Perhaps the biggest advancement in game development in recent years is that it is now easier for the average person to get started in game development. This has lowered the barrier to entry to the point where developers of almost any skill level can release their games on a major platform. However, the platforms themselves have not adapted to the overwhelming amount of content being added daily. It has gotten to the point where the most prominent digital storefronts – PlayStation, Xbox and Steam – are so inundated with new games on a daily basis that even great games can be lost and forgotten forever.
With the exception of AAA games with huge PR and marketing budgets, the success of any other game that just wants to get a bit of attention at launch is a rigged roulette. We’ve reached a critical mass of games where the best no longer rise to the top based on quality alone. As we move toward a fully digital (or at least mostly digital) future, stores will need to solve this discoverability problem sooner rather than later. It’s not a problem of there being too many games, it’s a problem of the right games not reaching their target audience.
15 minutes of fame
When Lichens was first released in 2008, there were only 242 releases on Steam in the entire year. Fast forward to 2024 – with a quarter of the year still to go – and there have already been 10,862 game releases. That’s an average of almost 50 games per day so far. Since storefronts like PSN and Xbox have remained largely unchanged in recent years, Braid: Anniversary Edition was published and almost immediately pushed off the new releases pages.
With its primary means of reaching the masses who don’t follow big gaming news gone, this reboot of an established hit has “sold like the plague” with critics and at the box office, according to creator Jonathan Blow. While we don’t know exact numbers for all platforms, Blow did note that Steam was its biggest platform. Even then, the game’s player count only reached 570 at its peak.
Then there is World of Goo 2, another IP with a strong legacy that only released in early August and yet has seemingly made no noise whatsoever. One can only imagine how intimidating it must be for a team preparing to release a new IP, given how fickle the landscape is. When a game launches alongside 50 others, bad timing can mean the difference between it appearing at the top of the store for a few hours or a few minutes.
You don’t have to look that far back to find a prime example of this, either. You might remember the huge amount of attention Stumbling Cat garnered on the internet. Potions: A strange Story – for all the wrong reasons. Its launch became a viral moment that made it clear that platforms like Steam aren’t the friendliest places for indie developers. Speaking to Digital Trends, Renee Gittins, CEO and Creative Director of Stumbling Cat, recalled the event.
“Within hours of my launch, EA re-released 11 titles from their back catalogue without warning,” Gittins tells Digital Trends. “This caused my title to immediately disappear from the list of new releases and trending, despite having more than double the number of wishlists prior to my launch than were expected for launch. The first result was that I only saw 34% of the sales I had conservatively forecasted on launch day. While my subsequent virality helped boost those sales numbers, it was absolutely devastating that I saw 66% fewer sales than expected due to an unknowable factor outside of my control.”
The consequences of missing the first week of exposure can have dire consequences for developers. “As an indie developer, getting Steam’s algorithms to work can mean the difference between hundreds of dollars and hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue, and the window of opportunity to do so is narrow,” says Gittins. “While some games can become popular long after release, the way Steam, games journalism, and player attention work puts the most emphasis on the first week after the game’s release and all efforts to make that week as successful as possible.”
Of course, it is not easy to understand how these systems or algorithms for discovery work on platforms. Developer Josiah Peoples, who is currently working on a solo project called Shadow of Mammon, regrets the fact that platforms like Steam are a complete mystery.
“Platforms tend to be quiet about how discoverability works. The algorithm seems to change frequently,” Peoples explains. “For example, do I need 7,000 or 10,000 wishlists to get promoted on Steam?” Both Gittins and Peoples have suggested that indie developers seek outside resources to better understand how to exploit the system, pointing to How to market your game by Chris Zukowski and online resources like How To Market a Game.
Other developers made some suggestions on how these systems could be improved, but all acknowledged that there was no clear solution without some drawbacks. Examples included excluding new releases from the New and Trending page and offering filtering tools to users of featured lists. The main impression, however, was that indie developers wanted more opportunities on and off Steam to showcase their games.
Like it or not, digital distribution is the primary way to sell games. This opens many doors for developers, but our current stores are simply not set up to allow great games to succeed like they once did. Our stores need to reward effort and quality, and not reserve success for games with the biggest marketing budgets. Gittins highlights the double-edged nature of stores in their current form.
“Large studios have millions of dollars in marketing budgets, easily achieve high reach with game distributors, and have their own fan bases that love to sing their praises,” says Gittins. “As an indie developer, you have few tools to get your game in front of potential customers. Steam is not only a platform for game distribution, it’s also the best game marketing platform for developers… The advantage of Steam is that games are treated equally; that everyone has a chance at reach if they do the necessary groundwork to be successful.”
For each Balatro that manages to find that vocal audience that gives it a powerful signal boost, hundreds aren’t so lucky. In a perfect world, it would be ideal if an indie and a AAA game were equally noticed by retail stores, but that’s not the whole picture. Indie games have an uphill battle against the marketing might of a major studio and need more discoverability tools to find the target audience that sings their praises.
