16 ms·

Steam’s discovery algorithm killed my sales

154 points by doppp 8y ago

netcan 8y ago
Private, centralized 3rd party marketplaces are responsible for some of the biggest commercial successes of the web boom(#1 and 2.0). But, they haven't "done good" by vendors, by and large. A YouTuber with viewerships as high as mainstream TV shows can barely afford "2 guys and a mic." App store purchases is a fairly meager market, and not a place to build a serious business unless you have other "monetisation" plans. Steam is somewhat of an exception but still, being beholden to a discovery algorithm like that is disheartening. Recommendation engines are such an important part of any market these days. Besides recomending stuff, it's an incentive structure for the market.. a la google-> seo spammers, fb-> kgb spammers, etc.
- baby 8y ago
  have you seen how much youtubers earn?
  - Dayshine 8y ago
    Picking a random example: https://socialblade.com/youtube/channel/UCbx1TZgxfIauUZyPuBzEwZg https://socialblade.com/youtube/channel/UCbx1TZgxfIauUZyPuBz... 100k daily views, £17 - £250 estimated daily earnings. Game of thrones has an estimated 10 million viewers per episode. So, scaling up youtube earnings: £1,700 - £25,000 per episode. The actual per episode budget was around £4 million per episode. See the gap here?
    - baby 8y ago
      https://influencermarketinghub.com/how-much-does-pewdiepie-make/ https://influencermarketinghub.com/how-much-does-pewdiepie-m...
      - sbarre 8y ago
        You're using the example of the top earner to make your case about everyone? Do all film actors make $60M/year just because Dwayne Johnson does?
        GhostVII 8y ago
        Well to be fair the parent was using one of the most popular TV shows to make their case, so using the top YouTuber as a response seems reasonable.
        ArchTypical 8y ago
        There are multiple youtubers who have gone into depth about the details of how twitch people get paid. From top end to bottom, it's fairly consistent (except for a little subscription margin step at a certain point). Youtube/Google is even less involved in day-to-day, so there's no reason to believe that the scale isn't similarly linear.
        Applejinx 8y ago
        My God, no. It's not anything like linear. It's more like exponential: the top earners are totally off the charts, and everybody else is largely jockeying for position. I hesitate to even call it a scale. These things all follow viral dynamics: if you haven't blown up with billions of views, you're very possibly spending more than you get back.
        ArchTypical 8y ago
        Pareto explains the curve, but the monetary rewards are linear to where you are on that curve. Perhaps a small example will clarify. Pareto Curve (more or less) of Y values on index X: [1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,2,2,2,2,3,10,50,500,7000,9000000] Index 30 is "off the chart" Now revenue: $$*index The correlation is linear (basically). The top youtuber who is a kid who reviews toys, makes the majority of his 22mil from ads, same as you or I would with <100 views per video.
    - GhostVII 8y ago
      I don't think that is a fair comparison, because people pay money to watch Game of Thrones, while YouTube is completely free. If it cost $14.99 a month to watch a small set of YouTube channels, their viewership would be far lower (and revenue per viewer would be much higher).
      - munk-a 8y ago
        > If it cost $14.99 a month to watch a small set of YouTube channels Actually this exists, it's called Youtube premium and there are some channels that offer some content exclusive to the platform (as far as I'm aware) I have no idea how it's doing but I also don't have any interest in trying it out, I'd much rather support specific content streams via patreon or other offerings.
      - josefresco 8y ago
        I pay for YouTube Premium.
        na85 8y ago
        Are there ads?
        ramses0 8y ago
        No.
        josefresco 8y ago
        Not on YouTube (general) but I also pay for YouTube TV and there are loads of ads on their "on demand" content.
        ramses0 8y ago
        Vote with your wallet. I'm about to ditch Pandora b/c they keep advertising pandora super-premium, when I'm already paying for pandora premium. What should that particular anti-pattern be called?
    - criddell 8y ago
      How did you generate the random example? If you do it again, I'd be shocked if you got a 100k/day example. I would guess there's a very, very long tail of channels that have a very small number of videos and essentially no views.
      - Dayshine 8y ago
        That channel is ranked around 20,000... It's in the long tail. I picked an example of someone who does it full time.
        criddell 8y ago
        With hundreds of millions of channels, it's pretty darned close to the head.
        Dayshine 8y ago
        Sure... but what's the value of a channel with no views in this example? It won't be monetised, so you can't really compare it to TV?
    - ssalazar 8y ago
      Earnings is far from a linear function of viewer count.
    - merb 8y ago
      well I always tought that most youtubers actually make money via "hidden" ads and not via views. most of these 100k daily views channels make way more than 17€ - 250€ juat because they have sponsors and what not. basically it's the same than on free tv. people with the most sponsors and ad network will basically make the most money. (i.e. on german television (sky paid tv) there are ads on the end of game of thrones which makes them probably more money than their subscriber count)
- criddell 8y ago
  The discovery algorithm serves the consumer first and foremost. When users start complaining about not being shown interesting stuff, then Valve will jump into action. In this case, how do we know that the algorithm change isn't correcting a problem? I'm sorry for the game developer in the article, but every time his game was being promoted, somebody else's wasn't. How do we know he wasn't being over-promoted with the old algorithm? Without seeing everything that Valve sees, can we really know?
  - sbarre 8y ago
    The point here is not about this particular developer, but at about recommendation engines in general and the challenges they pose. I'm not arguing against algorithms here, there are just too many games on Steam to show everyone a raw list of products and let them fend for themselves.. You need some kind of automated curation. But as a seller of products, you have to put all your faith in the marketplace's ability to put your products in front of the right people as much as possible, and it can be frustrating when you suddenly start seeing data that shows this is happening less, and you don't know why.
    - netcan 8y ago
      Exactly what I meant. They're not meceydoing a bad job, but just having that central decider (human or botmaster) is disheartening.. when things don't go your way. ..it's a gatekeeper, and we have a complicated relationship with those guys.
      - sbarre 8y ago
        For sure, I agree and I know exactly where you're coming from.. A decade ago or so I was tasked with writing a recommendation engine for a "creators community" company I worked at, and the feedback we got after launching that feature was pretty much constant for as long as I was still working there. Everyone wanted to know exactly how it worked (so they could min/max for the logic) and no one was happy with the results.
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
- badloginagain 8y ago
  > YouTuber with viewerships as high as mainstream TV shows can barely afford "2 guys and a mic." This actually isn't a revenue thing, its a platform expectation thing. There's a really good video essay (on YouTube, naturally) explaining the 'Manufactured Authenticity' for popular YouTube channels: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8FJEtCvb2Kw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8FJEtCvb2Kw
- LeifCarrotson 8y ago
  It depends on how you define "done well by vendors". They aren't causing a few vendors to find success on the scale of a mainstream TV show, but they have allowed a great many vendors to "succeed" weakly. 2 guys and a mic, without Youtube, would just be a self-funded hobby to show your friends and family, maybe enter some indie film shows, maybe help get a job in advertising or local TV with your portfolio. With Youtube, they might get a million subscribers and make on the order of $10,000 per year from what would otherwise be just a hobby! And there are on the order of 10,000 such channels with 1 million subscribers. Now, you can say what you like about how Youtube treats the other 97% of channels with far less viewership - but there's a lot fewer than 10,000 channels on mainstream TV. It's the same in game development, mobile app stores, music, sports, and a lot of other fields. The marketplace is open to a lot of people who really want in to get their chance at the top. It's hard to earn a living wage from doing the work when you're competing with people who are willing to earn less than a living wage.
  - TheGRS 8y ago
    The issue here is that you make (just continuing your hypothetical here) $10k per year for 2 guys doing 7 days per week to maintain their viewership. Not enough to sustain their business, so their content starts moving toward least common denominator stuff.
    - tokyodude 8y ago
      I'm not seeing how this is not just reality. It's like trying to make a living as a rock band, a book author. There's too many games. The iOS app store claims 2 million apps. It's been around 10 years. Opened July, 10, 2008. 2 million apps / 10 years = 547 new apps every day for the last 10 years. And of course the number of apps coming out today is far greater than it was 10 years ago so it's actually more like 1000 apps a day right now. Steam has the same issue. Steam was around 8k new games in 2017. That's 21 new games per day, 153 a week, 666 a month. No one has time for that many games. What would Steam do to suddenly get all those games to make a salaries for every indie that put stuff up? There's really nothing they can do. There's just too many games. At most Steam could go back to restricting the market. That wouldn't raise anyone's odds, it would just make invisible all the people that tried and failed to get on the market.
- LoSboccacc 8y ago
  The recommendation engine are there for the buyers, not to replace sellers' marketing. That's as reliable as a source of viewers as scratch lottery cards.
- notatoad 8y ago
  >A YouTuber with viewerships as high as mainstream TV shows can barely afford "2 guys and a mic." Do you have a source for that? because it seems to me like there's a lot of youtubers out there making pretty good money.
  - ghaff 8y ago
    Here's one example. [1] It claims 1.4 million monthly viewers translates to about $17K per year. Yes, a few people have made relatively big money ($millions) but that's for billions of views. A popular TV show averages in the neighborhood of 15 million viewers these days. ADDED: So the parent comment seems pretty close. Maybe $150K/year gross revenue for viewership in neighborhood of the most popular network programming. That's in the ballpark of barely supporting two guys and their gear. [1] https://www.inc.com/minda-zetlin/even-youtube-stars-with-14-million-monthly-viewers-earn-less-than-17000-a-year-research-shows.html https://www.inc.com/minda-zetlin/even-youtube-stars-with-14-...
    - skksjsnaahs 8y ago
      Aren’t TV ratings based on how many people watched each episode, during its initial airing? And the same episode is sold in multiple venues, like DVDs and paid streaming. To apples-to-apples compare traditional TV production budgets to the YouTube stat of revenue per views per month for a whole channel, you might need need to multiply by 10 or 100. YouTube’s cut is reportedly 45% - I am skeptical that the traditional media industry gives such a revenue share to its creators.
      - ghaff 8y ago
        With traditional network TV, the vast bulk of the money is in how many people watch the show when it first airs. Syndication revenue, DVDs, etc. are relatively trivial. Obviously the whole model is shifting to a more fragmented and on-demand market with fewer, but often more valuable, eyeballs per show. Seinfeld peaked at over 30 million average views for first-run episodes. Game of Thrones is about 10 million for a comparison on cable today. I agree that apples-to-apples is hard but the bottom line is that very few people make a real living from YouTube views.
- notafraudster 8y ago
  > A YouTuber with viewerships as high as mainstream TV shows can barely afford "2 guys and a mic." But this stands to reason. Mainstream TV show viewing figures refer to the number of adults 18-49 in the United States watching the show live(-ish now that L+SD and C+7 rates are used to sell ads) including at least putatively watching the various 3 minute blocks of commercials in the middle. YouTube viewing figures show the number of worldwide plays by all people in or out of the demo, most not in the United States and in less valuable markets, many adblocking, those who don't adblock often skip ads, and the ads are either inline or pre-roll. And the content is shorter, so it's sort of unclear how an 11 minute video should compare to a 42 minute television series.
  - bytematic 8y ago
    Adblock works for most of the network tv websites too! Surprisingly...
    - notafraudster 8y ago
      One reason networks have been very ineffective at including online streaming views in their ad sales packages.
- nitwit005 8y ago
  Let's say, hypothetically, that I create a website that rivals YouTube where people do achieve fairly consistent success, and can live off of the income from their videos. What do we expect to happen? Hundreds of thousands of people will try to get in on it, causing both the income of existing creators to drop, and the average income to plummet. Any market where there is a huge supply of people who want to produce the good is going to have this problem.
ivanb 8y ago
Yeah no, you are supposed to do marketing. No app store is going to do much for an unknown title. Run some facebook ads, see what happens.
- babuskov 8y ago
  I don't think Facebook ads would work for many games. Here's an example: https://store.steampowered.com/app/949790/Rogue_Bit/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/949790/Rogue_Bit/ How do you market such game outside of Steam? How do you reach the programmer/hacker niche that would be interested in playing this?
  - jklinger410 8y ago
    Since half of them are blocking every type of tracking known to man, in my view? Fuck that demographic. Let all of your nerdy projects starve because you guys all hate marketing.
  - mattkrause 8y ago
    You post it here? Give away some promo codes at Meetups or other gatherings where programmers congregate? It’s not like this would be any easier without Steam.
    - babuskov 8y ago
      > You post it here? I tried. Twice. Even made a browser playable demo: https://roguebit.bigosaur.com/ https://roguebit.bigosaur.com/ Mostly got ignored (a single upvote on the post). > It’s not like this would be any easier without Steam Of course. This is exactly what I was trying to say. No Facebook ad can match Steam. With Steam algorithm, you can laser-focus the type of players who play this type of games. Without Steam you have to spend so much time and energy.
      - mikekchar 8y ago
        Quick feedback: If you change the trailer to show some game play, I think it would improve your conversion rate. As stupid as this sounds, I have discovered I'm too lazy to try the browser version (but not too lazy to give you a reply -- that is weird...) The trailer just didn't hook me and I found myself thinking, "I don't have enough energy to learn how to play the game right now. Maybe later". But I know "later" will never come. To be fair, I'm not a fan of puzzle games and this looks like a puzzle game. However I think the engagement issue may still affect other people.
sdinsn 8y ago
"It's everyone else's fault, not mine!"
SubiculumCode 8y ago
AAA games are starting to avoid Steam, opting to hosting it themselves for a number of reasons. Steam has taken a few actions lately that would favor big companies, including lowering Valve's take from biggest sellers (1). I think they are trying to keep the name brands in Steam. 1. https://www.polygon.com/2018/12/3/18123649/valve-steam-revenue-sharing https://www.polygon.com/2018/12/3/18123649/valve-steam-reven...
- LoSboccacc 8y ago
  While that's true, that also resulted in people avoiding AAA games on the worst channels like origin. We're maybe not much, but with AAA average margins we're important
  - gruez 8y ago
    >that also resulted in people avoiding AAA games on the worst channels like origin is this actually a thing? if the game is good, I'm not going to rule it out just because it's on a different client, especially when the hassle of using it is marginal at best. reminds me of this: https://i.redd.it/wwx5exndw6b11.png https://i.redd.it/wwx5exndw6b11.png
    - lmm 8y ago
      You don't know if the game is any good until you've tried it though. I put off trying Overwatch for about 6 months because it was a non-Steam channel. I would've bought Forza Horizon 4 a couple of weeks ago if it had been on Steam (literally searched for it ready to click buy), since it sounded good in the reviews, but it's yet another non-Steam channel so I can't be bothered.
      - bytematic 8y ago
        I guess you're just lazy? None of the other clients are even bad anymore, certainly not worse than steam. On all of them you can import steam friends too. What makes steam so great, gaben?
lbj 8y ago
If its possible for Steam to kill your sales, its because you've put your main sales channel(s) in the hands of another company. This is unwise in any business.
- cwyers 8y ago
  The majority of businesses, even really big businesses, do this. Very few businesses control their own sales channel, and the ones that do are generally smaller than the ones that don't. Apple doesn't control their main sales channels: https://9to5mac.com/2017/10/19/apple-store-sales-cirp/ https://9to5mac.com/2017/10/19/apple-store-sales-cirp/ So it's unclear why you think anyone else should, either.
  - lbj 8y ago
    My point here is, that if you have a single sales channel only, you need to control/affect it. Apple has a myriad of sales channels all boosted heavily by Apple advertising.
    - cwyers 8y ago
      And that is an _entirely unreasonable expectation_ even for large, established companies. Vlasic Pickles and Levi Jeans are both large brands that are parts of larger conglomerates, and they both got pushed around by Wal-Mart: https://www.fastcompany.com/47593/wal-mart-you-dont-know https://www.fastcompany.com/47593/wal-mart-you-dont-know Asking indie game developers to challenge the domination of Steam as the sales channel for PC games where EA/Ubisoft/Microsoft have all failed to do so is absurd.
      - lbj 8y ago
        I dont know about reasonable, but its a practical necessity. Consider Google Ads. There are a maximum of 13 spots available on the frontpage - How do you chose the 13 out of the billions of possibilities? A mix of quality/relevance and advertising dollars.
    - 8y ago
nkrisc 8y ago
I wonder what his sales would look like if there was no discovery algorithm and Steam was instead a simple directory of game listings.
- jpfed 8y ago
  I can only wish! "Aardvark Adventures" would finally get its due!
  - bytematic 8y ago
    Nah, the rise of "....!!!Rowboat Dungeon" would quickly outshine.
flankstaek 8y ago
What confuses me is their reluctance to attempt to use other third party distributors (itch.io, GOG, etc.) when Steam clearly isn't working in their favor.
- TheGRS 8y ago
  That's addressed in the article, its still not as big of a revenue source.
- jkchu 8y ago
  Although the author did mention this in the article. I still wonder how much some of these indie games would benefit from partnering with a marketing consultant. Listing a game on steam is basically free marketing for the game. The author mentions only 1% of his sales are from direct sales. I wonder how much having an experienced marketing pro could improve that percentage.
- wccrawford 8y ago
  That's because despite all the complaining about Steam changing things, it's still far better than all other ways of selling their game. Personally, I think Steam is correct to change their algorithm whenever they think it'll help the buyers find games that suit them better. It's also very possible that other developers have seen a bump in sales that correspond with the decline for this developer.
  - llukas 8y ago
    For start: to get on GOG your game cannot be shovwelware. I buy from GOG first.
Ntrails 8y ago
When it was physical stores, what mattered was shelf placement and magazine reviews. Which, by the way, were worse by far than anything Steam will ever do in terms of being based on merit. I acknowledge that the risk to developers from changes to a black box algorithm are significant - but as a steam user the only thing I care about are "top sellers" (under £5) because that's where I'm occasionally likely to find a good game on sale.
- TheGRS 8y ago
  Interestingly that stuff doesn't bubble to the top for me. I see mostly indie recommendations I've never heard of and maybe a scattering of AAA or bigger indie titles. It feels very random to me these days.
clickme_zsh 8y ago
Have you tried Discord Store?
TheGRS 8y ago
Some very dismissive comments on here. For context, Grey Alien is responsible for one of this year's best GDC talks about how to survive in the indie world for 10 years without a hit. He's been doing this for a long time and so I think he's a really great resource for this type of discussion. http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/286091/Video_How_to_survive_in_indie_game_dev_for_10_years_without_shipping_a_hit.php http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/286091/Video_How_to_survi... Steam is a bit of a linchpin for indie game success for better or worse. The audience is there, understands the platform, and uses it extensively. But just as is the case with any marketplace, they do not serve the interests of indie developers first, they serve the interests of the marketplace owner first (in this case Valve). I think indie devs mostly understand this, but I think its totally reasonable to call out what the current situation is. Grey Alien points out considering other avenues of revenue, but how they mostly just don't show the same level of sales. My take is that if we want both indie games to be a thing and have good indie games, then maybe Valve should pay attention to this sort of feedback and make sure the hard-working, full-time indie devs are getting enough attention to be sustainable. Otherwise you basically get the Youtube model of lowest common denominator drivel.
- nindalf 8y ago
  Rather than being a case of the developers' interest not being aligned with Valve, it is possible that they're not aligned with the users. You point out users use Steam extensively, could that be attributed partially to the users liking the recommendation algorithm? If the algorithm was changed to favour hardworking indie devs at say, the expense of AAA studios, would Steam users still use it as much?
  - TheGRS 8y ago
    As a long-time Steam user, all I can say is an anecdotal response that the algorithmic recommendations on Steam are not why users stay there. They stay because they have huge libraries of games already built, so there's a bit of a lock-in effect going on. I wouldn't dismiss that developers are still responsible for gathering user data, observing trends and marketing their product, all that is still there. This post is merely highlighting how changes to the platform can have some huge cascading effects downstream, and that sucks for those trying to build followings and businesses.
adnzzzzZ 8y ago
For completion's sake, here's another developer of a popular game saying his game is seeing unnaturally high sales https://twitter.com/RaymondDoerr/status/1069004011309867009 https://twitter.com/RaymondDoerr/status/1069004011309867009. It might just be that Valve changed the algorithm slightly to show more popular games more and less popular games less. This is already what the algorithm did to some extent but it might be doing it even more now. In my view I generally trust Valve to best serve their audience first and developers second, even with me being a developer. If people are complaining all the time that Steam isn't showing them good games then it's probably for a good reason.
mmirate 8y ago
I wondered what these folks' portfolio was like, so I took a look. Here's the summary: > cards > cards > puzzle > puzzle > puzzle ... for which reason it's no wonder that these folks' sales are down when AAA releases come out. A silly little puzzle or card game has nothing on a 3D spaceflight simulator and other such AAA fare.
village-idiot 8y ago
I used to just browse Steam and collect games that looked interesting. Over the years I've slowly stopped doing that. For certain, part of it is that adult life gives me far less time to enjoy "dedicated" gaming. I have plenty of time for mobile games on my commute (I walk), but I no longer have dozens of hours a week that I can dedicate to CS or Eve Online. But part of it is that the Steam store is anxiety-inducingly overwhelming. It feels like there's more than a lifetimes worth of content in there, and I have absolutely no idea how to find the good stuff. Something about Steam's design appears to provoke this response, because I do not have similar issues with the similarly large Apple store. I think a redesign might be in order. And the recommendation algorithm just keeps sending me the same games that don't look interesting to me.
- kochikame 8y ago
  > I have plenty of time for mobile games on my commute (I walk) Er, do you mean you walk and game at the same time? Coz I am constantly walking around people like you and tutting if that's the case
  - village-idiot 8y ago
    Low density area, and I lower the phone when crossing streets.
adanto6840 8y ago
We [0] saw a similar drop happen after what appeared to be fairly aggressive adjustments made by Steam in early October. It improved throughout the first half of October but still ended up being between ~35-45% lower than what we'd have expected to see versus the curve we had been seeing prior to the changes. I posted a comment here yesterday [1] about Steam's incentives, but it's worth posting again: Sometimes I wonder what Steam actually optimizes for. If their algorithms always show the "best" games (ie ones that players spend hundreds++ hours playing), then I'd expect that to actually hurt Steam revenues, at least short term if not long-term as well. In theory they'd be better off marketing/optimizing to push games that 'satisfy' users (read: does not cause exodus) but that have low play-time/hours on average -- so that they can sell the player another different game that much sooner. It's a strange set of incentives & it's hard to tell how aligned they really are (with either players or developers). 0 - https://store.steampowered.com/app/598330/SimAirport/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/598330/SimAirport/ 1 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18583254 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18583254
torgian 8y ago
I have some games that I bought through steam, but I refuse to buy any more games through steam. I’ll either use GoG (which is a better interface anyway) or buy directly from the developer

154 points by doppp 8y ago

Private, centralized 3rd party marketplaces are responsible for some of the biggest commercial successes of the web boom(#1 and 2.0). But, they haven't "done good" by vendors, by and large. A YouTuber with viewerships as high as mainstream TV shows can barely afford "2 guys and a mic." App store purchases is a fairly meager market, and not a place to build a serious business unless you have other "monetisation" plans. Steam is somewhat of an exception but still, being beholden to a discovery algorithm like that is disheartening. Recommendation engines are such an important part of any market these days. Besides recomending stuff, it's an incentive structure for the market.. a la google-> seo spammers, fb-> kgb spammers, etc.

baby 8y ago
have you seen how much youtubers earn?
- Dayshine 8y ago
  Picking a random example: https://socialblade.com/youtube/channel/UCbx1TZgxfIauUZyPuBzEwZg https://socialblade.com/youtube/channel/UCbx1TZgxfIauUZyPuBz... 100k daily views, £17 - £250 estimated daily earnings. Game of thrones has an estimated 10 million viewers per episode. So, scaling up youtube earnings: £1,700 - £25,000 per episode. The actual per episode budget was around £4 million per episode. See the gap here?
  - baby 8y ago
    https://influencermarketinghub.com/how-much-does-pewdiepie-make/ https://influencermarketinghub.com/how-much-does-pewdiepie-m...
    - sbarre 8y ago
      You're using the example of the top earner to make your case about everyone? Do all film actors make $60M/year just because Dwayne Johnson does?
      - GhostVII 8y ago
        Well to be fair the parent was using one of the most popular TV shows to make their case, so using the top YouTuber as a response seems reasonable.
      - ArchTypical 8y ago
        There are multiple youtubers who have gone into depth about the details of how twitch people get paid. From top end to bottom, it's fairly consistent (except for a little subscription margin step at a certain point). Youtube/Google is even less involved in day-to-day, so there's no reason to believe that the scale isn't similarly linear.
        Applejinx 8y ago
        My God, no. It's not anything like linear. It's more like exponential: the top earners are totally off the charts, and everybody else is largely jockeying for position. I hesitate to even call it a scale. These things all follow viral dynamics: if you haven't blown up with billions of views, you're very possibly spending more than you get back.
        ArchTypical 8y ago
        Pareto explains the curve, but the monetary rewards are linear to where you are on that curve. Perhaps a small example will clarify. Pareto Curve (more or less) of Y values on index X: [1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,2,2,2,2,3,10,50,500,7000,9000000] Index 30 is "off the chart" Now revenue: $$*index The correlation is linear (basically). The top youtuber who is a kid who reviews toys, makes the majority of his 22mil from ads, same as you or I would with <100 views per video.
  - GhostVII 8y ago
    I don't think that is a fair comparison, because people pay money to watch Game of Thrones, while YouTube is completely free. If it cost $14.99 a month to watch a small set of YouTube channels, their viewership would be far lower (and revenue per viewer would be much higher).
    - munk-a 8y ago
      > If it cost $14.99 a month to watch a small set of YouTube channels Actually this exists, it's called Youtube premium and there are some channels that offer some content exclusive to the platform (as far as I'm aware) I have no idea how it's doing but I also don't have any interest in trying it out, I'd much rather support specific content streams via patreon or other offerings.
    - josefresco 8y ago
      I pay for YouTube Premium.
      - na85 8y ago
        Are there ads?
        ramses0 8y ago
        No.
        josefresco 8y ago
        Not on YouTube (general) but I also pay for YouTube TV and there are loads of ads on their "on demand" content.
        ramses0 8y ago
        Vote with your wallet. I'm about to ditch Pandora b/c they keep advertising pandora super-premium, when I'm already paying for pandora premium. What should that particular anti-pattern be called?
  - criddell 8y ago
    How did you generate the random example? If you do it again, I'd be shocked if you got a 100k/day example. I would guess there's a very, very long tail of channels that have a very small number of videos and essentially no views.
    - Dayshine 8y ago
      That channel is ranked around 20,000... It's in the long tail. I picked an example of someone who does it full time.
      - criddell 8y ago
        With hundreds of millions of channels, it's pretty darned close to the head.
        Dayshine 8y ago
        Sure... but what's the value of a channel with no views in this example? It won't be monetised, so you can't really compare it to TV?
  - ssalazar 8y ago
    Earnings is far from a linear function of viewer count.
  - merb 8y ago
    well I always tought that most youtubers actually make money via "hidden" ads and not via views. most of these 100k daily views channels make way more than 17€ - 250€ juat because they have sponsors and what not. basically it's the same than on free tv. people with the most sponsors and ad network will basically make the most money. (i.e. on german television (sky paid tv) there are ads on the end of game of thrones which makes them probably more money than their subscriber count)
criddell 8y ago
The discovery algorithm serves the consumer first and foremost. When users start complaining about not being shown interesting stuff, then Valve will jump into action. In this case, how do we know that the algorithm change isn't correcting a problem? I'm sorry for the game developer in the article, but every time his game was being promoted, somebody else's wasn't. How do we know he wasn't being over-promoted with the old algorithm? Without seeing everything that Valve sees, can we really know?
- sbarre 8y ago
  The point here is not about this particular developer, but at about recommendation engines in general and the challenges they pose. I'm not arguing against algorithms here, there are just too many games on Steam to show everyone a raw list of products and let them fend for themselves.. You need some kind of automated curation. But as a seller of products, you have to put all your faith in the marketplace's ability to put your products in front of the right people as much as possible, and it can be frustrating when you suddenly start seeing data that shows this is happening less, and you don't know why.
  - netcan 8y ago
    Exactly what I meant. They're not meceydoing a bad job, but just having that central decider (human or botmaster) is disheartening.. when things don't go your way. ..it's a gatekeeper, and we have a complicated relationship with those guys.
    - sbarre 8y ago
      For sure, I agree and I know exactly where you're coming from.. A decade ago or so I was tasked with writing a recommendation engine for a "creators community" company I worked at, and the feedback we got after launching that feature was pretty much constant for as long as I was still working there. Everyone wanted to know exactly how it worked (so they could min/max for the logic) and no one was happy with the results.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
badloginagain 8y ago
> YouTuber with viewerships as high as mainstream TV shows can barely afford "2 guys and a mic." This actually isn't a revenue thing, its a platform expectation thing. There's a really good video essay (on YouTube, naturally) explaining the 'Manufactured Authenticity' for popular YouTube channels: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8FJEtCvb2Kw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8FJEtCvb2Kw
LeifCarrotson 8y ago
It depends on how you define "done well by vendors". They aren't causing a few vendors to find success on the scale of a mainstream TV show, but they have allowed a great many vendors to "succeed" weakly. 2 guys and a mic, without Youtube, would just be a self-funded hobby to show your friends and family, maybe enter some indie film shows, maybe help get a job in advertising or local TV with your portfolio. With Youtube, they might get a million subscribers and make on the order of $10,000 per year from what would otherwise be just a hobby! And there are on the order of 10,000 such channels with 1 million subscribers. Now, you can say what you like about how Youtube treats the other 97% of channels with far less viewership - but there's a lot fewer than 10,000 channels on mainstream TV. It's the same in game development, mobile app stores, music, sports, and a lot of other fields. The marketplace is open to a lot of people who really want in to get their chance at the top. It's hard to earn a living wage from doing the work when you're competing with people who are willing to earn less than a living wage.
- TheGRS 8y ago
  The issue here is that you make (just continuing your hypothetical here) $10k per year for 2 guys doing 7 days per week to maintain their viewership. Not enough to sustain their business, so their content starts moving toward least common denominator stuff.
  - tokyodude 8y ago
    I'm not seeing how this is not just reality. It's like trying to make a living as a rock band, a book author. There's too many games. The iOS app store claims 2 million apps. It's been around 10 years. Opened July, 10, 2008. 2 million apps / 10 years = 547 new apps every day for the last 10 years. And of course the number of apps coming out today is far greater than it was 10 years ago so it's actually more like 1000 apps a day right now. Steam has the same issue. Steam was around 8k new games in 2017. That's 21 new games per day, 153 a week, 666 a month. No one has time for that many games. What would Steam do to suddenly get all those games to make a salaries for every indie that put stuff up? There's really nothing they can do. There's just too many games. At most Steam could go back to restricting the market. That wouldn't raise anyone's odds, it would just make invisible all the people that tried and failed to get on the market.
LoSboccacc 8y ago
The recommendation engine are there for the buyers, not to replace sellers' marketing. That's as reliable as a source of viewers as scratch lottery cards.
notatoad 8y ago
>A YouTuber with viewerships as high as mainstream TV shows can barely afford "2 guys and a mic." Do you have a source for that? because it seems to me like there's a lot of youtubers out there making pretty good money.
- ghaff 8y ago
  Here's one example. [1] It claims 1.4 million monthly viewers translates to about $17K per year. Yes, a few people have made relatively big money ($millions) but that's for billions of views. A popular TV show averages in the neighborhood of 15 million viewers these days. ADDED: So the parent comment seems pretty close. Maybe $150K/year gross revenue for viewership in neighborhood of the most popular network programming. That's in the ballpark of barely supporting two guys and their gear. [1] https://www.inc.com/minda-zetlin/even-youtube-stars-with-14-million-monthly-viewers-earn-less-than-17000-a-year-research-shows.html https://www.inc.com/minda-zetlin/even-youtube-stars-with-14-...
  - skksjsnaahs 8y ago
    Aren’t TV ratings based on how many people watched each episode, during its initial airing? And the same episode is sold in multiple venues, like DVDs and paid streaming. To apples-to-apples compare traditional TV production budgets to the YouTube stat of revenue per views per month for a whole channel, you might need need to multiply by 10 or 100. YouTube’s cut is reportedly 45% - I am skeptical that the traditional media industry gives such a revenue share to its creators.
    - ghaff 8y ago
      With traditional network TV, the vast bulk of the money is in how many people watch the show when it first airs. Syndication revenue, DVDs, etc. are relatively trivial. Obviously the whole model is shifting to a more fragmented and on-demand market with fewer, but often more valuable, eyeballs per show. Seinfeld peaked at over 30 million average views for first-run episodes. Game of Thrones is about 10 million for a comparison on cable today. I agree that apples-to-apples is hard but the bottom line is that very few people make a real living from YouTube views.
notafraudster 8y ago
> A YouTuber with viewerships as high as mainstream TV shows can barely afford "2 guys and a mic." But this stands to reason. Mainstream TV show viewing figures refer to the number of adults 18-49 in the United States watching the show live(-ish now that L+SD and C+7 rates are used to sell ads) including at least putatively watching the various 3 minute blocks of commercials in the middle. YouTube viewing figures show the number of worldwide plays by all people in or out of the demo, most not in the United States and in less valuable markets, many adblocking, those who don't adblock often skip ads, and the ads are either inline or pre-roll. And the content is shorter, so it's sort of unclear how an 11 minute video should compare to a 42 minute television series.
- bytematic 8y ago
  Adblock works for most of the network tv websites too! Surprisingly...
  - notafraudster 8y ago
    One reason networks have been very ineffective at including online streaming views in their ad sales packages.
nitwit005 8y ago
Let's say, hypothetically, that I create a website that rivals YouTube where people do achieve fairly consistent success, and can live off of the income from their videos. What do we expect to happen? Hundreds of thousands of people will try to get in on it, causing both the income of existing creators to drop, and the average income to plummet. Any market where there is a huge supply of people who want to produce the good is going to have this problem.

ivanb 8y ago

Yeah no, you are supposed to do marketing. No app store is going to do much for an unknown title. Run some facebook ads, see what happens.

babuskov 8y ago
I don't think Facebook ads would work for many games. Here's an example: https://store.steampowered.com/app/949790/Rogue_Bit/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/949790/Rogue_Bit/ How do you market such game outside of Steam? How do you reach the programmer/hacker niche that would be interested in playing this?
- jklinger410 8y ago
  Since half of them are blocking every type of tracking known to man, in my view? Fuck that demographic. Let all of your nerdy projects starve because you guys all hate marketing.
- mattkrause 8y ago
  You post it here? Give away some promo codes at Meetups or other gatherings where programmers congregate? It’s not like this would be any easier without Steam.
  - babuskov 8y ago
    > You post it here? I tried. Twice. Even made a browser playable demo: https://roguebit.bigosaur.com/ https://roguebit.bigosaur.com/ Mostly got ignored (a single upvote on the post). > It’s not like this would be any easier without Steam Of course. This is exactly what I was trying to say. No Facebook ad can match Steam. With Steam algorithm, you can laser-focus the type of players who play this type of games. Without Steam you have to spend so much time and energy.
    - mikekchar 8y ago
      Quick feedback: If you change the trailer to show some game play, I think it would improve your conversion rate. As stupid as this sounds, I have discovered I'm too lazy to try the browser version (but not too lazy to give you a reply -- that is weird...) The trailer just didn't hook me and I found myself thinking, "I don't have enough energy to learn how to play the game right now. Maybe later". But I know "later" will never come. To be fair, I'm not a fan of puzzle games and this looks like a puzzle game. However I think the engagement issue may still affect other people.

sdinsn 8y ago

"It's everyone else's fault, not mine!"

SubiculumCode 8y ago

AAA games are starting to avoid Steam, opting to hosting it themselves for a number of reasons. Steam has taken a few actions lately that would favor big companies, including lowering Valve's take from biggest sellers (1). I think they are trying to keep the name brands in Steam. 1. https://www.polygon.com/2018/12/3/18123649/valve-steam-revenue-sharing https://www.polygon.com/2018/12/3/18123649/valve-steam-reven...

LoSboccacc 8y ago
While that's true, that also resulted in people avoiding AAA games on the worst channels like origin. We're maybe not much, but with AAA average margins we're important
- gruez 8y ago
  >that also resulted in people avoiding AAA games on the worst channels like origin is this actually a thing? if the game is good, I'm not going to rule it out just because it's on a different client, especially when the hassle of using it is marginal at best. reminds me of this: https://i.redd.it/wwx5exndw6b11.png https://i.redd.it/wwx5exndw6b11.png
  - lmm 8y ago
    You don't know if the game is any good until you've tried it though. I put off trying Overwatch for about 6 months because it was a non-Steam channel. I would've bought Forza Horizon 4 a couple of weeks ago if it had been on Steam (literally searched for it ready to click buy), since it sounded good in the reviews, but it's yet another non-Steam channel so I can't be bothered.
    - bytematic 8y ago
      I guess you're just lazy? None of the other clients are even bad anymore, certainly not worse than steam. On all of them you can import steam friends too. What makes steam so great, gaben?

lbj 8y ago

If its possible for Steam to kill your sales, its because you've put your main sales channel(s) in the hands of another company. This is unwise in any business.

cwyers 8y ago
The majority of businesses, even really big businesses, do this. Very few businesses control their own sales channel, and the ones that do are generally smaller than the ones that don't. Apple doesn't control their main sales channels: https://9to5mac.com/2017/10/19/apple-store-sales-cirp/ https://9to5mac.com/2017/10/19/apple-store-sales-cirp/ So it's unclear why you think anyone else should, either.
- lbj 8y ago
  My point here is, that if you have a single sales channel only, you need to control/affect it. Apple has a myriad of sales channels all boosted heavily by Apple advertising.
  - cwyers 8y ago
    And that is an _entirely unreasonable expectation_ even for large, established companies. Vlasic Pickles and Levi Jeans are both large brands that are parts of larger conglomerates, and they both got pushed around by Wal-Mart: https://www.fastcompany.com/47593/wal-mart-you-dont-know https://www.fastcompany.com/47593/wal-mart-you-dont-know Asking indie game developers to challenge the domination of Steam as the sales channel for PC games where EA/Ubisoft/Microsoft have all failed to do so is absurd.
    - lbj 8y ago
      I dont know about reasonable, but its a practical necessity. Consider Google Ads. There are a maximum of 13 spots available on the frontpage - How do you chose the 13 out of the billions of possibilities? A mix of quality/relevance and advertising dollars.
  - 8y ago

nkrisc 8y ago

I wonder what his sales would look like if there was no discovery algorithm and Steam was instead a simple directory of game listings.

jpfed 8y ago
I can only wish! "Aardvark Adventures" would finally get its due!
- bytematic 8y ago
  Nah, the rise of "....!!!Rowboat Dungeon" would quickly outshine.

flankstaek 8y ago

What confuses me is their reluctance to attempt to use other third party distributors (itch.io, GOG, etc.) when Steam clearly isn't working in their favor.

TheGRS 8y ago
That's addressed in the article, its still not as big of a revenue source.
jkchu 8y ago
Although the author did mention this in the article. I still wonder how much some of these indie games would benefit from partnering with a marketing consultant. Listing a game on steam is basically free marketing for the game. The author mentions only 1% of his sales are from direct sales. I wonder how much having an experienced marketing pro could improve that percentage.
wccrawford 8y ago
That's because despite all the complaining about Steam changing things, it's still far better than all other ways of selling their game. Personally, I think Steam is correct to change their algorithm whenever they think it'll help the buyers find games that suit them better. It's also very possible that other developers have seen a bump in sales that correspond with the decline for this developer.
- llukas 8y ago
  For start: to get on GOG your game cannot be shovwelware. I buy from GOG first.

Ntrails 8y ago

When it was physical stores, what mattered was shelf placement and magazine reviews. Which, by the way, were worse by far than anything Steam will ever do in terms of being based on merit. I acknowledge that the risk to developers from changes to a black box algorithm are significant - but as a steam user the only thing I care about are "top sellers" (under £5) because that's where I'm occasionally likely to find a good game on sale.

TheGRS 8y ago
Interestingly that stuff doesn't bubble to the top for me. I see mostly indie recommendations I've never heard of and maybe a scattering of AAA or bigger indie titles. It feels very random to me these days.

clickme_zsh 8y ago

Have you tried Discord Store?

TheGRS 8y ago

Some very dismissive comments on here. For context, Grey Alien is responsible for one of this year's best GDC talks about how to survive in the indie world for 10 years without a hit. He's been doing this for a long time and so I think he's a really great resource for this type of discussion. http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/286091/Video_How_to_survive_in_indie_game_dev_for_10_years_without_shipping_a_hit.php http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/286091/Video_How_to_survi... Steam is a bit of a linchpin for indie game success for better or worse. The audience is there, understands the platform, and uses it extensively. But just as is the case with any marketplace, they do not serve the interests of indie developers first, they serve the interests of the marketplace owner first (in this case Valve). I think indie devs mostly understand this, but I think its totally reasonable to call out what the current situation is. Grey Alien points out considering other avenues of revenue, but how they mostly just don't show the same level of sales. My take is that if we want both indie games to be a thing and have good indie games, then maybe Valve should pay attention to this sort of feedback and make sure the hard-working, full-time indie devs are getting enough attention to be sustainable. Otherwise you basically get the Youtube model of lowest common denominator drivel.

nindalf 8y ago
Rather than being a case of the developers' interest not being aligned with Valve, it is possible that they're not aligned with the users. You point out users use Steam extensively, could that be attributed partially to the users liking the recommendation algorithm? If the algorithm was changed to favour hardworking indie devs at say, the expense of AAA studios, would Steam users still use it as much?
- TheGRS 8y ago
  As a long-time Steam user, all I can say is an anecdotal response that the algorithmic recommendations on Steam are not why users stay there. They stay because they have huge libraries of games already built, so there's a bit of a lock-in effect going on. I wouldn't dismiss that developers are still responsible for gathering user data, observing trends and marketing their product, all that is still there. This post is merely highlighting how changes to the platform can have some huge cascading effects downstream, and that sucks for those trying to build followings and businesses.

adnzzzzZ 8y ago

For completion's sake, here's another developer of a popular game saying his game is seeing unnaturally high sales https://twitter.com/RaymondDoerr/status/1069004011309867009 https://twitter.com/RaymondDoerr/status/1069004011309867009. It might just be that Valve changed the algorithm slightly to show more popular games more and less popular games less. This is already what the algorithm did to some extent but it might be doing it even more now. In my view I generally trust Valve to best serve their audience first and developers second, even with me being a developer. If people are complaining all the time that Steam isn't showing them good games then it's probably for a good reason.

mmirate 8y ago

I wondered what these folks' portfolio was like, so I took a look. Here's the summary: > cards > cards > puzzle > puzzle > puzzle ... for which reason it's no wonder that these folks' sales are down when AAA releases come out. A silly little puzzle or card game has nothing on a 3D spaceflight simulator and other such AAA fare.

village-idiot 8y ago

I used to just browse Steam and collect games that looked interesting. Over the years I've slowly stopped doing that. For certain, part of it is that adult life gives me far less time to enjoy "dedicated" gaming. I have plenty of time for mobile games on my commute (I walk), but I no longer have dozens of hours a week that I can dedicate to CS or Eve Online. But part of it is that the Steam store is anxiety-inducingly overwhelming. It feels like there's more than a lifetimes worth of content in there, and I have absolutely no idea how to find the good stuff. Something about Steam's design appears to provoke this response, because I do not have similar issues with the similarly large Apple store. I think a redesign might be in order. And the recommendation algorithm just keeps sending me the same games that don't look interesting to me.

kochikame 8y ago
> I have plenty of time for mobile games on my commute (I walk) Er, do you mean you walk and game at the same time? Coz I am constantly walking around people like you and tutting if that's the case
- village-idiot 8y ago
  Low density area, and I lower the phone when crossing streets.

adanto6840 8y ago

We [0] saw a similar drop happen after what appeared to be fairly aggressive adjustments made by Steam in early October. It improved throughout the first half of October but still ended up being between ~35-45% lower than what we'd have expected to see versus the curve we had been seeing prior to the changes. I posted a comment here yesterday [1] about Steam's incentives, but it's worth posting again: Sometimes I wonder what Steam actually optimizes for. If their algorithms always show the "best" games (ie ones that players spend hundreds++ hours playing), then I'd expect that to actually hurt Steam revenues, at least short term if not long-term as well. In theory they'd be better off marketing/optimizing to push games that 'satisfy' users (read: does not cause exodus) but that have low play-time/hours on average -- so that they can sell the player another different game that much sooner. It's a strange set of incentives & it's hard to tell how aligned they really are (with either players or developers). 0 - https://store.steampowered.com/app/598330/SimAirport/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/598330/SimAirport/ 1 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18583254 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18583254

torgian 8y ago

I have some games that I bought through steam, but I refuse to buy any more games through steam. I’ll either use GoG (which is a better interface anyway) or buy directly from the developer