22 ms·

Hard facts: Steam has over 73k games - and is growing at over 10k games per year and increasing. The median game on Steam earns less than $800 - down from $4k

• bckr 2y ago
  I think that, while making a game is not hard, making an excellent game is hard. And I think making an excellent game is a lot like reaching product-market fit. It takes fast iteration with user feedback to find the fun, then a ton of polish to make it extraordinary. It has to be so good that, out of those 73,000 games and counting, I’ll spend some of my money and time on it. The way GenAI can help here, I think, is the first part of this problem. Help me iterate quickly to find the fun. Then, let me export to Unity / Godot / Unreal to begin the polish process.
  • aleph_minus_one 2y ago
    > And I think making an excellent game is a lot like reaching product-market fit. Making an excellent game takes quite different skills than creating a commercially successful game; just compare "pop culture" (optimized to be commercially successful) vs "high-brow culture". Even if you are not the "extremely high-brow taste" kind of person, there exist quite some video game genres in which excellent games are produced, but the audience of these games is a quite small (but sophisticated) niche audience, so that just by volume, games of these genres likely won't make a lot of money.
    • admax88qqq 2y ago
      That really just depends on your definition of "excellent" You have defined it to mean "high brow"
      • aleph_minus_one 2y ago
        > You have defined it to mean "high brow" Both in - "high brow" - niche genres categories (which I both gave as examples) you will likely find quite some games that that are excellent, but won't make a lot of money. But don't pick too much on these categories since my central point is "Making an excellent game takes quite different skills than creating a commercially successful game".
        • Jensson 2y ago
          The main games in niche can easily sell 100k copies, that is a lot of money for a couple of indie devs. And no those games are far from excellent, I play a lot of such niche games but they all suck quality wise compared to mainstream games with similar sales, I play them for new experiences but I never expect quality from them. So it is much easier to sell well enough to maintain an indie team by making niche games than by making mainstream games since the competition for niche markets is so much smaller. Maybe you think that "100k" copies is a failure since it didn't sell millions, I have seen people thinking along those lines. But no, 100k copies is a massive success, even 10k copies is more than enough for a 1 person indie game, so those "indie gems" hardly failed at all.
          • johnnyanmac 2y ago
            > The main games in niche can easily sell 100k copies, that is a lot of money for a couple of indie devs. I understand your point, but I hope people are seeing the irony of making such arguments under a post detaliing how the median game on steam can barely pay rent. I don't think even if you filtered that data for "overwhelmingly positive games" that it'll suddenly average $500k+ revenue. >Maybe you think that "100k" copies is a failure since it didn't sell millions, I have seen people thinking along those lines. But no, 100k copies is a massive success, even 10k copies is more than enough for a 1 person indie game, so those "indie gems" hardly failed at all. really depends on team size. 100k is good, but divided among a team of 10 and after steam cuts, a $5 game is getting roughly 35k for a dev. You know, minmum wage in high COL areas. likewise for a solo game that made 10k sales. My definition of success is as simple as "can the studio sustain itself from the sales of its games?". Maybe in a day where rent wasn't $3000+, but not these days in the US.
  • dwallin 2y ago
    Making an excellent game isn't even enough these days, that's just table stakes. With so many games out there it's a market of lemons. You need to have a way of rising above the noise. For AAA, it's having budgets to make games on a bigger scale than everyone else. For mobile games, it's generally about leveraging a large war chest to fuel an advertising-driven margin game. For prestige/indie games you need something that people will want to talk/write about, or build a dedicated fanbase over time. For tiny games like flappy bird / wordle you need massive built-in virality and lots of luck.
    • bavell 2y ago
      Just get some popular streamers/channels to do a review/let's play and if they like it you'll get tons of free exposure. I've spent probably hundreds of dollars on indie games in the last year or so from first seeing them on a gaming channel and then pulling it up in steam. Channels like Splattercat are a great resource for indie gamers & studios alike: https://youtube.com/@splattercatgaming https://youtube.com/@splattercatgaming
      • jokethrowaway 2y ago
        This has been known for more than a decade, you can bet the competition does that too
        • Jensson 2y ago
          Competition doesn't have excellent games. There aren't that many excellent games released per year, if you have an excellent game just getting noticed is enough.
      • vunderba 2y ago
        "Just get some popular streamers/channels to do a review/let's play" Just is doing a lot of heavy lifting here.
        • jaggederest 2y ago
  • hatenberg 2y ago
    You won't find them.
  • varelse 2y ago
    [dead]
• jncfhnb 2y ago
  The majority of those games are now visual novels / pornography.
  • dev1ycan 2y ago
    which shows how bad puritan culture is, most people don't care about your puritanism in their room, they want to play a game, see a hot char, and be able to do stuff with them in the game. it's the harsh truth that people seem to get mad at. Especially now with ever increasing rates of ADHD and other stuff, having an old school genre like an RPG have that type of stuff as a "reward" for beating a level or whatever reinvigorates a genre that felt outdated due to a lack of a proper reward structure. Fact of the matter is, if you as a game dev want to make money, better lose your inhibitions real fast, because the consumers, want more choices in their game, even if it's just romance for the most part. Look at stardew valley, I would never have played it if I hadn't found out you could literally date and marry a girl in the game, it just added a layer of reward to the gameplay.
    • jncfhnb 2y ago
      Stardew Valley: too hot for puritans
      • dev1ycan 2y ago
        I didn't mean it was a porn game lol, more like even basic romance can add nuance to a fairly simple game that would probably have sold less to mature audiences without it.
        • jncfhnb 2y ago
          I don’t think that supports your claim that this is what the market wants though. It’s merely that shitty porn games are incredibly easy and cheap to make. They earn much less than other games on average. But they’re still profitable to make.
    • jokethrowaway 2y ago
• ben_w 2y ago
  Huh. That's close to what I was earning from Mac shareware games 14 years ago, something like £2k over 2 years (not inflation adjusted) if I remember correctly. (And that's why I stopped making games :P)
• pjc50 2y ago
  Itch.io claim to host over 200k free games. AI makes standing out harder; we're not ready for the sludge era of having seven billion people and ten billion games.
  • ElFitz 2y ago
    Except that’ll just be a fluke. The next thing isn’t a never-ending list of AI generated games stored somewhere that we’ll have to sift through somehow. The next big thing will be ephemeral games, created on the fly based on the context and the preferences expressed, both explicitly and implicitly, by the player’s (or players’) past behaviour (and, for multiplayer games, that of their social graph). That and perhaps, if we manage to preserve it and keep it alive, an industry of hand-crafted games made by people trying to beat the odds.
    • user432678 2y ago
      I wouldn’t be overly optimistic on what an average player can express as a preference. Besides, as a gamer I want to be surprised and entertained, I don’t want to design rules and game mechanics, iterate over balancing the game and finding consistent art style. Unless you meant like really distant future.
      • ElFitz 2y ago
        I meant something akin to recommendation engines like TikTok’s, applied to generative models instead of user-generated content. Start-off with generic, "one size fits all", generated content, using a few parameters such as rough area, time of day, time of the wear, what’s currently popular at that time in that area, what’s popular with the person who created the link if they got in through that, etc. Then, use the player’s actions (playtime, engagement, sharing, whatever) to infer preferences, and fine-tune the model using both context (time of day, location, other players if multiplayer, etc) and those preferences. Again, recommendation engine, applied to generative models. I wouldn’t wager on how distant or close that future will be. I don’t think it’s doable today, but it’s so obvious that I am certain people are currently working on it. And perhaps some duct tape (sorry, heuristics and expert systems) may be able to somewhat fill the gap in current or near-future models’ capabilities. But I’m certain (unless copyright laws end up killing such use cases), that it’s the future for both streaming platforms (Netflix, Disney, Spotify & all), content-driven "social" media platforms (TikTok, YouTube, Instagram,…), and video games. Most of them anyway. Some might doubt it can rival with the greatest movies, books, or games, but it doesn’t need to. It just needs to be as good as the cheap filler content these platforms are mostly filled with. I just hope we’ll find a way to preserve those industries so we can keep getting great new things.
• dkarras 2y ago
  It is not just about marketing though. There is this belief, especially among fledgling indies that if they make a game that they think is good, and if they are able to market it well, it will be a success, even a hit. A hit in gamedev is not easier than creating a hit in the music industry really. Even the veteran composers are not able to replicate (or even achieve) creating a hit. Possibility of success depends on many factors which change constantly, and success hinges on your ability to "read the room" which is the sound palette and the persona (for the artist that "performs" the music) millions of people are likely to find interesting at any point in time. If you are a beginner composer creating a hit, it is an extreme fluke. Same is with gamedev. Your passion project most probably is not the thing most people want at this point in time. No amount of marketing will solve that problem. Your efforts at marketing are doomed to have negative ROI. Maybe you are a year too late? A decade too late? Maybe a couple years too early? Maybe what you think is fun is not really fun in the general sense and will never be? I'd honestly struggle to find any good games (right for their time and audience) that failed because of a lack of suitable marketing. In the same vein, I'd struggle to find a hit game that succeeded because of marketing. No amount of marketing effort can beat thousands of people finding what you do interesting and sharing their opinion in person, on social media, youtube etc. If you have pockets as deep as Coca Cola, you may influence the culture through your marketing efforts, influence what "should" be popular - but if you are not that, you need to be an expert at reading culture of your target audience and cater to that. When you do that, "marketing" will be a walk in the park. Or else, even if you spend enormous efforts in marketing, it will only generate negative ROI.
  • baobabKoodaa 2y ago
    > If you are a beginner composer creating a hit, it is an extreme fluke. You're punching too high. Music is a passion for many people. Same as game dev. I would expect >95% of game devs to be perfectly happy if they can make a living creating indie games. Of course it's nice to make a hit that makes you tens of millions of dollars, but most game devs would be happy to make enough to pay themselves a salary to live on. Now, if we're not looking to make a hit, but we're looking to make a living, there are a lot of composers out there who can consistently achieve that (e.g. beatmaking for rappers advertising on youtube and such). > I'd honestly struggle to find any good games (right for their time and audience) that failed because of a lack of suitable marketing. I'll offer Flappy Bird as an example.
• password54321 2y ago
  Word spreads fast on good games due to Reddit and Twitch. Look at the success of Balatro and how much marketing that had. The number of games you listed just highlights how little Steam filters.
  • kibwen 2y ago
    This is subject to survivorship bias. Balatro is a great game that deserves its success. But it's easy to imagine a universe where it simply never got any traction, anywhere, and died in obscurity. Conversely, this suggests that in our current universe, many games just as great as Balatro have quietly passed without ever getting their 15 minutes of fame. At the end of the day, much of success just hinges on luck. There is no law of the universe that says that great art must be appreciated.
    • password54321 2y ago
      I immediately knew someone would claim "survivorship bias" but at the same I knew that they would fail to come up with a single counterexample.
      • Auracle 2y ago
        Vampire Survivors and Among Us were both out for years until they got traction, IIRC. That could have easily continued forever for both of them.
      • kyleamazza 2y ago
        That's sort of the point of survivorship bias. Name one unsuccessful would-be entrepreneur. It's hard because chances are, anyone that's recognizable was successful in some way. For games, I'll give an example: Aegis Defenders. Great game, no traction.
        • password54321 2y ago
          >Aegis Defenders 7/10 on Steam and Metacritic. Reviewed by major publishers. Over 100 reviews. Not sure what you mean by "no traction". But I'm sure it did fantastic in some alternate universe because Sean Carroll.
• barbariangrunge 2y ago
  If you think that’s true, I invite you to sort steam games by release date and to simply buy the most recent 10 of them in the categories you like that aren’t free to play. I mean, they’re all equally good, right? Making good games is easy. Assuming those low review counts are only due to bad marketing? It will even save you money, compared to buying the titles you normally would Or we can acknowledge that making a great game is extremely difficult and expensive, and not dismiss the whole industry
  • hwbunny 2y ago
    95 % of games are boring, and unoriginal. Why? Because most of these people, who create these games are entrepreneurs. They only see the possible money from these. These games have no heart whatsoever, why? Because good games need passionate people, not blue collar suits. There are 1 million subscribers at the gamedev reddit. It's ridiculous, and when people ask something, they get total balooney, ridiculous botlike answers.
    • bnralt 2y ago
      Being passionate doesn’t guarantee a game being a success, though. Look at a game like Knights of the Chalice 2. It's definitely a labor of love, and many people who play it think it has the best DnD combat of any game out there, and maybe some of the best turn-based combat as well. It has mediocre graphics, though, and a high price point, so it’s had extremely slow discoverability. It also has a somewhat niche audience (people really into complex DnD combat), so it’s not clear how much of an audience is out there even if discoverability wasn’t an issue.
      • hwbunny 2y ago
        People are in their own bubble and believe everything that people say to them on the internet. People lie all the time, plus they don't want to create friction by saying that a specific game is, well, shit. That game is built on already outdated foundations. You need to give something to users that will stimulate them.
• jayd16 2y ago
  I guess if you mean in the sense that writing a book is just writing words or publishing an app is not hard it makes some sense... But no. Shippable games are incredibly hard to make. Why do you think publishers invest in new games instead of just hunt for diamonds in the rough?
  • mimischi 2y ago
    Probably the same effect that VCs invest in many startups, knowing only a tiny fraction will make a large profit?
    • jayd16 2y ago
      How does that gel with the idea that it's just the marketing thing?
• SubiculumCode 2y ago
  I find it sad that this post is dominating this conversation.
  • seattle_spring 2y ago
    This theme of comment comes up for sooo many types of posts, and it is unfortunate that it usually dominates the conversation. If Facebook or Airbnb-type companies share a new JavaScript lib, the comment sections will be about how Facebook is evil, or an anecdote about someone's horrible Airbnb experience when they cheaped out in Paris.
    • SubiculumCode 2y ago
      If my startup worked hard on something cool, got it on the front page of HN, and the top thread is: you have no chance. I mean it's malicious
      • mattgreenrocks 2y ago
        What people fail to understand is you have to be smart about the size of the target market and what you're up against while simultaneously being willing to step into the arena. You get no credit for sitting on the sidelines and whining about how hard it is out there. And it shouldn't be regarded as an especially intellectual point to state facts like the size of the market or the relative success the average game makes. We're not entitled to any sort of success of the things we make. All we can do is make the best shots we can and keep at it.
  • johnnyanmac 2y ago
    Don't want to be rude, but most people here probably aren't game devs. So bikeshedding taking over is inevitable.
• SubiculumCode 2y ago
  Is this on topic?
• azhenley 2y ago
  I miss the days of Flash. I used to be able to make a game in a few weeks from my dorm, add Mochi ads, upload it to Newgrounds, and then it would spread to thousands of sites and get played by hundreds of thousands of people.
• bcrosby95 2y ago
  Yes and no. I've done a lot of reading from people that have done a lot of research about this. In general, the revenue you make from a game seems to be related to it's production value. I say no because that isn't marketing. But I say yes because its what makes it easier to market.
• djeastm 2y ago
  Maybe it's not about marketing the game, but marketing the application that allows you to make your own games. To be able to make a bunch of games easily that just you and your friends can enjoy without having to code seems like a good use case.
  • johnnyanmac 2y ago
    When in a gold rush, sell shovels. You're right, devs aren't as picky with tools as gamers are with games. As long as it works and is proven to save time, it'll sell. But the downside is that you're audience is much less.
• forrestthewoods 2y ago
  > Making a game is not hard - marketing a game is. Literally no one who has ever made a game says this. Making games is so incredibly hard that the phrase “making games is hard” is a running meme!
  • pjlegato 2y ago
    Perhaps a better formulation would be: "Making games is hard. Marketing games is even harder."
• rco8786 2y ago
  > Making a game is not hard - marketing a game is. The sentiment here is true of all software and always has been. However, it does not mean that making a game/software isn't hard, it means that marketing it and selling it is a different problem space that people underestimate.
• delusional 2y ago
  The act of marketing a game isn't separate from making the game unless your ubisoft and have 3k people working on your game.