Steam Sales 2015
medium.com
medium.com
I think I speak for quite a few people when I say thank God. I have nothing against indie games in general but the sheer volume of low-quality DayZ/Minecraft-inspired early-access survival game clones that were all broken in the same ways that were never finished by the developer have left me jaded.
The game is Rimworld and it's a early-access clone of prison architect. The game is far from done, the dev left for a long extended break but the game is still a endless source of joy. And I haven't even touch the mods.
The sheer diversity and new ideas that Indiepocalypse brought is a reaction to the mainstream sequelcalypse. I just can't see it anymore. I also don't buy those games anymore because I know they'll last for a weekend or two and then I'll be pissed that I wasted money even though I knew it won't be better then the one before.
Big studios may save us from low-quality but not from broken or cloned games. They are just more expensive.
Tynan also wrote a book, "Designing Games," which is worth checking out.
Also, the similarities to Prison Architect are coincidental. I've played and followed both games for a long time, and neither is a clone of the other. (However, I do wish that Tynan would clone PA's user interface--Rimworld's UI is clunky by comparison.)
If anything, both Rimworld and PA are "clones" of Dwarf Fortress.
I agree, my queue is littered with genres I have zero interest in. After the 10th anime dating sim I marked not interested in, it should prevent those games in the future.
And now that you say it, I remember that about the not interested button.
Where is it made clear "my queue" isn't based on my preferences?
I found out that Steam catalog, despite "opening the floodgates" is quite limited on some genres, some niche genres have the nicest games don't even volunteer for steam (usually because the nicest games have perfectionist devs that don't want to be "another shitty early access", for example Starsector, the game has been being sold in pre-release form for years now, but the dev flat out absolutely refuses to get on Steam, because he thinks the game ins't ready for that), and even when they do, they don't get enough traction with the public to get through Greenlight or to skip Greenlight.
On some other genres, you will see loads and loads of crap shoveled at you, but the good games still don't fill completely the recommended games section screen...
The only thing I think Steam can do differently in their interface, is make the "order by public rating" easier (this feature actually exists already! But is mostly hidden, every time I need it, I google around until I stumble on it, and each time I end on it by a different path!), usually when you do that you see a list of actually great games, mixing both truly great AAA games and actual underdogs (example: last time I checked for some genres, I owned all games on the first page on the list, some of those games I know I am one of the few people that own them, because they are not widely known, while others are full blown 100 million marketing AAA).
I once read an article that said you only get one release. There are exceptions to this rule, but it seems to be true.
If you choose to debut your game on Steam with the early-access model, it's usually your one shot to impress customers with your product. We all know that it isn't complete. However, the update tempo and promise tracking can easily tank your product if you fall behind. Taking an extended break, even with the early release model, is pretty much suicide.
I can only think of a handful of titles that hyped their early release AND got a second round of hype on full release. For most, however, the first time you put your game on Steam will be the only major press that you get.
And there is a subreddit called gamingsuggestions that has great people over there to suggest stuff!
Can you blame these other devs jumping on the wagontrain? There is so much money to be made in this space. It should be Steam's job to keep out halfcooked games but apparently they disagree. I imagine the whole greenlight "give us what we want" aspect of Steam encourages realeases like these. This is the problem with fan-led media and stores. Fans get too excited and are willing to excuse a lot of things just to "get the game." The devs cash out on what's at best a beta-test and have zero incentive to continue.
Infact, in the genre (which is lacking in general), i think it's one of the top.
I really wish that Steam had much better filters for what it shows, i.e. I have 0 interest in F2P games, like 99.99% of anime/manga games, etc. I greatly prefer the old interface which didn't try to force-feed you other people's "curated" opinions.
The recent sales have been lackluster discount wise as well and 3rd party shady key sites and whatnot often have better pricing.
Having said that, though, I did get Witcher 3 from Steam during the Winter sale which is the best RPG I've ever played and I've put 100+ hours in to it in less than 2 weeks. I was disappointed to see the same price as was in the sale. I waited expecting a better discount. It's so good I went back to buy the season pass at full price though - <3 for CDProjekt. They're outstanding and I hope they don't go the way of the other (mostly) scumbag publishers.
That's the cess pit the PC game market will be turning into, and I have no hope that Steam's Greenlight will prevent this.
Steam would be fairly easy to compete with, I expect, since they don't do anything other than let big publishers do whatever they want and provide a dumping ground for everyone else. If they restricted the big publishers, then it would be tough because you'd have to get them on board, but Valve even paid to implement their "preloading" system so big publishers didn't have to run the risk of actually taking advantage of digital distro and endangering their retail distro agreements by having stuff available 2 weeks before the boxes could make it onto the shelves.
Definitely. I've simply stopped buying indie games unless they're massive hits. Way too much shovelware out there.
people buying greenlight votes in bulk and selling unchanged asset packs hasn't gotten any better from what I can see, and Valve has made it clear they don't mind letting shovelware through the door as long as they get 30%.
why would it stop?
Is anyone else under the impression this number is too low? I mean, sure, it's still impressive, but at this point I would honestly expect them to control 30-40% of the PC core games market at least. I'd find it easier to believe that the NewZoo estimate is inaccurate.
League of Legends is also incomprehensibly huge. And Blizzard is nothing to scoff at.
*EDIT: Found the article an article from Newzoo. Looks like China alone is almost triples USA PC game sales.
http://www.newzoo.com/insights/us-and-china-take-half-of-113...
Why are consoles banned in China (2010): http://kotaku.com/5587577/why-are-consoles-banned-in-china
China lifts the ban (2013): http://kotaku.com/china-lifts-their-console-ban-but-theres-s...
Some big department stores even sold major consoles and games, including Friendship Stores[1] which are state run.
In other words, Valve holds all the cards in the majority of negotiations.
I guess there's Origin, but I've only ever bought Mass Effect 3 from them.
Good luck even finding PC games in a box in a retail store...
EDIT: Derp, completely spaced Blizzard... that's where most of the missing money must be going.
Really? The most popular retail PC games are easy to find at a variety of stores in the south-eastern US. I've seen them at WalMart, GameStop, Best Buy, Fry's Electronics, and MicroCenter.
I have been arguing with another founder about the double-y and how we should not use it.
What are peoples' response to the charts in this post? Do you find them easy to read/helpful/giving good insight into the data?
As with almost all data vis it can be misread but for showing relationships between metrics over time it's the best chart.
However, when talking about price and revenue it is legitimate to render them on the same chart, since revenue is a function of price. Steam in particular has proven to be a wonderful platform to demonstrate this phenomenon, as the elasticity of demand for games software is very high, and discounting even modestly generates far more revenue than you lose through the discount. Steam and the publishers benefit even more due to the low marginal cost of delivery, largely accountable to transmission costs and the marginal wear-and-tear on data servers.
Relationships between quantities with different units are hard to show otherwise, without significant cognitive overhead (a new unit ), or two charts which causes inevitable back and forth examination.
You mention elsewhere that they are commonly misinterpreted or misleading. Care to show some examples? I can't think of any off the top of my head.
These particular charts are poorly done because their isn't enough information about which axis refers to which plot line, but are otherwise clear in intent.
Why are the axis labels not colored the same way the lines are, or the entries in the key not positionally associated with their axis (rather than being in the center). The triangles and circles on the lines on "Steam Sales" offer no utility (except, perhaps, for color-blindness or if it was printed in black-and-white, but then dotted-vs-solid would be a better choice). There are horizontal tic marks, but they are separating the dates, not centered on the datapoint, meaning the data is being presented as a column, which a line graph is not best for (that is, the choice of graph given this data may not be the best one).
And that's just the problem with one graph. There are two graphs on this page, and both have different rendering details. Consistency is important because it means understanding the rendering of one graph translates to the understanding of the other. Why doesn't the second graph have shapes over the data points? Why doesn't the second graph have tic marks along the x-axis? Color is used inconsistently: the unit for the blue line is units sold in the first one and dollars in the second one, and the side the graph the blue line is associated with switches. Despite that the axes that are denominated in dollars are showing different things (totals vs discrete values), there is value in having them both on the same side of the graph (and in the same color)—that the blue one switches sides means the viewer needs to concentrate harder on the key and layout leaving less time for interpreting the data. It would actually be better if four colors between the two graphs were used since there are four different domains of data being shown. They both show the same time range, but the dates are not formatted similarly along the x-axis.
In both cases, the units on the labels are too exact. "60.00%": why is this 4 significant digits, a whole number percentage would do. At this size, the decimal point and percent sign almost get lost with the unneeded zeros. "Steam Sales" has units that are so big with so many zeros you have to think about the order of magnitude; these should be truncated to "$300M" and "65M".
But I can certainly see a use case for $ v. %, etc.
OK - let's see a line chart showing the correlation between average daily lunch cost and annual salary :)
This does not add confidence in the validity of other figures in this post.
https://medium.com/steam-spy/preliminary-results-for-steam-s...
We manually set out prices to match our store (https://www.scirra.com, sorry can't help myself!). Bit of a PITA as we have to keep it updated regularly for volatile currencies, but we'd rather people buy from us directly.
Geo pricing difference is significant, so depending on per country volume actual revenues may be minus a significant figure if those numbers are based on USD.
Steam also continues to face the threat of large publishers creating their own competing marketplaces, like EAs Origin. Since Steam offers nothing unique that a publisher couldn't reproduce themselves with little effort, drowning in a sea of clones wouldn't be terribly surprising. When Apple came out with iTunes, they demanded that music publishers do things like sell individual tracks, and cap those at 99 cents. They forced publishers to take advantage of digital distribution. So when music publishers wanted to compete, they found that they simply couldn't. Their board of directors would demand that they sell albums together. They would demand more than 99 cents a track. And users would never go for it. But with Steam, which places absolutely no restrictions upon the publisher whatsoever, that's not a problem. Origin showed that gamers loyalty to the franchises they like far outpaces any loyalty to Steam.. and why shouldn't it? Steam doesn't guarantee lower-than-physical-retail prices. They don't guarantee anything, really, for consumers.
I would love to see Valve start squeezing publishers and forcing them to take advantage of digital distribution. Cap new game prices. It is patently absurd to pay $60 for a digitally distributed title when distribution makes up the vast majority of the price of a retail title and digital distro drops the cost of distribution to nearly nothing. It would require big publishers to violate their distribution agreement contracts with retailers, just like iTunes forced music publishers to violate their distribution agreement contracts with record stores, but Steam would end up being much more robust as a result.
Back to the recommenation engine, though. My nephews got their first laptops for christmas. They're 9 years old and their parents are not technical at all. So they ended up with the cheapest Black Friday craptops you can imagine. There are plenty of things on Steam that they could play, but I didn't even install it for them. Because if I had, Steam would have inundated them with advertising for games that they don't have any chance of running, and, being 9 and used to tablets and consoles, they would not understand why they couldn't run something. Finding something they COULD play would be very difficult.
Alright, I should stop complaining and just build something to solve the problem. At least Valve doesn't seem aggressive against scraping Steam data and the like.