That’s art for you. Music, fine art etc I’d guess is even more lopsided.
Sales tend to be proportional to the marketing budget. You see this in every entertainment media. Movies and Music, in particular, will have marketing budgets equal or in excess of the actual production costs.
It isn’t simply that 1% of the games make 110% of the money. It’s that 1% of the games get a marketing allowance at all, while the majority of indie projects and first round game offerings just get spat out into the void with little more than a whisper.
And what percent of the “games that barely make anything” are asset flips and zero-effort slop? Like, “percent of new games that are trash” is going to be very high when the barrier to entry is “pay Valve $100 once”. This is a total junk statistic.
Like, store A where you can buy 100 good games and 1000 asset flips will score 10x better on this un-metric than store B where you can buy 10000 good games and a million asset flips. And yet nobody would ever argue that store A is a better store.
And yet nobody would ever argue that store A is a better store.
I would argue it. Store B is just Amazon. They’re the most successful retailer on the planet.
I don’t know if you consider them “asset flips” or not. But the number of anime/furry porn “puzzle” games released every single day, has to be throwing off the numbers.
An asset flip imo is anything where it’s basically identical to another game but with different art assets
And yet nobody would ever argue that store A is a better store.
apple begs to differ
Apple’s customers don’t get a choice of stores in the first place.
AAA titles made by corporations are the trashiest of them all
And the smallest in volume. The number of games on Steam that cost a million dollars or more to make (owned by shareholder value generators) is much lower than other types. For every one Assassin’s Creed there are ten Peaks and Slay the Spires and lower quality “real, good indie games”. And for every real, good indie game there’s a hundred asset flips and ai slop “games”.
For every one Assassin’s Creed there are ten Peaks and Slay the Spires and lower quality “real, good indie games”.
I’ll spot you that for every Assassin’s Creed, there’s ten lower quality games. Probably closer to 100 lower quality games, tbh. But to suggest that there’s ten “Slay the Spire” games for every one AC? You’ve got to be kidding. Slay the Spire is exceptionally good as a deck-based rogue-like. I don’t know if I could find ten other games in the entire Steam store that compare properly. Absolutely in its own league.
And for every real, good indie game there’s a hundred asset flips and ai slop “games”.
Even games that aren’t asset flips or AI slop can be very hit-or-miss. There’s tons of mediocre JRPGs. There’s tons of Farmville-style endless click simulators. There’s puzzle games galore. There’s bad ports of older titles. There are games with crummy interfaces and miserable learning curves and needlessly graphic art.
I tried out Stellar Blade recently. And while I enjoyed the combat mechanics, the fundamental quality of the art was good, and the dialogue was… fine, I couldn’t get over the fact that I was piloting a woman in skin-tight lingerie against Dick and Ball monsters. Gave up inside the first chapter.
Tales of Arise had absolutely miserable writing. Monster Hunter: Stories was fun for maybe 5 hours before I’d figured out the mechanics and bored by the flat, unimpressive landscapes. Darkest Dungeon 2 failed to meaningfully improve on the original, while tossing in a bunch of extra mechanics that just made the game feel clunky.
Making a good game is hard even when you do it properly.
Slay the Spire and lower quality but still “real” indie games. That entire gamut. The best games ever made and “uhh it’s balatro but with throwing darts”. That’s all more numerous than AAA stuff and also dwarfed in volume by porn jigsaw puzzles, asset flips, and other actual zero effort slop “games”. AAA and “real indie games” are a tiny minority of the games on steam.
Twelve thousand “games” have been released on Steam this year as of July. That would mean the meaningless statistic in the article implies that 240 games from this year drive 85% of this year’s spending. 240 games in 2026 “worth spending money on” is not a dire portrait of AAA slurping up the market space. That “1% of games” is presented to look like “the top 1% fat cat games” when 1% absolutely includes not just the AAA and the top shelf indie (like Slay the Spire) but also the flashes in the pan and the trend chasers and the friendslop and the Balatro clones and the forever GAAS.
Those “not truly slop but” uninspired indie games like stardew clone #780 comfortably fit into the “top” 240 Steam games this year. Darkest Dungeon 2 is absolutely a “top percent” game when the overall pool includes so much actual nothing in it.
The best games ever made and “uhh it’s balatro but with throwing darts”.
Aside from being addictive, Balatro’s a popular game because it plays well on any medium. Deck-builder rogue-likes are phone friendly, PC friendly, and not entirely unapproachable on console.
AAA and “real indie games” are a tiny minority of the games on steam.
That’s all true. But even if we cut out the click-bait and the slop, lots of games fail on their own merits.
240 games in 2026 “worth spending money on” is not a dire portrait of AAA slurping up the market space.
Yeah, I absolutely agree. Adding in the denominator counts for a lot. I might caveat that with the question “Are those 240 games any good?” Because it’s very possible that slop games are what pull in all the revenue, while quality titles flounder. But, again, that would require some real actual journalism instead of click-bait rage-bait headlines.
Incidentally, has anyone asked about the state of game journalism recently? What are those stats looking like?
Yeah, and do you think those games will be part of the 1% that make 84.5% of revenue?
No, it will be the AAA games.
“Real games” (AAA, top tier indie, low tier indie) can easily be as low as 1-2% of “steam releases”. 12k games were published on Steam over half of this year. That would mean, if you want to care about this meaningless statistic of “x% of games drive y% of revenue”, that there’s room for over 240 “worthwhile” games to have released in 2026 without disrupting the scary 1% metric at all. Two hundred forty games this year. AAA releases are what, ten or twenty a year? Less? That’s not 1%, it’s 0.0004%. The other 99.9996% of the 1% are free to be indie games or GAAS or whatever else.
AAA titles made by corporations
arebecame the trashiest of them allBe fair. It was better many moons ago. And still valid for (many) non-US AAA.
The only reason it was better before is because before only AAA games existed.
You couldn’t make a SNES cartridge without tons of money behind it.
There is more than consoles… There always were indie-games. Just maybe not on every console. I could name a ton of excellent AAA from the good-old-times.
I don’t see how that is “steam” economy.
That’s just economy when you try to sell anything, specially anything art related.
If you made any art and try to sell it in any store the most probably amount of money made is the same number in every currency.
I don’t see how that is “steam” economy.
Valve is a for profit company that decides which games to advertise.
The advertisement algorithm is pretty much understood. It depends on wishlist and first day sales.
It’s not like Gabe, or anyone, is sitting there deciding which game gets advertised and which game isn’t. As far as algorithms go, steam one is pretty straightforward and fair afaik.
It’s not like Gabe, or anyone, is sitting there deciding which game gets advertised and which game isn’t.
They are indeed in charge of the ads on their website, not only they can decide what gets featured in ads but they also design the website page and the ads placement as they like.
Wouldn’t they just advertise whatever makes them the most money, which would be the games people want to buy? I don’t see this as being radically different from how games were before steam was popular.
Wouldn’t they just advertise whatever makes them the most money, which would be the games people want to buy?
Yes, they promote the top 1%
So, like on music industry. Millions of songs are released each year and yet only top artists get the listens.
Or, like movie/series industry where the top movies that got advertised gets viewed and art-house ones getting buried in the black hole of unknown.
And yet, some weird days artists and bands, directors and their weird movies sieve through and become hit sensation. Who knows why? (hint: they’re good)
That seems like a good distribution for digital art and entertainment.
Hey op, I see a lot of your arguments in the comments.
I have a challenge.
Name 5 things Valve could implement to change this that would not be to the detriment of indie devs.
This is not a joke. You have opinions. I want to hear them.
I’m also curious (since I see you pushing a decentralized market place in the comments), how you think a decentralized marketplace would function and what would be better about it.
I mean, they could start with not asking 30% of the revenue when you sell less than a million or so units.
It costs a LOT to build a global cdn with the uptime steam has. That 30% is totally justified as a platform fee imo
Especially now with cloud storage and software development costs being so high.
I mean I see your point for sure, but I also see why consistency matters too. Why would valve “punish” someone for doing well? Those big titles are also great for revenue on their side too so honestly selling more units would be even more justifiable to lower the revenue split (from a business perspective on valves side)
Idk. Just thinking out loud I guess.
That 30% is totally justified as a platform fee imo
and yet everybody hates on Apple’s 30% cut…
Why would valve “punish” someone for doing well?
maybe it could be like how rich people are taxed more? (at least if rich people paid their taxes in the first place)
I don’t personally hate on Apple’s 30%. I hate on Apple’s predatory licensing practices which demand an upfront expenditure before the first unit sells at all.
Would a decentralized version of Steam do that?
Is that 30% the bulk of Valve’s profit?
What do Indie developers get in exchange for Valve’s 30% cut on Steam that they don’t get elsewhere that charges 30% or charges less of a percentage?
So could physical retailers, so how’s that working out?
I’m not going to say they can’t do that. It’s not a bad suggestion but it seems to be suggested continually in a vacuum without considering other factors.
Decentralized
Imagine paying $60 for a game and then finding out the torrent is dead.
No solution, only angry >:(
I’m one of those that makes most of the money off a different platform. I’m not making it because the platform is helping me. It’s inertia. I’m the best in my category and so I dominate. Same for these games.
I believe that this is as much about game quality, over saturation, and marketing/inertia as it is about Valve in general, but I’m trying to understand what they think (based on the contents of the article) can be done to fix this problem for game devs.
Name 5 things Valve could implement to change this that would not be to the detriment of indie devs.
Valve is a for profit company and their main goal is to boost their profits to the roof (valve ceo owns an entire fleet of megayachts). They work to boost their sales not to help other people, when their salesmen lay down 5 things they could implement on the platform their main objective is to do business. Anything you implement that benefit users and devs rather than the already full valve wallet would be a positive change.
The first thing you want to implement is a less greedy and profits drive mentality, the second thing they could implement is the source code of their platform. They could implement exact sales data for each game and transparency reports on their profits, they could implement a mastodon social page and they could implement disclaimers on AAA titles warning people they are buying games from evil corporations.
So just to recap you want valve to become a non profit, and open source their platform? It seems like you’re really mad at capitalism, and just chose to lash out at valve.
They could operate in a much more anti consumer way, like other game companies (Epic), they could remove user reviews, they could get rid of the ability for games to be added to the store without a publisher, but they don’t.
how is Epic anti-consumer?
I don’t use it, but last time I checked they still haven’t implemented a review system… Also their ceo is out there saying stuff like this https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/epic-boss-tim-sweeney-blasts-steam-for-putting-ai-tags-on-games-says-move-is-irresponsible-of-valve
Edit: Can’t believe I forgot buying rocket league, then removing it from steam.
You are on a free, open source and decentralized platform that share nothing with steam. This is indeed the right place where to lash out at evil corporations like valve and their billionaires ceos
The main problem I see with this is that game devs are trying to use capitalism to make money. So what you’re saying is, it’s alright for game devs, but not for store fronts.
That doesn’t make sense to me.
Additionally though, of the major gaming retailers, Valve has the least predatory model (I’m not counting smaller game retailers in this because we need to be honest about the fact that they aren’t competing in the market with Valve as far as what they offer devs).
Did you take into account the reasons that game devs choose Valve over other retailers like GOG? Or the fact that very often game devs will use Valve, GOG and other gaming retailers?
You didn’t give any specifics in your answer to me and honestly I have to wonder if you even know where the majority of Valves money comes from.
Follow-up question.
How does the consumer benefit from and why should they switch to a different retailer than Valve’s Steam? What is the benefit of a fediverse style retailer and how does it work?
That doesn’t make sense to me.
Here an example that you can understand: nobody should buy gasoline or use cars but many are forced to do it because they have to go to work to earn the money they need to survive. The capitalists pushing this corrupted system are forced to do it only by their own greed, they are the ones who need to be blamed before anyone else.
Additionally though, of the major gaming retailers, Valve has the least predatory model
They promote gambling to kids, the “least predatory model” it’s still a predatory model.
Did you take into account the reasons that game devs choose Valve over other retailers like GOG? Or the fact that very often game devs will use Valve, GOG and other gaming retailers?
Valve managed to build a small monopoly on the videogame market and together with other tech corporation they managed to centralize internet around a bunch of service/platforms that people are now hooked to. Promoting anything outside the corporation world would result in small to zero visibility.
You didn’t give any specifics in your answer to me and honestly I have to wonder if you even know where the majority of Valves money comes from.
From taking a cut on selling games and from microtransactions.
Now i have a question for you, how does the ceo of valve spend the majority of his money?
How does the consumer benefit from and why should they switch to a different retailer than Valve’s Steam? What is the benefit of a fediverse style retailer and how does it work?
https://join-lemmy.org/docs/index.html
The whole humanity will benefit if we stop giving money to billionares and their private corporations who promote closed and centralized, for profit, evil, business models.
I’d argue that that is entirely a good thing overall.
It means that Steam is very open to Indie devs (something we already know) that don’t make as much money but are passion projects for the creators.
If they’re making enough from the…let’s call them prestige titles…to be able to afford to give indie devs a place to host their passion projects and maybe get more eyes on it, than I see no problem with that.
No idie dev is going into it thinking they’re going to be next giant thing. They just want to share their work and maybe make a few bucks. And Steam gives them that, PLUS the chance that maybe they’ll be a Rimworld or a Hollow Knight; something that sparks a giant success for them.
No idie dev is going into it thinking they’re going to be next giant thing
I would argue that a significant amount of them are but that’s not the point.
I’m not sure how they started, but Brotato came from a very small studio, and rose up to top-played on Steam Deck and some other charts. It made their creators a lot of money, because they were lucky, sure, but also because they made a very good game and had a platform to sell it from.
As far as I know, Valve’s monetisation scheme for developers is also quite fair. I might be one of those fanboys, but I think they deserve it to some extent. There’s much worse players out there, and with the money Valve is making and the market share they have now, they could absolutely be one of the bad ones and not care.
Is it luck though?
It’s hard to make a game. It’s much harder to make a good game that pushes all the right buttons.
I play some of these games that probably make well under average, and there are very distinct reasons why they didn’t take off.
I believe that there’s always luck involved to some extent. You have a very valid point, though, if a game is THAT good, at some point success becomes the only plausible outcome. So definitely not a hill I would die on.
If they’re making enough from the…let’s call them prestige titles…to be able to afford to give indie devs a place to host their passion projects and maybe get more eyes on it, than I see no problem with that.
Valve is a for profit company, you have to pay to upload your games there and they take a cut of any sale. The article literally say that most games don’t make anything.
Sure. You have to rent a stall at farmer’s market if you want to sell your corn, too instead of selling it to a larger distributor. No body is saying otherwise.
The point is that having Steam as an option as an indie dev rather than having to connect to a larger publisher in order to get your work out there, is a good thing. The fact that some titles don’t make money isn’t part of it. It’s the fact that Steam at least allows these devs to cut out the middle man (the publisher). Maybe it’ll work and be a hit. Maybe it won’t. But at least they have the option to try.
No dev should consider releasing their game on the private store/platform of an evil corporation that promotes gambling to kids and who’s ceo is a billionare with a fleet of megayachts. Many devs have no better option because they are trying to make a living and catch up with life (unlike valve ceo who makes billions through questionable practices). If the market is so much centralized around certain publishers and distribuition platforms you can thank greedy corporations that for decades shaped the system to be what it is.
So in your mind, no one who is self-publishing a book should put it on Amazon. No one who is trying to sell their product on etsy should use PayPal. No one who is just trying to get rid of a few things around the house should use Facebook Marketplace… etc…
Welcome to reality. Sometimes the best of a bunch of bad options has to do. Should these companies all be put int he ground. Yes. But if we let perfect be the enemy of good, we never make any progress.
So in your mind, no one who is self-publishing a book should put it on Amazon. No one who is trying to sell their product on etsy should use PayPal. No one who is just trying to get rid of a few things around the house should use Facebook Marketplace… etc…
Exactly, don’t use these platforms they belong to evil corporations who among other things are helping israel government in a genocide
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_companies_involved_in_the_Gaza_war
Welcome to reality. Sometimes the best of a bunch of bad options has to do. Should these companies all be put int he ground. Yes. But if we let perfect be the enemy of good, we never make any progress.
You are on lemmy defending corporations, ask yourself, are you making progress?
I’m not defending anybody.
I’m saying that if you’re an author (for example) that wants to self publish instead of trying to find a big publisher to accept your manuscript, what are you going to do? Email a copy to anyone who wants to buy it? No…of course not. Similarly, if you’re a dev who wants to release a game without going through a big publisher like Activision or Bethesda or whatever…what are you going to do? Other than Steam and Itch.io, there aren’t many places to do that.
Does it suck? Yes. But the reality is that if we want to get our work out into the public, regardless of monetary concerns, we have to roll around in one mud puddle or another. Our only choice (until that changes) is how deep of a puddle we choose to get in.
if you’re a dev who wants to release a game without going through a big publisher like Activision or Bethesda or whatever…what are you going to do?
I write about it here on lemmy
Other than Steam and Itch.io, there aren’t many places to do that.
Why there aren’t many places to do that? How was it in the past? What changed? How you can improve that?
Does it suck? Yes. But the reality is that if we want to get our work out into the public, regardless of monetary concerns, we have to roll around in one mud puddle or another.
To me it sounds like the reality is that you are choosing visibility over doing what is good
Okay, but explain how consumer preferences are somehow Steam’s fault?
If you told me it was that way because Steam was boosting AAA games and suppressing indie titles, then okay, you have a valid reason to criticize Steam for that, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.
Okay, but explain how consumer preferences are somehow Steam’s fault?
Valve is a for profit company, they make money by advertising games and selling them, their website is literally an ad shelf.
doesn’t seem to be the case.
It seem the case to me that they are advertising the shit out of certain games with ads as big as the entire screen.
Even etsy creators advertise their more profitable products instead of things that barely sell. Apart from the top banner on the store page everything steam advertises is based on demand, calculated by sales numbers and whishlists, and relevance to your library.
Even decentralized platforms like Lemmy operate under this exact principal, a decentralised gamestore would show you the same games as steam does.
If you want to see everything, you are free to set your steam store to new releases. Have fun sifting trough hundreds of cash grabs and “garbage” first time passion projects to find a single interesting game.
Even decentralized platforms like Lemmy operate under this exact principal,
There are no ads on lemmy
“Walmart advertises some of the things they sell, but never advertise the off brand water” ok, and???
Walmart and valve are two corporations.
Ok, I guess its my turn.
And?
Behold the whole story of every economy
Pareto principle at work
Like, lots of games just aren’t very good, and lots of games are pretty niche. If you want to make a lot of money in the games industry, selling an indie game on steam is not the way. make a preditory mobile game instead.
Candy Crush makes about a billion dollars a year. GTA V makes about 500 million from selling shark cards. Whatever happening at the steam store to warrant an article like this isn’t on steam, its 100% on consumers being dumbasses.
It’s also just the fact that some games are better than others. For every Factorio and Hollow Knight, there are a hundred other games that aren’t as good that significantly less people buy.
It’s also on many people wanting to play AAA games and there not being many good AAA games so everyone plays the same few good ones
I really dont get this, there have been and still are things you can very much criticise valve for but people come up with the most insane shit to criticise them for. “Uhh yeah this problem affecting the whole game industry is steams fault”. Also the top 1% are prolly aldo much much more expensive to produce so i dont think its as bad as it sounds at first but yeah.
Barely make anything compared to multi million companies
Solo dev games can make a fraction of what those giant games and the dev can live a very comfortable life. Etc: balatro
Very pointless article.
But that’s the thing. It’s incredibly rare that a indie game becomes successful enough to sustain even a single developer. It’s like with every other entertainment industry. YouTube, OF, Twitch, TikTok, you are competing with millions of other people in exactly the same situation as you. I think it’s OF where you need to be in the top 25% to earn $1k per year.
Hard work and clever marketing can improve your chances of a success, but you still need to be extremely lucky to be noticed enough to make a living out of it.
I remember this talk about a developer making a living as a game dev. Not by making inspiring or “good” games, but by pretty much endlessly reskinning solitare games.
Have you ever considered the fact that these games suck?
as a hobby game dev (i made this game), i can confirm that most indie games do not reach the stage where they would be enjoyable by other players.
Talking about statistics is not pointless, it’s quite interesting sometimes even.
Games like Balatro or Stardew Valley are absolute unicorns. Most smaller teams and solo devs that have a constant stream of some revenue through Steam need to work on the side to earn a living.
The point they’re making is pointless. Should have clarified my self better. I think this is an issue of behemoth companies are eating the big chunk of market and not leaving anything for the smaller creators to make a living. Same like McDonald’s is everywhere squishing smaller burger shops.
This a market problem not steam. The article points it like it’s steam’s fault. IMHO steam does its best to support indie devs. they even patch their games so they’d have a smooth release (sorry its a Reddit link)
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That’s basically the story of the whole economy.
Podcasts, music, film, paintings, novels…Linux distributions, ice cream flavor sales…literally everything.
Upvotes on lemmy posts…
You could indeed argue that lemmy follow similar patterns, for example threads posted in popular subs predates all other content. If you ask me this is a big problem and the result of a design shaped around advertising and content manipulation inherited from reddit.
Hell, the website I get knitting patterns from has the same situation. The top 1% of designers make all the dough. But it’s great to have a platform that anybody can submit patterns to. The top designers pay the bills and they keep people coming back.
The platforms also create the new top designers/performers by letting new talents submit for free.
Like live streaming, Twitch have no clue who’s going to become big and who’ll stay at 2 concurrent viewers. But you need to let everyone try, to be able to have the few that rises to the top
Twitch streamers, YouTube channels, book best seller lists, radio play lists…
ice cream flavor sales
Strawberry’s fallen on hard times. We need to seize the means of chocolate production and distribute the wealth among all our fellow flavors.
Athletes, at least in the sports that make any money at all.
What? You never played Monopoly before? What do you think the endgame is?
The Monopoly endgame is spending as much time in jail as possible to evade property tax and fees.
Yeah but you gotta own the best properties before you do that.
Would Pareto be ecstatic or rolling in his grave at this disparity?
For profit centralized economy perhaps
Should they pool game sales earnings and distribute the money equally among developers? I can’t think of any other platform that based on my own tastes recommends me games that don’t even have double digit all time high concurrent players (at most just basic lists that end up burying old titles at the end of the queue) and that I end up buying.
There’s plenty of valid criticism for steam, I don’t understand why we should focus on nitpicking.
Really topics against Steam are getting ridiculous.
Like ok. Is Steam supposed to force players to buy shit games too so that the distribution curve flattens?
I’m gonna pump so many AI shit games so I can get my fair share 🥰
Really topics against Steam are getting ridiculous.
Less ridiculous than the people defending a corporation who makes money promoting gambling to kids and that is owned by a billionare with multiple private yachts
Alternative Headline: Sturgeon’s Law Continues to Exist
