Would think that could apply to most markets. Almost the weird 80-20 “rule” that goes for most things.
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 8 hours ago by brachiosaurus@mander.xyz to games@lemmy.world
Comments
oyzmo@piefed.social 17 minutes ago
Lexam@lemmy.world 8 hours ago
That’s basically the story of the whole economy.
raze2012@lemmy.world 28 minutes ago
Would Pareto be ecstatic or rolling in his grave at this disparity?
DrBob@lemmy.ca 7 hours ago
Podcasts, music, film, paintings, novels…Linux distributions, ice cream flavor sales…literally everything.
raze2012@lemmy.world 26 minutes ago
ice cream flavor sales
Strawberry’s fallen on hard times. We need to seize the means of chocolate production and distribute the wealth among all our fellow flavors.
p03locke@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 hour ago
Twitch streamers, YouTube channels, book best seller lists, radio play lists…
wh90b@sopuli.xyz 1 hour 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.
FarceOfWill@infosec.pub 6 hours ago
Upvotes on lemmy posts…
RedFrank24@piefed.social 2 hours 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.
PhobosAnomaly@feddit.uk 7 hours ago
Jesus, the gamesradar site is absolute ass
nothingcorporate@lemmy.today 3 hours ago
The top 10% of games make 98.80% of all revenue. Woof.
SkunkWorkz@lemmy.world 6 hours 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.
molten@lemmy.world 4 hours 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.
raze2012@lemmy.world 30 minutes 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.
SupraMario@lemmy.world 2 hours 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…
geekwithsoul@piefed.social 7 hours ago
That’s basically how art and media have always worked. This isn’t a function of Steam, or even the modern economy.
halfapage@lemmy.world 8 hours ago
not that I like it, but isn’t it how the current economy works across most fields?
mfed1122@discuss.tchncs.de 6 hours ago
A lot more than just the economy, it’s like a law of nature. Even language itself obeys it
LemmyPlaceDN@europe.pub 5 hours ago
Ecactly, I think you’re referring to the Pareto distribution and/or Zipf’s law
newthrowaway20@lemmy.world 5 hours ago
This isn’t the shocking statement they think it is.
brucethemoose@lemmy.world 7 hours ago
OP, can you link the original research? It’s an excellent site:
MolochAlter@lemmy.world 8 hours ago
Pareto principle writ large.
That or Sturgeon’s law.
dudeface@lemmy.world 7 hours 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
Aeder@lemmy.world 8 hours 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.
justdaveisfine@piefed.social 7 hours 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.
Kronusdark@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
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.
HubertManne@piefed.social 8 hours ago
Is this presented as a bad thing?
raze2012@lemmy.world 16 minutes ago
It’s a thing. If you’re an inspiring indie dev, it’s hard numbers to let you know if you can work with these numbers. If you’re just a gamer, they probably don’t matter at all.
The 1% numbers makes me question by there aren’t more AA initiates out there. we don’t get many 5-10m budget games these days, but the typical AA game is (conservatively) making 15m dollars. So if you can turnournd a game on the level of Claire Obscur (which IIRC had a 10m dollar budget) in 4 years, there should be openings for potential success.
Guess it comes down to the lack of investors who care at that level (who wouldn’t just throw it at AI)
FiniteBanjo@feddit.online 7 hours ago
It’s certainly not a good thing for startup indie devs putting months of work into a project.
HubertManne@piefed.social 7 hours ago
its indicative of accessibility for startups. the way a company would change the metric is not gatekeep the smallfry.
Tattorack@lemmy.world 4 hours ago
I don’t get it. Why leave out Adult Only titles? Why don’t they count?
raze2012@lemmy.world 23 minutes ago
Given the way they estimate sales numbers, it’s probably too different a curve. I imagine there’s both a lot of bottom of the barrel adult games that still manage to get some sales off (as opposed to none for most non-adult games) and there’s a lower sales ceiling that still results in surprisingly strong revenue compared to a game with similar reviews.
bashibazouk@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
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.
jerkface@lemmy.ca 7 hours ago
The lower the barrier to entry, the longer the tail.
yeahiknow3@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 hours ago
I, for one, think Steam deserves a 30% cut of game revenue for doing literally nothing.
warm@kbin.earth 4 hours ago
Dont list your game on Steam then, sell it yourself.
yeahiknow3@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 hour ago
Exactly. Fools should just make their own monopoly if they’re so jealous. I, for one, love Steam and Google. They know how to do business.
Auth@lemmy.world 5 hours ago
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+
auzy1@lemmy.world 7 hours ago
Surely coconut simulator makes up 80% of all revenue. It’s amazing
desmosthenes@lemmy.world 4 hours ago
whales prop up the whole industry
Krudler@lemmy.world 7 hours ago
Deponia on the chart showing 470,000,000 licenses and 30 total sales
Broadfern@lemmy.world 5 hours ago
Deponia is like the AOL disks of games. They give it out for free constantly
vulgarcynic@sh.itjust.works 2 hours ago
Been a long day, thanks for giving an internet stranger a chance to let out a sharp exhale through my nose and a sensible chuckle.
W3dd1e@lemmy.zip 13 minutes ago
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.