Steam Strategy now that Greenlight is gone

Very interesting. Wonder how many of the owners picked those games up in bundles and how many paid a dollar for them. The biggest seller in that list, "Uncompromising Trash", was terrible looking yet had 154,637 owners according to Steamspy. If those were actual sales, then hats off to the devs who pulled that off.

 

I think most of them are bundles . This guy has 25 games so its pennies on the dollar
http://steamspy.com/dev/EHTechnology

https://www.bundlestars.com/en/game/hell-angel
https://www.dogebundle.com/?page=bundle&id=15
http://www.epicbundle.com/bundle/indie-gala-friday-special-bundle-39

 

Bundles or not this person seems to be moving a serious number of units. About 3.5 million copies in the past 12 months across all of the games. Even if his take was only 5 cents on each that is $175,000. If he actually made a dime for each $350k. I'd say that is exceptionally good for one year of Indie game dev. Far better than the majority. Seems like someone really truly being an Indie game dev. Created 25 games in the last 1 year.

That is the greatest thing I see here. They just keep working. Many games are rated negative but occasionally one is positive and a few are even very positive. But they are so focused on making games nothing slows them down. They don't just stop and sit around crying because they made a game and it flopped. No time for that because have to get that next game out there. lol I like it if only for that attitude which I think is pretty much what a person needs to succeed in anything.

Every game they make always has that tiny chance of being the one that "hits" and sells million copies or half a million copies at the normal price. So that is another advantage of it compared to if they spent the last year and released 1 game. And even if not... would they have made $100k or more if they had spent the past 12 months working on 1 highly polished awesome game? Possibly but I think the odds are they would not have. But who knows everyone just needs to do what they think is best.

 

What I don't quite understand about a case like this is how they are able to do it. The art would be a major bottleneck. So I think this has to be a team of a few people like maybe one person doing the logic side putting it all together and a couple of people creating the art. At least I've not met any artist yet who could produce art this quickly. Two games worth of content per month.

I suppose it could be one lone programmer buying art asset packs. But it is impressive to produce so much so quickly and sustain it for a year so far. Maybe they are just highly motivated working for early retirement.

 

Interesting website: http://www.indiegamebundles.com/?s=uncompromising+trash

Edit: I was going to make a point about reviews as well--that game has a very small number of reviews. I took a look here on page 16. i checked out a few of the other games, and while MOST have way, WAY more reviews, there are a couple that also have very small numbers of reviews. Namely Itineris and Vindictive Drive. Just searched one of the names though, and...

http://www.indiegamebundles.com/dig-super-bundle-95/

These are bundle games. It would be useful to find out how much they're making per game "sold" in the bundles.

 

This is far from a single developer. Take a look at the games. Almost every single one of them has another company listed (there are a couple companies they have like 5 games with, like the previously shown oblomysh or YarGri or Bogdanehi).

I wouldn't be surprised if this EHTechnology is acting like something of a publisher for these games, with these other companies (or people, a couple of them are just names) really making the games. This certainly isn't one person pumping out 25 games in a year.

Edit: One of them outright omits that company as a developer and lists them solely as a publisher: https://steamspy.com/app/628860.

Edit: a better approximation of money one might be making would be to look at just one of the companies and their owners + development time. To go with oblomysh, and to go with the aforementioned $0.05 made per game, they have about 208,000 owners total, with about $10,500 in the last seven months (discounting unknown dev time for their first game). That equals out to around $18,000 in a year, which is not to shabby. Very likely not a single person though, and it's divided up with their publisher (though to be fair, it's also probably higher than $0.05).

 

Well that makes a lot more sense. You are probably spot on that it is some kind of small Indie publisher. Well there goes my being impressed. If it had been even a team of 3 people who created these 25 games in the past year I would say very well done. That is some work!!!

Kind of sad because it was almost enough to motivate me. I was like dang I thought I was pretty fast at game dev and they are completely blowing me away. I am like a turtle compared to him / them. So thought I had better get back to the grind of completing some games as quickly as I can and try to shave more time off. Whew! Now instead I can relax with a beer.

Still I think I will do some investigating just to see what I can find.

 

Sorry, I edited again. Should have made a new post. But just looking at one of the companies it's still a pretty high output (six games or so in as many months) with a respectable income.

 

Bogdanehi is significantly higher at $21,000 in seven months (adding a month because they released two games on the same day starting off) with a yearly income of $36,000. Seemingly lower quality though, more negative reviews.

And then there's YarGri, with $26,000 in six months and around $52,000 for a year. Pretty high (though this is also discounting the initial game's dev time). Graphical quality looks a bit higher though for a few games, so probably more effort (and time and money) put in there.

For all of them though, you immediately notice that their recently released games have relatively low amounts--5k-10k sales. But more than a few months and they suddenly jump to over 100k? Definitely bundles at work there.

 

$18k per year though... that would be extremely not worth it. For me anyway. I think these are russian devs and maybe that is a good income there I have no idea. I mean if one person did it very part-time then it would be quite good.

 

That implies the initial low sales may actually be full price "normal" sales or maybe 50% off Steam sale. If that is the case it would make a huge difference over figuring 5 cents per unit sold. I only chose that number thinking any game in a bundle would make at least a nickel per sale... I would hope anyway.

 

Yeah it's not a whole lot of money just on its own, but as a side project maybe (for someone like yourself, who can push out stuff in a week's time or less), and especially in places with a lower-cost standard of living like Russia.

 

It is very tiring. That's why it needs to be worth doing to really seriously do it. I may only put in 5 to 10 hours per week (or 18 for that game when a few of us tried to knock out a game quick a month or so back) but it is working very fast go go go every hour worked. If I wasn't half-burned out by the time I got off work be a completely different story.

That's the main thing with these people. I think they are truly working hard. At least some of them. Maybe some are buying stuff, flipping some stuff I don't know. But I look at it purely from an angle of if I was doing it and I see just a ton of work. And fast always pushing work. Kind of like an eternal game jam. lol So if anyone is doing that part-time after their job and creating 5, 10 or even more games per year I definitely don't see such a person as lazy by any means.

 

I wonder how effective the tiny games and bundling strategy will be now that Valve is cutting back on the number of Steam keys developers can get.

 

I started to say someone here just needs to do it. Then I thought well that is a crazy thing to say because the odds are high there are people here already knocking out game after game after game. They just don't participate in such discussions. Because they are busy creating game after game after game. And if they are finding it very profitable to do so why say "oh hey guys I do exactly this and make a great living". lol

I will probably give it a go at some point. I need to gear myself up mentally because it would be a lot of work. Mainly because doing anything like this as a business I wouldn't approach it as make one game release it and see how it goes. I'd take the first few hours and come up with concepts for 5 to 10 different games to make. Then once I start it is just a long haul of doing them all one after the other. Then finally at the end of it all after a month or so passes can see what the results are.

I don't think it's wise to ever just make one attempt. That is not an accurate. Need a decent sample of multiple games. Some will be "sure does suck!", some will be "ah it's okay" and a couple will be "hey this is pretty darn good".

I'd also do it that way because then I kind of design the games and implement them in a way that doing work on this one can benefit these other two over here and so forth.

All of this thinking about doing is quite tiring. I am going to play a game or two and relax and forget about it all for now.

 

The main reason you need to just release one game is to gather information. A lot of the unknowns will remain unknown until you release that first game.

 

Yeah I am a pretty big analytical nut. I'd make them and release them one at a time but I'd want at least several ideas lined up ready to go. The whole thing would be a learning process and adjust on the fly. If it's 3 months per game I'd probably just do 4. I'd prefer a 2 month or less dev cycle per game but that would be quite demanding on a part-time basis.

I'm thinking the best way for me is to just plan from the start I need to make a line of platformers or a line of dungeon explorers, etc. This way the first one lays the foundation and each new game can use a lot of work done previously while also enhanceing the engine / framework a tiny bit. In fact, I'd probably go with episodic games like the old shareware model popular in the 90s. Thinking is good. That just made it a whole lot more manageable.

 

I am getting tired of writing and reading about "how I will do it" (which may change in time) so we really need someone else to describe how they will approach it OR someone who is already doing it to join in I think to push this thread further along and be valuable.

There is more than one strategy that can be used for sure and certain strategies would work better for some cases / people and other strategies better for other cases / people.

Like I have absolutely no interest in running around to expos and demoing a game. Seems like just adding another expense (time, cost to get there, cost to attend). Worth it if you are doing some super duper gee whiz kind of game but not so much otherwise IMO. Of course, I wouldn't mind going to a niche specific show. That way I get some personal enjoyment out of it as well as making connections with like-minded people. Anyway there I am rambling again.

Maybe someone else will come along and share how they have been doing it for the past year. It is not like there is any shortage of people. Just visit the Made With Unity forum and look at all of those Steam releases.

Here is one released last month...

Poseidon: Project Dark Sky

 

These are very likely card farming games, sold for extremely low prices to card farmers.
How it works =>

.


Valve is getting stricter with this kind of practice, so if someone here wants to earn money with this scheme, he may be a bit late...

 

He always sounds so serious in the videos I've skimmed. Like he's covering the final days of the world... destruction is moments away. Lol

That's a great thing. I'm all for cleaning out the true clutter that exists just to take advantage of the backdoors to make money. Although that is what the big businesses and individual elite do all the time... take advantage of loopholes in laws and tax code for profit.

If it gets to where the game devs can't do it then maybe instead of targeting developers "using stuff I know they didn't make for themselves" these guys can always focus on big business and so forth.

 

It is crazy the things that people do. I don't get it. I mean I realize there seems to be an obsession with money. Yes I get that. But sometimes still even after all of these years it is difficult for me to imagine that so many people seem to be willing to do anything & everything to make a buck. lol

I've noticed checking out various games on Steam because I wondered why some of them were getting so much negativity. Then I read things like "yep it is confirmed the music is stolen from Command & Conquer" or even "you did not make this game... you stole the demo another developer made and listed on IndieDB".

Now this kind of stuff really is...well it's just criminal period. And the thing I don't understand is some people seem like they actually don't get why people are telling them it is wrong. Like they don't even know it is wrong. Makes you wonder are there like 12 year olds just grabbing stuff from anywhere & everywhere and publishing games on Steam or what?

LOL Never really thought about it before but now I wonder how many Mario, Sonic and other fan games showed up on Greenlight. Actually I'm surprised these people aren't just going to like old DOS games sites grabbing a bunch and throwing them up there as "their" games. But maybe that has happened too.

But anyway enough of the dark side. There is always a dark side. Best to focus on the light. Although certainly the dark side does make it difficult to interpret stats in any reliable way.

On the bright side I think I might actually do something tonight. I mean besides eat this bowl of ice cream. Almost have enough motivation to doodle some level design or something maybe.

Anyone want to share some doodles of their plan to storm Steam?

 

I suspect you're the only one who's made such plans.

 

My plan to storm Steam is to make a game and market it before putting it up for sale. It's a little bit of a crazy plan, I know, but it's crazy enough that it might just work.

 

From what I've seen the past few days checking out Steam from a developer perspective... just doing that would put you in a top 20%. I'm guessing maybe 80% of the Indie games are actually complete. The others stay in Early Access until abandoned or are released yet not completed. And 80% of the completed ones are probably actual legit games. And I suspect probably only about 20% of those have had any marketing of any kind done other than maybe 1 post in a forum saying check it out and maybe a forum sig link.

When you look at it that way the real supply is only about ~15 to 20% of what it appears to be. Still a lot of noise but not really competing for consumer dollars in a "serious" way. Granted that is still a lot to be sure but it does mean if 500 games hit the store each month probably at least 400 just sort of disappear quite fast.

 

Thinking about making a plan. I have virtual scribbles on napkins so far. Ideas that came up just from discussing the topic in this thread. But yeah at this point I probably have enough scribbles to have an actual plan for development, niche, etc. Need scribbles for marketing. I'll do that sometime.

I did think about designing a level but then I realized I really hadn't decided exactly what to do... platform game, top down dungeon blaster explorer thing, etc. So then I realized I should make either platform games or top down dungeon blaster explorer things. But then thought I've always wanted to make hybrid games so probably should do that.

Then I just sort of did nothing from that point.

 

IMO just start and get the ball rolling, once you have a good idea.

When you have a prototype and some graphics done, show it on social media as soon as possible. So you can gauge interest in your game and build a following. Worst case would be, that nobody cares. But then, you could scrap it early on, without wasting too much time.

If your game is interesting enough and ideally caters to a starving market, you will eventually succeed.

 

I've got a 3-day weekend coming up very soon. So I've pretty much decided to do some light design and prototyping. Just to play around and help me to decide if I want to actually do it or not. I like the idea and sure it's just a matter of doing it. It is spending the time to do it that I am not sure I want to commit to.

I think I can just use the much more relaxed approached I was taking many months ago. Just working an hour here and 30 minutes there randomly. So it doesn't turn into a real grind.

One thing I've noticed is even platform games... there are a lot of them but most either don't play so well or don't have much to them. There are some great ones... typically metroidvania style. They all compete to get player attention to a degree but I think the kind of platformer games I'd like really they just don't seem to exist.

Yeah I'll do some design and prototyping this weekend.

Maybe to keep the thread alive and with value what we can instead do is pick genres and look at some examples on Steam and discuss the minimum needed to create a great game in that genre. Something that would stand out. That might be fun and would tie in to the thread topic.

 

We've got people on here all the time that don't know much about copyright law, or just don't care. And it's often so much work to convince them of what they're doing is wrong, that I've given up on trying.


Speaking of minimalist games. Have you ever thought about making a retro pixel RTS, where each unit is just 1 colored pixel?

 

Yeah it's still very odd behavior to me. Whether or not a person knows about copyright law I don't understand how anyone except possibly a young kid cannot just know that taking things created by other people is wrong.

I don't know if it is some kind of cultural differences or what. Like maybe in some countries it is completely acceptable if you go into a neighbor's house and take some posters off the wall and other things just because you like them. I get the whole anonymity of the Internet driving a lot of it... but still that implies they do know it is wrong just hiding behind the anonymity aspect.

Some may well think if it is on the Internet it is free. But that is an excuse I find hard to believe. Really. And if this is how most people think it is quite impressive we haven't blown ourselves up yet just obliterated the planet. Lol

Although saying that I have seem numerous game dev tutorials where one of the first things they show is "okay we need some graphics... let's get a tree... so we just go to Google or Bing and search images for tree... oh there are some nice ones... let's save this one" and same for music and sounds. So maybe part of it is caused by such people teaching this.

-----------

I've thought about a lot of things and yes have thought about an rts with tiny colored blocks. I used to greatly enjoy playing the original Warcraft and Warcraft 2. Also an rpg would be pretty cool with that view for the overworld. Maybe 4x4 color blocks. See little dots traveling around. And then can switch to a side on view for battles and such like Link.

There are lots of cool things that can be made for sure. I'm kind of craving a platformer at this moment. I always feel like the games all just go so far and stop. And like they are constantly being reinvented in some ways but losing all of the stuff that was learned previously even decades ago.

 

Strategy for Steam now I think is... streamline streamline and then streamline some more. It's ridiculous how long this stuff takes. I've spent 2.5 hours so far just on designing the game window, the basics of the game world and then creating the main hub level in Tiled. And I mean just using solid color tiles. Sure I did spend some time setting up layers for parallax scrolling but still... this stuff just takes time. And I hate that. Because the more time the greater the development cost obviously.

Of course, in hindsight one thing that would have saved time here is that for the prototype layers of parallax scrolling aren't needed. So that was just a waste of time spent on visual interest stuff that wasn't needed. At least not at this point. I also made the sprites for the player idle and walking. Did I need to do that? No.

Although saying that... I don't know... I kind of think I needed to do it because I wanted to be able to see and know for sure that I can do what I would like to do. I'm very happy with the results. So I think at this point the next time I do some work on this I will switch to solid non-animated rectangles for the player, enemies, obstacles and so forth. Although besides just color coding them I will likely mark these images to indicate what they are. But that is it. No more.

The bottom line is it's so easy to get distracted by visual stuff and particularly in prototyping that needs to be eliminated as much as it possibly can. In fairness though a lot of the time was just designing. Trying to think ahead and do things now that will make it easier later. Like laying out redundant solid color tiles in the sheet even though the proto only needs one. The idea being later I won't need to rework things to add in additional tiles for variations. And the beginning is always slow because of all of this design, planning and prepwork.

Overall I guess it is not too bad. Is it $125 worth of work? I doubt it but maybe. It is hard to really determine the value of work so early on. It should save time moving forward.

Anyway I hope you are all making progress thinking about your strategies and game design and so forth.

 

Sounds like you were pretty productive. I've spent longer than that today to make this, and half the buttons don't even do anything yet:



But I'm still wrestling with the UI system, a lot. If I were to do it again now I'd be much quicker.

 

Yours looks like you're focused on making the final end product assets so that explains a good part of the time as well. Looks great.

I have nothing yet besides a data file and a couple of image files. Gonna focus on changing that soon though.

 

Steam game supply seems to be busy. I doubt that surprises anyone. I've been checking the new releases each day on steam itself as well as the whatsonsteam site and finally today followed their twitter account.

Steam is now averaging 1 new release every hour. That might not sound like much but it is a fast rate for games I think and it is steady. Looks like democratization of game dev has been accomplished.

Anyway... knowing this we can then estimate that your (whoever) new game will sit at the top of the New Releases for 1 hour. Then it will bump down the list one spot every hour on average until finally the following day it has moved to the top of page 2 of new releases. And each day after becomes increasingly buried.

Probably no real news to anyone just sharing what I have observed this week. Personally I now have 7.5 hours of game dev time on my project. I'll probably be at 8.5 to 9 after tonight.

I'm taking a sort of hybrid approach of prototyping combined with sorting out the critical things such as how the "game" feels when moving around and jumping. Iterated on the collisions with the environment, movement speed, jumping speed and distance etc. Also have the data structures more or less defined at this point and the camera system to track movement, scrolling etc in. Finally tonight I will add some collectibles and shooting. And then probably one very simple enemy type. If I work 1.5 hours I can do all three. And I probably will do that.

 

The other thing to note is that the new releases section itself is buried. This is the opposite from a few years ago when the new releases section was featured at the top of the front page for Steam users. Now users have to actively look for new releases, and that means most users will never see the new releases.

 

You know I did notice that and also remember hearing about it somewhere online. How they have kind of systematically hidden the new releases more and more where they used to be prominent and this is what accounts in part for the decrease in sales of new games. Steam used to almost feature them in a sense and through time they have been working to hide them. Which of course shifts the scale much more to how good a game dev does at the marketing game.

That is what I suspected though... maybe it wasn't the case before.... probably not when they featured the new releases... but at this point a person will probably be rewarded more in proportion to how much work they do and how skilled they are at it. Meaning if someone treats like a business creates a marketing plan and focuses on it relentlessly you should do ok.

This is a big part of why I will not spend many months on only the development aspect of a game and certainly not years. People ramble continually about quality and effort but making the game is only half of it and IMO it is not even the most important half. Reason being you can have an awesome game and if nobody knows about it what will that do for you as an Indie game dev? On the other hand if you have a game of less quality and work the marketing hard you will make sales and have some happy customers.

I don't see how many solo indies have the time, energy and money to spend many months and years on a game unless they don't plan on doing the other half of the work... the marketing. Of course a long dev cycle can be the marketing by continually blogging, posting on forums and twitter etc. Making YT videos submitting press releases all of that time so there is that option... it's just a very expensive option.

 

They probably featured them prominently when it was still curated to be exclusively games of a certain type and standard. Nowadays with all curation gone just being a new release doesn't give you the same kind of exposure anymore. But the games that do get featured are probably mostly the kind of games that in days of curation were the only games to even get onto the plattform. Just a feeling, I have no hard data on it.

 

Even after the days of curation, Steam continued to feature the new games section at the top of the front page. But some really terrible games (and some very blatant UnitZ asset flips) made them rethink that policy. I get why Steam no longer features the new releases.

I just brought up the state of the new releases section to remind people that the new releases section is buried, so you can no longer rely on that to get an initial sales boost. This is important to remember when coming up with an indie Steam strategy.

 

I feel like you are going to need to bring in your own traffic. So maybe blogs, or handing steam codes to a few smaller twichers. Then maybe putting a demo on gamejolt thats how i found out about darkside detective


If I scroll down on the front page past "Keep scrolling for more recommendations" the steam algorithm is really good. And its actually showing me games I want to play.
http://store.steampowered.com/app/490360/Hermodr/

 

Yeah I agree. I look at it like an indie game dev needs to assume the only people who will ever see their game are people introduced it as a direct result of an action they (the game dev) took. Although saying this...

I spend most of my time lately browsing specific tags on Steam when looking for games. It seems to be the best way to find stuff on there. Then on the tag games listing page I click on the New Releases tab then I click back to about page 20 and browse forward.

Of course Steam defaults to the New & Trending tab and that is followed by the Top Sellers tab. Neither of those have any meaning to me as a gamer. As a game dev they do to a degree because they tell me what is popular but I basically see those tabs as "view the games with the best marketing".

From a gamer perspective I don't care what is popular and trending. I just care about games that are good and that I probably will never hear about unless I dig for them. Any game that is popular / trending is probably something I have seen already someplace because otherwise it wouldn't be popular (again marketing).

I am much more interested in discovering the games that I will probably never see any place because although the games are good their creators suck at marketing.

I am probably somewhat different than the norm though. I imagine most people are basically sheeple who are led to the same games again and again and maybe only care about the popular games. But who knows really.

Another benefit for devs & gamers of browsing by tags is there are featured games at the top and seem to be randomly chosen each page view although there does appear to be some weighted factors in the algorithm because often I refresh several times and 1 or more games are always in the featured section. Still it is a good way for a gamer to be introduced to a game thsy might not otherwise ever know about.

 

I think it's going to be important to stand out on the Steam page and have a good banner image. I am going to put a lot of work into my title screen/ promo artwork. I will plan it out so I can reuse it for any banners, thumbnails, buttons, anything. Maybe I'll plan out the composition so it can be cropped in a few different ways depending on the size and shape of the banner/button.

I mean, that's all people have to go on when browsing Steam. They won't see your screenshots or trailer until they actually click to your game page. You need to do something to get them to click to it.

Plus, it could be reused if you are doing any advertising on other sites.

I don't know, it just seems like something that would be very important. As I browse the Steam store, I see banners of games, and most of the time I can tell what game would appeal to me or not.

That and, I haven't had time to do any serious illustrations for a long time. I'd like an excuse to do something really nice.

 

If I look at my steam recommendations based off two games i recently bought they all look good and most of them from the screenshoots looks like something i would be interested in. So I think as long as the game is good it will have a good tail once the algorithm gets better (and the 2 games I actually bought werent even good).

 

Yeah the images for the recommendations are very good but the images in general (on featured list, etc) I find to be worthless for most games.

Once in a while I see a great one... an image that has maybe the name of the game placed over a screenshot from the gameplay. Otherwise they are all but worthless. Just a bunch of art. I mean sure I might see 20 images for 20 different games showing some very nice artwork of a dude holding a gun. I can't get anything of value from that. Especially when some will be for FPS, others for top down games, others for 2D side scrolling platformers, etc. I mean yeah I know okay it seems like you have a gun but I think anyone could pretty much guess that even if the image was completely black.

It's like browsing games in stores like Gamestop, etc. Everyone I see does the same thing as I did 30 years ago... picks up a box and immediately turns it over to see the actual screenshots and read the info. The cover art is near meaningless. Sometimes it is interesting but it is near impossible for a game to stand out on that alone at this point. Show something of substance.

 

I would never have even clicked on half of those games based of "cover image", but the screenshots look great. Look at the new release and you have no idea what type of game it is or what it looks like - why not allow the screenshots to go beside it. If you had the 3 screenshots you would have a better idea

 

Well it is possible that Steam is shifting to try to maybe reward those game devs who use their brains. I mean just basically no longer making it so easy to get a lot of attention. I am sure there are still plenty of views on the cover images but maybe they just figure why should they do everything for you, ya know? And these kind of things can make a difference help people stand out.

Well this one possibly won't anymore because we have it here on the forums which means quite likely within the coming weeks we'll see more games being released with cover images better representing the game itself and when that becomes fairly common it won't be as meaningful anymore. But in general I mean things that devs think of and don't post on a forum visited by many thousands of game developers... yeah those would be helpful. lol

EDIT: The closer I move toward actually doing this the more I find myself thinking I should just keep my thoughts to myself. Because as much as I like to help other people first a good number seem to think my views are crazy anyway and second it's business. It is a competition in a sense. It can be a collaborative / community effort but with all of the people into this it is much more likely that many people just read things and then immediately put it to use never saying a word or contributing anything they have found to be useful. So really I think you'd be better off too just keeping that stuff to use to your own advantage as long as you can.

 

Yeah I think it might be better to use small screenshots of the game. Where now you got an idea of whats going on although probably not that squished

 

Honestly, I can't tell what's going on in these screenshots at all. Like, I can barely even tell what genre the gameplay is.

 

True but even squished like that they already provide much more insight into the games than the completely made up fancy cover art which tells nothing not even viewpoint or 2D or 3D etc.

 

I want to point out once again that literally all you have to do is hover over a game's banner for 1 second and you'll see the screenshots.

Yes, it does take a conscious decision on the gamer's part. But so does them trying to understand a screenshot, especially if it's tiny. In fact, a screenshot with the title of the game "overlayed" is going to be more difficult to read anyway.

To be completely fair though those are probably not very good images - I'm sure images for any of those games could be found which would be as representative and yet be simpler and easier to understand visually.

Edit: but this can fall apart when you get to the more, pardon the term, but "immersive" type games. Take ShilohGames' Disputed Space, an arcade space combat game (correct me if that's a poor description). How is he supposed to show that game in a tiny little screenshot--in a manner that makes the genre of the game immediately obvious? Any picture of shooting at other ships or seeing them blowing up is going to look terrible because the lasers or the explosion will cover the entire visible area. You can show other ships flying about but that won't tell you it's a first-person arcade shooter.

Can look at Blood, Sweat, and Gold, too. You could show the overworld map, but then people will think it's an RTS or 4X game, and it's not that at all. You might show a top-down view of the combat, but it doesn't even have top-down I don't think, just third person. And if you go third person, there's no way in the world to differentiate it as a turn-based combat experience.

I think the screenshot idea might work for RTS-like games (might include things like tactical RPGs) and 2D platformers, but outside of that it's just too limited to give any insight into gameplay. At best you can get something like a theme or art style, and you're getting that already with the game name and custom banner.

 

Keep in mind also that your banner basically represents your company and game. Would you want your game to be represented by a banner that looks worse than everyone else's on that page?

Whether you choose a screenshot or custom art, it needs to look good, if only just for first impressions of people browsing the store and seeing your game listed.

A game that goes out of its way to do nice promotional artwork can give gamers an impression about the quality of the game or at least how much the developers cared about it.

 

It is definitely a challenge. For example, the image used in lists in Steam is only 184x69. It is too tiny to show extensive details about a game. Technically speaking, the developer supplies a 231x87 and Steam generates a 184x69 image from that.