I think the bad reputation for asset flips is somewhat overblown. Like, of course some slop game is going to use assets but a lot of decent indie games do too. Using assets doesn‘t make a game bad. But yes a lot of games are just low effort bootlegs of whatever is popular right now.
But whats worse are games containing legit malware on Steam. Apparently that is becoming a growing problem.
AI has slop is a problem, and Shovelware has been a problem for decades, basically as long as videogames have existed.
However, a LOT of these cheap and obscure games on steam have more innocuous explanations, with that explanation often being “the dev doesn’t really care about making money”. Perception, for example, is a student project that was released for free and I wouldn’t pay much for anyways, but it was a fun way to spend a couple of hours.
Or when I was in a band, one of the other members was a developer by trade who, as a hobby, connects with a couple of his other friends to develop game that he released on steam. I recorded and produced an EP for that band and we released it for free and we certainly spent more money buying drinks at the bars we played than we were ever paid for playing. I think his game was similar: they charged money for it to cover some of their costs, but he certainly never left his day job.
Or Mind Over Magnet, which was the project of the YouTuber GamerMakersToolkit. The whole thing was a multi-year project where the guy made videos covering the game development process and culminated in the release of the game. The actual business model was based on the video content, while the game itself was just a side piece that was probably profitable, but I doubt made enough profit for him to survive on for years.
The developer of Mind Over Magnet did a post mortem video where he covered among other things how much of gross he kept after paying the artists he hired, paid for things like assets, and after taxes, and it was about 43%. A very lazy search yielded somewhere around $300k in total sales on Steam, meaning he took home $129k. So yeah, not a bad chunk of change, but it’s not exactly changing social class or long term working conditions.
I think it’s more efficient if people get a few hundred dollar boost every week to spend when and wherever they please, rather then stand in line and receive whatever obtuse handout the government has decided they deserve.
Something I tried to do earlier to help with it, in this very channel, was a “Downvote any game you’ve heard of before” thread. It was a nice exercise to help people post odd games no one had heard of.
can’t help but feel like this could be solved by increasing the deposit to a couple thosuand $'s or something.
worst of the shovelware would become unprofitable immediately
Well, that’d mean missing out on some really cool stuff.
Games like Vampire Survivors and Stardew Valley were made by a solo developer. A couple thousand bucks is a LOT of money for some people. I’d hate to have missed out on either of those.
We certainly do need some quality control, but I don’t think the financial route is the way to go.
What is there to be solved? It’s not a physical store with scant storage space. It has been solved by the store algorithm. Games that do well in the first week will rise to the front page and will get recommended to other customers, while crap will basically become invisible. Does it really matter that these crap games exist when you’ll rarely see them and the storage space they take up is insignificant to Valve’s bottom line. Like when was the last time you ever saw shovelware on the front page? If you see shovelware then the algorithm thinks you like that stuff. You can solve that by giving shovel ware in your library low reviews and by curating the queue.
Sure this will hurt some devs who made a hidden gem, but these devs would have failed in the physical retail space as well. Studios have the responsibility to do the leg work of promoting their own game. That’s not Steam’s job. The Steam algorithm will basically give each game some visibility during its first few days of release and if a game can’t generate sales momentum the algorithm will drop it and basically becomes invisible unless you search for it. Games that do well in that period get pushed to the recommendations. And no the threshold isn’t millions in sales it’s basically a couple of thousand copies in the first days.
Raising the fee would hurt devs on a budget, like devs outside high income countries and students.
I think this statistic would be more interesting if it filtered out all of the blatant cash-grab, asset-flip, AI generated shit that makes up a large portion of new releases.
Is it 19,000 releases with 10,000 actual sincere efforts at making a game, or 19,000 releases with 1,000 actual games.
And what’s the average number of reviews for actual games versus garbage?
I don’t disagree. It would require manual labelling by a group of people with enough patience and understanding of gaming to be able to reliably label ~60 new games every day. I’d have thought that the Steam community was large enough to achieve this though.
10 reviews means like 500-1000 sales. The vast majority of people dont leave reviews. Not much, especially for low priced games, but also not nothing. As long as you enjoyed the game making process and didnt invest anything except for time its not really an issue.
10 reviews means the developer has some combination of the following:
friends/family/classmates
developers on the actual game
multiple Steam accounts with the same owner
10 is essentially 0 and cannot be extrapolated into sales.
I agree that if game development is a hobby and not a career, this isn’t a problem for those developers.
I also submit that if you are attempting to make money from your efforts and don’t yet have a following, and can’t afford a marketing budget, and have actually made something unique, interesting, or otherwise worthwhile, it is more difficult to stand out in a market whose signal to noise ratio is continuously and exponentially growing noisier.
Agreed, my first thought was about the stats for Twitch streamers where having more than something like 10 concurrent viewers consistently for a 30 day period puts you in the top 15% of streamers on the platform or whatever. I forget the exact numbers, but it’s something crazy like that.
One of those things people waste energy getting concerned about. Better than highly stringent curation that has no chance in being representative of all different taste/demographics. It’s a more level playing field. Happened to music and books. Then video/movies. Video games followed quickly after. Better than the days of payments for every patch you push through Xbox live/PSN. Better than needing to get 35mm prints and access to theaters
Oh, no! Competition in the games industry causing the slop to fall to the bottom! We better ban steam immediately put everything behind a walled guardian and have “AAA” companies be the only ones allowed to publish! What if the plebs start making money? Then what?
Slop falls to the bottom but I bet a lot of hidden gems do too. The greater volume of games coming out, the harder it’ll be for individual developers to get recognized!
Old school indie developer Jeff Vogel has a whole talk about how difficult it is.
Competition in the games industry causing the slop to fall to the bottom!
Do you really believe that markets and competition creates better products and services? How do you square that with basic observations about how the world is? If success was linked to quality, then Subway would be the worlds best food; Clash of Clans the best video game; and Tesla the best car.
The markets of the world say that Nvidia is worth more than the Pharmaceutical Industry.
How often do people leave reviews? I rarely see a profile with +100 reviews.
I only leave reviews after 100% completion or a lot of time (hundreds of hours) in case of fighting games where sometimes 100% is ridiculously difficult to attain (oh hi, Plus R)
I think the average time between my picking up a game and leaving a review is like 3~12 months. Definitely even more if I’m not vibing with the game.
Same. I’m often in the process of breaking down why I like/dislike the game, what works about it, and what doesn’t as I’m playing. I can’t give honest feedback with incomplete thoughts.
As I recall, its around 5%-20% of players leave a review, usually closer to 5% unless something about the game makes people want to talk about it, for both good and bad.
Speaking only for myself, I only leave a review if I loved or I hated a game. A “meh” game doesn’t get a review. I’d hazard that many people do something similar.
I don’t know if it’s true or not, but I’ve heard a rough proxy for modest success “above breakeven” in the indie sphere is 1,000+ reviews.
The chart doesn’t break out the 1,000+ review count band, but it looks like under 5% of the 19,000 games released in 2025 on Steam were even able to go above 500 review count.
The 1,000+ review count band as a measure of success does make sense in a back of the napkin kind of way.
Assuming 5% of buyers leave a review, that would be 20,000 in sales. At a net unit revenue of $10 (after Steam’s cut and the payment processor), that would be $200 K net revenue.
An unfortunate ‘secret’ for most indie titles is that the vast majority of their sales are on discount, usually during launch or one of the big week long sales. Not a lot of people buy indie games at full sticker price unless its a pretty high quality title.
So your $200K net revenue would be at absolute max, but is realistically ~50-80% of that.
Assuming 5% of buyers leave a review, that would be 20,000 in sales. At a net unit revenue of $10 (after Steam’s cut and the payment processor), that would be $200 K net revenue.
A unit revenue of $10 means your product is going for ~15 base price. I don’t know about you, but I rarely buy stuff above $10 anymore. So like the other guy said, you’re looking at like half of that based on people buying during sales.
Other people have mentioned removing asset flips and AI slop. I’m wondering what this dataset looks like if you remove all of the shitty NSFW games that get shoveled out en masse.
Our first game barely got past 10 reviews in a 2 years, despite real original assets etc. It just didn’t click with people. While ‘filtering out the slop’ will improve the numbers, I’m sure there are many games in a similar boat as ours.
As someone that regularly goes through new releases, I really wish there was a way to filter out all of the slop so that I even see games like yours. I’m sure I miss games I’d enjoy all the time due to the deluge of garbage, it’s a shame.
Haven’t you heard. Indie games have to launch on steam or they fail miserably.
Seriously though. This is why I roll my eyes at people who claim steam makes it breaks these games. Humble bundle? Runs sales events where these games get showcased. Itch.io’s whole schtick is selling indie games.
It’s nice that Valve gives studios a platform to help market their games and all that, and yes, by dint of being one of the largest gaming sale platforms out there launching on steam helps their chances. But most of them weren’t ever gonna reach the success of AAA titles regardless and we pretend that that’s Valve’s fault for reasons I have never understood.
It’s the same problem with each of the online stores including the Nintendo E-Shop. Your game still has to be decent and be marketed to the people who want to play it.
Additionally they have to have time to play it. Which means you’re fighting every other game in the category in order to claim each players time.
There’s a whole lot to making and marketing a successful game at literally every level and not every studio can be a Team Cherry.
Indie games have to launch on steam or they fail miserably. Seriously though. This is why I roll my eyes at people who claim steam makes it breaks these games.
Those two things aren’t opposed though. Launching on Steam doesn’t guarantee success, but I believe what they’re claiming is that not launching on Steam more or less guarantees its failure.
I can definitely understand why not selling a game on the most popular marketplace would detrimentally affect a studios ability to make money.
But a lot of the reason games aren’t successful has as much to do with the quality of the game and the amount of money spent developing it as it does with marketing. And plenty of developers/small indie studios assume that they can ouvert over-stretch themselves monetarily and with other resources like time, and still come out on top because Indies are becoming more popular.
But what it often comes down to is if what you’re selling is worth it to the consumer and they know about it. On steam an indie game is just as likely to get caught up in the influx of games and lost in the noise as it is to get noticed.
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“game” is a big stretch for a lot of the asset flip or AI trash that is currently on steam.
I think the bad reputation for asset flips is somewhat overblown. Like, of course some slop game is going to use assets but a lot of decent indie games do too. Using assets doesn‘t make a game bad. But yes a lot of games are just low effort bootlegs of whatever is popular right now.
But whats worse are games containing legit malware on Steam. Apparently that is becoming a growing problem.
AI has slop is a problem, and Shovelware has been a problem for decades, basically as long as videogames have existed.
However, a LOT of these cheap and obscure games on steam have more innocuous explanations, with that explanation often being “the dev doesn’t really care about making money”. Perception, for example, is a student project that was released for free and I wouldn’t pay much for anyways, but it was a fun way to spend a couple of hours.
Or when I was in a band, one of the other members was a developer by trade who, as a hobby, connects with a couple of his other friends to develop game that he released on steam. I recorded and produced an EP for that band and we released it for free and we certainly spent more money buying drinks at the bars we played than we were ever paid for playing. I think his game was similar: they charged money for it to cover some of their costs, but he certainly never left his day job.
Or Mind Over Magnet, which was the project of the YouTuber GamerMakersToolkit. The whole thing was a multi-year project where the guy made videos covering the game development process and culminated in the release of the game. The actual business model was based on the video content, while the game itself was just a side piece that was probably profitable, but I doubt made enough profit for him to survive on for years.
The developer of Mind Over Magnet did a post mortem video where he covered among other things how much of gross he kept after paying the artists he hired, paid for things like assets, and after taxes, and it was about 43%. A very lazy search yielded somewhere around $300k in total sales on Steam, meaning he took home $129k. So yeah, not a bad chunk of change, but it’s not exactly changing social class or long term working conditions.
Anyone doing a uBlock for Steam?
Augmented Steam has a ton of useful features, including better filters
Steamdb lets you filter out games with less than x reviews which I’ve made liberal use of over the years.
I personally stick to searching by specific tags to find the hidden good stuff.
There’s no downside for consumers, sucks if you are making art for an oversaturated market.
But that’s why artists should get a UBI
When I am supreme overlord, artists will get free food and housing. But like, it’s gonna suck really bad because tortured artists make the best art.
We can just waterboard them
: warms up netti pot:
I am immune to your punishment.
That will be the only access to drinking water
No not UBI, but universal necessities to live. ie food water electricity housing healthcare and for all people not just artists.
UBI is a bandaid solution where money is taken from the government and given to corporations when governments should supply those necessities itself.
Uni has nothing to do with corporations though?
It’s everyone getting enough money to live comfortably
I think it’s more efficient if people get a few hundred dollar boost every week to spend when and wherever they please, rather then stand in line and receive whatever obtuse handout the government has decided they deserve.
Money can be exchanged for needs.
It works fine to distribute resources.
big part of the ones with almost no reviews are such garbage its insulting to even call them games. But i bet there are some gems buried in there too.
Something I tried to do earlier to help with it, in this very channel, was a “Downvote any game you’ve heard of before” thread. It was a nice exercise to help people post odd games no one had heard of.
My game Drone Perspective is one of those. Such a good game, but I am a bit afraid that I can’t turn it around.
Hey that looks good actually. Wishlisted it for when I have more time.
can’t help but feel like this could be solved by increasing the deposit to a couple thosuand $'s or something. worst of the shovelware would become unprofitable immediately
Well, that’d mean missing out on some really cool stuff.
Games like Vampire Survivors and Stardew Valley were made by a solo developer. A couple thousand bucks is a LOT of money for some people. I’d hate to have missed out on either of those.
We certainly do need some quality control, but I don’t think the financial route is the way to go.
it’s a deposit though, you’d get it back pretty quickly if your game is halfway decent
What is there to be solved? It’s not a physical store with scant storage space. It has been solved by the store algorithm. Games that do well in the first week will rise to the front page and will get recommended to other customers, while crap will basically become invisible. Does it really matter that these crap games exist when you’ll rarely see them and the storage space they take up is insignificant to Valve’s bottom line. Like when was the last time you ever saw shovelware on the front page? If you see shovelware then the algorithm thinks you like that stuff. You can solve that by giving shovel ware in your library low reviews and by curating the queue.
Sure this will hurt some devs who made a hidden gem, but these devs would have failed in the physical retail space as well. Studios have the responsibility to do the leg work of promoting their own game. That’s not Steam’s job. The Steam algorithm will basically give each game some visibility during its first few days of release and if a game can’t generate sales momentum the algorithm will drop it and basically becomes invisible unless you search for it. Games that do well in that period get pushed to the recommendations. And no the threshold isn’t millions in sales it’s basically a couple of thousand copies in the first days.
Raising the fee would hurt devs on a budget, like devs outside high income countries and students.
I think this statistic would be more interesting if it filtered out all of the blatant cash-grab, asset-flip, AI generated shit that makes up a large portion of new releases.
Is it 19,000 releases with 10,000 actual sincere efforts at making a game, or 19,000 releases with 1,000 actual games.
And what’s the average number of reviews for actual games versus garbage?
I don’t think that’s trivial to filter.
I don’t disagree. It would require manual labelling by a group of people with enough patience and understanding of gaming to be able to reliably label ~60 new games every day. I’d have thought that the Steam community was large enough to achieve this though.
Shit’s turning into amazon. Lol.
That’s actually more than I thought. I thought about 80% fall into complete oblivion.
This was my initial reaction too. I am making the assumption that less than ten still means not zero.
I rarely leave reviews so I’m surprised that 50% of all releases even see a single one.
10 reviews means like 500-1000 sales. The vast majority of people dont leave reviews. Not much, especially for low priced games, but also not nothing. As long as you enjoyed the game making process and didnt invest anything except for time its not really an issue.
10 reviews means the developer has some combination of the following:
10 is essentially 0 and cannot be extrapolated into sales.
I agree that if game development is a hobby and not a career, this isn’t a problem for those developers.
I also submit that if you are attempting to make money from your efforts and don’t yet have a following, and can’t afford a marketing budget, and have actually made something unique, interesting, or otherwise worthwhile, it is more difficult to stand out in a market whose signal to noise ratio is continuously and exponentially growing noisier.
10 reviews is basically statistical noise.
Agreed, my first thought was about the stats for Twitch streamers where having more than something like 10 concurrent viewers consistently for a 30 day period puts you in the top 15% of streamers on the platform or whatever. I forget the exact numbers, but it’s something crazy like that.
One of those things people waste energy getting concerned about. Better than highly stringent curation that has no chance in being representative of all different taste/demographics. It’s a more level playing field. Happened to music and books. Then video/movies. Video games followed quickly after. Better than the days of payments for every patch you push through Xbox live/PSN. Better than needing to get 35mm prints and access to theaters
Oh, no! Competition in the games industry causing the slop to fall to the bottom! We better ban steam immediately put everything behind a walled guardian and have “AAA” companies be the only ones allowed to publish! What if the plebs start making money? Then what?
Slop falls to the bottom but I bet a lot of hidden gems do too. The greater volume of games coming out, the harder it’ll be for individual developers to get recognized!
Old school indie developer Jeff Vogel has a whole talk about how difficult it is.
Do you really believe that markets and competition creates better products and services? How do you square that with basic observations about how the world is? If success was linked to quality, then Subway would be the worlds best food; Clash of Clans the best video game; and Tesla the best car.
The markets of the world say that Nvidia is worth more than the Pharmaceutical Industry.
How often do people leave reviews? I rarely see a profile with +100 reviews.
I only leave reviews after 100% completion or a lot of time (hundreds of hours) in case of fighting games where sometimes 100% is ridiculously difficult to attain (oh hi, Plus R)
I think the average time between my picking up a game and leaving a review is like 3~12 months. Definitely even more if I’m not vibing with the game.
I’ll click the thumbs up button then get intimidated by the text box that pops up. I’m not mentally prepared to give out a useful review.
Same. I’m often in the process of breaking down why I like/dislike the game, what works about it, and what doesn’t as I’m playing. I can’t give honest feedback with incomplete thoughts.
I just say “I like it”, it’s not very helpful but at least it counts for the rating
As I recall, its around 5%-20% of players leave a review, usually closer to 5% unless something about the game makes people want to talk about it, for both good and bad.
Speaking only for myself, I only leave a review if I loved or I hated a game. A “meh” game doesn’t get a review. I’d hazard that many people do something similar.
I recall an estimation that about 1/20 players leave a review, but this probably depends a lot on genre and other factors.
I don’t know if it’s true or not, but I’ve heard a rough proxy for modest success “above breakeven” in the indie sphere is 1,000+ reviews.
The chart doesn’t break out the 1,000+ review count band, but it looks like under 5% of the 19,000 games released in 2025 on Steam were even able to go above 500 review count.
The 1,000+ review count band as a measure of success does make sense in a back of the napkin kind of way.
Assuming 5% of buyers leave a review, that would be 20,000 in sales. At a net unit revenue of $10 (after Steam’s cut and the payment processor), that would be $200 K net revenue.
An unfortunate ‘secret’ for most indie titles is that the vast majority of their sales are on discount, usually during launch or one of the big week long sales. Not a lot of people buy indie games at full sticker price unless its a pretty high quality title.
So your $200K net revenue would be at absolute max, but is realistically ~50-80% of that.
That’s fair. A blended net revenue per unit figure of $10 might actually be high.
A unit revenue of $10 means your product is going for ~15 base price. I don’t know about you, but I rarely buy stuff above $10 anymore. So like the other guy said, you’re looking at like half of that based on people buying during sales.
Other people have mentioned removing asset flips and AI slop. I’m wondering what this dataset looks like if you remove all of the shitty NSFW games that get shoveled out en masse.
@Assassassin @Agent_Karyo
Our first game barely got past 10 reviews in a 2 years, despite real original assets etc. It just didn’t click with people. While ‘filtering out the slop’ will improve the numbers, I’m sure there are many games in a similar boat as ours.
As someone that regularly goes through new releases, I really wish there was a way to filter out all of the slop so that I even see games like yours. I’m sure I miss games I’d enjoy all the time due to the deluge of garbage, it’s a shame.
Haven’t you heard. Indie games have to launch on steam or they fail miserably.
Seriously though. This is why I roll my eyes at people who claim steam makes it breaks these games. Humble bundle? Runs sales events where these games get showcased. Itch.io’s whole schtick is selling indie games.
It’s nice that Valve gives studios a platform to help market their games and all that, and yes, by dint of being one of the largest gaming sale platforms out there launching on steam helps their chances. But most of them weren’t ever gonna reach the success of AAA titles regardless and we pretend that that’s Valve’s fault for reasons I have never understood.
It’s the same problem with each of the online stores including the Nintendo E-Shop. Your game still has to be decent and be marketed to the people who want to play it.
Additionally they have to have time to play it. Which means you’re fighting every other game in the category in order to claim each players time.
There’s a whole lot to making and marketing a successful game at literally every level and not every studio can be a Team Cherry.
Those two things aren’t opposed though. Launching on Steam doesn’t guarantee success, but I believe what they’re claiming is that not launching on Steam more or less guarantees its failure.
I can definitely understand why not selling a game on the most popular marketplace would detrimentally affect a studios ability to make money.
But a lot of the reason games aren’t successful has as much to do with the quality of the game and the amount of money spent developing it as it does with marketing. And plenty of developers/small indie studios assume that they can
ouvertover-stretch themselves monetarily and with other resources like time, and still come out on top because Indies are becoming more popular.But what it often comes down to is if what you’re selling is worth it to the consumer and they know about it. On steam an indie game is just as likely to get caught up in the influx of games and lost in the noise as it is to get noticed.