Jesus, the gamesradar site is absolute ass

The data: https://weloveit.io/developers/steam-revenue-report/

That's basically the story of the whole economy.

OP, can you link the original research? It's an excellent site:

https://weloveit.io/developers/steam-revenue-report/

That's basically how art and media have always worked. This isn't a function of Steam, or even the modern economy.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 on Youtube who talks about how little they sold 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.

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.

Would think that could apply to most markets. Almost the weird 80-20 "rule" that goes for most things.

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.

Pareto principle writ large.

That or Sturgeon's law.

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