Over 50% of all steam games have never made over $1000
We've put together an infographic that explores the Steam games market in 2023
Considering how much stuff people dump on there that probably doesn't even deserve to be released it's not super surprising right? I'm more surprised that 8.9% of games, that's almost 1 in 10, made over $200k.
Also clearly visual novels are not the way to go if you want to make a lot of money
Yeah exactly. Because to me it implies that less than 90% is shovelware crap, and I cannot quite believe this. It doesn't feel that way, even with all the filtering Steam offers nowadays.
Compare the Nintendo eShop, which doesn't filter and where Nintendo doesn't care, and the endless pages and pages and pages of shovelware you need to scroll through (and 15 iterations of AAA Clock for 2€, 80% off! 😅) to find each single proper game.
I would have thought 2%-3% make money, honestly.
I mean releasing a game on Steam is not free. You pay a $100 fee per game to Valve to release on their store.
That at least seems to stop the flood of shovelware a tiny bit.
There is probably some bias because games that make money stick around a lot longer. I doubt most games released in the last three years (which seems to be the time they looked at) that made no money are still on there.
With VN makers and Midjourney, you can pump out a half way decent VN in no time. I've honestly thought of doing a cheesy one for my DnD players as their story recap each session, but I already spend so much time on the rest of the game...
Because over 50% of all games on steam are complete trash.
Seriously steam really needs to add a quality gate, the amount of garbage they have in the store is absurd and eventually it's not going to be worth the tiny fee they make from these games.
I dunno. I kind of remember when it was hard to get on steam. I wonder how many cool games we have now that we wouldn't have had of they had to go through some sort of arbitrary checkpoint. There always seemed to be some controversy over who and what got in.
Do those trash games even matter? I feel like I basically never see them unless I go looking for them specifically. Steam is far, far better at content discovery than Google Play is, despite both platforms having an abundance of shovelware.
Ah, so it's not just my own perception that was making me think that steam was filling up with crappy visual novel stuff.
I am not surprised with the amount of Unity free assets games, now with AI-generated stories.
I think they removed Only Up! for that reason
The developer took that one down to focus on their health, they said. https://www.dexerto.com/gaming/only-up-creator-reveals-they-are-removing-the-game-on-steam-due-to-stress-2284288/
If we try to exclude the super simple and cheap games by only looking at games priced at more than $5, the median is closer to $4000
just because a game is more than $5, doesn't mean it's not super simple, cheap shovelware.
Nobody is claiming that, the claim is merely that a lot of the games under $5 are shovelware. I'm sure you could take it a step further and try to remove shovelware, but that's gets really subjective really fast.
Honestly, that's okay. As long as indie devs have a place where they can sell and market their games fairly.
There‘s no mention of ingame purchase revenue, so I assume they aren’t included?