It sucks but my impression is that people familiar with releasing games on Steam all seem to immediately see why this could happen and gave feedback. Also it doesn’t seem like a beloved early access game in general by those that bought into early access. It had its hype period a long time ago and limped out of early access. Now Valve is trying to help them market
Steam for the most part is the primary marketing platform for indie games. Not just for PC, also PlayStation, Xbox, Nintendo because of how lackluster those shops are for discoverability of games that aren’t front page advertised with large thumbnail/poster placements. Success on Steam is viral marketing for other platforms
Still recommendations are always to try to build a following both on and off Steam. Twitter for a while were the major social media accounts indies should spend time building up a following. Now it’s Tiktok. YouTube and Twitch influencers are also a good choice for getting viewers converted to customers but you can’t just pick a popular person, got to be mindful for if their viewers watch for game recommendations or for the personality only. So in that way, it’s not as simple as pay a popular streamer to play your game and their fans will play the game
Regardless Steam is the best for marketing. Steam curators are way smaller than YouTubers, streamers, Tiktok but it’s highly directed at spending customers. Some Steam reviewers have followers. You can follow game developer/publisher pages. That’s how I learn of some games. I get emails and check out publisher Steam pages of games I like.
Until any competitor actually tried to compete with Steam as a service, I’m not going to knock Valve heavily over Steam. They keep improving. Itch is not anything close to marketplace that can compete with Steam. It’s even more barebones of a service than Desura over a decade ago. At the basic level to compete with Steam, it needs a desktop client and social media functionality for developers to build followers. Maybe it needs to open source and join under the Linux foundation or KDE or something to help guide it to the next level
Music taste is super subjective and the barriers of entry are incredibly low now. There’s a lot of sour grapes in the art fields that I side eye. Like incredibly gates open for all and equality in their persona but among close friends they’re complaining about how much competition there is how they wish it was like how it was back in the where it was way harder and more expensive to get into music as if they’d be the one to make it through the gatekeepers like Harvey Weinstein and P Diddy
There’s a ton of good music. Every year thousands and thousands of new quality music artists put music on YouTube and music subscription services. If you live in a big city, look up all the music venues including small stage coffee shops, you’ll see hundreds of good artists you’ve possibly never heard of. All these artist either local or going on a national tour, they’re all mostly paycheck to paycheck.
Broke musician/singer/writer was the standard in the 90s and before. Broke musician/singer/writer is the standard today just there’s a whole lot more of them and the Internet to hear the bitterness of not succeeding in making a lot of money off ones art
Besides that, the “best” music spreads itself on its own to a small niche of people. On one hand because of the Internet, you can be incredibly cheap on marketing compared to the past. On the other hand there’s so much music out there that marketing and knowing the right people is more important than ever. More competition than ever before.
Like before you pretty much had to pay money to get money on radio, television, play in any venue, get your music heard by industry influencers to have a shot as someone selling their own music. Now you don’t have to but really from what I’ve seen, the Internet indie to mainstream success seems pretty dead to me so you have to spend a lot of money to actually make a career out of your own music. Even just being a freelance studio musician, good luck. World class classical musician, good luck getting into any orchestras that pays well. Better off private teaching and recording holiday music covers
Context, if it’s ten years and your most popular song on YouTube has 4 million views and that was over ten years, you made some money. Not a lot and that was spread over ten years. You better have another income stream besides album sales and Internet streams or else you’d be homeless. Got to your hard. Sell merch. Write songs for other people. Work at Wal Mart. 4 million views in ten years is both an incredible success and not much money. That’s not even taking into account how much money was spent on production/studio time/etc to get 4 million YouTube views in ten years
So traditional music industry is incredibly important to success because they market. They have money to place music where people hear it. Most people don’t search for music they like, they stumble on it passively which means what’s marketed to them. What gets in Spotify playlists. What is on radio and television. What’s used in a major movie. Used by their favorite super popular influencer. Today you have greater access to reaching people but so does everyone else so marketing and networking matter an incredible amount and that’s where traditional music companies come into play