Considering how much stuff people dump on there that probably doesn’t even deserve to be released it’s not super surprising right? I’m more surprised that 8.9% of games, that’s almost 1 in 10, made over $200k.
Also clearly visual novels are not the way to go if you want to make a lot of money
Yeah exactly. Because to me it implies that less than 90% is shovelware crap, and I cannot quite believe this. It doesn’t feel that way, even with all the filtering Steam offers nowadays.
Compare the Nintendo eShop, which doesn’t filter and where Nintendo doesn’t care, and the endless pages and pages and pages of shovelware you need to scroll through (and 15 iterations of AAA Clock for 2€, 80% off! 😅) to find each single proper game.
I would have thought 2%-3% make money, honestly.
There is probably some bias because games that make money stick around a lot longer. I doubt most games released in the last three years (which seems to be the time they looked at) that made no money are still on there.
I mean releasing a game on Steam is not free. You pay a $100 fee per game to Valve to release on their store.
That at least seems to stop the flood of shovelware a tiny bit.
With VN makers and Midjourney, you can pump out a half way decent VN in no time. I’ve honestly thought of doing a cheesy one for my DnD players as their story recap each session, but I already spend so much time on the rest of the game…
Because over 50% of all games on steam are complete trash.
Seriously steam really needs to add a quality gate, the amount of garbage they have in the store is absurd and eventually it’s not going to be worth the tiny fee they make from these games.
I dunno. I kind of remember when it was hard to get on steam. I wonder how many cool games we have now that we wouldn’t have had of they had to go through some sort of arbitrary checkpoint. There always seemed to be some controversy over who and what got in.
Do those trash games even matter? I feel like I basically never see them unless I go looking for them specifically. Steam is far, far better at content discovery than Google Play is, despite both platforms having an abundance of shovelware.
The content discovery on steam is being built up by massive community effort. It’s maybe difficult to find the most egregious asset flips, but it’s trivial to find tons of rpg maker games or similar, especially with the discovery queue.
Nah. I understand the ask for a more curated store, but I don’t want to make it harder for developers to get their content out there.
Adding minimal requirements isn’t going to block any indie game the average gamer has heard of. In fact blocking asset flip games may actually help devs get more exposure in the new release lists. Heck just banning people that upload only asset flip garbage would probably be a big help.
They do have a $100 submission fee, which the developer can recoup once they have $1k in sales. So that alone cuts out a lot of the nonsense since low selling games won’t make enough to be worth the effort.
Maybe there’s an argument that the fee should be higher, but at a certain point you’re just making releasing a passion project impractical.
I disagree. They’re pretty good about not shoving shovelware in your face. I don’t think games should be prevented from entry to the store just because they’re perceived low quality. Where would you draw the line?
A minimal level would be analyzing assets used and if more than say 90% are known free assets then block a game.
What if you have a fun game idea but aren’t big into graphics? You could just use a bunch of CC-BY licensed assets.
Then find a way to purchase or otherwise create 2 out of every 10 assets you do use. You likely need some level of customization to make your idea a reality.
That’s a very significant additional cost!
I feel you, I’m not denying a correlation between free assets and shovelware but why punish good quality games using free assets? Steam has a pretty generous (relatively speaking) refund policy letting you refund games you’ve bought in the past week that you have played for less than two hours. I feel like most games and especially shovelware games you can know if they’re shit in under two hours. Better to let too many shitty games in and not risk keeping a good one out and let folks get refunds for shitty games than to potentially keep good games out because they don’t meet some weird criteria they can’t quite meet.
I am not surprised with the amount of Unity free assets games, now with AI-generated stories.
I think they removed Only Up! for that reason
The developer took that one down to focus on their health, they said. https://www.dexerto.com/gaming/only-up-creator-reveals-they-are-removing-the-game-on-steam-due-to-stress-2284288/
Ah, so it’s not just my own perception that was making me think that steam was filling up with crappy visual novel stuff.
If we try to exclude the super simple and cheap games by only looking at games priced at more than $5, the median is closer to $4000
just because a game is more than $5, doesn’t mean it’s not super simple, cheap shovelware.
Nobody is claiming that, the claim is merely that a lot of the games under $5 are shovelware. I’m sure you could take it a step further and try to remove shovelware, but that’s gets really subjective really fast.
Honestly, that’s okay. As long as indie devs have a place where they can sell and market their games fairly.
There‘s no mention of ingame purchase revenue, so I assume they aren’t included?
