Makes sense as the barrier to entry gets lower and lower to make a game. Even I could make a game and release it. Of course nobody would buy it. One of the consequences of increased accessibility is that there’s more competition in the market place for those entering with the intention of trying to make money off of it.
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!
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.
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.
[A] ton of games were released on Steam this year. Valve’s store has seen nearly 13,000 game launches since January 1, 2025, according to Steam data hound Gamalytic, and a majority of those games went straight under the couch to be forgotten for the rest of time like lost batteries.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Eh this is a non article. Basically 99% of these are AI shovelware by some low income shovelware factory. They probably are just fishing for a random meme game that hits rather than actually expecting success.
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.
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.
$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?
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.”
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.
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.
I wonder how much of this has to do with the currency change in late 2023. I used to buy lots of tiny indie games, which offered a couple of hours of entertainment, and didn’t cost more than a few cents.
Then they complained to Steam, others abused VPNs, and Steam itself didn’t enforce tying the payment methods to the country, therefore they had a lot of people buying from places like Turkey or Argentina (as in, pretending to be from those places).
But much like the piracy debacle, does someone cheating the price translate as a potential buyer at full US price? I don’t think so. I imagine only a small percentage would have paid full price, and only for big or well promoted games (aka Big Name Devs). I can’t imagine how having a handful of “correct” buyers vs a ton of “incorrect” buyers would tip the scale in favor of the former.
Edit: And for the record, I’m from the LATAM region, so I was buying legitimately.
Another factor is as people’s libraries grow new titles are also competing with past large budget games that now go on discount cheaper than indie games. PC has more games that are backwards compatible compared to consoles, so that’s decades of cheaper games that a new title has to compete against.
ow did they limit it? I still see all the regions in steamdb. I know the exchange rates haven’t been updated in a while so their suggested regional prices haven’t been pretty bad
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Makes sense as the barrier to entry gets lower and lower to make a game. Even I could make a game and release it. Of course nobody would buy it. One of the consequences of increased accessibility is that there’s more competition in the market place for those entering with the intention of trying to make money off of it.
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!
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.
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.
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.
Just knowing how the internet be, I bet it’s 98% shovelware garbage looking for whales
Just knowing Steam, it’s shovelware.
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.
Oh hey, this random CD I got from the mail has a screensaver in it!
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.
Don’t forget the Unity Asset Store free example gamemodes packed with free assets and shoved onto Steam.
Its also that it takes time building an audience, and some devs are awful at setting up their store page.
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.
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.
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.
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.
How many of them were good games and original?
Precisely three.
Listen best I can do is ai slop.
Eh this is a non article. Basically 99% of these are AI shovelware by some low income shovelware factory. They probably are just fishing for a random meme game that hits rather than actually expecting success.
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.
idk, “Dildo Catcher” sounds like it may be fun
With the economy tanking like it is, they likely won’t recover soon either
To release something for free on steam, does it cost $100?
you a pay deposit to publish on steam, you get it back after enough sales
Is that 100 per game or per developer account?
Per game.
😲
Oof. Forking over a hundred dollars as a dev just out of college looking to get broader critiques kinda sucks
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.
Steam refunds the fee if you make over $1000 in Gross Adjusted Revenue.
It’s supposed to be a tactic to discourage shovelware.
$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?
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.”
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.
I would distribute on Github, make a Flatpack, or use itch.io or similar for a hobby project.
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.
Come on, what can a hundred dollars be anyway? Five bananas?
yes
Is there a search filter for hardly bought games?
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
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.
I wonder how much of this has to do with the currency change in late 2023. I used to buy lots of tiny indie games, which offered a couple of hours of entertainment, and didn’t cost more than a few cents.
Then they complained to Steam, others abused VPNs, and Steam itself didn’t enforce tying the payment methods to the country, therefore they had a lot of people buying from places like Turkey or Argentina (as in, pretending to be from those places).
But much like the piracy debacle, does someone cheating the price translate as a potential buyer at full US price? I don’t think so. I imagine only a small percentage would have paid full price, and only for big or well promoted games (aka Big Name Devs). I can’t imagine how having a handful of “correct” buyers vs a ton of “incorrect” buyers would tip the scale in favor of the former.
Edit: And for the record, I’m from the LATAM region, so I was buying legitimately.
Another factor is as people’s libraries grow new titles are also competing with past large budget games that now go on discount cheaper than indie games. PC has more games that are backwards compatible compared to consoles, so that’s decades of cheaper games that a new title has to compete against.
ow did they limit it? I still see all the regions in steamdb. I know the exchange rates haven’t been updated in a while so their suggested regional prices haven’t been pretty bad