I launched a steam demo of my programming game last month (you can find it in my HN profile if you are curious), and without having to do any marketing of my own built up about 1000 wishlists in a month just thanks to getting traffic from similar but more well known titles like Exapunks.
This for a local application that has a library of…10k items in the entire store? The inventory could comfortably be processed inside Excel and yet the launchers struggle.
I could be wrong, I don't keep up with Epic because the store itself has such bad UI design.
edit: Oh, and payment... I think it was Jeff Vogal's talk I'm thinking of.
https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1024944/Failing-to-Fail-The-Sp...
Planting and processing my own wheat for bread would be very resource-intensive, that doesn't mean commercial bread is a luxury article.
Maybe if the other big-monied game stores were to have a similar show of goodwill towards players would Steam feel some real competition.
My maximum new game price is $20 and I would need a compelling argument to break it.
Do not buy a game, (unless it is literally $0) unless you are going to install it and seriously play it at that exact instant. No FOMO about deep discounts is allowed. If a game is $1 today, it will be $1 again in the future.
How many of those are free samples? Bundles?
My steam collection is bad enough that I have like a hundred of just those, and various "modding tools" too.
I watched a talk on Steam and independent authors' revenue, and it's a tremendous tax on top of an environment where it's so difficult to build a good product, generate revenue, and grow to begin with. And your customers will happily buy and build $1,500 dollar systems to play $20-70 dollar games on sale for $10-50 dollars. And then complain about the price of games, too.
And predominantly my most vocal users are teenagers, and running communities where they want to interact with the developers is just such a tremendous liability because you almost have to parent their behavior.
It's just an awful environment.
That is nor actually all that bad for something that does not take any physical space and was frequently bought for, like, 4 euro. Or in pack of three for price of, roughly, one.
But, the moralization of the article reminds me what I dont like about gaming culture. It just needs to go out of its way to make big deal about nothing with a cringy rhetorics.
I don't buy PC games if they aren't on Steam.
I believe the actual reason is that Steam has a near monopoly on PC game distribution, and you'll get a lot of hate from consumers if you distribute on competing platforms (Epic) but not Steam.
Taking it a step further - 30% of revenue seems absurdly high for what Steam offers (see the app store for a similar racket), and I hope Valve faces much stiffer competition in the future so they're forced to bring down their cut.
Totally agree Steam is a great platform, I just hope for more competition from other great platforms.
Maybe 15% if you employ enough people for support or audits. At 10.8 billion profit in 2024 with less than 500 employees, it seems like a racket.
Unlike iOS, alternatives are available, but universally are not preferred by the customer base (except maybe for GOG, which positions itself differently in the market)
not even the most socialist country on planet Earth taxes their people that much
i have lost hope on anything that society is capable of, people became literal zombies...
PaulHoule•5h ago
It was a running gag in the Neptunia series (from a time and place where Steam wasn't so big) that every gamer had a big backlog. It's true about clothes. Even people who are pretty frugal buy clothes they never wind up wearing.
I must admit though that I bought a Steam Deck instead of a Nintendo Switch precisely because I had a big backlog of Steam games which I could play instead of buying new games for the Switch. I played through Persona 5 Royal and now I'm enjoying Death End Re:Quest which might be a trash game to you but it scratches my itch.
bigyabai•5h ago
Boy, what a mistake. Great game - but Persona 5 is one of those game that makes you understand why your backlog exists. If I spent 120 hours grinding VN scenes and RPG encounters in every $60 game I played, my backlog would never end. Finishing the game and seeing Royal announced with expanded content a few months later felt a bit like this: https://tenor.com/view/saul-goodman-trash-can-gif-25675857
PaulHoule•5h ago
For one thing, the game does not make you make any hard choices when it comes to the VN content. It is so freakin' long that playing it on New Game Plus is unthinkable so you feel compelled to max out everyone's social rank in one run, which isn't that hard but makes a long game even longer.
I have the same complaint which I have with most turn-based games (a genre I love because I really enjoy having a big party) in that there are many mechanics, such as status effects, buffs and debuffs, that really don't matter. It doesn't have the feeling that a different resource is scarce (money, SP, items) at different times in the game or that different things make the game hard at different times. There are plenty of turn-based games that do something interesting (where you make a deck and get 3 random action cards, where you have to be careful not to cast healing spells on your enemies or attacks on your friends, where a lot of your scaling comes from customizing combos in Neptunia, where you knockback enemies and they carom like pool balls in DER:Q) but you can make an AAA game that doesn't add anything to FF7 and gamers and game reviewers will accept it.
An answer we've been chewing on is an anti-Persona answer in the sense of a much shorter (30m-12h) game where you really do need to make multiple playthroughs with or without NGP to really experience it all.
glimshe•5h ago
Back in the 80s when games were expensive, a backlog was unthinkable. Sure, I did but games I didn't play much because I didn't like them, but there was no such thing of an unopened, unplayed game for me
Cerium•5h ago
[1] https://brooker.co.za/blog/2023/04/20/hobbies.html