The shovelware storm is hitting Valve’s bottom-line really hard, they are losing money because consumers are losing confidence in their platform and buying fewer games (and a number of successful mid-tier developers no longer even use their storefront). It’s more or less an exact mirror of the games market crash 82-85 - when consumer confidence is low, consumers stop buying. In the early 80s this almost completely wiped out the console games industry, and it was caused by an over-saturation of low budget, poor quality releases. Atari allowed almost complete freedom for third parties on their platform - it cost Atari everything and they never recovered. Nintendo on the other hand were highly selective, and went on to massive success. This isn’t a coincidence, it’s an important consideration in market economics.
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Consumers confidence isn’t a big deal when you can easily get a dozen reviews from a wide range of sources in seconds, and there’s a built in 2 hour refund window. Consumers confidence isn’t an issue from the consumer perspective, there’s no problems with Steam unless you want to try to find a gem in new releases or in early access. It’s easy enough to find great games. The problem is from a indie developer standpoint, how do you get a fair shot versus a dozen other similar indie games that just came out in the last few months. Indie devs cannot rely on the store front to help build momentum or a base when there’s a lot of competition and no barrier to entry. But this has been a common issue for the last 2-3 years, here’s enough stories, write-ups, documentations, postmortems, indie talks, etc about that topic. Although cutting the **** games in half might make it easier to overcome that success wall.
Steams bottom-line is another topic all together. Steam doesn’t get as great of sales anymore, EA and Ubisoft all have their own store fronts (which have gotten better) that are pushing consumers away, alternative sites like gog.com and Amazon have been growing quick. Steam is just no longer the only option.