All excellent, I'm sure.
this post was submitted on 25 Dec 2024
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How many of those are $0.99 hentai titles with like an hour of gameplay, though.
That's like 20 gameplay sessions for 99¢, that's only like 5¢ per.
Only around 17,000 or so. The rest are minimum effort Unity asset flips.
I do appreciate that it used to be too much effort to get a game onto Steam, but this situation is hardly better.
Some of the most-played steam games are "Banana" and "Cats" where you literally click it every few hours and get steam item drops. Basically NFTs where people try to get rare items, but even more braindead because the developer, at any time can make more tokens.
And how many are nearly entirely AI generated?
Idk, AI is usually very good at translation into English, and most of the translations are garbage.
Dude, I legit read that as "hentai titties" 😂
Also true
My friend is a connoisseur, and he says both the quantity and quality has been declining this year.
A terrible, terrible for Steam and ~~gooners~~ gamers this year
Discoverability is a huge problem on Steam because there's so many games releasing, you can't really keep up.
18,000 games is almost 50 per day on average. That's 50 titles fighting for your attention and wallet every single day.
If you don't get noticed because you didn't spend half of your development budget on marketing, or your game didn't pick up well with influencers or more traditional media like reviews, you're just kinda fucked. No matter how good your game might be.
Speaking about quality, how many of those 18k titles were uninspiring, asset flipping slop?
The Steam Next Fest is how I found most of the good indie games I've played. Making a good demo will put you above 99% of the cruft out there.
I have picked up the same habit. I'll download and test a couple of dozen demos every next fest, and then wishlist/buy the ones that are good. I played 108 demos this year, and some of my favorite games this year were demos like this: Kill Knight, Last Plague Blight, Karate Survivor, Empty Shell...
that and word of mouth or just cool gameplay vids. dude parrying an explosion got me to withlist va proxy
I remember that clip of the dude parrying a nuke, can't remember the game but it stuck with me.
It doesn't help that Steam store is a nightmare to navigate.
Releasing demos is a great way to succeed. It doesn't take me more than 5 minutes to decide if it's something I want to continue playing.
Putting videos of nothing but cut-scenes is a great way to ensure I keep scrolling but every title seems to take this approach.
I've always dreamed of a world where game demos were mandated by law. Some products can't be tested out easily, but just about any video game really can.
I use steam's two hour return window as a demo.
That's unironically the reason I don't even attempt to find games on Steam anymore.
I'll only go looking if I see a cool game in a YouTube video or see a cool article about something coming out soon that looks interesting. Otherwise, same.
It depends, sometimes I go down the rabbit hole on their "Games Like This" suggestions on my favorite games' store pages. I actually just found a cool one that way the other day called Ad Fundum. It was a funny coincidence since it came up suggested on a completely unrelated game, but I'd been wanting a game centered around digging underground.
But yeah, with literally over 100,000+ games on Steam, it's become way too difficult to find quality stuff that isn't AAA or indie games that struck it lucky with popular streamers giving them exposure. Which sucks for indie devs that actually put out their passion projects since it makes discoverability so hard, as others have pointed out here.
I've always found the "games like this" section to be so superficial that it very rarely actually has games which I'd consider to be similar to the one I'm looking at. Just looking at the store right now, for "Aquaria" which I really enjoy, it recommends Skyrim as a similar game. Sure they both are open world adventure RPGs... but I definitely would not consider them to be similar games.
I can recommend the site steampeek.hu for this. It shows much better recommendations for similar games than steam itself.
Thank you!
It's definitely a crapshoot a lot of times. But there's usually at least one or two on there that are similar enough that I might genuinely be interested in it. You can also forcefully hide games from showing up in suggestions, iirc. I've never done it, but some of my friends have recommended doing so in order to make Steam dig deeper for finding lesser known stuff. I'm not that big of a connoisseur, though.
Edit:
I recalled correctly, and it seems they've even made the Ignore button a lot easier to find (or I just never noticed before):
Guys we have soooo much shovelware, asset flips and softcore porn that's barely a game. This is very much a good thing!!!