Thankfully Steam will refund your money if you play a game and find out you don’t like it… with caveats. I think they’ll refund it as long as you have under an hour of gameplay, which i don’t think is reasonable.
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I don’t know about this, I mean sure they have a monopoly, but only because they don’t have competition.
I recently sat through an IEEE presentation by a career game dev (one of the first women devs in the industry).
The more walled the garden, the more revenue you make. iOS is where on average you make the best money. Steam is one of the worst places to make money.
Of course, there’s various properties which make way more money than others regardless of platform. One of the key takeaways on this topic was that My Little Pony games on GB/GBA/DS/etc. are a license to print money.
Another key takeaway is that even if it feels a little sexist that a publisher comes to you with a My Little Pony game because you’re a woman, you take it. Because life has always been tough for indie game devs. Don’t turn away work.
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Yes, that’s a good policy, for the most part. I’ve never used it for 2 reasons:
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There have been a couple games that I didn’t like at first, but grew into them: Don’t Starve and Banished are two of them.
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Usually the games I hate are the under $20 games. It’s worth $20 to me to delete the local content and never think about them again. Other people are not in the same financial situation. The one exception is Duke Nukem Forever, but I kept it as a reminder to never, ever trust the hype.
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Thats a fair point. While I think Valve cares about having, and being, an indy marletplace. As thats a big part of how digital distribution became a thing, how they became so dominant, and the reinvigoration of the PC as a plaform.
I dont think they much care if its a healthy indy market. Both due to the mismanagement/lack of internal interest. And because they’re probably making more money as volume has gone up, they make just as much money of the trash, so on their side the numbers are just going up.
Steam is arguably less dominant than they used to be. GOG has expanded beyond re-release of old games, and has finally moved to launch its own service client comparable to steam. Other large publishers like EA and Ubisoft has launched their own store fronts and backended steam.
But its a bit frustrasting to hear devs. Devs you’ve never heard of even if you follow this shit, and where theres no info out there about their products. Talk about the indy market, and only talk about Steams store front features and tactics. There never seems to be a marketing director. They never seem to be maintaining relationships with press. A lot of times they seem to be only involved with Steam and indy scene events. Which isn’t a great way to sell things to anyone who isnt also at those indy events. Its very much like the way most tech start ups focus their marketing on other tech startup people and investor/business press.
It makes sense when the indy game is just one or a few people running things as a side project. Time and resources limit what you can do. But a lot of times your looking at companies with multiple employees
I feel that. A big chunk of the indy market is driven by very simple and retro games. Like platformers. A lot of stripped down or perfunctory visuals. A lot of the narative driven ones back end the mechanics. Text and visual novels are big. And theres a lot of it that seems drivem exclusively by nostalgia.
If you arent into those sorts of things a big chunk of those games just dont hold much interest. And its a big reason why I dont actively follow the indy scene. But there are lots of indy games I have enjoyed.
Finding the yous and me’s. The people who arent already interested just becaue you’re indy, or retro, or whatever. Is hard. There was a brief period (looking at the graph 4ish years) where just being on steam might have been enough to do that. But it wasnt originally that way, and that’s not usually the way it works. Look at the way indy musicians bust their ass. Or podcasting. Theres a reason the biggest success stories there are comedians and people with backgrounds in public radio. The features of iTunes or patreon are important, but they arent the whole thing. These people go on tour. They’re all over social media, they make sure their content is available on as many distro channels as possible. They sell merch. They cross promote with competitors.
As the guy you do that to reach? I dont see a ton of that from most of these indy devs. And the games I’ve bought and played, did more of it. Yeah I bought them on Steam, but I’ve not once discovered a game through Steam. Word of mouth through IRL friends (and a couple of yous guys), or those other avenues. Just like almost any other media I’ve discovered.
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Steam’s UI is shit. It just is. I mean look the store search. Try to search online co-op games with good reviews in certain price bracket. You can’t do that properly. Also why does steam ask for your birth date over and over again?!
I actually sort of like Steam’s discovery queue. If you configure it to exclude early access and tags that are high in crap content it actually recommend some releant stuff:
However, mostly I get my game recommendations from friends and an actual gaming magazine (they still exists and some of them are good). And buy the occasional Humble bundle.
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Me too. A game that’s new to me is a new game.
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I really don’t like side-scrollers. I did, back in the day, when I was poor. I loved Mario Bros, etc. But I didn’t buy a Quad-Core 16-gig RAM, with 1080Ti and 28-inch 4k monitor to play 1980s-era side-scrollers. I got it to immerse myself in the experience, and I can do that a lot better with, say, World of Warships, or Left4Dead2, or any recent Total War game.
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It was Microsoft that actually bought Indie to the forefront with their Xbox Live Arcade. They sold nearly 85 million Xbox 360’s and when they put Xbox Live on the dashboard of every 360 connected to a Live account they put Indie games on the map for millions of people. Xbox Live now has circa 60 million members and all of those are paying members so a lot of those accounts will be actual real in use accounts presumably. They didn’t have 60 million paying subscribers ten plus years ago but they still had a lot of them and according to Microsoft nearly 70% of them plunked down for one of these games. It was several years before some of these games were available on Steam and it wasn’t from lack of trying from the developers side.
Thing about Steam is that it earned it’s stripes for a long time, all you had to do was download the client, purchase a game that you could go pick up in a store and that was it, some games had you enter the code which was redundant considering the distribution platform could handle that but Steam was the same but better.
The thing was Steam had tens of millions of active accounts with members buying several or more games a year on those accounts and there wasn’t anything in town that came close. When Battle.net started hitting tens of millions of users most people still had most of their games on Steam and the social element that Steam provided was just a lot more convenient and accessible to a lot of people than the likes of Teamspeak.
Battle.net had a huge resurgence the past several years thanks to Hearthstone and Overwatch which were more popular than Blizzard could have imagined and Twitch has grown to tens of millions of concurrent users and now has a desktop client. Amazon Prime has 125 million plus subscribers and any of them that have the Twitch client on their computer get games every month. Discord started off as with a few hundred thousand users but now has over 100 million users, it’s left Steam in the dust in usership and it’s widely preferred to Steam chat even with the new re-design which doesn’t look familiar at all. Overwatch in particular meant that a lot of people were spending stupid amounts of time on Battle.net and their friends on Steam couldn’t add them. Discord solved that problem by being entirely platform agnostic so you can chat with somebody regardless of whether they are playing Overwatch or CSGO. Damn you can chat to those people whilst playing Candy Crush on your phone in fact.
Steam about 10 years ago wasn’t the best, it was the only one in that category, if you didn’t want to use Steam but you wanted to play Fallout 3 you had to go buy the Disc and install it the old fashioned way and a lot of the time the game would install the Steam client before installing the game itself and if you didn’t want the Steam client you couldn’t play the game.
It was eye brow raising stuff when Activision seemed to fall out with Valve or have a change of heart and decided Destiny 2 and future Call of Duty titles would not see release on Steam. It didn’t work out too badly for Destiny 2 which had incredible sales on Battle.net without Steam. Now Bethesda have announced Fallout 76, Fallout 3 was only available on one digital platform initially and it was on pre-order on that one platform months before it was available anywhere else on shelves digital or otherwise. Fallout 76 is coming to Steam… well it might be, there’s nothing about it on Steam, it’s only available on Bethesda.net and the beta is exclusive to Bethesda.net but… I mean it might be a Destiny 2 situation but it’s probably still coming to Steam. Tell a Fallout 3 pre-ordered about the future where another installment of Fallout is perhaps coming to Steam, most likely and he will sell you a chocolate fireguard.
Unfortunately Valve aren’t interested in quality control, they are interested in making mounds of money and selling whatever shit they can get away with. Discord a few years ago was home to DDOSers, perverts, racists and trolls and it coupled those wonderful features off with a platform that was a UI nightmare and spent more time breaking than anything else but they put in the work to improve things and while they still have a ways to go, Discord have put in enough work and done enough to show that the platform has a future that makes anything in the past pale by comparison. Steam is a mound of horseshit and I hate saying it because I was the biggest fan of Steam for years but being forced to download all these other clients like Discord to chat to the guys that play Battle.net games, then the Battle.net client to play the overhyped Overwatch, then the Bethesda client to play the Quake Champions beta and then the Gog client to redeem a great offer on The Witcher 3. I used to be annoyed that these things couldn’t be done on Steam. Now I’m furious because using these other clients has shown me how horrible Steam is. Battle.net was a joke of a client which is why very few people stuck around but Battle.net is probably the cleanest client I use now, it just works and everything you need to see is a click away. The chat pales in comparison to Discord or Slack but I’ve never used a chat client that’s quite as good as the dedicated ones like Discord or Slack. Gog.com on the other hand is very quickly developing a fierce following and they are very picky with the games they put on there, I rarely buy a game because I think it’s good anymore, I just look at how cheap it is and decide I can afford to lose that much, I buy stuff in sales that I’ve not played several years later. Everything on Steam is pushed on you for a cheap price and cheaper gimmicks and once they have your impulse buy money they move onto the next big blockbuster crap. Gog.com is a little insane with how tightly it is curated but I buy full price games on there because the community reviews are often very thorough and they don’t stick shiny shit on there and slap a sale sticker on it to shovel it down your throat.
In the next couple of years TenCent seems like it wants to distribute it’s client outside of the Asian continent too. I don’t care much for either Amazon or Tencent but it’s obvious when they come to market the whole “big platform with lots of shit” is going to favour them strongly. Clients like Gog.com are going to have to carve a niche for themselves. I don’t know what niche Steam is going to go with, hey we have lots of shitty games but we aren’t a corporate interest so throw your impulse money at us instead? Even Microsoft with their investments in server backbone are probably a bigger candidate that Steam is right now. You shouldn’t try and out-Walmart Walmart because when there’s enough money to be made they are going to take back their share. Steam is shovelware but doesn’t have the clout to get away with it. It’s pretty sad.
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Good information, thanks. Also, Steam games have a tendency to quit working after some years. Battlefield2 is my biggest complaint in this area, but other games have failed, at least for a time.
Was there any breakdown of how much “because only the people who make it into the garden have to share the revenue” contributed and how much “because people are willing to spend money since the place isn’t a sketchy lemon market” played a role?
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I don’t think there’s enough transparency to make a judgement call on that. Something she said was along the lines of, “I wish I could tell you what would make a game make money, because I’d do it every time. The only thing I can say with certainty is that My Little Pony sells.”
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That much is true - it was totally expected (and we could see the situation developing for a while). Though it’s because, when indie games first started showing up on Steam, the lack of games being released meant that each game got huge amounts of attention that launched them into financial success. You could digitally distribute a game independently of Steam, but the lack of attention was a killer to sales. So to be a successful indie developer, you had to be on Steam (with a tiny, tiny handful of exceptions, e.g. Minecraft). Largely fueled by the success of indie games on Steam, there was an indie explosion - the number of indie games exploded, the number of indie developers demanding to get their games on Steam exploded, the number of games appearing on Steam (eventually) exploded. So now indie games on Steam got no attention - or at least no more than being outside Steam. (In fact, to have a successful launch, one needed to generate interest in the game outside of Steam and bring the eyeballs there.) Without the former artificial scarcity giving attention to a handful of titles, Steam can no longer be the indie king-maker it was.
This goes beyond Steam, too - previously, having a deal with a publisher acted as a gatekeeper for would-be game-makers. Without that deal, you weren’t going to get games on disks into stores. The side effect was that there weren’t any more developers than could be supported by the market. (Though the market was also made smaller than it could have been by this arrangement, too.) Digital distribution changed that - there’s no gatekeepers anymore. Anyone can - and does - make games. There’s a rather extreme game glut. As a result, most won’t make enough to pay for their own development. The profit margins on games that do succeed are smaller. Everything’s a little more precarious as a result. It’s as if every aspiring musician had to fund the production of their own album as a starting point (and every subsequent album they put out didn’t have their name on it).
Yep. This has been true for a while, actually - ever since the indie boom. What’s different now is that it’s not just first-time indie developers who aren’t making any money.
Right, and this is the thing. There’s a direct correlation between money spent on marketing a game and sales. But indie game = “no marketing budget” usually. The indie boom started when the number of games on Steam was small enough that just being on Steam acted as all the marketing you needed.
Valve’s long-term plan is for Steam to be a protocol layer essentially, that handles payment and distribution. “Storefronts” would be lists of games that particular people/entities recommend. The existing “curator” system they have is a step in that direction, albeit a poor one (as evidenced by the fact that you’ve just now discovered it).
As an indie, it’s a huge problem - you have a small team (or even one person) spending a good chunk of their time doing “social” stuff rather than developing the game. It can easily end up that a sizable fraction of the team’s time is spent on that.
In some ways, crowdfunding is worse than useless. At no time has crowdfunding been enough to fully develop a game (with about two or three exceptions, and they set up their own sites for the crowdfunding). Normally the best a developer can hope to get is about 20% of their game budget. To make matters worse, the game has to be substantially completed to get even that much (because people want to see a working prototype before they fund it). So crowdfunding amounts to funding 80% of a game and then getting another 20% that has legal liabilities and a whole lot of effort involved in it (as well as locking you into the design/features you showed in the prototype, even if they later turn out to have been bad ideas when the game is more finished). On top of which, crowdfunding for games has almost disappeared in the last couple of years as people became unhappy with what they had previously funded/overwhelmed by existing games.
Yeah, the problem with shovelware and asset flippers pales in comparison to just the lack of attention that anyone could pay to games because of the huge increase in titles available. Every indie developer wanted to be on Steam, but they also wanted to be one of a small number of developers on Steam, and could thus benefit from the attention it granted them.
Well, but they do have competition - GOG, Humble (to some degree - increasingly they’re just a Steam key seller), Green Man Gaming, GamersGate (not to be confused with #gamertaint), plus Ubisoft and EA’s distribution platforms, etc. But they’re all orders of magnitude smaller than Steam. Which is what gives Steam its semi-monopoly.
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This. It’s like an ATM that constantly asks my language preference. Why can’t that bit of info be stored with the account, particularly on my bank’s actual ATM?
/TWITCH/ Please don’t use a pie chart to show a time series. Just. don’t.
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I think its a problem of those mechanics often holding the material back.
My favorite example is old isometric rpgs, the Black Isle golden age ones. Those were great games. But when Beamdog started updating and re-releasing them, and I got all excited and bought them again to replay them. I, and a lot of people I know, realized/remembered something.
Mechanically those games were pretty boring. I can remember playing Baldur’s Gate over and over when I was a kid. But after the first run through I’d put on god mode so I could leave the combat on auto pilot while I made a sandwich. Unless you were very into turned based and tactical combat it was sort of an impediment. And even if you are, they’ve got big short comings in the way the simulated dice rolls and D&D stat system clash with the video game part. So that even with good stats all your characters swing and miss endlessly turn after turn. Reading walls of expositional text can be fun, but it sort of kills pacing when you have to. Even the people who made these games have acknowledged some of this. With the Planescape Torment team pointing out the D&D system used clashes badly with their goals and impedes the game. Because it doesn’t work with the mechanics and story they were trying to implement. You’ve got a game with a character that’s completely unsuited to combat, and combat is the opposite of what the game is about. But because of the nature of the system used and that whole character progression thing. You’re immediately and repeatedly exposed to combat. Boring combat you will fail at. I don’t think I’ve ever made it more than an hour into that game.
Those weren’t good games because of the walls of text and isometric POV and direct use of pen and paper mechanics. They were good games, and the standards and technology of the time dictated those things. The same companies that made those games are the ones that pushed us beyond them as soon as technology allowed, and they could figure out a better approach. And a lot of those original games haven’t aged well in terms of mechanics due to those factors.
And yet here we are. Those same people are now putting out indy games built in that mode. Even though they’re accutely aware of the shortcomings. Part of that is practical. 2d and walls of text is cheaper than complex 3d and hours of voice acting. But there are plenty of ways to design your way around 10,000 words of exposition.
Its largely nostaligia. And I’ve bought a bunch of those games but have had trouble getting into them as the mechanics still just dont hold up given how approaches have changed.
Steam had been out for a couple years, the indy scene was already burbling (as it had been before Steam, just without much in the way of money and distribution), and the early focus of live arcade was re-released retro games and casual games. The major indy focus and releases didn’t become the thing till several years later. I think Braid was 08. And IIRC it came out of a lot of popular calls for space for indy games on console and XBox specifically. From devs and players. After things had already started to take off for PC.
Xbox was smart to jump on it when it did. And its a big part of Indy games getting crossover interest. But the big thrust of indy gaming is, and always has been PC. As much as we always talked about PC being dead or dying. Constantly and over and over. Through the 90s and 00s. It never died and doesn’t seem to have ever been at risk of dying. Since about the mid 00’s PC has represented a full third or more of the games market in sales. Both volume and raw dollars. It was quietly bigger than any other single platform for years.
A number of those early Xbox exclusive indy games eventually saw a box release. And became more profitable and far more popular when they did. Because even now, when digital distro is normal everywhere and the default on pc, consoles are mainly focused on retail boxes. Even though those disks increasingly just contain downloaders. Some of those games were pretty vocal about making a lot more off Steam when they finally launched on PC. A lot of “we made more in 3 days selling the game for a buck than we did in 4 years with XBox.” stories. And you can see that in how central a concern Steam is to most indy devs. They aren’t complaining without reason. This is where the bulk of their money comes from, even when they can wrangle access to the consoles.
And you still have to put in codes with Steam, it just does it automagically for you. You can still buy boxed pc games. Some of them require Steam or an equivilent. But many of them don’t. Its just that those retial box sales havent been a major factor since downloads became practical. A big thing holding PC sale back years ago is that there was seldom much space for PC games at retail. It was often actively hard to find PC copies of a game. Huge hits would hit big box stores, or the lonely PC shelf at game stop. But amazon was how you got PC games for a lot of us between when the PC friendly mall retailers got swallowed by game stop, and Steam’s launch.
That said its a good point. Xbox was important to the growth there. I just dont see them as central.
I dont think thats a Steam issue. Ive never had that problem and I have steam games from when it launched that work fine. As well as a bunch of really old, non rerelease games purchased through steam that work fine. Others not so much.
Older PC games had a tendency to stop working after a while. The older they are. The more often that was the case and the trickier it is to get them working. Newer versions of windows seem to be better at running the old stuff. Maybe its the game itself, could be a quirk with your system.
Yeah Steam being an easy way to raise your profile and find customers was a quirk of history. And its in the past.
Which is not to say the complaints arent valid. Steams store is borked. And even devs that do work hard to market their stuff. And have big visibilty. Are complaining about sales falling because it can be actively difficult to find things on Steam. Even when you’re looking for a specific game you know about and want.
And consoles. Its harder to get involved in as indy, and digital only distribution isnt exactly the default. But theres more to the market than just Steam. Even as Steam is huge.
Importantly GOG basically paid for those wildly successful indy games (yes) in the Witcher series.
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It kinda always was, though. There was a period of a few years, sometime after the original 2008 Spelunky and before, I guess, 2014, when a skilled indie dev had a solid shot at conceiving, developing, and releasing a game to an adoring and underserved market, but that was kind of a fluke. There have always been some people who could make a solid living selling small games, but the same is true of people who play the drums.
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Yeah - Steam, its UI and the choices Valve have been making about it are all messes. Even coming into Steam already knowing about and looking for a specific game doesn’t necessarily help. A few times I’ve not gotten any results from doing name searches on Steam, despite the fact that the games in question were on there. I don’t even know how that happens.
It’s interesting how the whole Greenlight thing came about after Valve were talking to Minecraft’s Markus Persson. Charitably, they wanted to foster the kinds of communities that made Minecraft so successful, but on Steam. (Less charitably, they saw Minecraft’s success and were trying to figure out how to get a piece of things like that in the future.) Ironically, everything they’ve done has made it less possibly for a game to build a community on Steam itself.
True. I was thinking specifically of the PC game market, but even there consoles indirectly are part of that because of multiplatform development.
I don’t understand it at all. I’ve had that happen with large high profile releases from the big publishers. Can’t seem to find it on the front page, search. Oh look previous games I already own and a bunch of totally unrelated stuff. Its completely bizarre.
It seems to me that early on their social network features did a lot of the work for them, together with the smaller library size. But nearly every one of them has tapered off, Steam as its own thing for Steams sake just doesn’t work. So they keep throwing more gamification and more features at them. They flare briefly and cease to be a factor. Most of the discussion about games, reviewing, and what have. Happens elsewhere. And Valve missed the boat on important new aspects like streaming. And never added key features that their predecessors had. Like how the fuck is Steam only getting voice chat now?
So the store front itself was never meant to deal with the volume of material they’ve got, so its borked. And features that floated that initially, noone cares about anymore.
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