Easiest way to see.
It’s likely due to fine tuning with all the various other aspects of Steam which you mentioned. Not everyone engages with the store in the same way. Let’s say you’re instead someone fairly new to PC gaming but a title you saw an ad for pushes you onto Steam, which defaults at its store page to open up. You’d have no wishlist, no game preferences, no curators, no friends list. You will be besieged by crap, and then get prompted for a gaming queue which won’t know a thing about you.
Well, if you bother to review what new games appear on the hour on Steam, you will see them. edit: I only saw two ‘cheap looking’ games in the last 24 hours, seemed done in rpg maker, that’s relatively not bad!
But, do you do the same on Amazon or Walmart??? Do you look at literally every product there?
This is completely correct. A bad game quickly gets a low review score and disappears from view. It happened unfortunately to Frozen Synapse 2, but they released in really bad shape and couldn’t really justify the existence of the sequel to their customers. Other than that, Steam offers SO many opportunities for exploration. I now follow companies I like and automatically see their games etc.
There’s also little mention of the fact that Indies screwed themselves over with the great rush to bundling. Humble Bundle may seem like a good thing, but it severely lowers the value of Indies. Whenever I buy an Indie game nowadays, I automatically think of whether it’ll be bundled. I’m actually suspicious of discounted Indie games, because often they lower their price right before being bundled. This has done untold damage to all Indies IMO far more than Steam ever has (including the infamous October bug).
At this point being a success indie is a bit like being a rock start. You can try, but for most won’t ever happen and you shouldn’t plan your future around that.
That’s the state of the general market, but somehow people make Steam the ones to blame?
Funny how I’m defending Steam here when a few posts above I wasn’t against Epic or exclusivities!
Well yeah, gotta keep an eye out for new space games and such. Steam actually made this so annoying to do through them someone had to make a site to do it. It’s so silly.
Epic store isn’t selling Steam keys. That’s like the whole point.
Because you realize the Epic store isn’t going to help anything, and is just going to fracture the PC space and possibly lead to more and more stores mushrooming and then collapsing after taking people’s money.
Steam has been competing this whole time against consoles, trying to provide the best PC experience possible - including in the living room - while also trying to preempt the possibility of new stores by making their user experience as awesome as possible. I can’t think of another company that’s been as benevolent while having so much power. The one thing I think they could improve is the cut to Indie developers vs major devs, now that I’m aware of it. But this is precisely a problem of awareness – a campaign to make buyers know about this may have been effective as well.
I don’t want exclusivity wars in the PC space. If Epic thinks they can do better than Steam, let them build up a store that’s better – don’t shove it down my throat. You can give users the choice of buying via the Epic store and giving more to the devs. You can even give Steam keys so people really have a choice. But I think Epic knows they can’t do better, which is precisely why they’re trying these exclusivity tricks.
Wait… can’t you just click on the ‘space’ tag on Steam?
Tags are garbage.
Are they? I went to the ‘space’ tag and it showed me a whole bunch of space games. Aren’t they set by the devs as well?
They’re more set by users and aren’t always accurate, nor do they get put on every game. They’re pretty useless.
Well, tags are always not an ideal solution. You know, it’s all subjective, depending who you ask, they will say that different tags are missing and other tags are clearly extraneous. And the same would happen if only the devs would establish them.
I guess I have to take your word for it, but even something with as few users as Drox Operative has the ‘space’ tag.
This says it all! I welcome the competition but not via fracturing the market.
Yeah, they’re a half-assed attempt at organization, just like the rest of the store.
How dare you.
For the information of those of you who never leave the house, physical retail stores have exclusives for all kinds of things, not just video games. This is kind of a common practice. You differentiate your retail store by offering brands or items that other stores do not.
Welcome (back) to the real world.
At the end of the day game development is a business, one that is precarious and shaky (as can be seen by many medium to large game companies going out of business). Having Epic use their marketing reach to push your game out, plus having better royalty cut is a win-win for studios and anyone calling out a studio for going with Epic store exclusivity at the moment is pretty laughable. It 100% makes business sense to do.
The problem with tags isn’t their existence, exactly, it’s that they’re the anchor of Valve’s “algorithms”. And in a very lazy, simplistic way. For example, right now my front page is littered with survival games - of which I have played exactly one on Steam, ever - because they share the “Sandbox” tag with X4 and also they’re popular. That’s literally the store’s entire analytical capacity.