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Also, in my limited experience the 30% also goes towards lots of other valuable features like access to the automatic marketing/recommendation engine. By launch
by umvi 1y ago
Also, in my limited experience the 30% also goes towards lots of other valuable features like access to the automatic marketing/recommendation engine. By launching your title on Steam, people will see your title in the "More like this" recommendation bars that appear at the bottom of each page. And if you like certain genres of games, Steam will just directly recommend you more titles of that genre on the home page.
I launched a steam demo of my programming game last month (you can find it in my HN profile if you are curious), and without having to do any marketing of my own built up about 1000 wishlists in a month just thanks to getting traffic from similar but more well known titles like Exapunks.
- atomicnumber3 1y agoA big part of the 30% is that people generally believe steam will not fuck them over. While everyone HATES literally all other launchers and walled gardens because they know EA et al want to fuck them over as hard as they possibly can, at every opportunity.
- 0cf8612b2e1e 1y agoIt also helps that the other launchers are terrible. There must be some hidden complexity of which I am unaware, because I do not understand. As a rule, slow to launch, memory hogs, unresponsive, etc. This for a local application that has a library of…10k items in the entire store? The inventory could comfortably be processed inside Excel and yet the launchers struggle.
- pathartl 1y agoThis is a crazy reductionist view of databases.
- beeflet 1y agoYou are free to correct it
- ahofmann 1y agoI don't know how absolute terrible the database must be, that you are talking about, but I think that managing 10k entries of whatever shouldn't be any problem at all for anything with a CPU and like 640KB of RAM.
- papichulo2023 1y agoNot wrong though. Almost like a embedded sqlite would be overkill.
- colonial 1y agoIt's extremely telling that nobody (developer or consumer) takes the Epic Games store seriously, in spite of their effort to undercut Steam on this front (0% on the first mil, and 12% after that - to say nothing of the free game promos.)
- jay_kyburz 1y agoAs far as I'm aware, Epic is still invite only. I don't think just anybody can launch an indie game on Epic. I could be wrong, I don't keep up with Epic because the store itself has such bad UI design.
- colonial 1y agoEpic has offered self-publishing tools for a while. They do involve a human review step, but one look at the piles of NFT shovelware available shows that the bar is in Hell. (Granted, Steam isn't too picky either, but at least they draw the line at unregulated speculative assets.)
- milesvp 1y agoI think you may even be missing a lot of things we completely take for granted today. I saw a talk by a long time RPG indie dev a few years ago. Said 30 years ago, he needed a full time employee to do all the things he gets for using steam. Things like distribution, customer support, returns. Said he was more than happy to pay 30% at his volumes to not have to have that head count. edit: Oh, and payment... I think it was Jeff Vogal's talk I'm thinking of. https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1024944/Failing-to-Fail-The-Spiderweb https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1024944/Failing-to-Fail-The-Sp...
- ASalazarMX 1y agoExcept economy of scale should have lowered that cost dramatically. The Steam of today is incredibly profitable compared to the Steam of 1994, that means costs have gone down, but their commissions haven't followed, and this is why others want their own store. If their commissions were fair, it wouldn't make business sense to compete with them. Planting and processing my own wheat for bread would be very resource-intensive, that doesn't mean commercial bread is a luxury article.
- ttoinou 1y agoI fail to understand the analogy, what’s the Steam of 1994 ?
- ASalazarMX 1y agoI mixed up the dates. The video the parent comment linked is from 1994, but Valve's Steam was released until 2003. Please do me a great favor and imagine that I said "The Steam of 2003" in my initial comment.
- the_snooze 1y agoWhat you say is true if "online game stores" were fungible commodities. The reality is that Steam has a long-running reputation of generally (but not entirely) pretty good for gamers. Buying games on Amazon, Epic, EA, Microsoft, or most any other storefront is risky because they don't have ~20 years of good pricing and good-enough governance. The only storefront that meets or exceeds Steam's reputation is GOG, mainly because they sell DRM-free games that work with or without GOG's continued existence. Maybe if the other big-monied game stores were to have a similar show of goodwill towards players would Steam feel some real competition.