The same is true in literally every industry, and practically every sphere of society. Nothing new.
Read more here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_distribution
The ideas described in Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody and Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail made the mid-2000s super optimistic about having fewer gatekeepers between those who would create something and those who would enjoy that thing: you no longer needed to convince an agent and publisher and distributor for the funds or approval to publish a book, or release an album, or even distribute a short film or movie, because you could just do those things and see if you could find an audience.
And it worked, because on the internet it became economically feasible to publish for a small audience, and it became economically feasible to aggregate a lot of small creators and small audiences into big content-agnostic platforms for the thing being distributed. And a few of them would make it big, too.
Yes, app stores still funnel the overwhelming majority of the money on the platform to a small handful of developers. But I’d argue that the recent moves towards consolidation and concentration is because the ecosystems have betrayed the democratic, decentralized, nondiscriminatory/content-neutral ideals that we built the user-created Web 2.0 on, and instead of descended into enshittified monetization of the platforms’ algorithmic control, SEO-like strategies so that slop isn’t filtered out, and our utterly hacked brains that can’t resist clickbait and ragebait and hornybait to where it’s mostly sorting through slop instead of organically finding the niches we enjoy.
And now instead of traditional gatekeepers, we have tech gatekeepers. It was a fun run, though, from 2005-2015.
The majority of anything sucks ass and fails, no shit Sherlock, this isn’t a problem unique to Steam
There is a hell of a lot of shit and slop games on Steam, though,
Yes, that happens if you have freedom. That is something I take, rather than having no freedom. At least the algorithm and how the store is organized handles this. Because, if not, who is to decide what slop is? Valve? Does that mean Valve has the power to decide what game is slop or not? Yes, it would prevent lot of slop, but then Valve would be in charge to decide this and that is not something I want to.
Edit: As an example, Nintendo seems to allow publishing a lot of games too without holding much back. The difference to Steam is, that Steam does an excellent job of organizing the games, with a good algorithm and user engaged reviews and tagging. That helps a lot, which Nintendo lacks. So yes, if you dig deeper in Steam or just list newest titles released, yes you will find a lot of slop. But going with the algorithm and looking through recommended games Steam does pretty good job hiding most slop.
I’m not judging, just stating it as a reason why so many games make so little money. It’s because they deserve to. They’re easy to avoid, and I honestly rarely even see them on my store page.
I also recently finally got around to blocking certain publishers that do pop up so I see even less slop now - Blizzard, Activision, EA, Playstation, to name a few.
Edit: Oh yeah, Ubisoft as well.
Is ‘games that sell more copies make more money’ supposed to surprise me?
What’s with these news pieces, they exclusively focus on steam, industrys slinging mud.
This is one of the reasons why the narrative is nonsense that renting games is better because you can easily own “too many games” if you keep buying them and then… oh no!!! You own too many digital games!!!
When you buy an indie game you are supporting art whether you get to the game or not, remember that, which isn’t to say buy random games but I think this statistic underlines how much it does matter to the smaller game developers to take a leap and buy their indie games. It helps that they usually cost 1/50th the cost of a AAA game lol…
The problem for all creators on the internet is discoverability. All the faults in the pre-internet publishing system, but those publishers did a huge amount of screening and reduced the choice paralysis on consumers. Now, we get the whole firehose of games, music, stories, movies, and who’s really got time for that? Who wants to spend the time installing 10 different, random games to give each of them a 10-minute test and uninstall? That’s 2 hours that could have gone into an actual good game, nevermind currency.
“They” used to solve discoverability by having “experts” decide where to spend advertising dollars. Algorithms try to solve discoverability by seeing what everyone else is playing, but that just amplifies the hyperbola distribution of plays & revenue. Most of those indie games will never even show up, unless you somehow search for them by exact name. And now with AI just flooding the zone…these statistics are only going to get more lopsided.
Their analysis comes with the usual Steam research caveat: Valve doesn’t publish revenue figures, so they’re instead reverse-engineered using user reviews as a base that’s then multiplied to estimate sales.
I didn’t know how unreliable and bad the usual Steam research was. I always thought there must be a bit more sophisticated method of estimating.
I pressume is bigger, ’cause there’s rather more private accounts, accounts that don’t make reviews, resellers, keys takedowns, gift card trading, etc…
Also, the more controversal and problematic a game is, the more reviews will be posted to inform others or to let out frustrations. Therefore some games or type of games will just get more reviews, which does not reflect the real number of sold games or generated money. So its not just about higher or lower numbers, the method of estimation is deeply flawed.
I’d be more worried about most people buying from Amazon or communicating through services owned by Meta.
Too many games on Steam (and any other store) and too many people believing if something trends and/or has extensive marketing it must be great. Added to this is the fun fact that any live service multiplayer game that’s not part of the most played is considered “dead”. I miss the days when I’d visit someone, each would grab a controller and have a blast playing some weird ass game nobody talked about. Good stuff that can still be done over long distances when someone bothers to purchase local multiplayer games and stream them through Steam’s Remote Play Together or some other alternative like Parsec (or less common still, games with LAN multiplayer), but too many people are stuck on the loop of typical live service hooks.
When if true, why is this news? There’s a ton of games on Steam and gaming is totally saturated at this point. There’s just too many games.
You get access to the largest game distribution platform in the world, but you end up being a single game in a sea of competitors. You gotta distinguish yourself from the lot, on top of being lucky that your stars are aligned.
gaben looking like a completely different person
