Comment on Behold, "the whole story of Steam's economy in one picture": the top 1% of games earn 84.5% of estimated revenue, and most games barely make anything

• Adderbox76@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

  I’m not defending anybody.

  I’m saying that if you’re an author (for example) that wants to self publish instead of trying to find a big publisher to accept your manuscript, what are you going to do? Email a copy to anyone who wants to buy it? No…of course not. Similarly, if you’re a dev who wants to release a game without going through a big publisher like Activision or Bethesda or whatever…what are you going to do? Other than Steam and Itch.io, there aren’t many places to do that.

  Does it suck? Yes. But the reality is that if we want to get our work out into the public, regardless of monetary concerns, we have to roll around in one mud puddle or another. Our only choice (until that changes) is to choose how deep of a puddle we choose.

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  • brachiosaurus@mander.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    if you’re a dev who wants to release a game without going through a big publisher like Activision or Bethesda or whatever…what are you going to do?

    I write about it here on lemmy

    Other than Steam and Itch.io, there aren’t many places to do that.

    Why there aren’t many places to do that? How was it in the past? What changed? How you can improve that?

    Does it suck? Yes. But the reality is that if we want to get our work out into the public, regardless of monetary concerns, we have to roll around in one mud puddle or another.

    To me it sounds like the reality is that you are choosing visibility over doing what is good

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    • imetators@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

      So, choosing what’s good and losing visibility would en me up as a non-visible altruist.

      Nobody would buy a book from a guy on a street. They’d go to a book store that is owned by a business man who offers books in exchange for money that he pays for the rent of the book store, for the salary of the staff and for himself.

      You can, of course, sell on the street. But how much do you think you would sell just in the street compared to a publisher or just a random book store that asked you to pay for them to take some bookshelf space?

      Money is where people are. Nobody goes on the streets to buy books. Peoole go to a book store to have variety of choices and to find something that they are interested in. Imagine you’re interested in sci-fi and you’d have to run around the city to find a street book vendor that wrote his sci-fi novel just fo sind out his novel is crap?

      You’d go to a book store 99.99%of the time.

      Now change “book” to “game”. See the point?

      And, if we talk about decentralized. That might as well mean “free”. If the community holds all the games, devs are paid but community is left aside?

      Lemmy doesn’t earn money. Maybe only donations. If we sell games based on donations to the service, who decides which dev gets paid and how much? In other words, this would be close to “free to play, ingame purchases” than to an actual game store.

      BTW, some devs already locked their games to their own stores so here is this “street book vendor” type devs (more like publishers) that sell their games only there. But their service is crap, and everyone wants to buy in steam. 🤷

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      • brachiosaurus@mander.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

        Nobody would buy a book from a guy on a street. They’d go to a book store that is owned by a business man who offers books in exchange for money that he pays for the rent of the book store, for the salary of the staff and for himself.

        says the guy on dbzer0

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