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Comment by walterbell | Hacker News Reader

Why aren't developers choosing to build PC apps instead? Stardock said that their worst-performing PC game earned more revenue than most iOS or Android apps for which they could obtain revenue numbers.

On PCs, it is still possible for developers to sell from their own website, without paying a 30% fee to a platform app store.

PCs may be a numerically smaller (hundreds of millions vs. billions of devices) market, but customer perceptions of software value are reflected in an order of magnitude difference in price expectations.

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I know some indie game developers.

Plenty don't develop for any particular platform. You write your code in Unity3D, and then build for all the platforms it can (Android, IOS, etc) then you build your app for Steam where you make it run on all platforms (ie Windows, Mac and Linux) which is easy because it is almost just a button in Unity.

Then you hope that enough people buy your game to earn the development cost back. You don't develop just for one platform because it is unlikely that you will make enough money to get it back.

Does the Steam ecosystem provide any support for marketing and discovery of new games, or are users relying on word of mouth networking?

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_(software) mentioned Steam Greenlight for estimating demand for new games, but it is apparently being phased out.

Is it limiting when a platform (Apple, Valve, Amazon, etc) owns the customer relationship? Seems like it would be difficult to apply conventional marketing techniques to learn about customers, if the platform provider owns the user's contact info.

An interesting recent article about publishing on Steam: http://gamasutra.com/blogs/BurakTezateser/20140717/220624/Dy...

Generally, you still have to do your own marketing. There's no great meritocratic system out there for discovering games (and pretty unlikely one can arise IMO - it's impossible to objectively class a game as good or bad).

Found a comment on an article linked from the one above: http://kotaku.com/i-think-gabe-has-mentioned-this-before-man...

"I think Gabe has mentioned this before many times, he'd like to get rid of Greenlight to leave developers open to place their game on steam.

Then, users would curate the titles through their own customized storefront. This would drive word of mouth and generate free adverting for the companies that really on the steam digital store.

So think of it as following your favorite youtube channel/ store front because it has niche titles that are in line with what you like. You wouldn't have to dig for titles if that's not your thing.

This way, the devs of said niche title appears directly to its audience and yet still leaves the choice to the end user if they want to dig into the onslaught of new releases.

I really hope Gabe follows through on this idea because it keeps options open and doesn't give you a force fed walled garden that Sony, EA or MS is so dead set on controlling and manipulating end-users/devs with."

Steam gives you some free advertising, but not much. You may also be featured, if you are lucky.

I think a lot of game devs are actually switching to PC (steam), PS4 and XBox One. I know we are, it feels like a much more stable and safe marketplace.

I don't know what steams cut is, but I suspect most indie developers are willing to pay it for the benefits it can offer in terms of distribution

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