4 ms·

An excellent game is, practically by definition, a game that people would recommend. And the Steam algorithm does a pretty good job of snowballing success. My f

An excellent game is, practically by definition, a game that people would recommend. And the Steam algorithm does a pretty good job of snowballing success. My favorite example here is Kenshi. [1] It started with modest interest and within a few months it was down to literally tens of players. This is normally where somebody driven by profit would just shrug, complain, and go try something new. But they guy clearly believed in his game, kept going, and now a decade later it's an extremely popular game that still has thousands of regular players - verging on overcoming Hogwart's Legacy. I think a lot of smaller developers are misled by things like game jams. Get a highly enthusiastic group of people in a room and the games they're going to respond well to, and the feedback they're going to give is going to be utterly worthless. What's fun to play in a highly social setting with lots of other hyper enthusiastic people, for 5 minutes at a time, does not translate at all to what people are interested in buying and playing at home. [1] - https://steamcharts.com/app/233860 https://steamcharts.com/app/233860

Hammershaft 2y ago
For every Kenshi there are many dozens of excellent indie games that languish. The steam algorithm is not as cooperative for surfacing small niche games as it was of Kenshi, and it's harder to get your game seen in a more saturated market. There has been a gradual shift from the 2010's where nearly all great games we're handsomely rewarded.
- hiatus 2y ago
  > For every Kenshi there are many dozens of excellent indie games that languish. Can you list some here?
  - Hammershaft 2y ago
    Sure! Pinning down some shared criteria for quality and obscurity might be a challenge, but I can give it a try. I'll only include games that I've played recently with an overall steam review score of >=%94 and less than 1000 cumulative steam reviews. Deadeye Deepfake Simulacrum: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1545990/Deadeye_Deepfake_Simulacrum/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1545990/Deadeye_Deepfake_... Tandis: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1297210/Tandis/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1297210/Tandis/ Nidus: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2372170/NIDUS/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/2372170/NIDUS/ Recursed: https://store.steampowered.com/app/497780/Recursed/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/497780/Recursed/ HyperRogue: https://store.steampowered.com/app/342610/HyperRogue/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/342610/HyperRogue/ Can Of Wormholes: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1295320/Can_of_Wormholes/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1295320/Can_of_Wormholes/ Mosa Lina: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2477090/Mosa_Lina/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/2477090/Mosa_Lina/ Sigma Impact: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1654890/Sigma_Impact/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1654890/Sigma_Impact/ Wilmot's Warehouse: https://store.steampowered.com/app/839870/Wilmots_Warehouse/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/839870/Wilmots_Warehouse/ Filcher: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1355650/Filcher/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1355650/Filcher/ Magicube: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2216120/Magicube/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/2216120/Magicube/ Stick It: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1828900/Stickit/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1828900/Stickit/ There are a ton of indie multiplayer games that at one point would have appeared on this list, but as small multiplayer games are starved of population they enter a death cycle where new reviews are negative as a result.
    - somenameforme 2y ago
      I'd drop the max reviews down by quite a lot. Sales:reviews tend to be around 60:1. So a game with 1000 reviews has sold tens of thousands of copies. We can look at something like the PS2 for some reality checks. It sold 1.5 billion games through 4000 titles. So an average of 350k sales. And of course that's going to follow something like a typical 80/20 ratio, which would leave us with a median sales in the ballpark of 70k! Of course Steam has far more players, but also way more games. The PS2 was a ring-fenced minimal competition domain with an attentive and [relatively] content starved audience! I decided to look up Tandis first. First off the game has been featured on Ars Technica [1], Rocker Paper Shotgun [2], and lots of other places. So it's definitely not like nobody heard of it. But it just doesn't really seem to drag people in. The reviews, positive as they are, all seem to stop playing after an average of around 3 hours. In fact a huge number of the positive written reviews have less than 1 hour of lifetime gameplay, which is pretty weird for a game that comes at a relatively premium price. And the peak players, a month after release was 7. [3] I'm guessing the players that moved on after such short timeframes probably weren't actively recommending this game outside of those reviews. Would you have actively recommended it, outside just filtering your library and seeing it there? [1] - https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2022/04/tandis-review-the-ultimate-geometry-based-puzzle-game/ https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2022/04/tandis-review-the-ult... [2] - https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/geometry-puzzle-game-tandis-bends-shapes-and-minds https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/geometry-puzzle-game-tandis... [3] - https://steamcharts.com/app/1297210 https://steamcharts.com/app/1297210
      - Hammershaft 2y ago
        The only source I can find for a 1:60 review to sale ratio is this: https://gameworldobserver.com/2022/11/15/how-to-count-game-sales-steam-2022-review-multiplier https://gameworldobserver.com/2022/11/15/how-to-count-game-s... This article explicitly mentions that that ratio only holds for hit games, and mentions that the ratio for smaller games is roughly 1:20, which is still a high ratio compared to figures I've heard in post mortems. Assuming a game with 1,000 reviews that takes ~3 years for 1 developer to make and support that sells for $15 at a 1:20x ratio. We're looking at 210,000 after steam's cut and before taxes, this developer at top of our review range is making ~70k a year before taxes that are calculated on one year of income. Many small indie developers lose ~35% of their income to taxes alone on game sales and so even under nearly ideal conditions for this 1000 review max constraint we have a developer earning <$50,000. Note that many of the games I listed are highly rated but have less than 200 reviews EDIT: I often reccomend Tandis to people, it's a great puzzle game that builds geometric intuition, and it's designed to distill that intuition into a roughly 5 hour play time.
- daedrdev 2y ago
  Personally I've dug quite deep into steam and come to the conclusion that there are just a lot of bad games, and that a good indie game most likely will break out eventually. I've found steam review percentages to be one of the biggest tells of a games quality, and so many games don't even have good reviews.
  - Hammershaft 2y ago
    I made a comment here where I went over some of the excellent indie games I've played recently that languish in obscurity. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40438001 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40438001
staticman2 2y ago
>>> An excellent game is, practically by definition, a game that people would recommend. And the Steam algorithm does a pretty good job of snowballing success. My favorite example here is Kenshi. [1] Steam early access launched with only 12 games in 2013 and Kenshi was one of them! This is not evidence of the algorithm working, it's evidence of Valve employees personally going out of their way to try to sell this game to you!
_carbyau_ 2y ago
"play at home" for me = play with friends. 95% of my game purchases are based on: - reliable 4 player co-op play PvE. Can opt-out PvP if it's there. - reasonable reviews. Doesn't have to be fantastic, we've been around and seen some shit. - released for 6 months with patch fixes to match This cuts down the number of games I care about on Steam considerably. We often struggle to have something new to play and go back to the favs. [snip growing rant, try to stick to the point here]

Hammershaft 2y ago

For every Kenshi there are many dozens of excellent indie games that languish. The steam algorithm is not as cooperative for surfacing small niche games as it was of Kenshi, and it's harder to get your game seen in a more saturated market. There has been a gradual shift from the 2010's where nearly all great games we're handsomely rewarded.

hiatus 2y ago
> For every Kenshi there are many dozens of excellent indie games that languish. Can you list some here?
- Hammershaft 2y ago
  Sure! Pinning down some shared criteria for quality and obscurity might be a challenge, but I can give it a try. I'll only include games that I've played recently with an overall steam review score of >=%94 and less than 1000 cumulative steam reviews. Deadeye Deepfake Simulacrum: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1545990/Deadeye_Deepfake_Simulacrum/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1545990/Deadeye_Deepfake_... Tandis: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1297210/Tandis/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1297210/Tandis/ Nidus: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2372170/NIDUS/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/2372170/NIDUS/ Recursed: https://store.steampowered.com/app/497780/Recursed/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/497780/Recursed/ HyperRogue: https://store.steampowered.com/app/342610/HyperRogue/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/342610/HyperRogue/ Can Of Wormholes: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1295320/Can_of_Wormholes/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1295320/Can_of_Wormholes/ Mosa Lina: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2477090/Mosa_Lina/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/2477090/Mosa_Lina/ Sigma Impact: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1654890/Sigma_Impact/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1654890/Sigma_Impact/ Wilmot's Warehouse: https://store.steampowered.com/app/839870/Wilmots_Warehouse/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/839870/Wilmots_Warehouse/ Filcher: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1355650/Filcher/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1355650/Filcher/ Magicube: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2216120/Magicube/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/2216120/Magicube/ Stick It: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1828900/Stickit/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1828900/Stickit/ There are a ton of indie multiplayer games that at one point would have appeared on this list, but as small multiplayer games are starved of population they enter a death cycle where new reviews are negative as a result.
  - somenameforme 2y ago
    I'd drop the max reviews down by quite a lot. Sales:reviews tend to be around 60:1. So a game with 1000 reviews has sold tens of thousands of copies. We can look at something like the PS2 for some reality checks. It sold 1.5 billion games through 4000 titles. So an average of 350k sales. And of course that's going to follow something like a typical 80/20 ratio, which would leave us with a median sales in the ballpark of 70k! Of course Steam has far more players, but also way more games. The PS2 was a ring-fenced minimal competition domain with an attentive and [relatively] content starved audience! I decided to look up Tandis first. First off the game has been featured on Ars Technica [1], Rocker Paper Shotgun [2], and lots of other places. So it's definitely not like nobody heard of it. But it just doesn't really seem to drag people in. The reviews, positive as they are, all seem to stop playing after an average of around 3 hours. In fact a huge number of the positive written reviews have less than 1 hour of lifetime gameplay, which is pretty weird for a game that comes at a relatively premium price. And the peak players, a month after release was 7. [3] I'm guessing the players that moved on after such short timeframes probably weren't actively recommending this game outside of those reviews. Would you have actively recommended it, outside just filtering your library and seeing it there? [1] - https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2022/04/tandis-review-the-ultimate-geometry-based-puzzle-game/ https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2022/04/tandis-review-the-ult... [2] - https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/geometry-puzzle-game-tandis-bends-shapes-and-minds https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/geometry-puzzle-game-tandis... [3] - https://steamcharts.com/app/1297210 https://steamcharts.com/app/1297210
    - Hammershaft 2y ago
      The only source I can find for a 1:60 review to sale ratio is this: https://gameworldobserver.com/2022/11/15/how-to-count-game-sales-steam-2022-review-multiplier https://gameworldobserver.com/2022/11/15/how-to-count-game-s... This article explicitly mentions that that ratio only holds for hit games, and mentions that the ratio for smaller games is roughly 1:20, which is still a high ratio compared to figures I've heard in post mortems. Assuming a game with 1,000 reviews that takes ~3 years for 1 developer to make and support that sells for $15 at a 1:20x ratio. We're looking at 210,000 after steam's cut and before taxes, this developer at top of our review range is making ~70k a year before taxes that are calculated on one year of income. Many small indie developers lose ~35% of their income to taxes alone on game sales and so even under nearly ideal conditions for this 1000 review max constraint we have a developer earning <$50,000. Note that many of the games I listed are highly rated but have less than 200 reviews EDIT: I often reccomend Tandis to people, it's a great puzzle game that builds geometric intuition, and it's designed to distill that intuition into a roughly 5 hour play time.
daedrdev 2y ago
Personally I've dug quite deep into steam and come to the conclusion that there are just a lot of bad games, and that a good indie game most likely will break out eventually. I've found steam review percentages to be one of the biggest tells of a games quality, and so many games don't even have good reviews.
- Hammershaft 2y ago
  I made a comment here where I went over some of the excellent indie games I've played recently that languish in obscurity. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40438001 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40438001

staticman2 2y ago

>>> An excellent game is, practically by definition, a game that people would recommend. And the Steam algorithm does a pretty good job of snowballing success. My favorite example here is Kenshi. [1] Steam early access launched with only 12 games in 2013 and Kenshi was one of them! This is not evidence of the algorithm working, it's evidence of Valve employees personally going out of their way to try to sell this game to you!

_carbyau_ 2y ago

"play at home" for me = play with friends. 95% of my game purchases are based on: - reliable 4 player co-op play PvE. Can opt-out PvP if it's there. - reasonable reviews. Doesn't have to be fantastic, we've been around and seen some shit. - released for 6 months with patch fixes to match This cuts down the number of games I care about on Steam considerably. We often struggle to have something new to play and go back to the favs. [snip growing rant, try to stick to the point here]