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Wow Lars you're on Hacker News, that's awesome. As an Indie who started way way back in the flash portal era, I think the current situation with Steam and cons

Wow Lars you're on Hacker News, that's awesome. As an Indie who started way way back in the flash portal era, I think the current situation with Steam and consoles is a vast improvement over what I experienced back then. Sure I had direct contact with players in theory, and no barriers to publishing my game. Except players had zero interest in me and my poorly made games. Every indie looks at their conversion rate and goes "I would do so much better if my game got more attention" missing on the reality that attention is the gold of the modern age. Given enough attention anything can succeed, hey you can even sell attention to others by putting up ads. Thus any platform which is both open, and gives attention (discoverability) is creating an unsolveable market issue. The attention is valuable, so giving it to anyone will just push the market into a market for cheapest converter of attention into dollars: porn. We see this already with Steam where the top lists always contain some sort of porn-lite games. Thus my own take is: I don't want an open market. I want a market which heavily selects for quality. Then I want to develop and polish my game to meet that quality bar: since in such a situation I know my little train game will not need to compete with fake japanese hentai.

meheleventyone 5y ago
> Thus my own take is: I don't want an open market. I want a market which heavily selects for quality. Then I want to develop and polish my game to meet that quality bar: since in such a situation I know my little train game will not need to compete with fake japanese hentai. This actually makes the attention thing worse. Now you’re competing for the attention of a few people who are sitting under a deluge of games. Established players with an existing relationship get entrenched and you better find a way to build a relationship outside of the official channels if you have no name. Plus some market wag will be along to tell you that the open market already heavily selects for quality. Which is fairly true and the issue for an individual developer isn’t really the result of the aggregate market. The actual issue is that there is a very strong power law in terms of actual sales. Success begets larger success as the algorithms take notice, word of mouth hits scale and the developer can afford to reinvest with worthwhile advertising. Secondary to that is that there is just too much information for players to make a fair assessment of all the games they could buy which further amplifies this issue with the market. Basically discoverability sucks still For the developers who would be automatically on a closed platform, yes less games would fix it but they’re probably already riding high in the curve. For developers who wouldn’t you want to be very sure you’ll definitely be one of the anointed. Be careful what you wish for. I’d like to see instead the Steam open up a bit, curators exist but it’s hard to make that a job as it doesn’t pay. Tackling that and turning Steam into a collection of stores rather than a store might help flatten the curve by allowing niches room to breathe and paying curator businesses to mine for gems. The games press used to be this way but now outside of tiny outlets it’s all pretty homogenised and they all talk about exactly the same games.

meheleventyone 5y ago

> Thus my own take is: I don't want an open market. I want a market which heavily selects for quality. Then I want to develop and polish my game to meet that quality bar: since in such a situation I know my little train game will not need to compete with fake japanese hentai. This actually makes the attention thing worse. Now you’re competing for the attention of a few people who are sitting under a deluge of games. Established players with an existing relationship get entrenched and you better find a way to build a relationship outside of the official channels if you have no name. Plus some market wag will be along to tell you that the open market already heavily selects for quality. Which is fairly true and the issue for an individual developer isn’t really the result of the aggregate market. The actual issue is that there is a very strong power law in terms of actual sales. Success begets larger success as the algorithms take notice, word of mouth hits scale and the developer can afford to reinvest with worthwhile advertising. Secondary to that is that there is just too much information for players to make a fair assessment of all the games they could buy which further amplifies this issue with the market. Basically discoverability sucks still For the developers who would be automatically on a closed platform, yes less games would fix it but they’re probably already riding high in the curve. For developers who wouldn’t you want to be very sure you’ll definitely be one of the anointed. Be careful what you wish for. I’d like to see instead the Steam open up a bit, curators exist but it’s hard to make that a job as it doesn’t pay. Tackling that and turning Steam into a collection of stores rather than a store might help flatten the curve by allowing niches room to breathe and paying curator businesses to mine for gems. The games press used to be this way but now outside of tiny outlets it’s all pretty homogenised and they all talk about exactly the same games.