True about games in general. I've got plenty of XBOX games I haven't played and my $5 a month Pro discount at Gamestop has motivated me to get some random cheap Japanese games for a PS4 that I bought to use as a Plex client.

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.

Also, in my limited experience the 30% also goes towards lots of other valuable features like access to the automatic marketing/recommendation engine. By launching your title on Steam, people will see your title in the "More like this" recommendation bars that appear at the bottom of each page. And if you like certain genres of games, Steam will just directly recommend you more titles of that genre on the home page.

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.

"Horders" being people who prefer to keep things they paid for as opposed to suckers who pay for the same artificially scarce resources over and over.

Steam sales are an important piece of this. I always buy a bunch of games from Steam sales, knowing full well that I'm not going to play all of them. The things is, I don't know which games I might feel like playing in the future, so I get several. I don't buy them when I actually want to play them, because then they won't be on sale.

A big contributor to this, to me, is that this metric is skewed. People buying 7 games for 15 bucks as some humble bundle or other package deal isn't the same as buying 7 AAA games that all cost 60-70 bucks.

I used to do this in the early days, then I learned my lesson. I have an ironclad policy that has saved me so much.

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.

> We make a brief stop by an older article from Simon Carless that analysed Steam collections and found the median player on there has 51.5% of their collection unplayed. The take-home message?

How many of those are free samples? Bundles?

Any (non?)digital media? I would be surprised not to see this exact dynamic on BJJ Fanatics. So easy to pick up instructionals with the constant stream of sales and discounts. Not so easy to spend the hours it takes to watch and digest one of those.

I give valve 30% because steam will occasionally get me a good game for $4.99 but for some reason, the GameStop (read all other online and physical retailers) store near my house wouldn’t sell me a pre owned copy of a 5 year old game for anything less than $20.

There are so few independent authors who make enough revenue to justify running a full-time studio that if I was self-publishing another game I would probably sell my game, never put it on sale, and try to publish anywhere where I didn't have to give up basically any percent outside of interchange fees to process credit cards.

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.

The sales are definitely a huge draw. I don't know of any other product that can get marked down over 50% semi-regularly like video games can. It makes it feel like an incredible value, in comparison to everything else we spend money on. Not to mention, there are many games that will get marked down to less than 5 dollars that you could easily spend hundreds of hours in. Terraria is a good example.

> found the median player on there has 51.5% of their collection unplayed

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.

It also gives me excellent Linux support.

I don't buy PC games if they aren't on Steam.

I disagree with the statement "The reason game developers are willing to give Valve 30% of their revenue is because the Steam marketplace is packed with super gamers who throw money at games they have no intention of playing."

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.

30%...

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...