I'm sad that Sturgeon's Law doesn't get talked about much anymore: "ninety percent of everything is crap". The vast majority of all media created is terrible.

I'm sad that Sturgeon's Law doesn't get talked about much anymore: "ninety percent of everything is crap". The vast majority of all media created is terrible. The only reason that mass media (AAA games, blockbuster movies, etc) are less bad is that they've passed through many layers of quality filters before reaching the public. Those filters are imperfect, which is a real downside. It's all too easy to reject risky ventures in favor of safe ones, or simply misjudge a great work as something bad, or something "the public won't get". It happens all the time, and it's one of the reasons indie works in any domain are so valuable. The lowered barriers to entry bring us brilliant products that would never have seen the light of day in mass media. But they also bring us an enormous amount of crap. That's predictable, and not a problem with the market or the domain. Even after you take out shovelware that the developers know is terrible, the odds of success are still slow. We can talk about making discovery better (and with Steam we absolutely should talk about that), but the low win rate is not inherently bad.