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The coda to this fascinating saga is that today - in a post publisher, open distribution marketplace - STEAM, the predominate game distribution gateway, allows anyone to publish just about anything for a $100 deposit and a 30% commission per sale. The predictable end result is that 19,000 new games were uploaded to STEAM last year alone, and over 100,000 titles are available for purchase on the platform.

The predictable result is that unless a studio has a lottery-win statistically equivalent outlier or a $50m marketing budget, a new game is swallowed up by the shear volume of titles. 1 in 5 games on STEAM never even earn back the $100 deposit.

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The majority of games released on steam are not serious games. There are tons of amateur, ugly, content-lacking games that are people’s first (toy) game.

Marketing (both the product part and the promotion part) are required, but in most cases all you (indie) need is a quality product (by far the hardest part) and some a small chunk of time or money devoted to marketing. Indie marketing mostly consists of social media posts, streamers playing their game, and trailer reveals (ign et al)

Steam then does its own thing and will promote your game internally after around 300 sales, and will continue to boost if it converts

This is true - but the scale is beyond what most people imagine. STEAM revenue last year was nearly $11B - while the median revenue for a game that makes it into the top 8% is estimated at $799. So 17.5k releases earned less than $800, with something like 10k making less than $100.

Those statistics won't be a surprise to anybody who has ever tried a "random Steam game" picker.

This may be true but shouldn't be read as an indicator of any shady business on Valve's part. Steam makes most of their money from commissions, not developer sign up fees.

Steam sells a lot of games and the game market as a whole is over 70% PC (and about 40% console with overlap).

I agree - it's not an indicator at all of shady business by Valve. If anything, Valve is the least shady and most transparent player in the game industry.

Valve is shady, but their shadiness comes from things like Counter-Strike loot boxes rather than milking developers.

Valve forbids developers from selling their game on a different store at a lower price than steam, that's a bit shady. Not too bad, but not amazing either.

Huh, wouldn't this be illegal in at least some jurisdictions ?!?

Wait, not that I personally have much hope left for the worthiness of touchscreen gaming, but I doubt it's negligible ?!? (Web gaming might be ?)

And in contrast to Atari, this works for Steam because Steam isn't paying a giant pile of resources per title. The fractions-of-a-cent-per-GB raw cost of digital distribution means they don't risk getting sunk over-hyping an E.T... They can let a thousand indies make a thousand E.T.s, and it doesn't matter because they're also the place you download Helldivers 2 or Monster Hunter Wilds.

That is a good thing. It allows for niches to be filled. Less generic games, more organic-made ones.

In praise of niches: Some of my favorite games were widely hated, and for reasons which I largely agree with. Not everyone values the same things.

On one hand it absolutely does allow for niches to be filled, but on another it's a dumpster full of trash with gold in-between. There's a danger of either fatigue or slump sales over time. Maybe another Nintendo Seal of Quality on the horizon will emerge.

While Steam could do that, there's no incentive for them to. They can lay out $0 into such a project and let third parties sift the trash for them and do journalism on letting potential customers know what games are good. Win-win.

Hence the demise of the Greenlight program...

It's not a good thing: if it was a good thing Steam would have done it at launch.

Steam only got traction because they were curating. There were loads of places you could dump games: people were installing Steam because games they cared about were on Steam. And getting on Steam in the early years was a guaranteed boost in distribution because they were hand picking quality games.

Somehow they managed to drastically reduce the value proposition twice (first with Greenlight, then with Direct) and keep the same cut, while the value-adds like Steamworks have gotten commoditized (see EGS)

I'm curious when the cutover occurred in consumer sentiment from "We use Steam because we need to for some specific titlese" to "We use Steam because it's the most convenient way to purchase"

War Z (and especially its timing relative to Greenlight) probably represents the death rattle of their initial direction: https://kotaku.com/the-war-z-mess-every-crazy-detail-we-know...

$100 is pretty cheap for this kind of lottery ticket. You have to pay way more to get a start in other marketplaces.

This is also the social media game. Building a following is the name of the game and the long tail can substant many

It definitely isn't a lottery ticket.

Steam doesn't award people anything. It's up to you to make your game great and then make it popular.

I feel like quality games usually get decent sales. I've rarely, if ever, seen a genuinely great game getting burried for too long among the trash. Maybe it's just bias though.

It would be pretty hard to review 52 games every day of 2024 to determine if any great games are being lost among the trash. The scale is just too large for most people to really understand - imagine the size of a physical store it would take to display 19,000 game boxes just in "new release" - much less the 100,000+ titles available in STEAM.

Reddit: I've seen and wishlisted or ignore every game on steam. https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/1dm3gxh/ive_seen_a... It turns that there are actually not that many hidden gems. The indie game dev community has a lot of discussion about hidden gems, and the prevailing opinion is there are very very few, especially in the avalanche of crappy games that is today's landscape.

When "reviewing every single game that came out" (rather than focusing on (sub)genres) by a single person was even still feasible ??

Reddit: I've seen and wishlisted or ignore every game on steam. https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/1dm3gxh/ive_seen_a...

It turns that there are actually not that many hidden gems. The indie game dev community has a lot of discussion about hidden gems, and the prevailing opinion is there are very very few, especially in the avalanche of crappy games that is today's landscape.

Another code might be that Nintendo is still selling super well, producing great games and consoles, and just crushing it even with that kind of competition.

Broadly speaking Nintendo is competing with all forms of entertainment for people's time and money, certainty

But in terms of selling game consoles and games? I actually don't think anyone is really competing with Nintendo

While Sony and Microsoft have chased hardware power and "next-gen" consoles, Nintendo is exploring and solidifying different niches.

You can see this really strongly nowadays. Every game Sony releases eventually winds up with a PC port, and many of them are even released on Xbox. Meanwhile Nintendo has an incredibly strong library of games for Switch, many of which cannot be purchased for other platforms. Not just first-party titles either. Other studios make games that can only be played on Switch hardware

It really is impressive that Nintendo has managed to design game consoles that have maintained its individual identity, while Sony and Microsoft have both basically settled on "just a mid range PC with a custom OS" more or less

You buy Nintendo for Nintendo games, as in first-party games. Everything else is just a plus. That has been the case since I'd say N64 days. Before that it was still a toss up, especially with Sega. After that, Nintendo drifted wholly into its own world, supporting its own worldview, and others were competing for third party titles and using specs in the marketing as if it mattered - which it did if same game was available on multiple target platforms and you were buying for that.

> You buy Nintendo for Nintendo games, as in first-party games

There are still Nintendo console exclusive third-party games, too. They often don't stay exclusive if they are successful enough, but they do happen

But largely you are correct

The truly impressive part is just how large the First Party Nintendo ecosystem is. They have a ton of IPs that you can only get on Nintendo systems. Pokemon alone is the most valuable franchise in the world

Technically there are also second-party games, which are independent companies exclusive to them like those from HAL Laboratory (Kirby), Intelligent Systems (Metroid), Game Freak (Pokemon).. maybe things have changed, but yeah.

I’d argue their last two custom hardware competitors were xbox 360 arcade (the indie store) and cell phone games.

(I’m counting competitors as “the game mechanics are more important than production values”)

In a massive self-own, Microsoft killed arcade at xbone launch (worst. console. ever.), and cell phone games were ruined by pay to win (most games) and lack of first party physical controllers (the other games, e.g., Apple Arcade).

These days, it’s just steam, abandonware and nintendo. I used to pay for nintendo online to get the emulation games, but the library kind of sucked, and (more importantly) if you pay for it, there’s no way to turn off in-game ads for online play in stuff like mario, making the entire system inappropriate for kids.

I’m curious to see how the switch 2 does. The lock screen on our switch is wall-to-wall ads for it, but nothing looks compelling so far. The kids are more excited about an old switch 1 port of a wii game...

The distinguishing feature of Nintendo is they're a toy company. That's the angle they approach the whole ecosystem from. It tends to result in consoles with features that are unusual (or, more specifically, it has ever since they decided to get off the CPU/GPU integration competition train Sony and Microsoft have first-class tickets on and made the Wii instead).

It's also why they released a fancy alarm clock with the same breathless excitement as a new game console.

> Every game Sony releases eventually winds up with a PC port, and many of them are even released on Xbox.

It's the other way around, Microsoft games on PC and more recently PS5. Sony sometimes releases their games on PC (often years after console) but AFAIK the only one they've released on Xbox is MLB The Show and that was MLB forcing their hand if they wanted to keep the license.

Nintendo has a digital store with all sorts of cruft on it, too. They're not curating or limiting releases in the same way as they did on the NES with the seal of quality.

Hell, they let Night Trap release on the Switch.

Steam is not capitalized.

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