Over 30K games released, trending to double that by 2020:
Not too far away from someday reaching the same player acquisition cost of mobile platforms (very expensive).
By 2020 (if you’re solo little guy, no established company) you either make games purely for passion or you don’t… Unless you invest a small fortune in marketing and be extremely lucky.
rolls eyes
IT’S THE INDIE APOCALYPSE
AGAIN
AND AGAIN
I’ve been hearing the same thing every year since 2011, but here I am, playing new indie games, from new studios, more than AAA games.
well indies aren’t going anywhere so it’s not the indiepocalypse
however steam as a tool for exposure just doesn’t exist anymore. the time where simply appearing on steam would make a game sell 10k copies are long gone, and now having your game on steam is almost as meaningful as having your own website as far as discovery goes.
so I agree. unless you can gain some massive traction on social media and build a big fanbase beforehand, or you can pour a lot of money into marketing… you better make games for passion and not for money
Yeah, it’s not as much of an issue for gamers as it is for developers
How many of those 30,000 are actual functional games? What is the number of real games vs spam (yeah we have game spam now).
In 2011, only about 300 games were released on Steam, 400 in 2012 and 500 in 2013. This is growth, but it’s far from outrageous - it’s not even two per day, which means a list of 20 new releases still encompasses everything from this week.
The Greenlight deluge arrived in 2014, with 1800 games, 3000 in 2015, 4000 in 2016, over 7500 when they opened the floodgates in 2017, and over 9,000 last year (PCGamer / SteamSpy’s numbers don’t include games that have since been removed from sale).
To put that in perspective:
https://i.imgur.com/VVXrXLd.png
If you released a game in 2018, there’s a good chance it never even saw the store page, leaving the top 20 new releases in hours and being pushed to the top 100 within a few days.
25+ games per day doesn’t benefit anyone. It’s totally useless for consumers as there’s effectively no way for anyone to keep up with that. It doesn’t benefit developers because visibility is so low that the storefront and discovery systems are totally ineffective. This is without even considering that the woefully low quality bar actively drives many potential customers increasingly away from Steam.
I think part of the problem is trading cards. It encourages devs to make free shovelware that bots play to earn the cards and sell, so the devs, bots and Valve get a cut. Get rid of those, and I’d love to see how many games Steam have then.
Cards have already been removed more than a year ago
Are you completely, absolutely, utterly sure about that?
I recently got cards from Shadow of the Tomb Raider and the winter sale.
Accounts silently flagged as “abusers” don’t get any of those cards anymore.
Hmm. And yet Hitman 2’s free Christmas level attracts over 350k concurrent players. I think there are still a lot of bots, and games for them to play.
(Don’t get me wrong, Hitman is my favourite franchise, and I’d love to think all those players were humans, but this doesn’t smell right.)
