial vinyl faded from the market) instead of a dramatic pop. With digital distribution and a "pay on purchase" selling model, Valve can stock 170,000 titles without any real risk on their part. At worst, the search tools get a bit clumsier, but it's easy enough to put "trending/popular/liked by friends" features in place, and "Lamia Princess Dating Sim XVI" is still there waiting for the 6 people who want it... until it goes viral and sells six hundred thousand copies.

thrance 1y ago

I feel like quality games usually get decent sales. I've rarely, if ever, seen a genuinely great game getting burried for too long among the trash. Maybe it's just bias though.

EncomLab 1y ago
It would be pretty hard to review 52 games every day of 2024 to determine if any great games are being lost among the trash. The scale is just too large for most people to really understand - imagine the size of a physical store it would take to display 19,000 game boxes just in "new release" - much less the 100,000+ titles available in STEAM.
- seventhtiger 1y ago
  Reddit: I've seen and wishlisted or ignore every game on steam. https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/1dm3gxh/ive_seen_a https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/1dm3gxh/ive_seen_a... It turns that there are actually not that many hidden gems. The indie game dev community has a lot of discussion about hidden gems, and the prevailing opinion is there are very very few, especially in the avalanche of crappy games that is today's landscape.
- BlueTemplar 1y ago
  When "reviewing every single game that came out" (rather than focusing on (sub)genres) by a single person was even still feasible ??
seventhtiger 1y ago
Reddit: I've seen and wishlisted or ignore every game on steam. https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/1dm3gxh/ive_seen_and_wishlisted_or_ignored_every_game_on/ https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/1dm3gxh/ive_seen_a... It turns that there are actually not that many hidden gems. The indie game dev community has a lot of discussion about hidden gems, and the prevailing opinion is there are very very few, especially in the avalanche of crappy games that is today's landscape.

mystified5016 1y ago

Steam is not capitalized.

EncomLab 1y ago
[flagged]
- shadowgovt 1y ago
  It's whatever color Wikipedia says it is most of the time, but this is a bit of a silly argument to have anyway. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_(service) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_(service)

shadowgovt 1y ago

And in contrast to Atari, this works for Steam because Steam isn't paying a giant pile of resources per title. The fractions-of-a-cent-per-GB raw cost of digital distribution means they don't risk getting sunk over-hyping an E.T... They can let a thousand indies make a thousand E.T.s, and it doesn't matter because they're also the place you download Helldivers 2 or Monster Hunter Wilds.

dtagames 1y ago

This may be true but shouldn't be read as an indicator of any shady business on Valve's part. Steam makes most of their money from commissions, not developer sign up fees. Steam sells a lot of games and the game market as a whole is over 70% PC (and about 40% console with overlap).

EncomLab 1y ago
I agree - it's not an indicator at all of shady business by Valve. If anything, Valve is the least shady and most transparent player in the game industry.
- kmeisthax 1y ago
  Valve is shady, but their shadiness comes from things like Counter-Strike loot boxes rather than milking developers.
  - ranguna 1y ago
    Valve forbids developers from selling their game on a different store at a lower price than steam, that's a bit shady. Not too bad, but not amazing either.
    - BlueTemplar 1y ago
      Huh, wouldn't this be illegal in at least some jurisdictions ?!?
BlueTemplar 1y ago
Wait, not that I personally have much hope left for the worthiness of touchscreen gaming, but I doubt it's negligible ?!? (Web gaming might be ?)