Apart From All That, What Has Steam Ever Done For Us?
Every topic comes with some go-to natter that bloggers pad their stories with. Not full arguments, just stock observations inserted here and there to inflate and article’s word-count, and that reflect a current titbit of assumed knowledge on the subject, some inoffensive idea in easy reach for a rushed journalist writing for the next pay-cheque.
On the subject of Steam, one such titbit I’ve noticed recently is the idea that Valve does not provide enough “visibility” to indie games. Somewhere on every news site you’ll find soundbites from a struggling indie devs with complaints against Valve because Steam doesn’t feature their game as prominently as it used to. In their mind, Valve makes “exposure” a selling point, but each time the discovery algorithm is tweaked it hurts the indie developers in some way. Valve, the assumed wisdom states, just isn’t doing enough for the small devs.
I understand why a developer would want the store that sells their game to show off that game as much as possible. I just think they’re expecting too much. Steam is just a shop, like Game or PC World. It is not the shop’s job or purpose to make a product popular (unless the shop also makes the product, obviously).
Indie devs: stop acting like you are in competition with Steam — they sell your game, don’t they? — and start acting like you are in competition with the other games that Steam sells, because you are.
I know, it’s a lot of competition. Anyone with $100 can put their game on Steam. “Steam is so open that great games get buried under the trash”. That’s another worthless nugget of perceived wisdom. The truth is that even if every low-effort game was evicted from Steam tomorrow, and all that was left was the work of talented, conscientious developers, there would still be an army of competitors to face.
Unlike Game, Steam doesn’t have shelving limits. Steam is a bit more like Medium or YouTube. I can’t expect Medium to promote my stories for me if I’m not already demonstrating that people are interested in reading them. They already have far more than a few front-pages worth of quality stories to show to visitors, ones that have a proven track record. I wouldn’t get a space based on a promise and a prayer. But I believe in my stories, so I make an effort to share them and encourage people to engage with them. In the realm of products like videogames, such work all falls under the banner of advertising.
If you are an indie developer that complains about Steam’s discovery algorithm, then I suspect you need to take your advertising responsibility a little more seriously.
Steam might not have shelving limits, but it does have limited space of another kind. By that, I refer to the limited time and attention users can give to the Steam store. If the average user, in an average browsing session, spends ten seconds on the Steam store, and in those seconds they see on average ten games before doing something else, then you could think of Steam’s high-impact shelving limit as only ten (or so) games. That’s only ten (or so) chances to get a sale on that day. How many of those ten slots could they afford to replace with unproven indie titles in before it starts negatively impacting profits?
If indie developers want Steam to sell their game, they need to convince Steam to buy into it. They need to sell their game before Steam will sell it for them.
