That seems like a good distribution for digital art and entertainment.
Gamedev is a pipe dream folks, meant to create steady labor force for publishers to squeeze work from for profit because they fire you after your game gets released, even if it does well.
By the way, Valve can do more here. This is something they can choose to invest more in. People don’t have to be satisfied with the effort Valve has made so far and can instead choose to expect more.
Indie games pump Valve’s stock—they should get some profit sharing even if they don’t sell IMO but that’s just me. Like a community dividend.
And what percent of the “games that barely make anything” are asset flips and zero-effort slop? Like, “percent of new games that are trash” is going to be very high when the barrier to entry is “pay Valve $100 once”. This is a total junk statistic.
Like, store A where you can buy 100 good games and 1000 asset flips will score 10x better on this un-metric than store B where you can buy 10000 good games and a million asset flips. And yet nobody would ever argue that store A is a better store.
AAA titles made by corporations are the trashiest of them all
AAA titles made by corporations
arebecame the trashiest of them allBe fair. It was better many moons ago. And still valid for (many) non-US AAA.
And the smallest in volume. The number of games on Steam that cost a million dollars or more to make (owned by shareholder value generators) is much lower than other types. For every one Assassin’s Creed there are ten Peaks and Slay the Spires and lower quality “real, good indie games”. And for every real, good indie game there’s a hundred asset flips and ai slop “games”.
I don’t see how that is “steam” economy.
That’s just economy when you try to sell anything, specially anything art related.
If you made any art and try to sell it in any store the most probably amount of money made is the same number in every currency.
I don’t see how that is “steam” economy.
Valve is a for profit company that decides which games to advertise.
Wouldn’t they just advertise whatever makes them the most money, which would be the games people want to buy? I don’t see this as being radically different from how games were before steam was popular.
The advertisement algorithm is pretty much understood. It depends on wishlist and first day sales.
It’s not like Gabe, or anyone, is sitting there deciding which game gets advertised and which game isn’t. As far as algorithms go, steam one is pretty straightforward and fair afaik.
It’s not like Gabe, or anyone, is sitting there deciding which game gets advertised and which game isn’t.
They are indeed in charge of the ads on their website, not only they can decide what gets featured in ads but they also design the website page and the ads placement as they like.
Like, lots of games just aren’t very good, and lots of games are pretty niche. If you want to make a lot of money in the games industry, selling an indie game on steam is not the way. make a preditory mobile game instead.
Try to say anything bad about the all-father and you will be flooded in downvotes …
I’d argue that that is entirely a good thing overall.
It means that Steam is very open to Indie devs (something we already know) that don’t make as much money but are passion projects for the creators.
If they’re making enough from the…let’s call them prestige titles…to be able to afford to give indie devs a place to host their passion projects and maybe get more eyes on it, than I see no problem with that.
No idie dev is going into it thinking they’re going to be next giant thing. They just want to share their work and maybe make a few bucks. And Steam gives them that, PLUS the chance that maybe they’ll be a Rimworld or a Hollow Knight; something that sparks a giant success for them.
I’m not sure how they started, but Brotato came from a very small studio, and rose up to top-played on Steam Deck and some other charts. It made their creators a lot of money, because they were lucky, sure, but also because they made a very good game and had a platform to sell it from.
As far as I know, Valve’s monetisation scheme for developers is also quite fair. I might be one of those fanboys, but I think they deserve it to some extent. There’s much worse players out there, and with the money Valve is making and the market share they have now, they could absolutely be one of the bad ones and not care.
If they’re making enough from the…let’s call them prestige titles…to be able to afford to give indie devs a place to host their passion projects and maybe get more eyes on it, than I see no problem with that.
Valve is a for profit company, you have to pay to upload your games there and they take a cut of any sale. The article literally say that most games don’t make anything.
Sure. You have to rent a stall at farmer’s market if you want to sell your corn, too instead of selling it to a larger distributor. No body is saying otherwise.
The point is that having Steam as an option as an indie dev rather than having to connect to a larger publisher in order to get your work out there, is a good thing. The fact that some titles don’t make money isn’t part of it. It’s the fact that Steam at least allows these devs to cut out the middle man (the publisher). Maybe it’ll work and be a hit. Maybe it won’t. But at least they have the option to try.
No dev should consider releasing their game on the private store/platform of an evil corporation that promotes gambling to kids and who’s ceo is a billionare with a fleet of megayachts. Many devs have no better option because they are trying to make a living and catch up with life (unlike valve ceo who makes billions through questionable practices). If the market is so much centralized around certain publishers and distribuition platforms you can thank greedy corporations that for decades shaped the system to be what it is.
So in your mind, no one who is self-publishing a book should put it on Amazon. No one who is trying to sell their product on etsy should use PayPal. No one who is just trying to get rid of a few things around the house should use Facebook Marketplace… etc…
Welcome to reality. Sometimes the best of a bunch of bad options has to do. Should these companies all be put int he ground. Yes. But if we let perfect be the enemy of good, we never make any progress.
Behold the whole story of every economy
Pareto principle at work
Hey op, I see a lot of your arguments in the comments.
I have a challenge.
Name 5 things Valve could implement to change this that would not be to the detriment of indie devs.
This is not a joke. You have opinions. I want to hear them.
I’m also curious (since I see you pushing a decentralized market place in the comments), how you think a decentralized marketplace would function and what would be better about it.
No solution, only angry >:(
Name 5 things Valve could implement to change this that would not be to the detriment of indie devs.
Valve is a for profit company and their main goal is to boost their profits to the roof (valve ceo owns an entire fleet of megayachts). They work to boost their sales not to help other people, when their salesmen lay down 5 things they could implement on the platform their main objective is to do business. Anything you implement that benefit users and devs rather than the already full valve wallet would be a positive change.
The first thing you want to implement is a less greedy and profits drive mentality, the second thing they could implement is the source code of their platform. They could implement exact sales data for each game and transparency reports on their profits, they could implement a mastodon social page and they could implement disclaimers on AAA titles warning people they are buying games from evil corporations.
So just to recap you want valve to become a non profit, and open source their platform? It seems like you’re really mad at capitalism, and just chose to lash out at valve.
They could operate in a much more anti consumer way, like other game companies (Epic), they could remove user reviews, they could get rid of the ability for games to be added to the store without a publisher, but they don’t.
You are on a free, open source and decentralized platform that share nothing with steam. This is indeed the right place where to lash out at evil corporations like valve and their billionaires ceos
The main problem I see with this is that game devs are trying to use capitalism to make money. So what you’re saying is, it’s alright for game devs, but not for store fronts.
That doesn’t make sense to me.
Additionally though, of the major gaming retailers, Valve has the least predatory model (I’m not counting smaller game retailers in this because we need to be honest about the fact that they aren’t competing in the market with Valve as far as what they offer devs).
Did you take into account the reasons that game devs choose Valve over other retailers like GOG? Or the fact that very often game devs will use Valve, GOG and other gaming retailers?
You didn’t give any specifics in your answer to me and honestly I have to wonder if you even know where the majority of Valves money comes from.
Follow-up question.
How does the consumer benefit from and why should they switch to a different retailer than Valve’s Steam? What is the benefit of a fediverse style retailer and how does it work?
I’m one of those that makes most of the money off a different platform. I’m not making it because the platform is helping me. It’s inertia. I’m the best in my category and so I dominate. Same for these games.
I believe that this is as much about game quality, over saturation, and marketing/inertia as it is about Valve in general, but I’m trying to understand what they think (based on the contents of the article) can be done to fix this problem for game devs.
Okay, but explain how consumer preferences are somehow Steam’s fault?
If you told me it was that way because Steam was boosting AAA games and suppressing indie titles, then okay, you have a valid reason to criticize Steam for that, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.
Okay, but explain how consumer preferences are somehow Steam’s fault?
Valve is a for profit company, they make money by advertising games and selling them, their website is literally an ad shelf.
doesn’t seem to be the case.
It seem the case to me that they are advertising the shit out of certain games with ads as big as the entire screen.
“Walmart advertises some of the things they sell, but never advertise the off brand water” ok, and???
Walmart and valve are two corporations.
Steam is gross, popularized the “own nothing” model (along with loot boxes), and just has a bunch of (very passionate) fanboys because it’s the least gross option (barring gog, which they often conveniently ignore), but this is more a problem of publishers consolidating and buying studios, giving some games obscene marketing budgets. The overwhelming majority of games are released by people whose marketing amounts to making (not promoted) social media posts on an account no one follows. Meanwhile Ubisoft, Microsoft, take two, etc have the capital and connections to dominate the press, social media, YouTube, etc
Best game ever won’t make a dime if no one knows about it. Even if you can get some pull it’s hard to compete with the game that everyone is talking about. That game is also probably more expensive, which theoretically gives you an edge, but in practice much of the time probably means your game isn’t getting purchased if the consumer is also hyped about gta6 or whatever
One measure they could take is to significantly lower or even eliminate their cut for niche games. They currently do the opposite, the largest cut (30%) comes in until your game makes 10 million, then progressively gets lower (25% 10-50m, 20% 50+m). A lower bracket that says like, 0 to 10% if your game makes under 300k or whatever. Based on this article they clearly make the majority of their revenue from heavy hitters so this would barely impact them
Valve is a for profit private company, the platform and the ads on steam are designed to boost their profits not to promote other people work. If you go on steam website right now you will see ads for 1% games as big as the entire page.
Those things are not mutually exclusive?
Candy Crush makes about a billion dollars a year. GTA V makes about 500 million from selling shark cards. Whatever happening at the steam store to warrant an article like this isn’t on steam, its 100% on consumers being dumbasses.
It’s also just the fact that some games are better than others. For every Factorio and Hollow Knight, there are a hundred other games that aren’t as good that significantly less people buy.
It’s also on many people wanting to play AAA games and there not being many good AAA games so everyone plays the same few good ones
It’s really sad to see in this place among others so many people defending a for profit corporation that belongs to a billionare and his centralized closed third party software launcher. Anyone arguing this is the law of nature should take a break from videogames and go outside to enjoy nature.
Name one other company that’s doing more for open source and open platforms than Valve.
They’ve helped push gaming on Linux from a very niche process to basically having Windows native games work better on Linux than on Windows. They do this via Proton which they upstream into WINE (all open source and free to use by anyone).
They’ve silently funded an x86 to ARM emulator for years and it’s entirely open source (anyone can use it).
The Steam client is a 1st class citizen on Linux. It doesn’t matter that their client is closed source, because all the tools they employ is open source. The client is mostly just the store portion of their stuff. The actual tools that run the games are open source.
They’re also the only major games store that supports Linux natively (itch.io exists, and they’re great, but Steam is so much bigger).
Name a company that does even half of that. Just one company.
Name one other company that’s doing more for open source and open platforms than Valve.
Any non profit company who’s products isn’t a proprietary third party software launcher.
They’ve helped push gaming on Linux from a very niche process to basically having Windows native games work better on Linux than on Windows.
They have built a semi-monopoly on videogames relying for two decades on closed source products and windows, they are now looking at the linux share because microsoft in the past years made bullish acquisitions in the videogames industry.
The Steam client is a 1st class citizen on Linux. It doesn’t matter that their client is closed source, because all the tools they employ is open source.
If the client doesn’t matter that much that’s even more reasons to release the source code.
Name a company that does even half of that. Just one company.
companies usually make money, non profit organizations help people
Any non profit company who’s products isn’t a proprietary third party software launcher.
You’re being disingenuous. You know full well the context of the argument precludes non-profits.
They have built a semi-monopoly on videogames relying for two decades on closed source products and windows, they are now looking at the linux share because microsoft in the past years made bullish acquisitions in the videogames industry.
You might want to check your math on that. Steam on Windows was originally released in 2003, and released on Linux in 2013.
And the reason for their interest has nothing to do with Microsoft’s game studio acquisitions, and everything to do with Microsoft’s attempts to lock down the Windows ecosystem back in the Windows 8/RT days.
If the client doesn’t matter that much that’s even more reasons to release the source code.
No one said it doesn’t matter. It’s their software/platform/service. They can do whatever they want, and it’s their right to do so. If you don’t want to use their platform, you don’t have to.
companies usually make money, non profit organizations help people
Usually. But the fact that Valve’s interests align with the benefits of its userbase isn’t a bad thing. Making money isn’t a crime, and making money while building a system people like also isn’t a bad thing.
You seem to have a strange hatred towards Valve for simply existing. Are you friends with Tim Sweeney or something?
In a vacuum it sucks, but we’re grading on a curve here. The nice thing about valve is that it’s asleep at the wheel. Yes they’re making ridiculous amounts of money but they could be making more if they decided to “develop” their platform, and it would be bad for everyone. Cthulhu sleeps and I for one would prefer the situation continue.
As for the billionaire…. I have no strong opinion about him, but again we’re grading on a curve here, it’s amazing how few countries he’s ruined or pedos he’s been in photos with, I have limited hate to spread around and I don’t have sufficient justification to smear any on him.
It reminds me of the manufactured hate on Taylor Swift.
Yea, she’s rich; but being rich alone, and using a plane, is not the direct cause of everyone’s misery. It’s often a red flag, yes, and can point to other things. We can argue they should pay more taxes, but even more we argue that they shouldn’t have intense control over our politics. And from what I see, Gabe and Swift don’t.
Yeah, if I had a lot of money, I’d probably buy a boat. Probably not 20 or whatever, but idk. I’d probably fly a lot of places. Probably not that many, but idk. Regardless, I 100% still would not traffic or rape children. Just the kind of guy I am, I guess.
I really dont get this, there have been and still are things you can very much criticise valve for but people come up with the most insane shit to criticise them for. “Uhh yeah this problem affecting the whole game industry is steams fault”. Also the top 1% are prolly aldo much much more expensive to produce so i dont think its as bad as it sounds at first but yeah.
Barely make anything compared to multi million companies
Solo dev games can make a fraction of what those giant games and the dev can live a very comfortable life. Etc: balatro
Very pointless article.
But that’s the thing. It’s incredibly rare that a indie game becomes successful enough to sustain even a single developer. It’s like with every other entertainment industry. YouTube, OF, Twitch, TikTok, you are competing with millions of other people in exactly the same situation as you. I think it’s OF where you need to be in the top 25% to earn $1k per year.
Hard work and clever marketing can improve your chances of a success, but you still need to be extremely lucky to be noticed enough to make a living out of it.
I remember this talk about a developer making a living as a game dev. Not by making inspiring or “good” games, but by pretty much endlessly reskinning solitare games.
Have you ever considered the fact that these games suck?
Talking about statistics is not pointless, it’s quite interesting sometimes even.
Games like Balatro or Stardew Valley are absolute unicorns. Most smaller teams and solo devs that have a constant stream of some revenue through Steam need to work on the side to earn a living.
The point they’re making is pointless. Should have clarified my self better. I think this is an issue of behemoth companies are eating the big chunk of market and not leaving anything for the smaller creators to make a living. Same like McDonald’s is everywhere squishing smaller burger shops.
This a market problem not steam. The article points it like it’s steam’s fault. IMHO steam does its best to support indie devs. they even patch their games so they’d have a smooth release (sorry its a Reddit link)
deleted by creator
