As you can see from about 2020 onwards, there was an absolute DELUGE of trash games. Of course the majority of games aren’t going to make anything, Steam makes zero effort to curate anything. A thousand games can get released per day and the vast vast majority of them you never even notice.
Misleading. There is so much slop made from free assets just thrown together or AI programmed messes and such on steam that it should read “little more than 1% of games on steam are worth your time” indie devs get a decent amount of love, especially at launch. But steam has such a backlog of games available that it gets pretty wild. If we’re counting DLCs, OSTs, and games, I’m really not surprised.
It seems that’s partially taken into account:
New analysis of 99,206 Steam games illustrates just how extreme the economics can be on Valve’s PC gaming emporium
Over 8,000 paid games analyzed never received a single Steam review
This report also only looks at premium games, meaning free-to-play giants like Valve’s Counter-Strike are left out, as are “non-game software, adult-only titles and unreleased entries.” The list of 99,206 was selected from a base of 136,281.
The only caveat is that revenue is estimated, so there can be big swings in the data.
The standard multiplier here is 35, so this research assumes one Steam review is worth 35 sales at a game’s current listed price, though you can also use a more “conservative” 20 or “generous” 50 in the report’s impressive graphs.
Yea the amount of shovelware and AI shit that’s put on the platform is massive. Steam just does a really good job keeping that shit from taking over your front store page… unlike the playstore…dunno how it is on iOS…
This isn’t the shocking statement they think it is.
So what? The vast majority of games released on Steam are either hobby or student projects or just first time devs’ shitty pixel platformer. Many are low effort products, Steam will not even give those games “shelve space”. The algorithm will based on pre launch and launch metrics decide if it should push the game in front of customers in the recommendation sections of the store. If a game can’t even move the needle a bit after launch Steam will blackhole the game and basically make it invisible in the store unless a customer searches for it. Because even though it’s a virtual store, “shelve space” aka the recommendation section is still scarce.
The hidden gem games on Steam are rare. Every time I watch a dev’s postmortem who talks about how little they sold on Youtube I’m rarely surprised when I see the game.
Also Steam generates around $10+ Billion in revenue in a year. So the other games generate around $2 Billion. If that is generated by 2000 games that still averages to a million a game.
That’s basically the story of the whole economy.
Would Pareto be ecstatic or rolling in his grave at this disparity?
Podcasts, music, film, paintings, novels…Linux distributions, ice cream flavor sales…literally everything.
ice cream flavor sales
Strawberry’s fallen on hard times. We need to seize the means of chocolate production and distribute the wealth among all our fellow flavors.
Twitch streamers, YouTube channels, book best seller lists, radio play lists…
Hell, the website I get knitting patterns from has the same situation. The top 1% of designers make all the dough. But it’s great to have a platform that anybody can submit patterns to. The top designers pay the bills and they keep people coming back.
Upvotes on lemmy posts…
That’s basically how art and media have always worked. This isn’t a function of Steam, or even the modern economy.
Jesus, the gamesradar site is absolute ass
The data: https://weloveit.io/developers/steam-revenue-report/
The top 10% of games make 98.80% of all revenue. Woof.
I don’t get it. Why leave out Adult Only titles? Why don’t they count?
not that I like it, but isn’t it how the current economy works across most fields?
A lot more than just the economy, it’s like a law of nature. Even language itself obeys it
Exactly. I think you’re referring to the Pareto distribution and/or Zipf’s law
OP, can you link the original research? It’s an excellent site:
It is not news to me that a handful of games have the most players, also considering people put low effort garbage on all stores constantly I don’t think the bottom 90% deserve anything
Pareto principle writ large.
That or Sturgeon’s law.
I think its unfortunate because there’s a lot of games that fall into that next ~15-25% that are decently good games (though sometimes flawed) but won’t make enough to let the developers survive a second game.
That being said I don’t think there is a particularly easy solution, and to Valve’s credit, they have tried unique approaches to combat this, but it’s still a problem.
I agree. It’s not a platform issue it’s a market saturation issue. You see this in many fields where the product is frequently a passion project. (Mostly art, music etc.) Some people will keep creating regardless of the earnings and throw the stats. Not that the stats really matter. Not much you can do… aside from UBI.
A lot of games on Steam hold zero interest to me. AI is just the newest form of slop. Beyond that what I see is a hell of a lot more games are being released in the last 4 years. That means more competition but also many have not been around long enough to build up over time revenue. To a certain extent you are comparing life time revenue to launch revenue. On AAA that probably doesn’t matter as much but on the lesser hyped indy games I think it would be an important distinction.
Did they include AI slop, dogshit mobile game ports, low effort games, and the like in the dataset? If so, I’m not surprised.
