So what? The vast majority of games released on Steam are either hobby or student projects or just first time devs’ shitty pixel platformer. Many are low effort products, Steam will not even give those games “shelve space”. The algorithm will based on pre launch and launch metrics decide if it should push the game in front of customers in the recommendation sections of the store. If a game can’t even move the needle a bit after launch Steam will blackhole the game and basically make it invisible in the store unless a customer searches for it. Because even though it’s a virtual store, “shelve space” aka the recommendation section is still scarce.
The hidden gem games on Steam are rare. Every time I watch a dev’s postmortem who talks about how little they sold on Youtube I’m rarely surprised when I see the game.
Also Steam generates around $10+ Billion in revenue in a year. So the other games generate around $2 Billion. If that is generated by 2000 games that still averages to a million a game.
This isn’t the shocking statement they think it is.
I, for one, think Steam deserves a 30% cut of game revenue for doing literally nothing.
That’s basically the story of the whole economy.
Podcasts, music, film, paintings, novels…Linux distributions, ice cream flavor sales…literally everything.
Upvotes on lemmy posts…
That’s basically how art and media have always worked. This isn’t a function of Steam, or even the modern economy.
I bet if you removed the top 100 games from this it would look a lot more fair. Just looking at this chart there are a ton of games making 10k+
Jesus, the gamesradar site is absolute ass
The data: https://weloveit.io/developers/steam-revenue-report/
not that I like it, but isn’t it how the current economy works across most fields?
A lot more than just the economy, it’s like a law of nature. Even language itself obeys it
Exactly. I think you’re referring to the Pareto distribution and/or Zipf’s law
OP, can you link the original research? It’s an excellent site:
It is not news to me that a handful of games have the most players, also considering people put low effort garbage on all stores constantly I don’t think the bottom 90% deserve anything
A lot of games on Steam hold zero interest to me. AI is just the newest form of slop. Beyond that what I see is a hell of a lot more games are being released in the last 4 years. That means more competition but also many have not been around long enough to build up over time revenue. To a certain extent you are comparing life time revenue to launch revenue. On AAA that probably doesn’t matter as much but on the lesser hyped indy games I think it would be an important distinction.
I think its unfortunate because there’s a lot of games that fall into that next ~15-25% that are decently good games (though sometimes flawed) but won’t make enough to let the developers survive a second game.
That being said I don’t think there is a particularly easy solution, and to Valve’s credit, they have tried unique approaches to combat this, but it’s still a problem.
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.
Pareto principle writ large.
That or Sturgeon’s law.
Did they include AI slop, dogshit mobile game ports, low effort games, and the like in the dataset? If so, I’m not surprised.
Is this presented as a bad thing?
It’s certainly not a good thing for startup indie devs putting months of work into a project.
its indicative of accessibility for startups. the way a company would change the metric is not gatekeep the smallfry.
Or promote new and interesting works as opposed to maximising profit by promoting established studios and games with already high levels of prestige.
im surprised they do promotion for free honestly but I doubt it would have much of an effect but not being so accessible to indie would make them look a lot better for articles like this.
What kind of store doesn’t do promotion? What universe do you live in for promotion to have no effect?
Many stores the producers bring their things in. It was not uncommon to get stuff from them to put up but the store itself generally did not make it. They just put up what they get. I don’t know what universe you live in but that is how mine has in meat space where you are making the comaparison. Promotions were usually more and bigger for the big guys. the guy who sold his homemade stuff maybe had a bit of space by the register.
