There were a lot of factors that contributed to the small indies "visibility problem" that just blaming Steam sales for shifting people's expectations is kinda ridiculous and really shows the entitlement of some developers thinking they have some sacred right to huge sales and market share in a very competitive, ever growing industry.
To blame Steam for the race to the bottom is ridiculous when developers themselves were willing participants outside of Steam, other platforms like iOS or bundle stores contributed enormously to it, and due to this gold rush, not only was the market completely experimental, it was also insanely profitable model at the time (which is why developers were willing participants). Take this interview from 2011:
"The sale is a highly promoted event that has ancillary media like comic books and movies associated with it. We do a 75 percent price reduction, our Counter-Strike experience tells us that our gross revenue would remain constant. Instead what we saw was our gross revenue increased by a factor of 40. Not 40 percent, but a factor of 40. Which is completely not predicted by our previous experience with silent price variation."
We had numbers from Valve that deeper discounts (i.e. 70% & 80%) would result in more straight revenue (not just units sold) than lower discounts, and yes, that could be because there were fewer games on the market. But not "fewer" Unity store asset flips and "bad" games taking up those sales (which is ridiculous because they generally don't), but fewer high quality games, period. Nowadays, these developers that apparently had their livelihoods killed due to the expectation of lower prices are competing against games like Shovel Knight, a game that rarely goes on sale, never on deep discount, and is extremely high quality. Maybe, just maybe, there are so many good games that consumers only have so much money to throw around.
"The most recent thing that also is really puzzling is that we made products available for free on numerous occasions, without significantly impacting the audience size. We recently said, we're now going to do something different, we're not only going to signal that it's free but we're going to say, 'it's free to play,' which is not really a pricing signal, even though that's what you would ordinarily think it is. And our user base for our first product that we made free to play, Team Fortress 2, increased by a factor of five. That doesn't make sense if you're trying to think of it purely as a pricing phenomenon.
Why is free and free to play so different? Well then you have to start thinking about how value creation actually occurs, and what it is that people are valuing, and what the statement that something is free to play implies about the future value of the experience that they're going to have."
https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2011/10/24/less-is-more-gabe-newell-on-game-pricing/
So Beyond discounts we had the proliferation of F2P models and GaaS as well. Why is no one blaming League of Legends for the "damage" it did to the PC market by basically "training" gamers to expect ever increasing, high quality competitive games with infinite content and completely for free. Why is no one blaming games like Fortnite?
Why is no one blaming "youtube influencers and streamers" who -on a dime- can change the perception of what a good game is and can rocket even low quality games like Flappy Bird and Five Nights at Freddy to ridiculous success.
Why are indie developers not blaming each other when thousands of them rush like flies to see who can put out the most "survival, jump scare horror, rogue, souls-like, zombie, craft" games in a calendar year. If you think this was only a problem Steam had, you might not even remember that Microsoft's Xbox indie initiative had a problem with zombie, craft (and massage games funnily enough) itself because chasing trends is easy and developing good games is harder.
But inky you say, a hand curated storefront that keeps a low number, high quality inventory, means more games with higher quality and higher visibility is better for everyone!
Yeah, except who is everyone? How many indie developers would you say are out there making games? How many of them are making good (not exceptional, just baseline good) quality games people would like to buy? How many of them do you expect would like the opportunity to be noticed and be allowed to sell their games (together will all the AAA of course)? Oh, what do you mean you want in, small indie developer who is creating another derivative product at $20? So you mean all of them want to get in as well because they obviously feel their product is worth just as much? OK.
I wish we had a storefront where the process of curating these thousands of worthy entries is fast and painless, where ALL of them get equal visibility and ALL of them are guaranteed to sell max units at full price. Maybe you are bit in denial about the whole business part of the "videogames are a business" line you love throwing around. You know, businesses fail. A lot. Especially in a cutthroat industry where products that take USD $350m to make are directly competing for time and money with your garage band operation.
But yeah, let's blame this particular store instead for all of it.
