>Indiepocalypse is cancelled, you can stop worrying now.
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.
That is true but I'm (as a customer) still happy with it since I got one single game out of it that I can't stop playing and this is a feeling I had not since...college.
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.
Another Rimworld player here. The parent post was complaining about knock-off survival-style games, and Rimworld assuredly isn't a knock-off. The developer, Tynan Sylvester, put a ton of thought into the game mechanics and created a simulation masterpiece--made even better by the extensive modding community.
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.)
Calling it a clone of Prison Architect is pretty weird. There's very little shared except for the graphics style. Even the basic "click to place walls" construction system is broadly different, given that in Prison Architect you have to lay down foundations and then build on top of that.
In the past they were more similar, at least the NPC art style was. When they first started Rimworld they used a sort of Prison Architect art style for their NPCs as placeholders until they got their own art in (which they have now).
If anything, both Rimworld and PA are "clones" of Dwarf Fortress.
I'm reluctant to breathe a sigh of relief yet. I've been visiting the Steam Store a lot less since they opened the floodgates to any and every game under the sun as I believe discoverability is now horribly broken and the queue and recommendations features both fail to mitigate the issue.
> I believe discoverability is now horribly broken and the queue and recommendations features both fail to mitigate the issue.
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.
I stopped bothering clicking "not interested", it seems to have no influence on the games. All I want is the option to block some tags from showing up in my queue at all (action, fps, multiplayer, racing and anime).
They have text somewhere explaining that clicking "not interested" just means that particular game won't show up again in your queue, and maybe on the home page too, I don't remember, but it doesn't actually affect their piss-poor recommendation system. I still click it, but considering the handful of games I haven't clicked it on yet also didn't click add to wishlist because they're the type of game I think "maybe I'll get it in a year or so when it's a better price but I'm not really committed, I wouldn't mind seeing it in the queue again sometime to remind me", I don't recall seeing a repeat on my queue despite going through many queues, so I'm also wondering what the value of "not interested" is. I agree I should be able to blacklist tags. What has surprised me is the sheer number of really basic "games" I have no interest in like the anime dating sims, walking sims, or choose-your-own-adventure sims. I wonder how much the average dev for those things make, makes me wish I had an anime artist friend to test the waters with in pumping out crap.
Steam makes it pretty clear that your queue and recommendations are absolutely NOT based upon your preferences at all. They even tell you what it is based on - a game is popular, or it's new. Big publishers might be displeased with a solution that used by-now-standard recommendation tech. It certainly wouldn't recommend any AAA titles to me as even though I have 1000+ games in my library (which I never play... I might have a problem) I haven't purchased a $60 on-release-day title for well over a decade. How horrified would Ubisoft and Activision be if they knew a lot of people never even saw mention of their latest title? And first and foremost, Steam appears to be built for them.
I am both a gamedev and a avid game player, of some niche and strange genres included.
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).
>but the dev flat out absolutely refuses to get on Steam, because he thinks the game ins't ready for that
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.
So where do you go to discover non-Steam games? These days I only browse for new games on Steam, and I know I'm missing out on some great stuff, but I don't know where else to look.
A simple Bayesian filter trained on the tags and maybe short description text to rank games per-user would probably do everything most people want. Steams Web API is nearly useless though, so you'd have to build a whole site, and do loads of scraping, to offer that to people.
Most of them suck, some of them rock. I have no problem with being flooded as long as we have ways to quickly assess game quality (game score on steam is a good enough metric to start with). By the way, it is not yet over. The growth of the number of releases has slowed down, but it hasn't gone down yet. There are still over 300 new releases per month.
You can't really fight fads. Did you see Dying Light clearing nearly $45M? Yeah, its not some indie half-cooked turkey, but its a completely forgettable and short zombie shooter/parkour game with milquetoast story and gameplay.
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.
I disagree with your assessment of Dying light. It's a beautiful game on xbox one, I enjoyed it at full price. I'll get back to it when I feel like it but the mood and scenery are fantastic and quite memorable. I'd give it a 7.5 - 8, and I can see somebody rating it a 9.5 depending on their taste.
Agreed. I know many people that enjoyed that game quite heavily, and it is far from a knockoff zombie sequal/ripoff. It may appear like an Assassins Creed / CoD of the zombie world, but it's definitely not, imo.
Infact, in the genre (which is lacking in general), i think it's one of the top.
I put early access games I'm interested in on my "wish list" aka watch list and then wait for them to be released and received. I no longer buy games in early access.
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.
But those games have always been there. Go in your local store that carries physical copies of games and count the shovelware. Steam isn't supposed to be a curation service - there are tons of those, find a reviewer you like and follow their recommendations. Steam should be as full as possible a repository of paid games you can download.
Yeah, we solved this problem already. YouTube is FILLED with garbage. But you only find the garbage you like, mostly. Steam is a problem because they don't have a recommendation engine that learns from a users preferences. And really, that should be inexcusable today.
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.
I think it was fairly obvious from the start that it wasn't going to be a lasting trend. The games were obviously either uninspired clones or promising the impossible, and as soon as consumers caught on then the trend would die off. A lot of folks had to get burned to see that the fire was hot, but now they know, at least.
has this really slowed down at all, even since refunds were introduced?
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%.
> PC worldwide core games market is estimated to be around $27B in 2015 (Newzoo). So, including Dota 2 and Team Fortress 2 revenue, Valve is controlling around 15% of it. Pretty impressive!
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.
I would myself have guessed at least 50%, but that would be just based on anecdotal experience. I've bought the occasional Humble Bundle outside of Steam, but that's the only one for several years now. The same applies for all of my friends as far as I know.
What is the revenue split for non-Valve games on Steam? While I certainly wouldn't have any problem believing that 50% of game sales happen through Steam, that is not the same as Valve getting 50% of the game sales revenue.
I wouldn't be so sure. It's not like most publishers have much of a choice. Unless you have your own Steam-like service (and sometimes, even if you do) you almost don't even have a choice. I'm pretty sure Valve knows this, and takes advantage of it.
In other words, Valve holds all the cards in the majority of negotiations.
Do note though that Valve/Steam isn't a publisher, it's just the distributor even if a major one. Quite many games still have separate developer and publisher, neither of which is Valve.
I would have thought they would have had a commanding majority as well. Occasionally I'll buy something on GoG - but it's usually an oldy-but-goody for $5 or less. Almost every single game I have gotten through Humble Bundle has just been a Steam key.
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.
Probably also forgetting about League of Legends. It's free, so no actual game sales are happening, but people spend a tremendous amount of money in-game.
The article also mentions that DLC and free-to-play games (along with in-game purchases, I'd assume) weren't counted in the Steam sales numbers, so the Steam marketshare shown could be a low estimate.
Walmart is still a gigantic part of some games PC sales. It's the reason why Valve is careful not to ask anything of the big publishers that would endanger their agreements with Walmart. That's why even though the cost to get a game through Steam is 10% of what it is to get it at Walmart, you still pay full price and often more than what you pay at retail. The big Steam discounts are only possible after the game has been removed from retail, since the retail agreements require not offering the game anywhere else for a lower price (though retail outlets are able to offer discounts from the MSRP which is why you might find a game that is $60 on Steam for $55 at Walmart). It's also why the stupid "preloading" system exists where you download a game you paid for, but aren't allowed to run it until retailers have a chance to put it on their shelf.
> Good luck even finding PC games in a box in a retail store...
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.
If someone reposts the link after your submission didn't get traction, it will get the time from the reposter but you'll still be credited with the submission.
I think it depends very much on what you're trying to show. In the article the point he is making is that volume and average price have a roughly inverse relationship.
As with almost all data vis it can be misread but for showing relationships between metrics over time it's the best chart.
I'm not sure how much you should count my input, but this was my first time to have seen a double-y axis chart and I'm still not sure if I was reading it correctly.
Don't worry, that's generally how most people feel, even if you've seen them many times. You have to pause and say, "...wait". I'd argue that the trends you actually see in almost all of them are misguided.
I'd say the bigger concern is spurious correlation. The two factors may very well be unrelated, or share a common cause (like drowning and ice cream prices -- they're both driven primarily by heat).
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.
I think the problem is that there are relationships that are very difficult to show cleanly using other chart types.
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.
I find I have to think about them too long, and I think the rendering details contribute to that. There is nothing wrong with double y-axis graphs if you don't just slap them together because the x-axis has the same range. I think the lack of concern for the rendering details make these harder to immediately read than they should be.
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".
Exactly my argument. I would rather not give the user the option of creating that chart in the first place because 95% of them are misused and give misguiding trends, etc.
If I was creating charts I would want the freedom to do this. Perhaps display a warning if both Y-axes are the same units (e.g. both dollars) because there is little reason to do that - either the values are related and the graph will be hard to parse/misleading, or the values are not related and they probably shouldn't be on the same chart.
But I can certainly see a use case for $ v. %, etc.
Worth mentioning is the default pricing settings on Steam create vastly different prices geographically.
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.
If anything I'd say a movie license in the world of gamers is a chain around your neck, because there haven't been a lot of films that made the jump well. Mad Max did well because it was a legitimately good game, and while Metal Gear was a big deal, its not as big on the PC as in Sonyland.
NVidia had been bundling MGS with all video cards using their chipset for a good part of the year. If I read the chart correctly it's not counting the bundled MGS as sales.
Steam still desperately needs a competent recommendation engine. Simply recommending the biggest sellers is a terrible solution, but appears to be what they are doing now. I am worried that Steam doesn't want to pursue this, however, because big publishers wouldn't like it. My personal Steam interface wouldn't be trying to sell me the latest AAA titles at all, for example. And Steam has thus far been very much a 'for the big publishers' affair. Sure indie devs have made some great successes there, but those were all despite Steams policies and structure rather than thanks to it.
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.
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.