I do. First game i ever made got me about 600.000 EUR in the first month. It didn’t matter what you released. Remember “The Stomping Land” - 12 million USD in less than 6 months and the game was ■■■■. Why do you think there are games sitting forever in the Early Access Top 10 ? It’s because that list is driving their sales.
And to be Featured all you had to do was asking your steam representative if they could feature you a few days. Nowadays - thanks to the spam-the-fakk-out-of-steam mentality by people producing crappy games most indies don’t even get an answer from Steam. And again, bad for you guys, good for me, since all i have to do to get a game listed and featured is sending an email. So yeah, being successful now is hard on Steam.
Also, i don’t understand why they got rid of Greenlight. People were complaining they couldnt get past Greenlight. Guess what, if you could not get past greenlight your product was ■■■■. I actually used Greenlight to figure out if prototype/concept had potential or not - now i don’t have that tool anymore, i have to release the game and put additional funds into marketing.
And here is the catch about Greenlight, if you got those 12.000 Votes who got you greenlit you basically had 12.000 potential customers already who had your product on their wishlist. So the day your game came out there was enough buzz going on to make your game interesting enough for Youtubers and Streamers to pickup on it. Nowadays you actually have to pay them because they cannot be arsed anymore actually buying your title because it’s ‘Hot’. (Plus, you need the visibility from them to be successful)
For indies this is big step back, for everyone who already released 1-2 games they don’t care. This system does exactly the opposite of what was implemented for - it ensures a few keep making money while the rest of you never get enough sales to make a living.
Again, if you have something cool, feel free to PM me, i’m actually looking for something i can publish this year.