The literal definition of 'tax' has nothing to do with his response, though.
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Mike Rose (CEO of PC publisher NoMoreRobots) publishes Steam game sales analysis (average game making 16k a year, down 47% from 2018) [See threadmark]
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The literal definition of 'tax' has nothing to do with his response, though.
this is the cold hard truth and it genuinely, honestly sucks for the indie devs who basically have a choice between making their passion project and scraping by or finding another job.
that's capitalism for you. Ech.
the only thing ive done with curation of steam besides turn on 18+ games is sub to the PCMR and some anime games curator back in like 2015. the top of my front page, with basically everything relevant to me:
Part 1
Part 2
i don't know what people are doing that results in garbage on their steam page tbh
if you browse the trash a lot, the algorithm thinks you are interested in it, and shows you more.
jim sterling experienced this.
Good might be a stretch, but there are a lot of games. I don't see changes to muH sTEaM taX helping solve stuff like the sheer volume of games or... not really having a reason to buy most of them.
See threadmark for methodology
There's a lot of context seemingly being left out of the discussion here, the first two slides say
So, when he says "the average game" on slide 4 he means not AAA, only games released over one month (July 2019, contains a few days of the summer sale) , no games with fewer than 10 reviews, and even after all these exclusions only the middle 90% are counted, i.e. 170 games, and to top it all off, it's all estimates pulled from "years of experience," extrapolation from group membership and review counts, and "more." He has no actual sales data. What's the 95% confidence interval on all these estimates?
Mike Rose said:
So, when he says "the average game" on slide 4 he means not AAA, only games released over one month (July 2019, contains a few days of the summer sale) , no games with fewer than 10 reviews, and even after all these exclusions only the middle 90% are counted, i.e. 170 games, and to top it all off, it's all estimates pulled from "years of experience," extrapolation from group membership and review counts, and "more." He has no actual sales data. What's the 95% confidence interval on all these estimates?
ooooh, fair point. I don't do much browsing because most of the time i know what i want to purchase and go straight to the store page, so the only data the algorithm has to work with is what i want enough to buy on the spot. guess i'm an edge case.
The definition of tax has nothing to do with telling someone to stop using the word tax incorrectly. 🤔
Love how no one called it tax before, but with Valve its the Valve tax.
Never heard anyone talk about the Sony tax, the Epic tax, the Nintendo tax or the Microsoft tax...
Never heard anyone talk about the Sony tax, the Epic tax, the Nintendo tax or the Microsoft tax...
I've been buying less and less games. I haven't bought a single game this year at launch, and the ones I do buy are usually on a good sale. But it's not because of money, it's time. I just don't have enough time to keep up with what I've bought in the past along with good games coming to game pass, ps plus, games with gold, etc. I also have my circulation of multiplayer games that I always come back to over the years.
I do wonder if the constant onslaught of good games, combined with GaaS/Multiplayer games designed to keep you coming back over and over are just sucking people's time and creating less of a reason to buy new games at full price.
I do wonder if the constant onslaught of good games, combined with GaaS/Multiplayer games designed to keep you coming back over and over are just sucking people's time and creating less of a reason to buy new games at full price.
Nice, you are moving the goalposts.
Let me repeat : what you said ("Indie developers keep blaming everyone but themselves for their games failing. ") is pure ignorance and if you talked with any of them, you would know that.
Now, it's up to you to educate yourself on that matter by looking any of the hundreds of blogs, youtube channels, website or reddits where you will find developers being critical about themselves and talking about their shortcomings. Hell you even got a indie creators topic on Era. Or you can keep saying ignorant (and incorrect) stuff.
As for your second post, Steam ecosystem is seen by the vast majority of developers (from your placeholder regular studio to the indie darling to the AAA) as "flawed" at best. That's not hating on Steam or "blaming other for your failures", that's pointing out facts so that everyone can try to get a better ecosystem.
Are they all whiners that are wrong or maybe they are onto something ? You tell me.
And if you think developpers don't have any problems with App Store policies, you are in for a surprise. The difference is that there are no leverage : if you want to release a game for iPad, you have to deal with Apple.
Epic Store (for now) seems to give developers leverage, that why you hear them more.
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Hell everyone is now rereleasing games in all forms, Even MMOs, the new wave of 'classic' servers.
"Im not trying to poison the well, im trying to have a discussion."
•Uses extremely loaded terms incorrectly to trigger emotional responses from people•
Only new PC game I've bought this year has been Resident Evil 2 remake. GaaS titles keep me busy.
Just in time for Destiny 2 to become F2P and get a massive update the 1st of October!
chances are they just assume a game is garbage if they haven't heard of it before
it's all just 2D indie shovelware crap to them, because taking the 5 seconds to see if a game reviews well or is similar to a game they have been playing is too much
Last time someone actually showed the crap, it was mostly niche great indie games. So probably.
That is not to say that there is a ton of crap in Steam, and that sometimes some crap does make it to the top, but it is not as common as many try to showcase (and less nowadays as the "upcoming" exploit was "fixed").
lmao i didn't actually click through to the methodology. man, how are you supposed to conclude literally anything from that??
It doesn't, someone doing something like this in other industries would get laughed out of the industry, but apparently its fine concrete conclusions using such a flimsy methodology with gaming.
Everybody wants to be in, but they want to shut the door behind them.
If you quit your job how could you afford a second ultrawide monitor?
This year, I've been mostly playing Assassin's Creed: Odyssey (released Oct 2018 - ~140 hours played total), The Division 2 (March 2019 - 120 hours), Earth Defense Force 4.1 (July 2016 PC - 20 hours), Earth Defense Force 5 (July 2019 PC - 60 hours), Dynasty Warriors 7 (Dec 2018 PC - 10 hours), Dynasty Warriors 8 (May 2014 PC - 30 hours), Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon: Wildlands (March 2017 - 110 hours), and Watch Dogs (May 2014 - 20 hours). Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon: Breakpoint comes out in a month and will probably consume my free time for the rest of the year along with trying to get around to the glut of AC: Odyssey DLC.
I still want to get around to playing Watch Dogs 2 before Legion comes out, Mad Max, Middle Earth: Shadow of War, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Hitman 2016, Crusader Kings 2, No Man's Sky with its recent updates, Fallout 4, The Witcher 3's DLC (criminal, I know. After 180 hours, I got tired of the gameplay), finish Divinity: Original Sin 2 (70 hours in but still in Act 2), Resident Evil 6, and replay Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines before 2 comes out to name some games that I already own and still want to play.
I play a lot of games and spend a lot of time gaming, but I have a huge backlog and don't have any time for more games, particularly most indie games that, in my opinion, aren't competitive with the huge catalog of past and present quality games. There's just too many good games period, thus prices will necessarily go down due to large supply and a demand limited by available free time.
I still want to get around to playing Watch Dogs 2 before Legion comes out, Mad Max, Middle Earth: Shadow of War, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Hitman 2016, Crusader Kings 2, No Man's Sky with its recent updates, Fallout 4, The Witcher 3's DLC (criminal, I know. After 180 hours, I got tired of the gameplay), finish Divinity: Original Sin 2 (70 hours in but still in Act 2), Resident Evil 6, and replay Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines before 2 comes out to name some games that I already own and still want to play.
I play a lot of games and spend a lot of time gaming, but I have a huge backlog and don't have any time for more games, particularly most indie games that, in my opinion, aren't competitive with the huge catalog of past and present quality games. There's just too many good games period, thus prices will necessarily go down due to large supply and a demand limited by available free time.
No but Switch's versatility maximize the time I can gather to play videogames.
That's why it is a godsend.
I want to draw more attention to this post, as it is a good one. No matter what Valve does, no matter what anyone does, it is simply not possible for the top 20% of games to succeed. 35 games per week is utter madness.
My point is now places like psn, Eshop are flooded with games, and not all are going to be played and not all should even be on there. There should be better curation so games like black tiger don't either make it on there or share the front page real-estate.
OP
OP
Well said.
Arguments in favor of strict store curation are not appealing to me because it will inevitably block worthwhile games. I prefer to have access to everything and I will be personally responsible for researching and finding the titles that interest me. I'm not looking for stores to tell me what to purchase.
Wouldn't the end result just be prices jacked up to be the same as the most expensive region? Can't imagine publishers are gonna just let people buy games for cheap.
Well this thread's just about Steam, which I already said gives you the tools to deal with this. If you can block a twitter account so you don't have to see it's tweets ever again, you can click ignore on a Steam game or an entire genre and not see it again. I don't know how it works on PSN, but you'll have to wait for them to pick up the slack and give you that kind of stuff if they don't already have it. But just like the internet in general, it's up to you to curate your experience yourself dude. If having that kind of power over yourself is too much for you, just leave it be and wait for word of mouth to get to you on the next big thing.
Yep.
I keep a list of games I'm playing and games I want to play this year alone, there's over a dozen games on the high priority list.
Bloodstained
Mario Maker 2
Fire Emblem: 3H
Dicey Dungeon
Children of Morta
Gears 5
Control
River City Girls
Daemon X Machina
Astral Chain
Link's Awakening remake
DQ11 Switch
Luigi's Mansion 3
Look at that list. Is there anything there that really screams out as being not worth playing?
A dozen or so games might not sound like a lot (that's just 1 new game a month!), but a lot of these games are really long games or games with huge replay value. Then you throw in a GaaS game like Path of Exile, old games I haven't gotten around to, favorites I want to replay, and that's how I'm in the situation of thinking things like "Yeah, Link's Awakening is probably my favorite Game Boy game of all-time, but am I actually going to get around to playing the remake?" or "Who do I cut, the new "totally-not-Castlevania" or the new "totally River City Rampage?" There's too many games, good games, amazing games even, and if you're someone who makes games that can be a scary thing.
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OP
OP
Think of all the developers you'll put out of work, you monster.
I never play games
the problem is I can't stop buying them anyway
Yeah, wtf you sicko!
The indie space is brutal. There's so much competition even if you're on a curated store front. Just look at the Eshop and how quickly things will go on sale to garner interest and try and make a profit just like on steam (I bought Xonic for 89 cents just like the rest of you).
It's a shame there isn't much that can be done to really fix this. Outside indie perhaps trying to work together to make bigger titles, rather than going with smaller teams and praying for a hit.
Thankfully it does seem that most Devs don't go all in until they have a hit.
It's a shame there isn't much that can be done to really fix this. Outside indie perhaps trying to work together to make bigger titles, rather than going with smaller teams and praying for a hit.
Thankfully it does seem that most Devs don't go all in until they have a hit.
OP
OP
How about if I buy their games but for someone else
You need help
With so many new games coming out, yeah I'm sure the competition is fierce. One of the reasons I have no problem passing on games if devs try some stupid shit...go ahead, I have PLENTY of alternatives ;)
Or like Steam, you allow users who bought the games, to offer their thoughts on them. That way you know what's worth looking at and what isn't.
Anecdotal but I have stopped buying indies on Steam now that I can play the best ones on my switch.
Two, most consumers don't have that problem. They don't have 4 systems.
Switch too. The "Nindies" idea was great but there's so much garbage every week on the new releases page.
All a curated store front does is buy time for those lucky few who win the golden ticket and get in early. You'll get a year or two tops before the store becomes crowded out with other high quality titles all competing for customers time and/or money.
It's expected for literally every thread somehow involving Steam but those wheeling out their tired 'no curation is the ill of the world, why doesn't Valve solve all our problems' bullshit are missing the forerst for the trees, which leads to misguided conclusions and illusionary easy solutions.
Same goes for devs, whining about xyz won't help you, there's no quick fix, no one specific to blame. For next week I have 8 games on my wishlist that I plan to buy, 4 on the 17th alone. Now some could turn out to be crap but they're all titles the devs clearly put a lot of time and work into. And even if those were the only ones releasing there's no way they all would sell, the average gamer doesn't need a new game every week. Add to that dozens of average to good titles that don't stand out but would never get filtered out by curation and supply across all platforms and stores is burying demand to an unhealthy ratio. And we've not even talked about bundles, Game Pass, PS+, Epic desperately throwing around free games and so on.
Speaking of, taking Tim's moneybags might look like a nice way out now but how long will that last, do you want to built a business on that foundation? Bringing up the Switch is weird too, when I go into the eShop it has become a bigger mess than Steam because while there are fewer releases, the tools to filter them aren't there at all. EGS will get there soon too.
Also I don't particularly trust the numbers in that analysis, too many unknown variables and caveats and certainly not nearly precise enough to get much use out of it. Change some things around and you'll get a very different picture.
Same goes for devs, whining about xyz won't help you, there's no quick fix, no one specific to blame. For next week I have 8 games on my wishlist that I plan to buy, 4 on the 17th alone. Now some could turn out to be crap but they're all titles the devs clearly put a lot of time and work into. And even if those were the only ones releasing there's no way they all would sell, the average gamer doesn't need a new game every week. Add to that dozens of average to good titles that don't stand out but would never get filtered out by curation and supply across all platforms and stores is burying demand to an unhealthy ratio. And we've not even talked about bundles, Game Pass, PS+, Epic desperately throwing around free games and so on.
Speaking of, taking Tim's moneybags might look like a nice way out now but how long will that last, do you want to built a business on that foundation? Bringing up the Switch is weird too, when I go into the eShop it has become a bigger mess than Steam because while there are fewer releases, the tools to filter them aren't there at all. EGS will get there soon too.
Also I don't particularly trust the numbers in that analysis, too many unknown variables and caveats and certainly not nearly precise enough to get much use out of it. Change some things around and you'll get a very different picture.
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