PC Gaming

It only costs $100 to list your own game on Steam, and that money is refunded if you make $1000. That's all there is. The rest is up to the dev or the publisher. That barrier to entry is absurdly low. If a game isn't making sales, it's not Steams fault, it's advertising. ANYONE can list games, which means there is a lot of chaff on the market. What do you want them to do? Increase the listing price so that trash games don't get listed as often? Then you cut out the good indie dev, too. Game dev is only half the battle. You still have to reach your market once you post your game.

Steam allows you to buy from whomever. Want to support an indie dev on their first title? Go for it. Steam won't stop you. You can be the change you want to see in the world.

Why is this written like some kind of hit piece.

Behold, it's easy to make a game and hard to make a good one

"Half of all paid games on Steam have earned less than an estimated $3,622 in their entire lifetime," the report reads. "A game at the 90th percentile has earned about $236,184, and the 99th percentile starts at $15,872,031."

10% making over $235k paints a very different picture tho...

Especially considering how 8/10 games seem to be utter slop lately.

/sigh

They admit the numbers are estimates.

This doesn’t seem to take into account “paid games” that are mangles of free assets smashed into a scene.

I’m not saying there isn’t going to be disparity, because there absolutely is. But these numbers are just grasping at straws and don’t control for obvious issues.

Is ‘games that sell more copies make more money’ supposed to surprise me?

There is a hell of a lot of shit and slop games on Steam, though,

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 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

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.

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.

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.

What's with these news pieces, they exclusively focus on steam, industrys slinging mud.