![]() When the indie movement started out, that wasn't the case. "Steam gives you a bare minimum package now," said Tom-Ivar Arntzen of Tinimations, developer of Klang. They say Steam's decision to rely on a changing algorithm rather than curation has hindered rather than helped their games, resulting in steep drops in traffic, unpredictable game sales, and an increase in the amount of time and expense needed for marketing that had not been as critical when Steam was a smaller, more curated platform. However, many of those same developers also expressed frustration that, while in the early days of Steam Greenlight there were numerous benefits to having a game appear on the platform, those benefits have largely dissolved as the library of games has exploded. Valve has the unenviable problem of figuring out how to categorize tens of thousands of games so users can find and buy what they wanted while still giving deserving games necessary visibility. And most of the developers I spoke with acknowledged that the basic challenge of discoverability when there are just too many video games isn't Valve's fault. It's easy to see how all of this in the scope of a year could be disheartening for a small developer, especially one struggling to get noticed on gaming's largest PC storefront. "Steam gives you a bare minimum package now" Tom-Ivar Arntzen Some of these included a threatened takedown of some indie games due to supposed "pornographic content," a vague new content policy, web API adjustments that hurt Steam Spy and made helpful data less accessible to indies, and new revenue sharing tiers that only benefit games that are already best-sellers. That doesn't touch on several other events from the last year that directly affected - or at least demoralized - smaller developers. And just a few weeks ago, confusion about the Steam Summer Sale resulted in indie games being removed en masse from users' wishlists - a critical feature for indies. But the last year has been especially rocky thanks to a series of discoverability and communication missteps that have left many independent developers feeling ignored at best or deliberately hamstrung at worst.įor example, a sudden, unexplained change in Steam's algorithm in October caused sharp traffic drops for many. To be fair, many of the 12 indie developers I've spoken to over the last six months might gently rap on my window and inform me that, no, it's been a rough several years for indies on Steam. ![]() It's been a rough year for indies on Steam.
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