Behold, "the whole story of Steam's economy in one picture": the top 1% of games earn 84.5% of estimated revenue, and most games barely make anything
https://www.gamesradar.com/games/behold-the-whole-history-of-steams-economy-in-one-picture-the-top-1-percent-of-games-earn-84-5-percent-of-estimated-revenue-and-most-games-barely-make-anything/Open linkView original on mander.xyz
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That's basically the story of the whole economy.
Podcasts, music, film, paintings, novels...Linux distributions, ice cream flavor sales...literally everything.
Upvotes on lemmy posts...
You could indeed argue that lemmy follow similar patterns, for example threads posted in popular subs predates all other content. If you ask me this is a big problem and the result of a design shaped around advertising and content manipulation inherited from reddit.
Hell, the website I get knitting patterns from has the same situation. The top 1% of designers make all the dough. But it's great to have a platform that anybody can submit patterns to. The top designers pay the bills and they keep people coming back.
The platforms also create the new top designers/performers by letting new talents submit for free.
Like live streaming, Twitch have no clue who's going to become big and who'll stay at 2 concurrent viewers. But you need to let everyone try, to be able to have the few that rises to the top
Twitch streamers, YouTube channels, book best seller lists, radio play lists...
Strawberry's fallen on hard times. We need to seize the means of chocolate production and distribute the wealth among all our fellow flavors.
Athletes, at least in the sports that make any money at all.
What? You never played Monopoly before? What do you think the endgame is?
The Monopoly endgame is spending as much time in jail as possible to evade property tax and fees.
Yeah but you gotta own the best properties before you do that.
Would Pareto be ecstatic or rolling in his grave at this disparity?
For profit centralized economy perhaps
No, it's a byproduct of differences in skill and fitness to tasks, it's gonna happen even in centralised economies (that were never tried and if they were it wasn't real communism, I'm sure) it's just not going to be recognised and rewarded if everyone is supposedly equal.
I don’t think we should prescribe to the idea differences in skill are AS great as riches would imply.
Elon Musk is not MILLIONS of times better at making cars than the next manufacturer. Most would say he’s worse.
What will also be relevant is the degree to which companies now subvert each other. If one person got really good at baking, he could take out an ad in the paper, right? Except adspot prices have gone way up because of rich companies running the same promo 1000x into people’s eyeballs about their frozen imported bread, even though this one guy might have something people actually want.
Or, look at game companies that all have competent products but are carefully managing their release date to avoid GTAVI.
Should they pool game sales earnings and distribute the money equally among developers? I can't think of any other platform that based on my own tastes recommends me games that don't even have double digit all time high concurrent players (at most just basic lists that end up burying old titles at the end of the queue) and that I end up buying.
There's plenty of valid criticism for steam, I don't understand why we should focus on nitpicking.
And what percent of the "games that barely make anything" are asset flips and zero-effort slop? Like, "percent of new games that are trash" is going to be very high when the barrier to entry is "pay Valve $100 once". This is a total junk statistic.
Like, store A where you can buy 100 good games and 1000 asset flips will score 10x better on this un-metric than store B where you can buy 10000 good games and a million asset flips. And yet nobody would ever argue that store A is a better store.
I don't know if you consider them "asset flips" or not. But the number of anime/furry porn "puzzle" games released every single day, has to be throwing off the numbers.
An asset flip imo is anything where it's basically identical to another game but with different art assets
An Asset Flip is easily definable:
The developer purchased an asset pack or multiple asset packs on a game engine asset store, made no changes or almost no changes, and uploaded it as a game.
What you have defined (a game that is the same as another game but with different art) isn't usually called an Asset Flip, but instead a Clone. Clone games usually have much more effort put into them compared to Asset Flip games.
Ah yeah, it's kinda like how all cubes are cuboidal but not all cuboidal are cubes
Makes sense 🙂
I would argue it. Store B is just Amazon. They're the most successful retailer on the planet.
apple begs to differ
Apple's customers don't get a choice of stores in the first place.
AAA titles made by corporations are the trashiest of them all
And the smallest in volume. The number of games on Steam that cost a million dollars or more to make (owned by shareholder value generators) is much lower than other types. For every one Assassin's Creed there are ten Peaks and Slay the Spires and lower quality "real, good indie games". And for every real, good indie game there's a hundred asset flips and ai slop "games".
I'll spot you that for every Assassin's Creed, there's ten lower quality games. Probably closer to 100 lower quality games, tbh. But to suggest that there's ten "Slay the Spire" games for every one AC? You've got to be kidding. Slay the Spire is exceptionally good as a deck-based rogue-like. I don't know if I could find ten other games in the entire Steam store that compare properly. Absolutely in its own league.
Even games that aren't asset flips or AI slop can be very hit-or-miss. There's tons of mediocre JRPGs. There's tons of Farmville-style endless click simulators. There's puzzle games galore. There's bad ports of older titles. There are games with crummy interfaces and miserable learning curves and needlessly graphic art.
I tried out Stellar Blade recently. And while I enjoyed the combat mechanics, the fundamental quality of the art was good, and the dialogue was... fine, I couldn't get over the fact that I was piloting a woman in skin-tight lingerie against Dick and Ball monsters. Gave up inside the first chapter.
Tales of Arise had absolutely miserable writing. Monster Hunter: Stories was fun for maybe 5 hours before I'd figured out the mechanics and bored by the flat, unimpressive landscapes. Darkest Dungeon 2 failed to meaningfully improve on the original, while tossing in a bunch of extra mechanics that just made the game feel clunky.
Making a good game is hard even when you do it properly.
Slay the Spire and lower quality but still "real" indie games. That entire gamut. The best games ever made and "uhh it's balatro but with throwing darts". That's all more numerous than AAA stuff and also dwarfed in volume by porn jigsaw puzzles, asset flips, and other actual zero effort slop "games". AAA and "real indie games" are a tiny minority of the games on steam.
Twelve thousand "games" have been released on Steam this year as of July. That would mean the meaningless statistic in the article implies that 240 games from this year drive 85% of this year's spending. 240 games in 2026 "worth spending money on" is not a dire portrait of AAA slurping up the market space. That "1% of games" is presented to look like "the top 1% fat cat games" when 1% absolutely includes not just the AAA and the top shelf indie (like Slay the Spire) but also the flashes in the pan and the trend chasers and the friendslop and the Balatro clones and the forever GAAS.
Those "not truly slop but" uninspired indie games like stardew clone #780 comfortably fit into the "top" 240 Steam games this year. Darkest Dungeon 2 is absolutely a "top percent" game when the overall pool includes so much actual nothing in it.
Aside from being addictive, Balatro's a popular game because it plays well on any medium. Deck-builder rogue-likes are phone friendly, PC friendly, and not entirely unapproachable on console.
That's all true. But even if we cut out the click-bait and the slop, lots of games fail on their own merits.
Yeah, I absolutely agree. Adding in the denominator counts for a lot. I might caveat that with the question "Are those 240 games any good?" Because it's very possible that slop games are what pull in all the revenue, while quality titles flounder. But, again, that would require some real actual journalism instead of click-bait rage-bait headlines.
Incidentally, has anyone asked about the state of game journalism recently? What are those stats looking like?
Yeah, and do you think those games will be part of the 1% that make 84.5% of revenue?
No, it will be the AAA games.
"Real games" (AAA, top tier indie, low tier indie) can easily be as low as 1-2% of "steam releases". 12k games were published on Steam over half of this year. That would mean, if you want to care about this meaningless statistic of "x% of games drive y% of revenue", that there's room for over 240 "worthwhile" games to have released in 2026 without disrupting the scary 1% metric at all. Two hundred forty games this year. AAA releases are what, ten or twenty a year? Less? That's not 1%, it's 0.08%. The other 99.92% of the 1% are free to be indie games or GAAS or whatever else.
Be fair. It was better many moons ago. And still valid for (many) non-US AAA.
The only reason it was better before is because before only AAA games existed.
You couldn't make a SNES cartridge without tons of money behind it.
There is more than consoles... There always were indie-games. Just maybe not on every console. I could name a ton of excellent AAA from the good-old-times.
I don't see how that is "steam" economy.
That's just economy when you try to sell anything, specially anything art related.
If you made any art and try to sell it in any store the most probably amount of money made is the same number in every currency.
Valve is a for profit company that decides which games to advertise.
The advertisement algorithm is pretty much understood. It depends on wishlist and first day sales.
It's not like Gabe, or anyone, is sitting there deciding which game gets advertised and which game isn't. As far as algorithms go, steam one is pretty straightforward and fair afaik.
They are indeed in charge of the ads on their website, not only they can decide what gets featured in ads but they also design the website page and the ads placement as they like.
Wouldn't they just advertise whatever makes them the most money, which would be the games people want to buy? I don't see this as being radically different from how games were before steam was popular.
Yes, they promote the top 1%
What you quoted from me and what you said after are different claims. It is disingenuous to put "Yes," in between them.
So, like on music industry. Millions of songs are released each year and yet only top artists get the listens.
Or, like movie/series industry where the top movies that got advertised gets viewed and art-house ones getting buried in the black hole of unknown.
And yet, some weird days artists and bands, directors and their weird movies sieve through and become hit sensation. Who knows why? (hint: they're good)
steam is the spotify of videogames
Jesus, the gamesradar site is absolute ass
The data: https://weloveit.io/developers/steam-revenue-report/
The top 10% of games make 98.80% of all revenue. Woof.
That makes sense right? Aren't 90% of games just kind of trash? If you open the store page and it says 14 Mostly Negative reviews of course you're not buying it. Top 10% is a huge number and basically encompasses all the thousands of videogames I would ever want to actually play.
And even before all the AI slop flooding app stores we've had plenty of asset flip type games that barely counted as complete games.
Even before that. Atari kind of failed due to overproduction of bad games
Answer, per Sturgeon's Law: "Ninety percent of everything is crap"
If you check one graph down below on the page, you'd find that in 2021 amount of games released was around 11k which is quite a bunch of games released in a year. By 2024 amount has doubled.
I don't want to make any statements, but my speculation would be that most of these games are UE/Unity asset flips or/and AI generated garbage that is worth no one's time.
If only major devs and solid indie devs are considered, revenue gap would probably be much narrower.
Right.... Nobody is buying games with mostly negative reviews unless they're under duress...
Or are huge fans of things like "Air Control"
almost suprised its that low, but I suppose "sex with hitler 2" has some audience
That's basically how art and media have always worked. This isn't a function of Steam, or even the modern economy.
No, that's how advertising has always work.
There is always going to be more art produced than people want to buy - nothing Valve can do to change that. Hell, it doesn't even require capitalism - a similar ratio was seen when most art was produced via patronage half a millennia ago. If anything, Steam with whatever faults it has, democratizes it more by making it easier to discover niche stuff with limited appeal.
There are also always going to be big ass ads on steam
So just replying with meaningless and unrelated word salad now? Got it.
Dude, cmon. At least these ads are gaming ads and not some crap Ai bullshit or milfs nearby ads. That is a game store where games are to be sold. It is a no brainer to see ads for games there...
The argument is that ads promotes certain games over others.
So, yes?
That's art for you. Music, fine art etc I'd guess is even more lopsided.
Sales tend to be proportional to the marketing budget. You see this in every entertainment media. Movies and Music, in particular, will have marketing budgets equal or in excess of the actual production costs.
It isn't simply that 1% of the games make 110% of the money. It's that 1% of the games get a marketing allowance at all, while the majority of indie projects and first round game offerings just get spat out into the void with little more than a whisper.
So what? The vast majority of games released on Steam are either hobby or student projects or just first time devs’ shitty pixel platformer. Many are low effort products, Steam will not even give those games “shelve space”. The algorithm will based on pre launch and launch metrics decide if it should push the game in front of customers in the recommendation sections of the store. If a game can’t even move the needle a bit after launch Steam will blackhole the game and basically make it invisible in the store unless a customer searches for it. Because even though it’s a virtual store, “shelve space” aka the recommendation section is still scarce.
The hidden gem games on Steam are rare. Every time I watch a dev’s postmortem on Youtube who talks about how little they sold I’m rarely surprised when I see the game.
Also Steam generates around $10+ Billion in revenue in a year. So the other games generate around $2 Billion. If that is generated by 2000 games that still averages to a million a game.
Also don't forget all the shovelware low effort games for farming "achievements" achievements
1 in 11 games released last year has 0 reviews.
https://steamdb.info/stats/releases/
~21.500 titles released in 2025, we've seen more than 16.000 games released this year so it will once again break a new record for titles released in a year.
That data also shows which games never got out of the “limited game status”. Around 16200 of games released in 2025 have the limited games status. Meaning these games were not making enough money or nothing at all and had not enough player engagement to unlock profile features.
If you look at the numbers of games that unlocked profile features the growth is much lower. Those are the numbers that matter anyway. 5000 games made actual money. And if we apply the Pareto principle than a thousand games made the vast majority of the new release revenue that year.
So if you release a game on steam not only you are promoting a centralized closed platform owned by a billionare but there's a good chance you are not getting much in return.
Good chance if your game didn’t do well on Steam that you didn’t make a good game that has high product-market fit in the first place and didn’t promote it properly. We are now in an era where indie devs have become millionaires from their $15 games. And I’m not just talking about Edmund McMillen and Johnathan Blow. Go back to the days of brick and mortar retail and that was nigh impossible when a small studio would earn pennies on the dollar for every sold unit.
Hey op, I see a lot of your arguments in the comments.
I have a challenge.
Name 5 things Valve could implement to change this that would not be to the detriment of indie devs.
This is not a joke. You have opinions. I want to hear them.
I'm also curious (since I see you pushing a decentralized market place in the comments), how you think a decentralized marketplace would function and what would be better about it.
No solution, only angry >:(
I’m one of those that makes most of the money off a different platform. I’m not making it because the platform is helping me. It’s inertia. I’m the best in my category and so I dominate. Same for these games.
I believe that this is as much about game quality, over saturation, and marketing/inertia as it is about Valve in general, but I'm trying to understand what they think (based on the contents of the article) can be done to fix this problem for game devs.
I mean, they could start with not asking 30% of the revenue when you sell less than a million or so units.
It costs a LOT to build a global cdn with the uptime steam has. That 30% is totally justified as a platform fee imo
Especially now with cloud storage and software development costs being so high.
I mean I see your point for sure, but I also see why consistency matters too. Why would valve "punish" someone for doing well? Those big titles are also great for revenue on their side too so honestly selling more units would be even more justifiable to lower the revenue split (from a business perspective on valves side)
Idk. Just thinking out loud I guess.
and yet everybody hates on Apple's 30% cut...
maybe it could be like how rich people are taxed more? (at least if rich people paid their taxes in the first place)
Valve provides a whole lot more developer infrastructure than Apple. Now a good argument may be that you don't use it all, but it is still provided to all.
Also the class of games on steam take up so much more space than most everything on the apple store.
I don't personally hate on Apple's 30%. I hate on Apple's predatory licensing practices which demand an upfront expenditure before the first unit sells at all.
Would a decentralized version of Steam do that?
Is that 30% the bulk of Valve's profit?
What do Indie developers get in exchange for Valve's 30% cut on Steam that they don't get elsewhere that charges 30% or charges less of a percentage?
So could physical retailers, so how's that working out?
I'm not going to say they can't do that. It's not a bad suggestion but it seems to be suggested continually in a vacuum without considering other factors.
Imagine paying $60 for a game and then finding out the torrent is dead.
Valve is a for profit company and their main goal is to boost their profits to the roof (valve ceo owns an entire fleet of megayachts). They work to boost their sales not to help other people, when their salesmen lay down 5 things they could implement on the platform their main objective is to do business. Anything you implement that benefit users and devs rather than the already full valve wallet would be a positive change.
The first thing you want to implement is a less greedy and profits drive mentality, the second thing they could implement is the source code of their platform. They could implement exact sales data for each game and transparency reports on their profits, they could implement a mastodon social page and they could implement disclaimers on AAA titles warning people they are buying games from evil corporations.
So just to recap you want valve to become a non profit, and open source their platform? It seems like you're really mad at capitalism, and just chose to lash out at valve.
They could operate in a much more anti consumer way, like other game companies (Epic), they could remove user reviews, they could get rid of the ability for games to be added to the store without a publisher, but they don't.
how is Epic anti-consumer?
I don't use it, but last time I checked they still haven't implemented a review system... Also their ceo is out there saying stuff like this https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/epic-boss-tim-sweeney-blasts-steam-for-putting-ai-tags-on-games-says-move-is-irresponsible-of-valve
Edit: Can't believe I forgot buying rocket league, then removing it from steam.
You are on a free, open source and decentralized platform that share nothing with steam. This is indeed the right place where to lash out at evil corporations like valve and their billionaires ceos
The main problem I see with this is that game devs are trying to use capitalism to make money. So what you're saying is, it's alright for game devs, but not for store fronts.
That doesn't make sense to me.
Additionally though, of the major gaming retailers, Valve has the least predatory model (I'm not counting smaller game retailers in this because we need to be honest about the fact that they aren't competing in the market with Valve as far as what they offer devs).
Did you take into account the reasons that game devs choose Valve over other retailers like GOG? Or the fact that very often game devs will use Valve, GOG and other gaming retailers?
You didn't give any specifics in your answer to me and honestly I have to wonder if you even know where the majority of Valves money comes from.
Follow-up question.
How does the consumer benefit from and why should they switch to a different retailer than Valve's Steam? What is the benefit of a fediverse style retailer and how does it work?
Here an example that you can understand: nobody should buy gasoline or use cars but many are forced to do it because they have to go to work to earn the money they need to survive. The capitalists pushing this corrupted system are forced to do it only by their own greed, they are the ones who need to be blamed before anyone else.
They promote gambling to kids, the "least predatory model" it's still a predatory model.
Valve managed to build a small monopoly on the videogame market and together with other tech corporation they managed to centralize internet around a bunch of service/platforms that people are now hooked to. Promoting anything outside the corporation world would result in small to zero visibility.
From taking a cut on selling games and from microtransactions.
Now i have a question for you, how does the ceo of valve spend the majority of his money?
https://join-lemmy.org/docs/index.html
The whole humanity will benefit if we stop giving money to billionares and their private corporations who promote closed and centralized, for profit, evil, business models.
A lot more than just the economy, it's like a law of nature. Even language itself obeys it
Exactly. I think you're referring to the Pareto distribution and/or Zipf's law
A centralized third party software launcher that sponsor certain games over others follow the law of greedyness not the law of nature.
I really dont get this, there have been and still are things you can very much criticise valve for but people come up with the most insane shit to criticise them for. "Uhh yeah this problem affecting the whole game industry is steams fault". Also the top 1% are prolly aldo much much more expensive to produce so i dont think its as bad as it sounds at first but yeah.
Barely make anything compared to multi million companies
Solo dev games can make a fraction of what those giant games and the dev can live a very comfortable life. Etc: balatro
Very pointless article.
But that's the thing. It's incredibly rare that a indie game becomes successful enough to sustain even a single developer. It's like with every other entertainment industry. YouTube, OF, Twitch, TikTok, you are competing with millions of other people in exactly the same situation as you. I think it's OF where you need to be in the top 25% to earn $1k per year.
Hard work and clever marketing can improve your chances of a success, but you still need to be extremely lucky to be noticed enough to make a living out of it.
I remember this talk about a developer making a living as a game dev. Not by making inspiring or "good" games, but by pretty much endlessly reskinning solitare games.
Have you ever considered the fact that these games suck?
as a hobby game dev (i made this game), i can confirm that most indie games do not reach the stage where they would be enjoyable by other players.
Talking about statistics is not pointless, it's quite interesting sometimes even.
Games like Balatro or Stardew Valley are absolute unicorns. Most smaller teams and solo devs that have a constant stream of some revenue through Steam need to work on the side to earn a living.
The point they’re making is pointless. Should have clarified my self better. I think this is an issue of behemoth companies are eating the big chunk of market and not leaving anything for the smaller creators to make a living. Same like McDonald’s is everywhere squishing smaller burger shops.
This a market problem not steam. The article points it like it’s steam’s fault. IMHO steam does its best to support indie devs. they even patch their games so they’d have a smooth release (sorry its a Reddit link)
I'd argue that that is entirely a good thing overall.
It means that Steam is very open to Indie devs (something we already know) that don't make as much money but are passion projects for the creators.
If they're making enough from the...let's call them prestige titles...to be able to afford to give indie devs a place to host their passion projects and maybe get more eyes on it, than I see no problem with that.
No idie dev is going into it thinking they're going to be next giant thing. They just want to share their work and maybe make a few bucks. And Steam gives them that, PLUS the chance that maybe they'll be a Rimworld or a Hollow Knight; something that sparks a giant success for them.
I’m not sure how they started, but Brotato came from a very small studio, and rose up to top-played on Steam Deck and some other charts. It made their creators a lot of money, because they were lucky, sure, but also because they made a very good game and had a platform to sell it from.
As far as I know, Valve’s monetisation scheme for developers is also quite fair. I might be one of those fanboys, but I think they deserve it to some extent. There’s much worse players out there, and with the money Valve is making and the market share they have now, they could absolutely be one of the bad ones and not care.
Is it luck though?
It's hard to make a game. It's much harder to make a good game that pushes all the right buttons.
I play some of these games that probably make well under average, and there are very distinct reasons why they didn't take off.
I believe that there’s always luck involved to some extent. You have a very valid point, though, if a game is THAT good, at some point success becomes the only plausible outcome. So definitely not a hill I would die on.
I would argue that a significant amount of them are but that's not the point.
Valve is a for profit company, you have to pay to upload your games there and they take a cut of any sale. The article literally say that most games don't make anything.
Sure. You have to rent a stall at farmer's market if you want to sell your corn, too instead of selling it to a larger distributor. No body is saying otherwise.
The point is that having Steam as an option as an indie dev rather than having to connect to a larger publisher in order to get your work out there, is a good thing. The fact that some titles don't make money isn't part of it. It's the fact that Steam at least allows these devs to cut out the middle man (the publisher). Maybe it'll work and be a hit. Maybe it won't. But at least they have the option to try.
No dev should consider releasing their game on the private store/platform of an evil corporation that promotes gambling to kids and who's ceo is a billionare with a fleet of megayachts. Many devs have no better option because they are trying to make a living and catch up with life (unlike valve ceo who makes billions through questionable practices). If the market is so much centralized around certain publishers and distribuition platforms you can thank greedy corporations that for decades shaped the system to be what it is.
So in your mind, no one who is self-publishing a book should put it on Amazon. No one who is trying to sell their product on etsy should use PayPal. No one who is just trying to get rid of a few things around the house should use Facebook Marketplace.. etc...
Welcome to reality. Sometimes the best of a bunch of bad options has to do. Should these companies all be put int he ground. Yes. But if we let perfect be the enemy of good, we never make any progress.
Exactly, don't use these platforms they belong to evil corporations who among other things are helping israel government in a genocide
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_companies_involved_in_the_Gaza_war
You are on lemmy defending corporations, ask yourself, are you making progress?
I'm not defending anybody.
I'm saying that if you're an author (for example) that wants to self publish instead of trying to find a big publisher to accept your manuscript, what are you going to do? Email a copy to anyone who wants to buy it? No...of course not. Similarly, if you're a dev who wants to release a game without going through a big publisher like Activision or Bethesda or whatever...what are you going to do? Other than Steam and Itch.io, there aren't many places to do that.
Does it suck? Yes. But the reality is that if we want to get our work out into the public, regardless of monetary concerns, we have to roll around in one mud puddle or another. Our only choice (until that changes) is how deep of a puddle we choose to get in.
I write about it here on lemmy
Why there aren't many places to do that? How was it in the past? What changed? How you can improve that?
To me it sounds like the reality is that you are choosing visibility over doing what is good
Nobody is forcing games to be released on Steam. In fact some of the biggest games played today are not on Steam. Roblox is not on Steam. Fortnite is not on Steam. Minecraft is not on Steam. Any game made by Riot games is not on Steam. Even smaller indie titles can easily get by without being on Steam. Vintage Story is not on Steam, Hytale is not on Steam. There are more titles whose name I can't remember off the top of my head that are doing just fine without being on Steam.
Most devs put their game on Steam because not everyone wants to handle the stuff that comes with setting up your own game delivery platform and, whether you like it or not, Steam actually helps with visibility. I can give you an example right now. I had never heard of "The Black Grimoire: Cursebreaker" until Steam recommended it to me a few days ago. It's been out for 2 years and I've probably not heard of it because there's barely anything about it on the web. Now it's in my to play list. An indie dev just made some money because Steam advertised that game to me. In fact there are a lot of indie titles I've picked up due to Steam regularly promoting games through things like the Steam Next Fest or themed sales. I've also found games through the Steam Discovery feature but I don't use it that much because it tends to mix in popular games I'm not interested with games I am interested in and most of the time I find what I want to buy without even needing to use it.
So your "evil greedy corporation" spiel only works when you ignore all the things Steam does that end up beneficial for indie games.
Nobody is forcing you to have a computer, buy gasoline or even own an house.
Have you ask yourself why you never heard about it? Read my previous comment.
I believe you are ignoring all the evil greedy shit they do, such as promoting gambling to kids.
Of course not. Having a computer is a convenience thing, owning a house should be a fundamental human right but under the capitalist system it's also turned into a convenience. Gasoline is also a convenience and as a matter of fact I don't regularly buy gasoline because I avoid driving a car whenever possible. You might not even understand that you're actually arguing against your own point here. The developers all have other options than Steam and just like me picking what conveniences I'm okay with they simply pick Steam because it's the most convenient option for them. And just like my moral code makes me pick the less convenient option when it comes to gas so can devs pick a less convenient option when they're not okay with Steam, I even brought examples of developers choosing to not be on Steam and still be successful. The idea that they have to use Steam to make a living is ridiculous.
You mean this?
So publishers and distribution platforms are the reason why the game has barely any presence on Youtube and really no other communities beyond a wiki and a Steam community. That's a borderline conspiracy theory.
And a counter-question to you. If the publishers and distribution platforms have shaped the system in a way to make sure you see what they want you to see, why did a distribution platform recommend this game to me in the first place? And why 2 years after it released? I thought they were supposed to feed me only the games they want me to buy not the games I want to buy.
I'm not ignoring those things. I'm all for criticizing Valve for promoting gambling and trying to skirt the gambling laws (which would also make it illegal for them to let kids gamble). I've criticized them on this very point before and I don't mind criticizing them on this point for as long as they're doing it. That said.
This is simply not relevant to the current discussion because the money Valve makes from gambling goes straight to Valve and has nothing to do with indie developers. Unless you want to somehow drag indie developers into this gambling shit. Honestly you'd look less like a rambling hater if you could focus your criticism instead of lashing out at everything.
In case you haven't noticed if you search for a video on youtube you get 3 video results and the rest is all ads and sponsored content
You seem to be implying that most games are worthy of turning a profit. Have you played most games on steam? There are a lot of really bad ones.
Misleading. There is so much slop made from free assets just thrown together or AI programmed messes and such on steam that it should read "little more than 1% of games on steam are worth your time" indie devs get a decent amount of love, especially at launch. But steam has such a backlog of games available that it gets pretty wild. If we're counting DLCs, OSTs, and games, I'm really not surprised.
Yea the amount of shovelware and AI shit that's put on the platform is massive. Steam just does a really good job keeping that shit from taking over your front store page... unlike the playstore...dunno how it is on iOS...
If steam were doing a "really good job," none of that garbage would be on the store in the first place.
Then literally no indie games would ever get popular.
There's a difference between a quality indie game and shovelware.
Ok. So what percentage of the games launched on steam are shovelware vs quality indie games. And where is that line? And who makes that decision?
Are you joking? Are we pretending we can't tell when a game is shovelware and valve can't moderate their own platform? They just don't care.
I swear people will defend steam no matter what.
This is absolutely subjective. Assets flips could count, but I've played and enjoyed several of those. Flappy Bird style games kind of fall into this category.
This is subjective. Just because a full grown adult with different tastes doesn't like something doesn't mean it's shovelware. A 5 year old kid might love it.
But, here's a better question. How much does it cost to moderate a platform with that many games?
Because they do moderate the platform just not in a way you like.
Literally in this comments section there's someone else talking about how they delist or de-prioritize games that don't get good feedback. You just want them to not allow those games at all.
The game Horses was moderated off the platform. You just want moderation to fit your specific model that you made up in your head.
It seems that's partially taken into account:
The only caveat is that revenue is estimated, so there can be big swings in the data.
Candy Crush makes about a billion dollars a year. GTA V makes about 500 million from selling shark cards. Whatever happening at the steam store to warrant an article like this isn't on steam, its 100% on consumers being dumbasses.
It's also on many people wanting to play AAA games and there not being many good AAA games so everyone plays the same few good ones
It's also just the fact that some games are better than others. For every Factorio and Hollow Knight, there are a hundred other games that aren't as good that significantly less people buy.
Really topics against Steam are getting ridiculous.
Like ok. Is Steam supposed to force players to buy shit games too so that the distribution curve flattens?
I'm gonna pump so many AI shit games so I can get my fair share 🥰
Less ridiculous than the people defending a corporation who makes money promoting gambling to kids and that is owned by a billionare with multiple private yachts
Nah sorry, your fixation on the yachts is still weirder.
Like, shoot me if I ever give that much of a fuck about how people spend their money, y'all are just fucking envious internet town gossips complaining the neighbours got a bigger car again this year while you .
Mind your own pocket, let Gabe worry about his.
Humanity is on the verge of extinction due to climate change, you should perhaps start to care about how people spend their money, a megayacht burn 1000 gallons of fuel in an hour.
Still a drop in the ocean compared to any of the actual needle-movers, I truly could not care less.
It's one guy using one yacht and having others parked, and even if he rented them out it's next to nothing compared to much more wide ranging systemic issues going unchecked.
I'll keep worrying about the real issues, you can keep obsessing over celebrity gossip.
He owns multiple megayatchts and now a company that make these
yea i figured out
Still a single person, still can't use them all at once.
You understand that the clientele of a megayacht shipyard is very limited, right? This is a non-issue.
Let's focus on real issues, like the move to nuclear, or finding better ways to do metallurgy than exporting all of it to the third world where health and pollution regulations don't apply, as if it's not the same atmosphere we're polluting, shall we?
Luxury purchases only a handful of people can even afford is really the bottommost thing on the list, short of regulating how much you're allowed to eat beans to reduce your methane output.
ETA: For the sake of checking my biases, I ran the numbers.
If Gabe lived every single day of a year on one of his yachts and they ran the full 1000 gallons of fuel you claim (which I am taking in good faith) this would amount to 77,850 metric tons of CO2 produced. Which is indubitably an impressive amount, until you realise that 32.8 Billion tonnes have been released in the atmosphere in 2024.
So yeah, I don't give a toss about your weird fucking fixation.
It is a lot of CO2, it's still not even a drop in the bucket compared to what we need to actually address, it is off by 6 orders of magnitude, get a grip, he'd have to own 5000 of the damn things and run them all year round to even add up to 1% of global pollution.
I understand you, you are a normal person so the idea of using two megayacht at the same time sounds off but that's what billionares do. Many of them move around the whole fleet and jump from one ship to the other as it please them. The megayachts are operated by hundreds of workers.
Okay, but explain how consumer preferences are somehow Steam's fault?
If you told me it was that way because Steam was boosting AAA games and suppressing indie titles, then okay, you have a valid reason to criticize Steam for that, but that doesn't seem to be the case.
Valve is a for profit company, they make money by advertising games and selling them, their website is literally an ad shelf.
It seem the case to me that they are advertising the shit out of certain games with ads as big as the entire screen.
"Walmart advertises some of the things they sell, but never advertise the off brand water" ok, and???
Walmart and valve are two corporations.
Ok, I guess its my turn.
And?
Even etsy creators advertise their more profitable products instead of things that barely sell. Apart from the top banner on the store page everything steam advertises is based on demand, calculated by sales numbers and whishlists, and relevance to your library.
Even decentralized platforms like Lemmy operate under this exact principal, a decentralised gamestore would show you the same games as steam does.
If you want to see everything, you are free to set your steam store to new releases. Have fun sifting trough hundreds of cash grabs and "garbage" first time passion projects to find a single interesting game.
There are no ads on lemmy
OP, can you link the original research? It's an excellent site:
https://weloveit.io/developers/steam-revenue-report/
Behold the whole story of every economy
Pareto principle at work
Pareto principle writ large.
That or Sturgeon's law.
As you can see from about 2020 onwards, there was an absolute DELUGE of trash games. Of course the majority of games aren't going to make anything, Steam makes zero effort to curate anything. A thousand games can get released per day and the vast vast majority of them you never even notice.
At a current year's rate it is around 66 games released A DAY. Nobody has time for that. Nor money. And FUCKING CERTAINLY no will to play asset flips and Ai slop.
If any of those 66 games would be good...
It's called Zipf's Law and it's a fundamental statistical probability formula found in many, many things, from languages to distribution curves.
VSauce had a good video covering this too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCn8zs912OE
This isn't the shocking statement they think it is.
It is not news to me that a handful of games have the most players, also considering people put low effort garbage on all stores constantly I don’t think the bottom 90% deserve anything
That seems like a good distribution for digital art and entertainment.
It would be weird if it didn't follow a power law distribution.
Aka the Pareto Principle. Aka "80% of everything is shit".
That's Sturgeon's law (originally 90%). If you want to condense Pareto, it's "80% of value is created in 20% of the time".
Thanks, I knew I was forgetting yet another name for it. Lots of names for the same, very common underlying phenomenon. As it applies to this case, Pareto would be "80% of the value earned by 20% of the games". But point being: it would be weird if that wasn't the distribution we saw.
Would think that could apply to most markets. Almost the weird 80-20 "rule" that goes for most things.
Alternative Headline: Sturgeon's Law Continues to Exist
Did they include AI slop, dogshit mobile game ports, low effort games, and the like in the dataset? If so, I'm not surprised.
Like, lots of games just aren't very good, and lots of games are pretty niche. If you want to make a lot of money in the games industry, selling an indie game on steam is not the way. make a preditory mobile game instead.
I think its unfortunate because there's a lot of games that fall into that next ~15-25% that are decently good games (though sometimes flawed) but won't make enough to let the developers survive a second game.
That being said I don't think there is a particularly easy solution, and to Valve's credit, they have tried unique approaches to combat this, but it's still a problem.
I agree. It’s not a platform issue it’s a market saturation issue. You see this in many fields where the product is frequently a passion project. (Mostly art, music etc.) Some people will keep creating regardless of the earnings and throw the stats. Not that the stats really matter. Not much you can do… aside from UBI.
How many of this are AI garbage? It seems like no coincidence that the number of games corresponds to the increased AI push.
I would love to know how this breaks down with you cut out all the slop products.
Maybe I’ve been lucky but I didn’t see AI garbage games in Steam yet.
However, ultra low quality copycats or “XYZ Simulator” with barebones scenarios and basic assets have been flooding Steam for years.
The adult category is even worse, very badly made games, some clearly being taken from a tutorial for learning the game engine, sparkled with some few hentai images in the background and sold by a very low price.
Yup, asset flips have been a problem for over a decade. Nothing to do with AI.
I think this is really where it's at. If this article was supposed to criticize Steam, the criticism should be that they will need to do better QA to fend off the waves of crappy AI (or otherwise low-quality) games in the future that are beginning to inflate the catalog, and not an economic one that makes this sound like some uneven distribution of wealth (which it really is not).
Is this presented as a bad thing?
It's a thing. If you're an inspiring indie dev, it's hard numbers to let you know if you can work with these numbers. If you're just a gamer, they probably don't matter at all.
The 1% numbers makes me question by there aren't more AA initiates out there. we don't get many 5-10m budget games these days, but the typical AA game is (conservatively) making 15m dollars. So if you can turnournd a game on the level of Claire Obscur (which IIRC had a 10m dollar budget) in 4 years, there should be openings for potential success.
Guess it comes down to the lack of investors who care at that level (who wouldn't just throw it at AI)
It's certainly not a good thing for startup indie devs putting months of work into a project.
its indicative of accessibility for startups. the way a company would change the metric is not gatekeep the smallfry.
Or promote new and interesting works as opposed to maximising profit by promoting established studios and games with already high levels of prestige.
The reality is they want you to find those other games to maximize profit, which is where all of their work into recommendation engines and personalized release calendars has gone. But it's not going to convince millions of people who want to play NBA 2K that they should buy the latest indie game instead.
And yet every time a Triple A title drops it gets a custom banner on the store page and a guaranteed panel on the recommendation window, even when those indie titles have outsold them in the past without preferential treatment.
Networking is always important. And those AAA studios probably have dedicated lines of support to Valve that can open up such deals way more easily than an indie trying to email support.
Valve also does try to highlight some successful indies, but that's a small slice of indie pie. While every other AAA studio is that direct line gained from events, existing networks reaching out, etc.
Yes, I'm aware that what Valve does maximises profit, but it's a trade-off with quality as we've seen the larger studios are more likely to be cashgrabs than even some asset flips.
Someone is probably far more likely to pick up a game like that that they just didn't know was out rather than one they've never heard of before. If they could pull that trick on any game, they probably wouldn't let a day go by without a banner, like today.
im surprised they do promotion for free honestly but I doubt it would have much of an effect but not being so accessible to indie would make them look a lot better for articles like this.
What kind of store doesn't do promotion? What universe do you live in for promotion to have no effect?
Many stores the producers bring their things in. It was not uncommon to get stuff from them to put up but the store itself generally did not make it. They just put up what they get. I don't know what universe you live in but that is how mine has in meat space where you are making the comaparison. Promotions were usually more and bigger for the big guys. the guy who sold his homemade stuff maybe had a bit of space by the register.
Considering valve is a for profit company and that steam is centralized and closed source third party software launcher with ads i would say these numbers are not entirely the result of "natural law" like many idiots are claiming but the result of corporations shady business practices.
I mean as opposed to all the non for profit and open source video game stores I totally get it.
80-20 rule still holds true, huh?
A lot of games on Steam hold zero interest to me. AI is just the newest form of slop. Beyond that what I see is a hell of a lot more games are being released in the last 4 years. That means more competition but also many have not been around long enough to build up over time revenue. To a certain extent you are comparing life time revenue to launch revenue. On AAA that probably doesn't matter as much but on the lesser hyped indy games I think it would be an important distinction.
The lower the barrier to entry, the longer the tail.
I don't get it. Why leave out Adult Only titles? Why don't they count?
Given the way they estimate sales numbers, it's probably too different a curve. I imagine there's both a lot of bottom of the barrel adult games that still manage to get some sales off (as opposed to none for most non-adult games) and there's a lower sales ceiling that still results in surprisingly strong revenue compared to a game with similar reviews.
This is why I follow reviewers and curators that sift through the bottom 99% to find interesting indie stuff. It's absolutely jaw-dropping what never shows up on Steam's store landing page or queues.
Splattercat is one such reviewer. He tends to prefer dystopia and post-apocalypse style stuff, and clearly works hard to bring interesting titles some more exposure: https://www.youtube.com/@splattercatgaming
Thats why steam is filled with indie games, because they dont make a dime and enjoy it.
I bet if you removed the top 100 games from this it would look a lot more fair. Just looking at this chart there are a ton of games making 10k+
Surely coconut simulator makes up 80% of all revenue. It's amazing
Deponia on the chart showing 470,000,000 licenses and $30 total revenue
Deponia is like the AOL disks of games. They give it out for free constantly
You got the joke!
Been a long day, thanks for giving an internet stranger a chance to let out a sharp exhale through my nose and a sensible chuckle.
Income inequality! We need to do something!
whales prop up the whole industry
Gamedev is a pipe dream folks, meant to create steady labor force for publishers to squeeze work from for profit because they fire you after your game gets released, even if it does well.
By the way, Valve can do more here. This is something they can choose to invest more in. People don't have to be satisfied with the effort Valve has made so far and can instead choose to expect more.
Indie games pump Valve's stock, popular or not---they should get some profit sharing even if they don't sell IMO but that's just me. Like a community dividend. Unfortunately, not too many people demand more from Valve.
Hopefully, by "stock" you mean available supply of games and not stock as in the stock market, since Valve is a private company and isn't traded.
As for profit sharing... no. That would incentivise even more porn AI slop games to be dumped on there, as if that wasn't already a problem. The "content farms" that are just going to churn out crap... would get all of the community share. And large companies would very likely ignore Steam going forward because again, potentially less profit. Unless it comes from Valves share, which that doesn't make a lot of business sense to give up revenue in order to pay those who weren't successful, a "participation award" of a paycheck.
Stock? They're private bub.
How do you decide what qualifies for the community dividend? Does every publisher get an amount from the dividend? Is the dividend a pool of earnings that has to be split evenly? Are there devs that don't qualify for the dividend? Is it because they make too much money? Or because the thing they created is ai slop uploaded specifically to syphon free money away from the dividend? You either have very wealthy devs taking from the pool or you have people who shouldn't be allowed to call themselves devs taking money from the pool, either way it's unfair to the devs who poured their heart and soul into a project nobody heard of.
Its just an idea to get the ball rolling homie, my point is is there is room for investigation into this and Valve have the resources to do it, and no one demands anything from them to use their massive resources to alleviate an issue they have the data on and can choose to work on.
I thought I was adding to the discussion. I wasn't dismissing your idea, I was providing a perspective on what could go wrong and asking how that might be handled.
Try to say anything bad about the all-father and you will be flooded in downvotes …
Steam is gross, popularized the “own nothing” model (along with loot boxes), and just has a bunch of (very passionate) fanboys because it’s the least gross option (barring gog, which they often conveniently ignore), but this is more a problem of publishers consolidating and buying studios, giving some games obscene marketing budgets. The overwhelming majority of games are released by people whose marketing amounts to making (not promoted) social media posts on an account no one follows. Meanwhile Ubisoft, Microsoft, take two, etc have the capital and connections to dominate the press, social media, YouTube, etc
Best game ever won’t make a dime if no one knows about it. Even if you can get some pull it’s hard to compete with the game that everyone is talking about. That game is also probably more expensive, which theoretically gives you an edge, but in practice much of the time probably means your game isn’t getting purchased if the consumer is also hyped about gta6 or whatever
One measure they could take is to significantly lower or even eliminate their cut for niche games. They currently do the opposite, the largest cut (30%) comes in until your game makes 10 million, then progressively gets lower (25% 10-50m, 20% 50+m). A lower bracket that says like, 0 to 10% if your game makes under 300k or whatever. Based on this article they clearly make the majority of their revenue from heavy hitters so this would barely impact them
Valve is a for profit private company, the platform and the ads on steam are designed to boost their profits not to promote other people work. If you go on steam website right now you will see ads for 1% games as big as the entire page.
Those things are not mutually exclusive?
It's really sad to see in this place among others so many people defending a for profit corporation that belongs to a billionare and his centralized closed third party software launcher. Anyone arguing this is the law of nature should take a break from videogames and go outside to enjoy nature.
In a vacuum it sucks, but we’re grading on a curve here. The nice thing about valve is that it’s asleep at the wheel. Yes they’re making ridiculous amounts of money but they could be making more if they decided to “develop” their platform, and it would be bad for everyone. Cthulhu sleeps and I for one would prefer the situation continue.
As for the billionaire…. I have no strong opinion about him, but again we’re grading on a curve here, it’s amazing how few countries he’s ruined or pedos he’s been in photos with, I have limited hate to spread around and I don’t have sufficient justification to smear any on him.
It reminds me of the manufactured hate on Taylor Swift.
Yea, she’s rich; but being rich alone, and using a plane, is not the direct cause of everyone’s misery. It’s often a red flag, yes, and can point to other things. We can argue they should pay more taxes, but even more we argue that they shouldn’t have intense control over our politics. And from what I see, Gabe and Swift don’t.
Yeah, if I had a lot of money, I'd probably buy a boat. Probably not 20 or whatever, but idk. I'd probably fly a lot of places. Probably not that many, but idk. Regardless, I 100% still would not traffic or rape children. Just the kind of guy I am, I guess.
Name one other company that's doing more for open source and open platforms than Valve.
They've helped push gaming on Linux from a very niche process to basically having Windows native games work better on Linux than on Windows. They do this via Proton which they upstream into WINE (all open source and free to use by anyone).
They've silently funded an x86 to ARM emulator for years and it's entirely open source (anyone can use it).
The Steam client is a 1st class citizen on Linux. It doesn't matter that their client is closed source, because all the tools they employ is open source. The client is mostly just the store portion of their stuff. The actual tools that run the games are open source.
They're also the only major games store that supports Linux natively (itch.io exists, and they're great, but Steam is so much bigger).
Name a company that does even half of that. Just one company.
Any non profit company who's products isn't a proprietary third party software launcher.
They have built a semi-monopoly on videogames relying for two decades on closed source products and windows, they are now looking at the linux share because microsoft in the past years made bullish acquisitions in the videogames industry.
If the client doesn't matter that much that's even more reasons to release the source code.
companies usually make money, non profit organizations help people
You're being disingenuous. You know full well the context of the argument precludes non-profits.
You might want to check your math on that. Steam on Windows was originally released in 2003, and released on Linux in 2013.
And the reason for their interest has nothing to do with Microsoft's game studio acquisitions, and everything to do with Microsoft's attempts to lock down the Windows ecosystem back in the Windows 8/RT days.
No one said it doesn't matter. It's their software/platform/service. They can do whatever they want, and it's their right to do so. If you don't want to use their platform, you don't have to.
Usually. But the fact that Valve's interests align with the benefits of its userbase isn't a bad thing. Making money isn't a crime, and making money while building a system people like also isn't a bad thing.
You seem to have a strange hatred towards Valve for simply existing. Are you friends with Tim Sweeney or something?
Both of them.
Exactly, don't use it
My interests are in free, open source and decentralized platforms. What about yours?
Making billions is a crime because there is no good way to do it, you have to be greedy and use shady methods to gain so much money. Valve promotes gambling to kids and makes a billion a year on microtransactions.
Billionares and corporations do not simply exist, they are built on the exploitation of others
Between 2003 (the launch of Steam on Windows) and 2013 (the launch of Steam on Linux) Microsoft acquired two game studios. Whereas in 2018 alone (the start of their acquisition spree) they acquired six.
Well, I want to use it. There is no better game store with as many good deals, and that supports Linux.
Show me a game store that supports Linux with a good selection of games of modern and major game titles.
Also, Steam directly supports and funds a plethora of open source tools that benefit everyone.
Agreed, which is why I use Linux and support companies that also support Linux.
You're right about 99.99+% of cases. And I'm not defending Valve as some altruistic company. But lumping in Valve with the likes of Amazon, Oracle, Nvidia, Monsanto, Elon Musk, etc, simply on the amount of money they make is desingenous at best, but frankly is insane.
You're one of those people that have a militant mindset when it comes to FOSS that gives open source a weird and bad reputation.
Open source literally cannot exist without companies using it to make money. The majority of funding for things like development of Linux itself comes directly from donations from for-profit companies.
Hell, the historically two largest distributions by install count (Ubuntu and Fedora) are developed and maintained by for-profit companies.
Say "hi" to Tim Sweeney. Tell him Canada is just fine without him moving here.
I suggest you to not play proprietary junk that belongs to evil corporations.
https://libregaming.org/
https://libregamewiki.org/Main_Page
If you feel the urge to play to certain videogames and can't resist you are probably addicted to these.
So do other evil corporations like microsoft and google. They do more damage than good.
Valve ceo owns more megayachts than bezos or elon musk and his company promotes gambling to kids and sell you games under DRMs.
They are just as bad
You are defending a billionare corporation, do you have any reputation at all?
You have no idea what you're talking about, and frankly you sound like a psycho.
Companies like EA make up a small fraction of the available games. Most of them are small studios with people who have a passion for making games.
Which proves my point that FOSS can't exist in a vacuum. I hope your using the Hurd kernel, otherwise you're still benefiting from and using the work of evil corporations!
He owns a shipyard. It's a side passion of his. And most of his vessels serve a scientific purpose, like marine research.
He seems a bit like James Cameron in that sense. Cameron's first passion was marine research, and he used his earnings from film production to fund his own research stuff.
There is NOTHING wrong with someone who made bank using their money for their passion. It means they keep they money flowing through the economy instead of just sitting in a bank account.
Then either you are ignorant of the world or have a child's understand of things.
A bit, ya.
Yes, lots of people know me. Therefore I have a reputation.
Well, I think Steam deserves a 30% cut of game revenue for doing basically nothing.
EDIT: Why the downvotes? I love Steam! I am one of you! :( I failed the shibboleth.
Dont list your game on Steam then, sell it yourself.
good let's repeat it louder: DONT LIST YOUR GAME ON STEAM
So you admit there is value. Got it.
While Steam isn't "doing nothing", I do think 30% cut of sales for the first $10M is a lot especially for indie and single developers that will never reach this target, and the larger/more known the publisher the easier it will be for them to hit the lesser % of sales tiers (reduced to 20% after $50M, but I can't remember the in-between tiers atm).
Itch.io, by comparison, takes 10% of sales as a default, but publishers can set it to whatever. Indie devs really should look more to using that as their store if they're cash strapped, and people should really get their indies off of there if possible.
Again, I don't disagree with you regarding Steam sometimes getting way too gassed up by gamers, and not having any incentive to change because of it. That's because the bar is so fucking low for the industry as a whole.
But I wouldn't call it "rent seeking". They make deals with publishers to have games come to PC instead of being locked into console exclusives, they are making consumer friendly hardware, they are pushing the Linux gaming sphere, and they have actual customer service for their storefront. All of this should be standard in the gaming sphere, but because it isn't, Valve and Gabe are seen as gods.
steam community features and workshop are both significant value propositions for some games (rimworld, oxygen not included) and the remote LAN feature is cool
What features does Amazon shopping have other than haul, the ai, and the main buying thing?