Average Steam game sales plummeting - Steam Spy

"Last April, the average number of copies sold per game was 13,655. This April, it's been 7,188". Those numbers are also wildly inflated because of bundles (pennies on the dollar) and steam sales.

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2016-04-27-average-steam-game-sales-plummeting-steam-spy

 

Average sales dropping, but top games doing just as well?

Seems like a market saturation story to me. Steam is slowly going the same way as the app stores.

Give it a couple more years and just being on steam won't be enough to generate sales.

 

Ya its getting to to the point where your better off somehow driving traffic to your own site

 

Well it's hardly surprising, right? I'm not sure why so many folks around here seem to not realize it (hundreds of thousands, or whatever it is, of people working on games they will actually release sooner or later) is an issue and talk about "make better games". That does nothing if nobody can find them.

I agree with you completely about [learning marketing and] building traffic to your own online properties. Currently, places such as the mobile app stores and Steam have a very sweet thing going on. People do the work to build the games. Then they link to their games on those sites providing a massive amount (across all of the tens of thousands developers) of free marketing happening for them.

However, it's really not wise. I mean sure these stores have done a lot to help people connect with gamers. I'm not saying they haven't helped out some folks. Obviously they did. But still it is always better to promote your own business instead of someone else's (unless you're doing it to practice marketing) and at the end of the day every link to a game on Steam or a mobile app store is helping to drive more traffic to their business not yours. I imagine many times someone follows a link to a game on Steam or a mobile app store then ends up browsing around, forgets completely about why they went there to begin with and tries a different game entirely.

I still believe the biggest issue is simply the number of people doing this. Imagine if every game dev focused on mastering marketing. It would just result in a massive amount of campaigns which would basically just drown each other out and it would end up back at the same place again.

But I think less people will be willing to focus on marketing and business building than focusing on game dev and posting a thread or a link or two to their game on Steam, etc. Focusing on marketing is the more sensible way to stand out instead of focusing on "make better games". Obviously, just my view here not saying it is written in stone (although to me... yeah it kind of is lol).

 

I mostly agree with you. But I'll still say the winners are going to be the ones who "make a better game". Trouble is better game is a relative standard. It's not about making a game that is "this good". It's about making a game that is "better then the competitors".

The absolute quality level of succesful games is spiralling upwards at a phenomenal rate.

 

I agree with this for sure. I think it is from being misguided and "pushed" in this direction by many people sort of chanting a mantra "make a better game" over and over. So... people are trying harder especially on the presentation side.

Of course, I agree a person should make a good game. Or even a great game. BUT... there are plenty of games out there (especially on mobile) that obviously look to be quite well done, get very good ratings from players (those that actually played) and yet they are not very popular.

Here are 3 examples of Steam games that are extreme (chosen on purpose) to illustrate this:

Khaba 13 Reviews "Positive" Rating

Project Tarvotan 7 Reviews "Mostly Positive" Rating

RETSNOM 45 Reviews "Positive" Rating

The key thing here is each of these games seems to be well done. Certainly enough they have Positive and Mostly Positive ratings on Steam by the people who bought them. The problem here is despite the amount of effort and time put into developing the games... it seems nobody knows about them.

At least now with this post a few more people will know about them.

Looking around on Steam you can easily find other games with far more reviews and yet a Mixed or Mostly Negative rating. That is what blows the "better game" argument out of the water for me.

 

It is the synergy of a good game, good marketing, and good luck.

EDIT: oh, karma, and voodoo also...

 

Both are required. But the presentation side really depends on having a good game. If you post a video of gameplay, that will be most of your presentation. As developers we can too often look at the wrong things. When you look at a game (even yours), you need to ask yourself, "Would I play this?". Obviously easier said than done, but you get the idea.

That falls under looking at it as a developer. Players don't care if a "game looks well done", they care if it looks like a game they want to play. Ratings can influence, but a handful of ratings mean nothing. People who buy games on steam understand that. You can easily find a dozen people that will like anything. A more meaningful statistic would be how many people looked at the page.

Looking at your examples:

The first thing I thought when looking at the video is that should be a mobile game. The second thing I thought was there was way too much dialog for a simple puzzler. Then I checked their site and found there is a mobile version. (poor marketing). The mobile version is 99¢ (not bad), but has no video, and the description doesn't actually tell you what the gameplay is, and you can't tell from the video. I wouldn't buy it on steam. If I discovered it in the app store, I would skip it because I have no clue what kind of game it is, and not going to spend a buck to find out. The sad thing is that it appears to be exactly the type of game I love, puzzlers. I am their audience, but poor marketing choices never put the game in place would find it, or presented in a way I would know it was a game for me. (though I did actually buy it).

The video you posted is the developer talking about being an indie developer, not the game. As a player, I don't care. (as a developer, don't care either) The page on steam is tragic. Video doesn't show gameplay in a meaningful way, and honestly, it looks painfully generic and cobbled together. (Space Shuttle shooting something?) Bad camera work and unclear graphics. And to top it off this is the description of the game:

What does that even mean? Is it a map type tactical game? Do I fly a ship? That is just story. Great for a book, bad for a game. The further description is more of the same. Frankly, it might be a good game, despite the graphics, but there is nothing to give me a clue as to what the gameplay is. As a player, I would skip it after the video.

Meh. It's pretty much the cliche overdone indie game. Pixel platformer. There are thousands out there. It doesn't look awful, but the repetitive blocks are doing it no favors. Google: indie pixel platformer, its not the worst, but wouldn't stand out on page full of others. It's a saturated genre, but has a good fan base. But there are a butt-load of more compelling competitors, and this one isn't visually compelling or innovative. (its basically a clone of hit game Shift.) Though, at least their description is clean and clear:

The first one might do well if they did some basic marketing. The others are meh at best. Meh doesn't sell games. Not when there are tons of Wow! games out there.

That isn't necessarily the correct conclusion. Maybe millions of people know about them, they just weren't interested. Tarvotan appears to have sold ~4000 copies, but averages 1 person playing it a day.

 

Clickbait?

This data is not very useful.

I'd like to see median average instead of arithmetic mean.
Also, an attempt to check for correlation between steam rating and number of copies sold.
Also profit data.
Also, breakdown by tags/genre.
Also, average during sale/non-sale.
Also, graph of sales for the game lifetime.
Same data graphed on daily/yearly/monthly data.

Just two numbers from the same month one year apart... that's not useful.

 

Honestly median would be pretty meaningless also.

This whole thread is click bait. Sales aren't 'plummeting' there are just way more titles than a year ago. I'm not sure if I'd call it saturation, but they eased up on greenlight and there are games flooding steam.

I don't think anyone who's done their homework in the last year expected steam itself to generate tons of sales for them.

 

Well, at the very least it would allow you to check if last april had a big seller game that inflated the arithmetic mean.

Either way, when I see titles like this I start thinking that the author is trying to manipulate the readers (and lie to them) using statistics - in order to trick more people into reading author's sh... stuff.

 

I agree, but I think that in this situation the median may drop faster than the mean, you're dealing with steam releasing like 2x or 3x more titles than it did a year ago.

But yeah, you always gotta ignore statistics. They're all lies.

The real question is just total sales, which I imagine are actually increasing. My money is on the pie itself being bigger, even if you need to elbow more people out of the way to get your slice.

 

Maybe check this out:
https://www.humblebundle.com/store/infinifactory?hmb_source=search_bar
I only started playing yesterday, but my first impression is very positive. The setting is roughly similar to portal, the puzzles are based around machine blocks a la minecraft/tekkit.

 

Who needs better search capabilities at stores when I have the unity forums.

That looks right up my alley, downloading now, thanks!

And as related to the topic, saturation and volume of games is a condition that I don't see a simple solution for at the store or distribution level. Recommendations account for most games I play these days.

 

Well steam had the curators but that just got dominated by the big youtubers which made it kind of useless. But they need something like you like Turret defence games well theres a front page and lists just listing all the good turrret defence games, another one for golf games etc.

 

Even then the curator stuff is pretty much dead once people realised that they don't actually get anything out of it for the time they spend on it. A few YouTubers I watch made an off-hand remark about Steam curation a couple weeks ago the basically it started big and now no-one uses it.

What these statistics could be saying is that since the top selling games haven't noticed any decline in sales and it's only the average sales per game going down then first off there's more games on the market for the same amount of buyers (probably wrong, market is growing) or no-one is buying the worst 100 etc. This could just be a sign that people have learned how to determine the games that are worth playing and deserve their cash and steer clear if they're unsure. I've been burned personally a few times buying games that looked decent to begin with but were actually steaming trash.

As for the 3 games shown above...I wouldn't buy or play any of those. They don't look appealing or like they're doing anything different or interesting. Plenty of better games I can spend my time on. That's another metric people need to start taking into account as well. Gamers don't just spend money on a game, they spend time. You have to show them that your game is worth both. Unless a game stands out then even if its $1 I'm not going to buy it because it isn't worth my time.

I'd hope that with the average sales per game going down that it'd mean people who make the trash games would stop trying to make a cash grab but even if they do the reality is 10 others are already "working" on games of similar quality to push out onto Steam.

 

It's already not. A friend of mine has a couple of games on Steam. The newer of the two is incredibly successful - he did an amazing job of picking the right game to make, making it well, and then kicking ass in all of the related support activities. The other game, from somewhat earlier, got on Steam and I think he said it trickles in a few dollars a month. I could be wrong on that figure, but it was clear that there was no point having that game on Steam for the purpose of income generation.

That's only one case study, so on its own we we can't draw any hard conclusions from it, but I still think it's safe to say that the days where just being on Steam was enough to make a project worthwhile are already long gone.

That's assuming that they ever existed in the first place, of course. Back when Steam was highly curated, sure, just getting there may have been an indicator of success, but it might not have been the sole factor. Getting there was harder, which meant that to do it you needed a better game and you needed to already be doing a good job pushing it yourself. I suspect that it wasn't so much that games were successful because they were on Steam so much as that games were on Steam because they were already becoming successful.

 

Well, Greenlight etc. suddenly removed a barrier to entry to a system that lots of people were lined up to get into. The result was a massive and immediate jump in growth. There has been no similar increase on the purchaser side - that's just the same steady growth it's always had.

So, yes, the "average" has plummeted because that's just how averages work. The same amount of stuff is now being spread amongst more people. The recent increase in supply has radically outstripped any recent increases in demand.

 

As long as someone is making huge amounts of money then the trend will continue. These sorts of things are more often driven by the maximum amount of money made, instead of by the average. The chance of striking it big is appealing, even if mathematically it makes no sense.

Check out the extra credits video where they discuss the concept.

 

To be honest that kind of makes sense, though. Who looks at the unsuccessful masses on Steam and says "I want to be like them?" Nobody. Targets are set based on the successful stuff. "Can I make a game as good as that?" and "if I do make a game as good as that, will people want to play it?"

It also goes back a bit to what others were saying about the average being a useless number. I really don't care what unsuccessful games are making financially. What matters is a) how do we make our games successful? and b) if we manage to crack that nut then how much might our game make?

All of this stuff really only matters to people who want to make games commercially and are willing and able to approach it as a business, though. People doing this for fun, or for art-for-art's-sake, can achieve what they want out of this without caring about all this.

 

The total library of games is growing almost exponentially, of course each title will make less. The growth rate of games added is much higher than the growth rate of Steam users/expenditures. There are ´companies´ throwing up a game a month, it makes it much more difficult for any one game to be found by search or browsing by a steam shopper.

As someone else mentioned, pretty soon the platform bonus of being on Steam will not be worth the 35% cut they take. If you have to spend all your time marketing your own game to get any sales, you might as well do it from your own website or itch.io and not have to give up the 35%. The deal you make with Steam is this.. I give you 35%, you put my game in front of a lot more eyeballs... and at some point, they stopped holding up their end of the bargain.

 

I'd rather say they listened to the countless voices criticizing their untransparent and highly curated greenlighting process that they used to have. It's a situation where "careful what you wish for" turned out to hurt indie game devs in the long run. Back then practically everyone wanted the floodgates to be opened and that is what they did and now most people realize what the advantages of the old untransparent walled garden were. I think valve is doing things to improve discoverability on their end. The main problem is the flood of games being pumped into the marketplace due to the low barrier to entry.

 

I know a lot of people don't seem to view it as a problem but I do agree with you. With a perfect system it wouldn't matter if there were 5 games released per month or 5,000. But with the current methods available to present the games and find the games... it just wasn't intended to deal with this kind of scope. It's the same flaw of the search engines. We all know there are a huge number of websites out there that have useful information we would be thrilled to find yet when we search and get a list of umpteen thousand or million results presented 20 or maybe 50 per page we just never find the majority of the websites.

Games have the same problem. Only the surface is really seen due to the way the results are presented. I don't know what the answer is really. We just need a new way to handle all of this information instead of the same way that was invented decades ago. But what exactly? I don't know.

And I guess that is why I see it as the solution is marketing. Marketing is the way a website found on the 100th page can get some attention. And it is also applies to a game in the same situation.

EDIT: I guess Steam does have somewhat of a solution to this guranteeing a game will get 500,000 views each time it is put on sale or however that works..Which no doubt causes the opposite problem... discoverabilty is fixed for a brief period of time yet this causes the spread of purchases across games resulting in less overall money spent on any one game.

The more I think about all of this (and only because I'm an entrepreneurial kind of guy and find the business side of things interesting) the more I think everything is exactly as it should be. With masses of different games prices go down, spending is spread out more and at the same time discoverabilty in general becomes a real issue. BUT... the person who really treats it as a business will be spending money and time on marketing activities, right? So that is how they can gain an advantage. So basically this is all just the same ole normal business stuff in the end.

 

I don't think that solves the problem at all. Before visibility even can become the limiting factor to sales, your game has to seem like the most compelling thing I could be playing at the moment of my purchase decision and have a better value preposition than other ways to obtain entertainment with my money. Most people nowadays seem to have completely unplayed games collecting dust in their library. That's what you are competing with too. But imho mostly you'll be competing for the free time a player can spend on games, and most people already have found franchises that cover their available time almost completely. The rising popularity of competitive multiplayer games also means that more time is spent on one single game a player takes serious. Check out how many hours people log on DOTA, CS:GO or LOL. Some play nothing else at all. Imagine a world where someone had to fill 1000 hours of gaming over the course of a year and multiplayer games wouldn't exist...

Sure there are people who buy games and never really play them or just play 2 hours and never go back to them. Actually quite a lot fall into that category as far as I know, but I don't think one should be making games if that's your target audience.

I have a few dozen games on my steam wishlist that I won't be buying any time soon, even though I have a general interest in them. Through bundles I already own dozens of games that I have never touched. Among those there's maybe half a dozen that I actually intent to play. And then I still have many games that I've started, liked, but not played through to the end. And I like several multiplayer games that I could easily put some more hundreds of hours into. Of course there are also some retro classics like Jagged Alliance 2 and System Shock 2 that I will play through again in the future. I don't think this kind of situation is totally uncommon. The bar has been raised insanely high. And the backlog of games that according to others are super awesome, is building up faster than I can catch up. Witcher 3, Metal Gear Solid 5 etc., haven't bought those yet...

Indie games sometimes can offer something so unique that I feel like I need to have it, but honestly with the humble monthly bundle I'm being fed more good indie games than I even want to play. And due to the way these bundles work, people are actually getting better value for their money from the monthly bundle, if they stop buying games that could end up in the bundle. E.g. in the last Rocket League sale I contemplated to just wait till it's in the monthly bundle but bought it anyway. I didn't play it since, and now I got it again in the next humble monthly bundle. I think these things could be potential game changers for indie game sales in the long run (I even made a thread about just that topic).

 

@Martin_H yeah that is true too. There is a point where there are just too many games period. When they come out faster than you can consume them I guess there is no real solution. I see games as a sort of consumable product. I may play one for a week and move onto another, maybe play it for a few weeks time for another. But ultimately yes I can only play so many games in a given year. But I don't have so much of the problem as some people because I like different kind of games I guess. I have no desire to check out the witcher for example although it looks like a great game I just don't have time for such a thing.

 

Its worth noting that while steam visibility is dropping, steam green light still has better organic visibility then any other platform I've tried. I got more views in one day then I'd had in a year on various portals. And I'm pretty sure a more polished game would have done better.

 

I was talking to someone about this the other day. Do you think actually being in the Greenlight process is better than actually passing and going live? The reason I bring this up is that someone had mentioned that what might work is to sell your game on your website, but then go through the greenlight process for an extended amount of time just as a marketing process.

The one change I would like to see them make though is to make the $100 charity donation be per game and maybe even higher.

 

I kind of hoped this would be the case. However Greenlight has provided no measurable increase in traffic to my other store fronts or people playing the game.

I'll let you know if passing Greenlight helps. But I don't imagine Pond Wars is up to crossing that bar.

 

Have to share our experiences.
Army of Pixels
- Our game is a niche strategy game, pixel based. (I don't see it as a problem)
- It was originally released on Android, and it was a mobile/tablet game (I see it as a _big_ problem).
- We went into greenlight, and got accepted in 10 or so days (not much).
- It costs 5 usd.
- After a couple of sales, one visibility round and one content patch, total sales is at 800 or so (a bit less).
- It has 26 reviews, positive overall, though 2 of these reviews are our "own" (friends wrote that). It would be still positive without it, I think.

So we are waay below the average sales. Now I know that our game is very niche, and mobile conversions are a big red flag to anyone, but I still see it as a minor failure.

 

Thanks for sharing your experiences, much appreciated! Why do you think it's a failure? For a mobile port from a developer with no other titles on steam that are more sales than I would have expected. Sure, money-wise it's almost nothing, compared to how much work making a game is, but it's a harsh marketplace and I think it could have been a lot worse. A legit positive review rating for a mobile port is impressive in its own right.

 

@kalamona I agree with @Martin_H on not seeing that as a failure. I know each person needs to determine success/failure for themselves. Definitely get that.

If I ever put a game on Steam I wouldn't shoot for that average of 7k in sales. I'd target maybe 500 sales for the first game and I would expect that by sticking with it over time to build up to the point where each game would average maybe 5k to 10k in sales. I just see that as being more realistic. And heck it really wouldn't surprise me if the first game failed to reach 500 sales either.

I'd be trying to figure out how to make the business work with a low number of sales. I'd probably experiment with a bit higher price, streamlining development speed, keeping scope small and focusing on marketing to increase awareness over time. But then I have no dreams of being able to retire to my own island some day. lol

Thanks for sharing your experience! You have done it. That counts for a lot!

 

The issue from a gamer point of view, is that too many games are simply clones without a soul. When you have development kits that allow you to trow a game together in a short time, it becomes so hard for any person to see any gems.

A lot of those popular games get a following that builds up over time because they release content updates all the time. Compare this to the 1001 generic games that get released and support gets almost dropped out of the gate. No news content for ages. Bug that do not get fixed. Small team developers can become a success but it requires not looking at the game as a quick cash price but as something that is constantly evolving and expanding.

A few years ago the MMORPG market got saturated with copy clones. A lot of big companies tried there hand at it. A lot of those big titles died out. Or have gone "free to play" ( translation: We give up ). Did steam have anything to do with that? No ... simply the fact that the game did not give the gamer what they wanted. One simply needs to be realistic. Eve Online survived all these years despite being in a very niche market. The X series did reasonably despite a lot of flaws. Then they released X:Rebirth and well ... they did not list to there clients. They wanted to make a game to sell on consoles and it backfired. There clients wanted x3+ ... More options, better graphics, more of the same but better. The result was a lot of backfire, they lost the momentum and lost the critical initial release mass.

The biggest issue you see with a lot of those games is not paying attention to the market demands. If there are a 1000 games in the genre that you want to make, do not make a copy that looks & acts like the 990 others. Make something that acts like the top 10 and market the hell out of it!

Just putting a game on steam and expecting the sale to stream in is not the solution. You need a good website. A trailer ( that does not look like cr*p ). Viral marketing ( posting on forums, twitter ). Have friends undercover market the game. Giving away you game for free to Youtubers. Giving the game to magazine's. Hell, even buying advertisement space on one of those game magazines or youtubers.

There is nothing wrong with making a quick & cheap game but like any product and yes, your game is a product, it requires market research and marketing! The moment you get a critical mass ( people talking about it in a positive way ), it has a growth potential. People assumed that Steam = instant recognition for your game. And while it helps, its nothing compare to doing your own (viral) marketing.

Look at Army of Pixels as a example. Just mentioning your game in this topic, increased your view count by maybe a dozen views or more today. Any people in the future that read this topic, may again click on the link. A simple forum post in a popular topic can have a nice return of investment as they say. Simply dumping it on Steam does not instantly mean a lot of views. You can help by pushing traffic to Steam with marketing. When there is more traffic, more chance that your game gets pushed to the more noticeable results in steam. Putting the game for sale at 75% on the sales periods can push your game to be very noticeable. Yes, your profit is horrible but you can gain a following / reputation ( hopefully positive ).

 

Yeah Id buy army of pixels if there was a mac version. But lets say there was a speciality/niche shop so I could just buy games like that then that game would probably do better

But you could probably sell a few thousand units if you put your game on sale in the summer sale in a few weeks. You should putting your game on sale every 2 months (or so) because youll be listed on the "specials" section which actually gives you some visibility.

http://steamspy.com/app/390920

 

i know this thread is kinda old but i also want to add my experience with steam.
I published my first game on steam "Tower Miners"
http://store.steampowered.com/app/690260/Tower_Miners/

i dont think this is a clone of any game but a mix out of 3 game genres. Tower Defense, strategy, party elements.
I have to admit that there is a local multiplayer mode only. So it doesnt have a single player, that is a huge obstacle i guess. I published it at a price of 2.99$ and the launch discout was 35% so the price at launch was around 1.94$.

I sold 67 copys so far. I published at 16.09.2017 till today 3.10.2017
I got around 280.000 impressions and round about 5.000 shop visits.
To be honest i really expected more units to get sold and more shop visits from a site like steam. Also i tried to contact some youtubers, small and big ones. Only 1 replied and made a video which barely no impact. I did send a press kit to 5 online magazines but non even replied.
I know that my game is not a fancy graphic master piece or anything like that. But i really had a great time with friends
playing it to be honest, so i thought some other players would have too.

It took like 4 days and my game was completely burried in the mass of more game releases on steam .

what has gone wrong? Maybe i diddnt try to grow a base around the game before i released it? But in my opinion you can do that only on games like hotline miami or really fancy art games but not on a small game like this.
Was the price to high? I saw another game called "MineFight"
http://store.steampowered.com/app/682970/MineFight/
which also supports local multiplayer mode only. But it is a free to play game and round about 10k people downloaded it.

Thing is. when you put a game on steam which costs 0.99$ most people will just skip it, all my friends and me included do the same to be honest. Since my experience with cheap steam games 99% of the time is the same, i dont feel interested in those games anymore since most of them are really crap. So what is the right price? I cannot answer that question. If its too cheap most of the people will skip it, if its to expensive most people will think its not worth the price.

I have compared many many games on steamspy. I noticed steamspys stats about my game says something like Owners: 650 (sometimes with +- 1500) so this stats are not very on point. 95% of all games i researched and compared have similiar stats, so i guess they are doing round about the same sells as i did which bring me to the conclusion that a minimum of 95% of all steam games (indie games) do fail very very badly.

So the only tip i can give you is, dont expect anything, give your best but dont expect too much. If you sell your game the amount of being able to get your 100$ fee back from steam you should be happy

Good luck!

 

Tower miner looks pretty good

Well from the steam comments it seems the biggest problem is keyboard controls

 

Average sales are plummeting for a very simple reason: supply and demand. The supply of new games is HUGE, but demand remains roughly the same. The result is lover prices and lover sales. These are basic economic rules. Monster hits still sell zillions since there is a VERY small supply of truly great games.

IMO, there is now less great games on the PC market than in the 90s and yet there are probably 1000x more total games on the market. There is ton of noise and very little signal.

 

As mentioned above its definitely got to the point where the market is saturated. If you were to start a new project now I would definitely take the Kickstarter route.This would allow you to ascertain whether your "new idea" has enough of a backing to follow through with development. This approach also makes people aware of the existence of your game well in advance of any release date you could set. Then you can act on the feedback from the campaign. Having a pre-release following on steam is becoming ever more important.

 

This would only be true if there weren't more people becoming "gamers," or more people buying video games. There are, so this isn't really valid.

Actually, Kickstarters tend to do poorly unless there's an already well-known name behind them. So a Kickstarter most definitely isn't the way to go for an indie with no following (and certainly not with nothing to show potential backers).

However, it can be argued that if YOU want to play something, there's likely a market for it out there (people aren't all that unique), so you just have to find that market, even if your game seems outlandish.

 

Based on what evidence? even if your Kickstarter fail's spectacularly at least you've come away knowing that the people that viewed your campaign didn't like it for whatever reason.Then you can act on that information. I agree that Kickstarters with big names behind them will typically do better but this doesn't prevent you from doing well if your idea is solid enough. I apologize for the wording of the above post you should definitely have an example ready to show your backers prior to launching your campaign.

 

http://mashable.com/2014/01/25/kickstarter-video-game/#g_QNv4s7xaqh

https://www.polygon.com/2015/5/19/8624665/big-indie-kickstarters-are-killing-actual-indies

https://gamedevelopment.tutsplus.co...e-to-succeeding-on-kickstarter--gamedev-10892

https://gamedevelopment.tutsplus.co...em-for-hiro-fodder-a-blue-hope--gamedev-11105

The second to last and last of those is specifically about being an unknown game developer, and you'll notice he asked for a laughably unrealistic $12,000 to make a game, even when he knew it would take more than double that amount (and he'd already sunk 10k in). And near the end he points out that he got a "plug" by a dev who was featured on Kickstarter's front page, so even he was getting more publicity than one might expect.

 

The growth in game releases is much larger than the growth in potential audience, though. I haven't looked at stats, but I expect one is relatively linear, where the other has had a sharp upturn over the last few years (as accessibility has increased dramatically) and, in Steam on particular, a large spike recently (as Greenlight switched to Direct).

Also keep in mind that while we've got plenty of new gamers over the past decade, a lot of them aren't buying the stuff that the existing audience was buying. None of that is good or bad per se, but looking at data in categories as broad as "gamer" isn't especially practically useful.

 

Some games are still doing really well on Steam. For example Player Unknown's Battlegrounds was released this year and it broke records. If a game is really good and delivers something an audience is very excited about, then Steam works great. For the completely unknown indie, it is probably getting tougher, though.

 

I think most of us knew this was coming a few years ago when Unity ( and now Unreal) basically created no cost of entry to become a game developer and Steam continually added more games without eliminating any from the store. Even newer stores like Itch just have to many games for your game to ever get any attention.

The noise ratio is just too high if you are a new indie developer. It is very difficult to be found because every media and marketing route you have available is also being used by the thousands of other games out there. It is difficult to create the critical mass necessary to be found for your game.

 

Certainly, very true. Just wanted to dispel the notion that it's a closed market.

 

Steam Direct is the death of steam's indie market. Good luck getting noticed.

 

Imho being "just really good" as a multiplayer game is being the Battleborn to the Overwatch. PUBG arguably seems to be "the best" at the specific multiplayer niche it serves. I haven't played any of those myself, just looking at player stats and public reception of those 3 titles.

Getting noticed is only the second hurdle. The first one is being more "worthy of a purchase" to your potential new customer, than literally every other game they could buy at that moment.

 

And worth pointing out about all of these new indie games on Steam creating lots of noise and hurting the rest of us--I think this ties back into the gaming media thread.

All of these new titles are coming out, sure. But the overwhelming majority of them are not being advertised. Players only see them if they browse the new releases, or if the game falls into their niche and it gets recommended (which is a good thing for us).

This means that the potential success of an advertised game is probably not diminished nearly as much as we might expect with the glut of new releases.

Now, worth mentioning that one definite hindrance to "our" success is anyone who gets burnt out on seeing all these new indies. But to be honest I doubt that's going to be very many people. Not many are going to be painstakingly going through the new releases and glancing at every title and thus getting burnt out on indies before they've even seen yours.

So in that sense, the tide of new releases is not as bad as it could be, if you do the appropriate marketing beforehand (building a base through a website, perhaps social media, free demos on itch or something, and getting websites to showcase your game, etc.).

Now, one thing that gets argued a fair bit (by at least one of us) is that, once everyone knows these marketing techniques, they'll become worthless. Not really, I don't think. That happening will overload those channels (websites showing your game, etc.), but it's still in those guys' best interest to feature indie games. So they're hardly going to stop showing them altogether. But they're going to get more rigorous in their expectations before showcasing a game.

So to me, it seems like it all comes down to having a solid, compelling (at first blush even) product and then building a community (through marketing) around it.

 

Nothing changed.

Lower sales average is explained by higher submission rate (post taking out Greenlight).

Or did you think that taking out Greenlight was going to let in all the gems?

 

Hey Airursrage2k i think you mixed something up Tower Miners is my game but the link you refered was just a random game i compared and is called MineFight and is not my game

 

While these stats are most likely due to allowing the remaining greenlight submissions through, it also is an actual trend, albeit slower than the skew from greenlight, because more people than ever are trying to make games with Unity.

In a way I'm glad Unity's shifting toward cinematic things because it can all go to Amazon or Netflix instead.

Pretty sure Unity will consider a games store one of these days.

Quite pleased most games are doing worse on steam now. Perhaps this will signal a drive to higher quality instead. Currently I don't look at indie titles at all any more except from a couple I already know to make good games.

In short, I no longer go looking for indie games on steam. This is because of steam's complete open door policy (such as it really is). Whenever I did go looking, I had S*** shovelled at me. Endless clones, moronic cash grabs and grotesque use of post effects.

Every Tom, Dick and Harry's special Unity tinker time with vile immediate mode gui shoved in my face only served to increase my abhorrence for seeking new thrills from the indie section.

In the end, everyone will be like me. Just, I saw it sooner and wasted less time moving away from it. If I get an indie game, it will be because everyone made significant noise about it. I will no longer discover them though. Too expensive, too time consuming and too frustrating to bother.

Bring back curation. Give me a true barrier to entry so I know what I look at, someone actually bothered to put effort in. If that's too hard work for an indie, tough luck, I'm not wasting my precious time on it.

Of course I can't be the only one being burned, bored or just plain tired of sifting though muck for gems.

You don't need the best budget to make an awesome game that looks and plays very well. You can achieve that in 6 months with some careful and deliberate scope management. This is part of being a great indie: pick your battles and win them.

If 6 months is too long a period, this is definitely the wrong industry for you