My answer to that is “yet”. The economics are those of a race to the bottom… Unless the company that provides the infrastructure for the market takes action.
Apple doesn’t care as their core business is selling luxury hardware, which they use to attract a number of passive income streams for “brokerage fees” on media content and software.
To be honest, I have never had a very clear idea of what is Valve long term business plan.
Except the app store pretty much started near the bottom, whereas discounts have if anything gotten worse and less immediate on PC by a fairly significant degree over the past few years. Indie games used to dramatically discount almost immediately and now I routinely see them go for a year or more with <25% discounts, for example.
I believe yes, though better curation and discovery is still needed. I think most good games get a decent following and generally rise to the top. Perhaps not to the extent they should be featured and as always you can find some unsung heroes. But somehow I will see a video, a forum thread, a curation recommendation or other mention enough to make me perk up with interest. I very rarely find a game that slips by my radar (though Oxenfree recently did). Of course, that is the essence of selection bias too. After all, if they did how would I know?
Now that may be also limited to the genres I play. I play strategy, building and story-based games. I do not generally play platformers, metrovanias, puzzlers, shooters or some other genres. I could see where those games, many of which feature some really retro graphics, could get lost in the noise. I see a huge number of metrovania-style games come up in my queue. I can not imagine who is playing all of those.
Here’s an old but relevant blog post from Jeff Vogel:
I agree with him that it’s mostly a supply problem. Curation or discoverability won’t change the amount of time I can spend on games, and there’s lots more titles competing for my time.
I wonder what the back-of-the-envelope calculation is for the portion of the gaming industry now goes to youtubers and streamers. I see just so many streamers making six figures a month, even ones that seem to have pretty unremarkable view counts. When it’s revealed just how much they are making in a single month my jaw drops every time. Is that mostly new money expanding the space overall, or is a portion of those dollars something that used to go into buying game themselves?
From an entrepreneurial standpoint, the odds of hitting it big with game development are still quite good compared to many other industries. I mean you could develop a better mop, but that’s pretty tapped out.
The nice thing is the whole artistic imagination thing. Like music or movies, if you have real talent, you will develop a following. If you don’t, well then you are a Darwinian failure. Luck, of course, does come into play, but statistically it works out. Enjoy being a statistical anomaly and/or game evolutionary dead end if you don’t make it! Both still make you special…
I liked Jeff’s article. Then and now. I just think he picked the wrong time in music history to make the comparison. For me this is the equivalent of the home stereo boom of the 60’s that new music was created and needed to fill the massive new demand as more and more people got into music and more and more people could earn a living making that music as a result.
You cannot solve that with just better curation and discovery.
Well made games cannot do it well because there are just too many of them, for the size of the market.
Better curation and discovery does a hell of a lot more than the default position everyone’s taking of “let the market sort things out.”
Do we really need Valve picking winners and losers on their marketplace? There are a ton of perfectly useful Steam curators doing the job. I can’t imagine what kind of curation Valve has to offer me that Rock Paper Shotgun or PC Gamer doesn’t already do.
Even more, if Steam were to start having their own people doing curation… they just would hire people with experience… journalists from PcGamer, or RPS, or whatever. So in the end you would discover the same games you do now.
If we assume 12 games per day, even if 90% are crap, that’s still 1 good game per day. Every day.
Gamers aren’t hurting for good games, they’re not hard to find.
“Steam needs more curation!”
GOG curates by not selling Opus Magnum
“I didn’t mean THAT!!! Opus Magnum is GOOD! Steam should just not sell BAD games!!!”
So… you’re perfectly capable of determining what the bad games are, then, using the reviews, videos, curation, and, if needed, 2-hour trial period currently available to you.
Jeff Vogel was right.
I wonder how many people who make art of any kind will make less than minimum wage making their art in their lives. Certainly “most.” This isn’t a Steam problem.
Without data that’s a best guess. I am not saying that what you observe is not real. I haven’t seen myself a change in patterns like that, or at least not in the genres I play. But that doesn’t mean the realisation of being trapped in a race to the bottom hasn’t taken hold and is starting to overcome other forces.
So far, other than Valve not totally behaving like they want to squeeze the last dollar out of the platform, there is very little pointing out that the economics are any different, in their processes, from those of other online software stores.
Regarding discoverability, curation etc. The problem is that without regulation of some sort, those mechanisms are prone to be penetrated by agents pursuing SEO for their products. We have seen this happen with the user reviews, the Steam curators system and probably we see it too on the 7-9 review scoring system, and how publishers play hardball with reviewers who are “mean” to their games.
Valve, I want to think, has been fighting the “good” fight and has been whacking the moles so far. For how long will they want to be doing that?
Until they started taking money from the developers or publishers for it. Then it would just be another IGN in the world that doesn’t want any more.
I don’t know that I trust Random Steam Employee when it comes to games. Some big names are “curators” and most of them agree the system is shit and not worth their time to bother with. That’s where the change needs to happen. I mean a lot of “famous” reviewers are curators, but no one leverages it into anything.
Haha. Yeah, I thought the same thing when I saw that article.
How many people saying “it’s all fine” have actually tried looking for a new game to play (or even just wishlist) starting from the Steam front page? In my experience I’ll have better odds with the one line of suggestions that I usually get on Amazon than on Steam’s entire page. The idea that everyone is easily getting matched with a great thing for them and there’s no value in doing anything is ludicrous. It may or may not actually be worthwhile to Valve - particularly as long as they’re the market leader by such a large margin - but there is plenty of room for improvement.
I think part of it might be the distinction of looking at Steam as a marketplace vs. a storefront. As a marketplace, Steam should reasonably offer pretty much anything. As a storefront, they’re a hot mess.
To be honest, Steam has been much better for me lately. I find myself adding too many games to my wishlist. If the front page doesn’t work for someone I have found the Activity Feed a great source to see what friends are buying and playing. Another great avenue that takes minimal effort is to search Steam via tags. A search for roguelike, 4X, tactical, or turn-based (to use some examples) give a great list of games. You can even sort by new, popular, best sellers, etc.
With very minimal effort I can find a decent amount of games. I personally don’t think discovery or curation are as problematic on Steam as they have been in the past.
There was a time when Steam constantly recommended anime-based games, visual novels, and JRPGs to me constantly. That was a couple years ago and since then Valve has tuned the system quite a bit so I hardly ever see that type of stuff now.
Why would I? My backlog and wishlist are both huge, because, like everything else, I know about the games from Youtube, websites and forums. Even then, now and then something catches my eye on the front page, but it’s not going to do anything for the dev, I’m full.