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.
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
greedytacothief@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
bashibazouk@lemmy.world 2 weeks 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.
PieMePlenty@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
80-20 rule still holds true, huh?
Kazumara@discuss.tchncs.de 2 weeks ago
That seems like a good distribution for digital art and entertainment.
jerkface@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
The lower the barrier to entry, the longer the tail.
dreadbeef@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
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.
CaptPretentious@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Indie games pump Valve’s stock, popular or not—they should get some profit sharing even if they don’t sell IMO but that’s just me. Like a community dividend. Unfortunately, not too many people demand more from Valve.
Hopefully, by “stock” you mean available supply of games and not stock as in the stock market, since Valve is a private company and isn’t traded.
As for profit sharing… no. That would incentivise even more porn AI slop games to be dumped on there, as if that wasn’t already a problem. The “content farms” that are just going to churn out crap… would get all of the community share. And large companies would very likely ignore Steam going forward because again, potentially less profit. Unless it comes from Valves share, which that doesn’t make a lot of business sense to give up revenue in order to pay those who weren’t successful, a “participation award” of a paycheck.
Lennny@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Stock? They’re private bub.
Jyek@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
How do you decide what qualifies for the community dividend? Does every publisher get an amount from the dividend? Is the dividend a pool of earnings that has to be split evenly? Are there devs that don’t qualify for the dividend? Is it because they make too much money? Or because the thing they created is ai slop uploaded specifically to syphon free money away from the dividend? You either have very wealthy devs taking from the pool or you have people who shouldn’t be allowed to call themselves devs taking money from the pool, either way it’s unfair to the devs who poured their heart and soul into a project nobody heard of.
dreadbeef@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
Its just an idea to get the ball rolling homie, my point is is there is room for investigation into this and Valve have the resources to do it, and no one demands anything from them to use their massive resources to alleviate an issue they have the data on and can choose to work on.
Tattorack@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I don’t get it. Why leave out Adult Only titles? Why don’t they count?
raze2012@lemmy.world 2 weeks 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.
liking625@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Thats why steam is filled with indie games, because they dont make a dime and enjoy it.
Auth@lemmy.world 2 weeks 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 2 weeks ago
Surely coconut simulator makes up 80% of all revenue. It’s amazing
64bithero@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Try to say anything bad about the all-father and you will be flooded in downvotes …
dejected_warp_core@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
This is why I follow reviewers and curators that sift through the bottom 99% to find interesting indie stuff. It’s absolutely jaw-dropping what never shows up on Steam’s store landing page or queues.
Splattercat is one such reviewer. He tends to prefer dystopia and post-apocalypse style stuff, and clearly works hard to bring interesting titles some more exposure: www.youtube.com/@splattercatgaming
yeahiknow3@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
I, for one, think Steam deserves a 30% cut of game revenue for doing literally nothing.
warm@kbin.earth 2 weeks ago
Dont list your game on Steam then, sell it yourself.
brachiosaurus@mander.xyz 2 weeks ago
good let’s repeat it louder: DONT LIST YOUR GAME ON STEAM
sigmaklimgrindset@sopuli.xyz 2 weeks ago
While Steam isn’t “doing nothing”, I do think 30% cut of sales for the first $10M is a lot especially for indie and single developers that will never reach this target, and the larger/more known the publisher the easier it will be for them to hit the lesser % of sales tiers (reduced to 20% after $50M, but I can’t remember the in-between tiers atm).
Itch.io, by comparison, takes 10% of sales as a default, but publishers can set it to whatever. People should really get their indies off of there if possible.
Krudler@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Deponia on the chart showing 470,000,000 licenses and 30 total sales
Broadfern@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Deponia is like the AOL disks of games. They give it out for free constantly
vulgarcynic@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks 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.
Krudler@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
You got the joke!
ragebutt@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
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 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
brachiosaurus@mander.xyz 2 weeks ago
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.
ragebutt@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
Those things are not mutually exclusive?
BlackLaZoR@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Income inequality! We need to do something!
desmosthenes@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
whales prop up the whole industry
brachiosaurus@mander.xyz 2 weeks ago
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.
scratchee@feddit.uk 2 weeks ago
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.
Katana314@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
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.
CeeBee_Eh@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
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.
brachiosaurus@mander.xyz 2 weeks ago
Any non profit company who’s products isn’t a proprietary third party software launcher.
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.
If the client doesn’t matter that much that’s even more reasons to release the source code.
companies usually make money, non profit organizations help people