To me, the interesting bit here is less about Steam in particular, but about the industry overall.
Fourteenthousand games. That’s insane. Sure, the vast majority is going to be asset flips and shovelware crap, probably a lot of AI generated spam games in there, too. But the sheer amount is still staggering. That’s a fair few games compared to when I started gaming in 1987, playing Squirm on a C16 with a tape drive.
the biggest concern for me is that game stores are going to become increasingly algorithmic to deal with this problem. Then game development becomes more about pleasing the algorithm than it does about pleasing the customer, or about making something good.
you can see this play out pretty much anywhere algorithms decide what people can see, YouTube is a good example, many channels had to just change to adapt to what the algorithm wants rather than what their audience wanted.
And of course this leads to situations where you can make something brilliant but no one will ever know, because algorithm.
Not sure about that, gaming the algo helps with discovery but at the end you have to please the customer, specially in a world where refunds and reviews are a thing.
So although the marketing, store info, pictures etc will try to game that at the end the game and it’s development won’t be affected much.
On YouTube/TikTok/etc doesn’t matter because people don’t pay anything (directly) and people might watch the content anyway to the end even if at the end they think it wasn’t worth it, it doesn’t matter anymore they cannot refund or complain about it much, there isn’t a review system, just comments or some upvote downvote but sometimes not even that.
The point is that refunds and reviews don’t matter if no one sees your thing. To go back to the youtube analogy, creators on YouTube still have to make something that viewers find acceptable because otherwise, watch hours would be down, and they wouldn’t make revenue. But they have to please the algorithm first.
You have to make something the algorithm wants before anyone gets to the point of being able to refund or review your thing.
It matters the creator loses the money if there is s refund or simply doesn’t get it at all if the user quickly see the bad reviews, on YouTube if the video ends up being shit he gets paid anyway, yeah maybe somebody read the comments before hand and yeah maybe next video you won’t watch from him so is not zero result but it’s not a so direct effect.
Plus the parent comment was about the development of games I still do not see games development being effected to play with the algorithm, the marketing and hype yes but the game I don’t think so. But maybe I lack some clear example of something like this.
In an algorithm world, the only games you would see on your steam homepage are games that are made to suit the algorithm. The only games that Steam would recommend to you are games that suit what the algorithm wants first.
I don’t know how to explain this better to you. In an algorithm world, you have to make something for the algorithm first and the consumer second. If you want an example, I’ve given a lot with youtube, which is the prime example today.
I don’t know what part of this you aren’t getting, but this is all it is. Refunds and reviews don’t matter because you have to make things for the algorithm for anyone to even get to that point.
What I was only saying is that for games it doesn’t work the same. Because if the game is bad it doesn’t matter shit if appears on the frontpage they won’t sell it anyway. On other platforms they can game the algorithm all they want and that works because is usually free content for the user and at least part of it will be watched and they will get some ad revenue, for games won’t matter… they still have to make a good game not just adjust the game to the algorithm, otherwise they don’t get any money.
An exception could be gamepass as at least they could get some money of people trying a game and then giving up if is shit, since is a subscription service and they might get paid by minutes played or similar.
There are a few important things here.
1, most platforms don’t have refunds 2. Youtube clicks that immediately result in not watching the video negatively affect the algorithm. So, the comparison is even more valid.
But ultimately, the game doesn’t have to be good. It has to be good enough. And the actual point I’m making that I want you to understand is that games will need to be made for thr algorithm first, and for the player second. Refunds, which are not available on most platforms, are not solving anything there.
Let’s agree to disagree, I do not see that happening games, you think will happen let’s leave it at this.
Then regarding the refunds availability nowadays I would say that most platforms have it available, they are on epic, steam, gog, Microsoft, Google Play/App Store. Sony offers but it’s more for mistakes when buying or for games completely faulty/broken, cannot test games so not very useful.
The only big exception is Nintendo which you could get one contacting support on rare occasions but it’s not usually the case, and when it is usually is a faulty case similar to Sony. And of course third party sellers keys.
But Youtube works on engagement. Their business model depends on people spending as much time on Youtube as possible and that’s the purpose of the algorithm, to keep the viewer on the site. Steam doesn’t need people to spend as much time on Steam as possible. If Valve wanted to be nefarious you could say the purpose of the algorithm would be to sell as many games as possible, but so far Valve has shown reason and understanding that the customers wallet is not infinite. There’s really no incentive on Valves part to shove the algorithm down out throat. And while I’m sure game devs would love to game the algorithm for visibility they also know that Steam is not a golden ticket to success (algorithm or not). If you want your game to succeed you need to do actual marketing and most of that marketing has to be outside of the Steam ecosystem.
I get where you’re coming from but I think it’s mostly an irrational fear rather than something that could actually happen (at least while Gabe is in charge). If Valve wanted to do it they could’ve done it years ago.
Marketing hasn’t been a viable way of gaining sales for years. No one watches ads, no one watches sponsored content, it doesn’t translate into sales. If you have a mega budget to put your ads on the side of the road, maybe, not for most.
Also remember there are more platforms than steam, I know you want to hope that steam won’t do something bad but you should remember steam does not exist in a vacuum and that steam does bad things for profit too.
The entire success of Vampire Survivors is built on accidental free marketing. For the first month of launch the peak players for Vampire survivors was 14 players. Then one youtuber made a video about the game and the next day it was 1000+ player peak. The some other guy started streaming it and Northernlion saw it. He then made a few videos and from there it just snowballed into one of the biggest games of 2022.
The success of Dave the Diver was clearly a marketing effort, it went from 700 player in early access to being The indie hit of 2023 days after release. And to show you don’t have to make a good game to get the word out, the reason people even know about “The Day Before” is because of marketing. That game was complete crap, but you had big youtubers and streamers talking about it because clearly their marketing strategy was on point. And finally it’s not just indie games, do you think Capcom launching a campaign to reinvigorate Monster hunter World has had no impact on the sales of a 5 year old game?
Marketing absolutely does work. If you want more you can always lurk /r/gamedev to see game developers discuss how to market games. You can look at it this way, either you’re smarter than the entire game dev subreddit (because nobody there goes “marketing is pointless”) or you’re wrong about it not being viable.
You do see how that part is entirely fearmongering? You’re pretty much saying that Steam has done bad things so we should expect them to also do this one bad thing and thinking Steam wouldn’t do it is just being hopeful. And if Steam for some reason actually won’t do it then there are other stores besides Steam that could do this bad thing.
Nothing even indicates that it might be a possibility beyond you just believing it is a possibility.