Damned if they do, damned if they don't. I remember the complaints when Steam was a closed platform and indie devs found it really hard to get on. IMO the truth is that the amount of truly great...
And most of the developers I spoke with acknowledged that the basic challenge of discoverability when there are just too many video games isn't Valve's fault.
They say Steam's decision to rely on a changing algorithm rather than curation has hindered rather than helped their games, resulting in steep drops in traffic, unpredictable game sales, and an increase in the amount of time and expense needed for marketing that had not been as critical when Steam was a smaller, more curated platform.
Damned if they do, damned if they don't. I remember the complaints when Steam was a closed platform and indie devs found it really hard to get on.
IMO the truth is that the amount of truly great indie games a year hasn't really changed since 2012. That's maybe 20, 30 games. And maybe 2 or 3 of them reach Celeste level mainstream success. That seems to be about humanity's creative output in terms of quality indie games. If 150 games a week want our attention on Steam, that's just not gonna work. Either we accept that the vast majority of games (less than 1% of games released!) get told that they're just not good enough and give that space to a handful of games that deserve it and the advertising that comes with it (pre-Greenlight) or we accept that Steam is a download service rather than a game curation/recommendation service and that 99% of the content on it is low-quality white noise. No "algorithm" can change that.
Damned if they do, damned if they don't. I remember the complaints when Steam was a closed platform and indie devs found it really hard to get on.
IMO the truth is that the amount of truly great indie games a year hasn't really changed since 2012. That's maybe 20, 30 games. And maybe 2 or 3 of them reach Celeste level mainstream success. That seems to be about humanity's creative output in terms of quality indie games. If 150 games a week want our attention on Steam, that's just not gonna work. Either we accept that the vast majority of games (less than 1% of games released!) get told that they're just not good enough and give that space to a handful of games that deserve it and the advertising that comes with it (pre-Greenlight) or we accept that Steam is a download service rather than a game curation/recommendation service and that 99% of the content on it is low-quality white noise. No "algorithm" can change that.