Watching videos about Steam and how their system shows content was depressing. Basically, stuff is shown because of sales and wishlists (they call it 'player interest'). Steam don't give a flying fuck about games, they could be selling furniture for all they care. Moths to flames. Indie devs need to drag in sacrifices of a bajillion users to the Steam altar and then they *may* get featured somewhere on a carousel for an afternoon. It's not a store, it's more like a fuggin' pyramid scheme!! 🖕
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All indie content is allowed on Steam for one reason: Directing bods to AAA games. For Valve, it's a win win, they get 30% of indie earnings (that's a LOT of small 30%'s adding up) and users/info brought in by indie dev's hard work on wishlists can be mined and go on to be sold the bigger items for AAA $$. Support for smaller indie games is an illusion. Indies on Steam are fodder in a system designed to draw maximum people in to buy AAA. All at the expense of a lot of indies hoping for scraps.
@psychicparrot42 I always wondered whether if we could accumulate 10-20 launches of smaller games, still getting scraps but x10-20 scraps per month, as a little money source.
Like Orange Pascal (but I think he probably gets a bit more than just "scraps" in a few of his games) https://store.steampowered.com/developer/orangepixel/ - he has 19 Steam titles!
@alfredbaudisch I have 6 games on Steam, 3 on Xbox. If it wasn't for my Xbox games, most months I wouldn't make anything at all. Xbox is a steady income, Steam is bullshit and only generates anything during discounts and sales (which says a lot about the Steam community!). Lots of different streams is def. the way to go, but building up to enough streams to make an income and then maintaining them can be a lot of work. Especially constantly changing SDK platforms like mobile/iOS.
@psychicparrot42 ah I see, so it's not exactly like how I dream/envision it (like, "10 games, $1k/monthly!").
The advantage seems to be that you don't need to worry about platform updates bullshits, right? Launch once on Steam, if it has no bugs, no need to update yearly like the stupidity of iOS or Android.
@alfredbaudisch I used to do Android and iOS but I felt like they were laughing at me. The amount I had to put in to be on those platforms, vs. the amount my games would earn... made no sense. I think you need a publisher/big budget/celebrity endorsement to make that all work lol
@psychicparrot42 Or like this guy https://store.steampowered.com/developer/RenegadeSector (almost 20 titles too, most barely have 50 reviews, but maybe every month they all sum up to a few $1k-2k?)
