As a consumer I love Steam, nothing else besides GOG compares, but I've always been more than a little grossed out by how they treat developers, especially small ones.
I think if you suggested to Steam execs that it'd be smart to hire a guy whose only job is to highlight cool, weird games that wouldn't be seen otherwise, you just KNOW some corpo asshole would fire back with "we want to avoid highlighting the *wrong* games", and this is the entire problem.
Once I was in a room with some of the Steam guys and I was like "but don't you see that what's most worthwhile is to give more opportunities specifically to games that are *not* selling well already" and i never saw less comprehension in a face
Weird, if something is already popular, it's made its initial footprint on merits. It may deserve a wider audience for the sale-hungry, but then there are games that didn't make that footprint that could both meet those looking for sales AND earn the word of mouth that might make them a new "10K"
Often they've said something like "Steam is a meritocracy, the good games float to the top", "We select the games we think are most likely to succeed" and it's always astonished me how plainly circular that is. Their success is only evidence that you selected them!!
My highest-grossing product ever came from being on the front page of Steam for 10 days straight, in the big capsule. It had to have been a clerical error! Nobody got that long! Someone forgot to swap it out! I lived on it for 2 years!
How do you not see that you have that kind of power and go, hey, I should keep an eye out for stuff that's cool but isn't selling? I should specifically boost stuff whose audience is inherently niche, which we know will *never* compete in the mainstream!
What's most frustrating with these platforms is the apparent unwillingness to even *try* a different approach. I went through a phase of watching a ton of UE vids on YouTube, and not once did your videos appear. Instead they'd feed me the same three vids, from the same three people, again and again.
This despite the fact that your UE tips video is packed with handy info that I'd have never even thought to look out for. Class viewer? FUCK YEAH GET INSIDE ME.
Instead, it was thoroughly suffocated under videos three times longer, containing less than half the amount of incidentally useful shit.
Like, I get it: show me all the hottest stuff when I first open Steam for the day. Do it twice. Three times even. But maybe the fourth time I return to the home page? Flood it with strange. Bury me in the fringe elements. Inundate me with what the fuuuck even are these games?
valve could spend like 3 bucks putting a random indie game on sale and make 12 quadrillion dollars AND the indie could get a good paycheck but instead we get MORE MONEY FOR THE MONEY MEN
which is also BS, because by in "how to market a game" they scraped daily deal info and "Surprisingly about 10% of games that got Daily Deals last year had fewer than 400 reviews (235 on average). So there is a VERY slight chance to get some extra visibility even if your game didn't go viral."
Comments
Instead, it was thoroughly suffocated under videos three times longer, containing less than half the amount of incidentally useful shit.