Sorry, that’s not how it works. From a consumer stand-point, Steam advertises itself as the biggest and best, go-to marketplace for PC games. Yet they allow every piece of garbage onto their store day after day. Garbage which will now have an even easier access to their “premium” PC store.
From a developer standpoint, Steam charges up to 30% royalties per sale, yet they give a masterfully crafted game the same time in the spotlight as the aforementioned garbage? How can they justify the prices they charge in royalties while allowing everyone onto the stage. This means that if you were to make a great game, spend thousands upon thousands of dollars on promoting and marketing it, you’re being punished for your effort and success because Steam will charge you a ton more money than some idiot who took a template from a marketplace, packaged it into a “game” in less than a week, shelled out the $100 for the Steam release and had 100 sales. Looking at the percentages, he has a bigger profit margin than you, for a fraction of the effort.
People forget that the infamous industry crash of the late 80’s is directly linked to the platforms at the time being flooded with cheaply made low-effort garbage. That’s why Nintendo decided that they will check every product themselves, thus making the Nintendo Seal of Quality.
Look at the Android and iOS markets today. Only the biggest players with the marketing muscle to push through the flood of garbage are able to even consider making a profit on it. I can’t remember where I heard this, and it might be off, but the Android market sees more than a 1000 games released every day. If that number is even close to true, that means Android is not an ecosystem for releasing games, it’s an ocean of feces where every gem that someone worked hard on and put effort into will sink, never even coming close to succeeding.
With this change, Steam is headed into the same direction. Even with Greenlight, over 40% of Steam’s library was released in the past year or so. This new system will be even easier to release on than Greenlight. How exactly do you expect this to work, and what do you think Steam will look like in a few years if this continues?
I am glad that the future of PC gaming is a joke to you. Makes me all fuzzy inside, gives me hope for the future.
Niceness only goes so far. There are times when mincing words doesn’t get you anywhere.
Exactly, which is why the iOS and Android App stores are cesspools today. If anything, Steve Jobs was short-sighted, and it shows today. You have better chances of waking up one morning and seeing that honey is flowing out of your pipes than succeeding on the App Store as a brand-new developer with a brand-new game.
But everyone seems to have glossed over something I said - I never mentioned that publishing should be an elite-only thing. I am saying that we should facilitate MORE stores. If I am a farmer who is making nice vegetables, the biggest retail store chain won’t give me the time of day at first, but I’ll go the local stores, sell it there, get some word of mouth going, make some initial profit, then pitch it to the big stores after I made some name for myself. Only then will they even consider giving me shelf time.
Steam is analogous to that. Everyone thinks they deserve the shelf space on the biggest and the baddest store, but this is no liberal college campus safe-space, this is the real world. Some games are just better, and without a track record no one will, nor should give you the time of day. But if we had a dozen alternatives to Steam, smaller digital platforms, then a new developer could release there, make some initial turnaround, some small profit, get the game rolling. It’s not like your game has a self-destruct timer on it, you can release it on the smaller market today, and put it on Steam in 6 months once the game is battle-tested and it’s proven that there’s an audience for it.
This is a win-win situation for everyone. Steam gets competitors, the quality on Steam goes up, overall discoverability of games increases and the monopoly on digital distribution goes down.
How anyone can seriously argue against this is beyond me.