Jesus, the gamesradar site is absolute ass
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
Submitted 2 weeks ago by brachiosaurus@mander.xyz to games@lemmy.world
Comments
PhobosAnomaly@feddit.uk 2 weeks ago
nothingcorporate@lemmy.today 2 weeks ago
The top 10% of games make 98.80% of all revenue. Woof.
jumping_redditor@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
almost suprised its that low, but I suppose “sex with hitler 2” has some audience
geekwithsoul@piefed.social 2 weeks ago
That’s basically how art and media have always worked. This isn’t a function of Steam, or even the modern economy.
brachiosaurus@mander.xyz 2 weeks ago
That’s basically how art and media have always worked.
No, that’s how advertising has always work.
geekwithsoul@piefed.social 2 weeks ago
There is always going to be more art produced than people want to buy - nothing Valve can do to change that. Hell, it doesn’t even require capitalism - a similar ratio was seen when most art was produced via patronage half a millennia ago. If anything, Steam with whatever faults it has, democratizes it more by making it easier to discover niche stuff with limited appeal.
EarMaster@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
So, yes?
SkunkWorkz@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
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.
gothic_lemons@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Also don’t forget all the shovelware low effort games for farming “achievements” achievements
BlaestEgnen@feddit.dk 2 weeks ago
1 in 11 games released last year has 0 reviews.
~21.500 titles released in 2025, we’ve seen more than 16.000 games released this year so it will once again break a new record for titles released in a year.
SkunkWorkz@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
That data also shows which games never got out of the “limited game status”. Around 16200 had the limited games status. Meaning these games were not making enough money or nothing at all and had not enough player engagement to unlock profile features.
If you look at the numbers of games that unlocked profile features the growth is much lower. Those are the numbers that matter anyway. 5000 games made actual money. And if we apply the Pareto principle than a thousand games made the vast majority of the revenue that year.
brachiosaurus@mander.xyz 2 weeks ago
So what?
So if you release a game on steam not only you are promoting a centralized closed platform owned by a billionare but there’s a good chance you are not getting much in return.
SkunkWorkz@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Good chance if your game didn’t do well on Steam that you didn’t make a good game that has high product-market fit in the first place and didn’t promote it properly. We are now in an era where indie devs have become millionaires from their games. And I’m not just talking about Edmund McMillen and Johnathan Blow. Go back to the days of brick and mortar retail and that was nigh impossible when a small studio would earn pennies on the dollar for every sold unit.
halfapage@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
[deleted]mfed1122@discuss.tchncs.de 2 weeks ago
A lot more than just the economy, it’s like a law of nature. Even language itself obeys it
LemmyPlaceDN@europe.pub 2 weeks ago
Ecactly, I think you’re referring to the Pareto distribution and/or Zipf’s law
brachiosaurus@mander.xyz 2 weeks ago
A centralized third party software launcher that sponsor certain games over others follow the law of greedyness not the law of nature.
molten@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Misleading. There is so much slop made from free assets just thrown together or AI programmed messes and such on steam that it should read “little more than 1% of games on steam are worth your time” indie devs get a decent amount of love, especially at launch. But steam has such a backlog of games available that it gets pretty wild. If we’re counting DLCs, OSTs, and games, I’m really not surprised.
SupraMario@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Yea the amount of shovelware and AI shit that’s put on the platform is massive. Steam just does a really good job keeping that shit from taking over your front store page… unlike the playstore…dunno how it is on iOS…
dreamkeeper@literature.cafe 2 weeks ago
If steam were doing a “really good job,” none of the garbage would be on the store in the first place.
raze2012@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
It seems that’s partially taken into account:
New analysis of 99,206 Steam games illustrates just how extreme the economics can be on Valve’s PC gaming emporium
Over 8,000 paid games analyzed never received a single Steam review
This report also only looks at premium games, meaning free-to-play giants like Valve’s Counter-Strike are left out, as are “non-game software, adult-only titles and unreleased entries.” The list of 99,206 was selected from a base of 136,281.
The only caveat is that revenue is estimated, so there can be big swings in the data.
The standard multiplier here is 35, so this research assumes one Steam review is worth 35 sales at a game’s current listed price, though you can also use a more “conservative” 20 or “generous” 50 in the report’s impressive graphs.
pory@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
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.
CaptPretentious@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I don’t know if you consider them “asset flips” or not. But the number of anime/furry porn “puzzle” games released every single day, has to be throwing off the numbers.
gwl@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 weeks ago
An asset flip imo is anything where it’s basically identical to another game but with different art assets
brachiosaurus@mander.xyz 2 weeks ago
AAA titles made by corporations are the trashiest of them all
pory@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
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”.
Dyskolos@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
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.
gandalf_der_13te@feddit.org 2 weeks ago
And yet nobody would ever argue that store A is a better store.
apple begs to differ
pory@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Apple’s customers don’t get a choice of stores in the first place.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
And yet nobody would ever argue that store A is a better store.
I would argue it. Store B is just Amazon. They’re the most successful retailer on the planet.
brucethemoose@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
OP, can you link the original research? It’s an excellent site:
lemmelemmy@feddit.org 2 weeks ago
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
creamfresh@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
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.
lemmelemmy@feddit.org 2 weeks ago
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)
HereIAm@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
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.
architect@thelemmy.club 2 weeks ago
Have you ever considered the fact that these games suck?
AI_toothbrush@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
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.
daniskarma@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
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.
brachiosaurus@mander.xyz 2 weeks ago
I don’t see how that is “steam” economy.
Valve is a for profit company that decides which games to advertise.
daniskarma@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
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.
matcha_addict@lemy.lol 2 weeks ago
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.
atrielienz@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
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.
Soggy@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
No solution, only angry >:(
architect@thelemmy.club 2 weeks ago
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.
atrielienz@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
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.
brachiosaurus@mander.xyz 2 weeks ago
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.
ExperiencedWinter@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
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.
Honytawk@discuss.tchncs.de 2 weeks ago
I mean, they could start with not asking 30% of the revenue when you sell less than a million or so units.
Lyricism6055@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
It costs a LOT to build a global cdn with the uptime steam has. That 30% is totally justified as a platform fee imo
Especially now with cloud storage and software development costs being so high.
I mean I see your point for sure, but I also see why consistency matters too. Why would valve “punish” someone for doing well? Those big titles are also great for revenue on their side too so honestly selling more units would be even more justifiable to lower the revenue split (from a business perspective on valves side)
Idk. Just thinking out loud I guess.
atrielienz@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Would a decentralized version of Steam do that?
Is that 30% the bulk of Valve’s profit?
What do Indie developers get in exchange for Valve’s 30% cut on Steam that they don’t get elsewhere that charges 30% or charges less of a percentage?
So could physical retailers, so how’s that working out?
I’m not going to say they can’t do that. It’s not a bad suggestion but it seems to be suggested continually in a vacuum without considering other factors.
MolochAlter@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Pareto principle writ large.
That or Sturgeon’s law.
spaceracoon@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
Really topics against Steam are getting ridiculous.
Like ok. Is Steam supposed to force players to buy shit games too so that the distribution curve flattens?
I’m gonna pump so many AI shit games so I can get my fair share 🥰
brachiosaurus@mander.xyz 2 weeks ago
Really topics against Steam are getting ridiculous.
Less ridiculous than the people defending a corporation who makes money promoting gambling to kids and that is owned by a billionare with multiple private yachts
MolochAlter@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Nah sorry, your fixation on the yachts is still weirder.
Like, shoot me if I ever give that much of a fuck about how people spend their money, y’all are just fucking envious internet town gossips complaining the neighbours got a bigger car again this year while you <insert boring struggle of the day here>.
Mind your own pocket, let Gabe worry about his.
yermaw@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
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.
jumping_redditor@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
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
RamRabbit@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
It’s also just the fact that some games are better than others. For every Factorio and Hollow Knight, there are a thousand other games that aren’t nearly as good that significantly less people buy.
Aeder@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Did they include AI slop, dogshit mobile game ports, low effort games, and the like in the dataset? If so, I’m not surprised.
newthrowaway20@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
This isn’t the shocking statement they think it is.
dudeface@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
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
RedFrank24@piefed.social 2 weeks ago
As you can see from about 2020 onwards, there was an absolute DELUGE of trash games. Of course the majority of games aren’t going to make anything, Steam makes zero effort to curate anything. A thousand games can get released per day and the vast vast majority of them you never even notice.
imetators@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
At a current year’s rate it is around 66 games released A DAY. Nobody has time for that. Nor money. And FUCKING CERTAINLY no will to play asset flips and Ai slop.
If any of those 66 games would be good…
Adderbox76@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
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.
verifiedbyme@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
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, their monetisation scheme is also quite fair. I might be one of those fanboys, but I think Valve deserves it to some extent. There’s much worse players out there, and with the money they are making and the market share they have now, they could absolutely be one of the bad ones and not care.
Rooster326@programming.dev 2 weeks ago
Is it luck though?
It’s hard to make a game. It’s much harder to make a good game that pushes all the right buttons.
I play some of these games that probably make well under average, and there are very distinct reasons why they didn’t take off.
brachiosaurus@mander.xyz 2 weeks ago
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.
Adderbox76@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
Sure. You have to rent a stall at farmer’s market if you want to sell your corn, too. 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.
Rooster326@programming.dev 2 weeks ago
No idie dev is going into it thinking they’re going to be next giant thing
I would argue that a significant amount of them are but that’s not the point.
justdaveisfine@piefed.social 2 weeks ago
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.
southernwolf@pawb.social 2 weeks ago
It’s called Zipf’s Law and it’s a fundamental statistical probability formula found in many, many things, from languages to distribution curves.
VSauce had a good video covering this too: www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCn8zs912OE
Sour_Kabos@reddthat.com 2 weeks ago
That’s art for you. Music, fine art etc I’d guess is even more lopsided.
HubertManne@piefed.social 2 weeks ago
Is this presented as a bad thing?
Furbag@pawb.social 2 weeks ago
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.
oyzmo@piefed.social 2 weeks ago
Would think that could apply to most markets. Almost the weird 80-20 “rule” that goes for most things.
teawrecks@sopuli.xyz 2 weeks ago
It would be weird if it didn’t follow a power law distribution.
Aka the Pareto Principle. Aka “80% of everything is shit”.
W3dd1e@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
Arguably more striking is the rate of Steam’s growth. “Steam’s catalogue grew faster than its revenue,” the report says, and this has seen those earning extremes widen. A massive 19,714 games were released on Steam in 2024, and 2025 passed even that at 23,107.
Go back just five years and Steam looks very different with 7,427 games released in 2018 – more than even 2019, and the highest on record at the time. 2026 has already doubled that at 15,814 games released, and the year still has several busy months ahead of it.
How many of this are AI garbage? It seems like no coincidence that the number of games corresponds to the increased AI push.
I would love to know how this breaks down with you cut out all the slop products.
aesthelete@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Behold the whole story of every economy these days
PlzGibHugs@piefed.ca 2 weeks ago
Alternative Headline: Sturgeon’s Law Continues to Exist
Lexam@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
That’s basically the story of the whole economy.
DrBob@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
Podcasts, music, film, paintings, novels…Linux distributions, ice cream flavor sales…literally everything.
FarceOfWill@infosec.pub 2 weeks ago
Upvotes on lemmy posts…
wh90b@sopuli.xyz 2 weeks ago
Hell, the website I get knitting patterns from has the same situation. The top 1% of designers make all the dough. But it’s great to have a platform that anybody can submit patterns to. The top designers pay the bills and they keep people coming back.
p03locke@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
Twitch streamers, YouTube channels, book best seller lists, radio play lists…
raze2012@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Strawberry’s fallen on hard times. We need to seize the means of chocolate production and distribute the wealth among all our fellow flavors.
ladicius@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Athletes.
ZombieCyborgFromOuterSpace@piefed.ca 2 weeks ago
What? You never played Monopoly before? What do you think the endgame is?
RightHandOfIkaros@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
The Monopoly endgame is spending as much time in jail as possible to evade property tax and fees.
raze2012@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Would Pareto be ecstatic or rolling in his grave at this disparity?
brachiosaurus@mander.xyz 2 weeks ago
For profit centralized economy perhaps
FierroG@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Should they pool game sales earnings and distribute the money equally among developers? I can’t think of any other platform that based on my own tastes recommends me games that don’t even have double digit all time high concurrent players (at most just basic lists that end up burying old titles at the end of the queue) and that I end up buying.
There’s plenty of valid criticism for steam, I don’t understand why we should focus on nitpicking.
MolochAlter@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
No, it’s a byproduct of differences in skill and fitness to tasks, it’s gonna happen even in centralised economies (that were never tried and if they were it wasn’t real communism, I’m sure) it’s just not going to be recognised and rewarded if everyone is supposedly equal.