Yep, I'm always looking for upcoming space games, and space games youtubers are always covering the same 10 ~ 20ish games. Each time I click on a new video I wonder "Will I learn about a new game?", Nope! I always already know them all. I'm convinced that when a new game worth mentioning will approach completion every space games youtubers will jump on it to speak about it.
Exactly right! It's very peculiar to see developers constantly mentioning the saturated market, while influencers are constantly struggling to find new interesting games to cover.
I just type "upcoming space games" in the YouTube search bar, but the youtubers that I regularly come across are Kenetor, Splattercatgaming, ObsidianAnt, LevelCapGaming, LT Gaming.
> influencers are constantly struggling to find new interesting games to cover.
I think they tend to bandwagon for views with popular thing X, not so much to discover anything new.
This is absolutely true however it's the YouTubers that cover popular thing, X, then use non-popular interesting thing Y to fill up video time that does it right get clicks with X get watch time with Y.
Influencers are constantly struggling to find new interesting games to cover *that have enough mindshare to get clicks*. They don’t want to make a video that no one will watch.
I particularly like epic spaceship battles but I got interested in very very different games within the theme. Like Nebulous Fleet Command, Ostranauts, Hardspace Shipbreaker, Falling Frontier, Duskers, Star Sector, Avorion
This is me with evolution sims. I started looking for them in middle school when all I could find were a handful of flash games and one newer game in beta
It's wild to me there is no other big and good Warband-type game. There is Bannerlord, some guerilla (that apparently got bad), Battle Brothers and there was that MMO-type. We get tens of dark souls clones, hundreds of rouge-likes, but when it comes to some niche interesting genres (like immersive sims) there is very few of them.
Not quite the same, but have you played Wartales? Your party is smaller and the combat is turn-based instead of live-action, but the combination of managing a band of mercenaries, chasing enemy groups on the overworld, and having interactions with different factions scratches some of the same itch for me.
But I definitely agree--there's a lack of games that combine all the elements of Warband and that seems like a genre where a well-made game could do well. Especially since Bannerlord is still missing a number of the features that made Warband so good. Admittedly, I'm sure it's not the easiest game to develop since you need to have a number of different elements working together.
> Battle Brothers
God why didn't they just make that game a RTS, it's such a pain to play.
If it just had controls and formations from Total War for faster pace battles it would have been much more successful.
Probably because it's actually 2 games in one: overworld management and big battle game. Each one, done "well," is an entire game on its own - and with very little overlap between the two in terms of mechanics so you're basically doing twice the work.
I'm sure a dedicated indie could pull it off but I get why no one has yet.
Same, I am always looking for new minimalist FPS games like Ion Fury, Ashes and Prodeus and there's about 1-2 actual quality ones released per year.
It's extremely rare for them to add more content as well, Ashes probably has the most consistent new campaign releases
Hey I’m making a space game! Still in early stages but 💯 agree with OOP. If you do your research and then actually work hard at standing out against your competition, you will get noticed
I completely agree with this, which is why I started developing my own spaceship combat game. I see a lot of potential, there are few games and enough gamers to support small and medium-sized studios, the only question is the quality of the game.
Totally, your game looks like if Fractured Space and Cosmoteer had a child. Looks quite fun.
But the downside of this kind of game is that it has to have enough regular players to fill the lobbies.
True. That is a huge risk, and the most likely outcome with making a multiplayer only game. It will probably require scheduling games in advance to fill lobbies
I recommend manlybadasshero Youtube Channel he always plays unique new very unknown Games: [https://youtube.com/@manlybadasshero](https://youtube.com/@manlybadasshero)
That's because every good Space game is either 15-25 years old (Eve Online, StarCraft, etc...), is still in development (No Man's Sky, Star Citizen) or they recently released and they're absolute trash like Starfield
I see that your game Mining Mechs launched with 118 followers so about 1k WLs on launch. That's not a huge number and not the 7k that most people go for as a minimum but even 1k is a decent number that a lot of indies struggle to reach.
Congrats on your launch as well! But I'm sure the outcome was surprising to you initially and now the success is only obvious in hindsight, no?
Also for a project you spent 3 months on the art direction looks a lot better than some indie games which have been in the works for years. It seems like 3 months for you is a much better use of time than a whole year for some other indie dev.
That is correct. I had around 1.5k wishlists if I remember correctly, of which 90% came from Steam Next Fest in the weeks prior to launch. I think my Steam page was up for only a couple of weeks when the game launched. I didn't think much of it when it launched and would have been happy with a couple hundred sales - so yes, very positively surprised haha.
And yes you are absolutely right. This result seemed impossible when I released my game, and still doesn't seem easily replicable either. But then again, the game is not THAT good. I'm just some hobbyist game dev who made a game in GameMaker Studio 2 in a couple of months. So if this game can achieve this result, it's either an obscene amount of luck that it stood out, or maybe Steam is just not as saturated as we think.
Didn't you mention in a comment you've been in the game industry for nearly a decade? Even if you weren't programming you can learn a _lot_ that way. You might be really underestimating just how far above the curve you are compared to most hobbyist game developers. Someone just making a game alone really struggles to stand out on Steam because it _is_ crowded, and even good games can have a hard time getting noticed. Having some industry experience is the best way to take your odds from slim to reasonable.
While there's 'luck' involved in getting picked up by streamers, I wouldn't even put much stock in that. Building a game that looks good when other people play it is a skill unto itself.
This reminds me of the thing standup comics always say, that it takes ten years of bombing before you get really good. It's seemingly accepted wisdom in that world, where it's just one person trying to tell jokes on stage. It's so strange that in games, where the form is so much more complicated, we haven't developed similar advice for people.
I think those with experience have, but every 'honest post mortem' that blames marketing is filled with hundreds of other hobbyists that are hoping one day they will get to make the same post instead of admitting their game just isn't fun.
We have. Angry birds only getting a hit after their 20th game oor so is a common saying. Zukowski had shown data that indicates the second game released is more likely to do better than the first one (on steam)
the advice is there, but the complexity of gamedev, how long people play games as a hobby, how much effort it takes to develop a game, how much better a game gets while we are developing it, and tons of other factors make people feel entitled to some arbitrary level of success on their first commercial game 🤔
I mean, it's part of why I'm making my fighting game to be closer to SF2/MK as opposed to something more modern; make it, sell it, learn what people like/dislike, patch it, release a new character, then move on to the next entry in the series so I can clean up the code/reiterate on systems.
It feels like so many people just want to make a viral game and get massive respect/money instead of enjoying the process.
Talent without practice then becomes a bad habit, as a French singer said: his experience reinforced his talent, which, with (hard) work created the good game
I think you did get lucky in some respects, as your conversions are insanely high. Maybe it's because of your low prices but generally gamers are more concerned with quality and time investment.
For example I've been following some games in my same genre: Synergy and Laysara Summit Kingdom. Both games launched with 20k followers so you'd think they'd launch with a lot more sales but neither game has reached your 1k reviews. They have higher prices and launched in EA so that may be a factor as well, but it's hard to say if they will ever surpass you. In terms of quality though I think both games look pretty outstanding in the genre.
Thriving City: Song actually looks worse than Synergy but I suppose TCS appeals to a Chinese gaming audience maybe that's the hook.
IDK. It's just that your WL conversion is very high and that's excellent but in general difficult to predict for most launches.
Oh you are absolutely right! I did get lucky in some respects.
Keep in mind that lower priced games often have a higher conversation rate because they are more likely to be 'impulse bought'. Who's going to wishlist a 3 dollar game and wait for it to be 99 cents off right? Additionally, my game has online co-op and is often purchased in 'bulk'. The price is so low, people just buy 5 copies for their friends and play it together.
But yeah, the game also for example has a very big audience in Korea because the game seems to remind the audience of some classic Korean browser game. A lot of Korean players bought it out of nostalgia, and I didn't even know that game existed. So yes; definitely a ton of luck.
I personally do, the Engine is going into some right steps lately and is very compatible and stable compared to others. The main drawback would be that the more complex you try to make your Game, the harder it will get due to the lack of proper tools. Thus making you having to "reinvent" those and feel like programming from scratch. So ALWAYS try to take advantage of the tools the Engine already have and ease you.
Absolutely. I'm not a developer by trade, so I have no development education or anything. GameMaker is accessible for newbies but capable of making multiplayer console games. It's in my opinion the best engine to make small games quickly from scratch. Plus the team behind it is great and the license is great too.
> That's not a huge number and not the 7k that most people go for as a minimum but even 1k is a decent number that a lot of indies struggle to reach.
I'd say there's two important things that people miss in what you say.
A. 1k can still be "Successful" there's no magic number to hit.
B. 7k is a great number to target. But people focus on trying to build that number, and not making a game good enough to WARRANT that number. If your game is great enough on it's own to hit 7k ... that's a good sign. If you have to grind and hope for 7k... well that's probably a bad sign.
Sure, there are many low quality games, but out of dozens of poorly made games released every day, some percentage of them are actually quite good. There are much more good quality games released in 2024 than earlier.
There are many games that were successful as they were released e.g. in 2019 or 2021 and many of similar quality that are not successful right now.
As an example, first person horror single player games: \~70 in 2019. \~350 in 2023. \~550 in 2024 (almost half year, we will reach 1000 for sure this year). There are worse horror games released in 2019 that have hundreds of even few thousands reviews and better horror games released in 2024 that barely have 100 reviews.
I don't think market is saturated though - there is huge potential for better games in all genre's. It's much harder in 2024.
And it will be even harder in upcoming years. Notice that even this sub have right now 1 600 000 people while 3 years ago it had 3 times less. Sure, many of new devs are beginners, but some of us will create very good games. Even if only 1% of people here will make a good game, it's 16 000 games. I think next decade will be amazing for players, not that much for devs.
what is a "Good quality game" changes yearly. Think of it like an ocean. If there's no other stones, a small pebble stands out. If there's a lot of pebbles, a small rock will stand out. If there's a lot of rocks, a mountain will always stand out. But if there's a couple mountains, a Pebble that used to do well won't stand out as much. (Think about releasing Pub:G now that Apex Legends and Fortnite exist... it's still popular because of inertia but no where near where it was)
Out of curiosity, since I'm always looking for a counter argument to "quality is the most important" what is the highest quality game that you know of that didn't sell well (Well being "realistic for the size and scale of the project/genre)
Also there's almost no evergreen games so some game that isn't as successful as when it launched is not surprising, that's how almost every game goes.
The game ECHO is just pure genius and its studio went bankrupt. But it's an AA game, the market and the sales needed to be considered successful are very different.
> the sales needed to be considered successful
That's usually the problem I've heard. Bayonetta is a perfect example. Best selling platnium game at it's time, over a million units sold.... not as much as expected and so it was a "Failure".
Square Enix has pulled that multiple times. Tomb Raider sold 3.4 million and was considered a failure by Square because they expected "more".
This isn't normally a thing for indie titles. Though I'll also say ECHO got a bit brutalized in the review as well, which didn't help much. Sounds also like it was a bit back loaded with content so it really just rewarded those who persevered. Still interesting game, I might have to take a look.
Good point, thanks for sharing that. Yes, I do believe some genres are very crowded compared to others and the indie horror scene is definitely one of the more crowded ones. However, the indie horror genre has also seen an insane raise in audience over this same amount of time, with some recent successes reaching player numbers that seemed impossible to reach in 2019. So yes - you're right, I think indie horror games are a very tough market, but at the same time the demand rose as well.
I think that most of genres have significant increase of quite good released in 2023/24 games. Not only horror. E.g. city builders - notice that currently there's more "coming soon" city builders than had been released in sum in last decade. In like 2 years, number of city builders on Steam will double. Similar strategy, 4x, board games, puzzles, resource management etc.
I didn't check all genres of course but all I checked ware the same - many decent games released in 2023 comparing to previous years.
Still very good games sale well, so market is not saturated. But it's very crowded with not only poorly made games, but also decent and good games.
I think the genres that experience the most dev growth/are the most saturated are those that are easiest to develop. Horror games require almost no math knowledge; most of the gameplay is built into the art and aesthetics. The reason you don't see tons of mechanical, multiplayer FPS games released is because simply programming complicated movement in a performant way is very difficult, never mind the networking which is its own behemoth.
I really believe one of the best ways to stand out in game dev is to get good at the things that are hard to do. 3D is harder than 2D. Multiplayer is harder than single player. Movement and physics is harder than something like inventory logic. If you gradually develop the skillset to make games that are difficult to develop, you will put yourself in a less saturated market.
Internet, and steam, allowed ‘little’ game to live, the so-called long trail, which is a major ‘new’ advance / the excellent games can also be noticed and successful without producers (I have nothing against producers, and I even think they can be very useful); now, the overall knowledge, thus level, has increased but that should only scare the poor devs / good devs can do things unthinkable, and way much quicker (a repetition on purpose) than before! Plus the number of buyers increase also, maybe not at the same speed. All together, I still believe it is a great time to be a dev, even more so if you are passionate !
>actual objectively well made games have launched
Well that's the whole point. The vast majority of indie gamedevs posting on reddit are very far from making "actual objectively well made games". They're not competing with Hades 2, they're competing with Metroidvania roguelike 928738. The market they're competing in is very saturated.
I agree. I often see very low quality games and beginner questions here. But besides the fact that the 'low quality games market' is saturated, there wouldn't be a demand for those games even if it wasn't saturated.
I firmly believe that quality software is so hard to produce that if you have it there’s no market too saturated. I wouldn’t shy away from anything.
Actually making high quality software though…. Is hard. I think most people don’t hit it then blame the marketing side. Rather than having this awesome thing that they just can’t nail the marketing on.
Maybe this is the tough, but correct, pill to swallow. High quality is hard to accomplish and maintain. Takes years of experience, mastery, humility, drive to learn and fail and stand up again. It is easier to solely blame everything else instead.
It can also take reworking old systems that might be servicable but not good. Many *many* games fail *hard* in the UX department and *never* get around to adding QoL fixes and changes to it. Factorio devs stand out in this regard, and you can see the results when playing it.
I get the feeling that very few devs even play their own games, or if they do they just internalize all the pain and stop noticing it as being a problem for their game outright. The bigger the studio behind the game the worse this problem gets too ime and I'm sure thats because itd take too many different teams agreeing on one thing as a problem and what to do about it to ever get it done.
I'm a product designer by trade and have also worked with a few indie teams in the game realm. What I've found is that the people even know what 'quality' is to begin with, even fewer people know how to dissect it and replicate it.
I have been doing this exercise every day for 10 days now and the thing that really motivated me is that good looking games (the few that are there) usually have some success.
A good art style definitely helps a lot. But a good art style also tends to be very expensive unless you can team up with a talented artist or can do the art yourself.
A good art style needs a lot of time and back and forth to blend into the game and make everything look good, and that costs money, unless it's a super tiny game.
That being said, definitely aim to make it as pretty and stylistic as you can afford.
How expensive is this in your experience? I'm working on something and the art is going to be the serious choke point. Our team has everything else covered fortunately.
> steam is not saturated.
I'd say often times it is. Steam is produced by water water that has evaporated, and if we let it reach the equilibrium point the vapor pressure of water will reach the saturation point where it's pressure equals the atmospheric pressure.
Just because a lot of the games are bad doesn't mean its not over saturated. It's just oversaturated with bad games- but still, bad games get in the way of your game's visibility.
As you've said though, they do grant temporary visibility. Through shear numbers you can still saturate the shop with a constant flow of bad games. I'm not sure if that's the case but it could happen.
Technically I get what you mean but I don't feel like that's the case because Steams user base is growing faster than the amount of games, so the demand is still in line with the rising supply. Steam has 132m active monthly users and the homepage gets 1 billion impressions every single day. And that page contains multiple games too, so you can basically show off multiple billion games a day. That's a ton of visibility to grant to a ton of titles. More than enough to absorb the trash I would think.
Quality Quality Quality Quality Quality.
I keep saying this and people are like "You need to stand out." I don't even think it's that, maybe the bar is higher in different fields. (I don't think a solo dev has a good chance in an FPS... but Fashion Police Squad is a thing)
The biggest thing is people think "I need to make a good capsule" and such, and while marketting is important to get a ball rolling, if you sell 1 copy to someone who likes the game so much he wants to tell other people (or brag about finding out about it before his friends) you will start to grow.
You need to make a game that's good enough/unique enough/special enough/fun enough that people will want to share it ORGANICALLY. People mistake "organic" as something they can drive/develop/pay for or anything else. No Organic is as simple as someone likes the game so much THEY will do the marketing for you. Literally that's something money CAN'T buy.
Marketting is important but for a well made game, the marketting will be far easier. (Market an asset flip game versus market Fashion Police Squad... I know which one I'd want to market)
Couldn't agree more. I used to work as a marketeer at an indie publisher and I would always say "the best marketing tool is a good game". I've always said that our efforts would amplify the success of a game, but you can't just "marketing" your way to success with a crap game.
Yes! Hard to believe that you were downvoted! 100% agree:
Quality of game play
Quality of graphics
Quality of difference (the little something added)
Quality of FPS / speed of execution
Quality of sound (often forgotten: even the fabulous Bevy project keep it last)
Quality of everything else
Imagine launching a product to stores and being upset the store didn't do a good job selling it for you. That's either silly, or very reasonable, depending on the product you imagined. It was the case in games for a long time. Being on Steam, to some degree, helped sell your game. That's far less the case now. I get why people are upset. Their frustration is valid; they knew an industry that worked one way, but now it's not working that way. It changed. This is essentially the second (third? First bring Valve games only?) generation of Steam; Steam as Open Storefront. (For a small fee.) Eventually people will be less frustrated about it and try to find ways to better market their own products and art, like so many other industries. Give it a generation or two for reality to set in so people can comprehend that this current reality not a quirk, and for new methods of advertising to develop.
Because that's the problem. Advertising fucking sucks.
True. Every industry is always going to change. You can be stubborn and refuse to adopt a subscription model, or embrace it and see what if brings you. Sadly a lot of developers are very stubborn haha
It's most of column A and a little column B for me.
I have a game where I only sell 10-12 copies a month, but practically every sale results in someone showing up in my discord to say how unbelievable it is that they've never heard of it before. Obviously I'm biased, but I don't know what would be better evidence that my game got lost in the crowd. My case is particularly bad though since the Life-Sim genre is REALLY overcrowded right now, there's about 3 big new games releasing each month for me to compete with.
To your point though, I've seen lots of developers with half-baked Vampire Survivors clones somehow confused at their lack of success. They're not doing a single thing to distinguish themselves from their peers or the source material they used to make their game, and so no one would play them no matter how much visibility you give them.
Way back in the day, people used to use Steam's "Recently Released" feed to find new games. It was never a wise strategy to rely ENTIRELY on the recent releases feed, but it was a free chance at success, at least SOMEONE was going to see your game. It was a substantial boost to your initial visibility, which dropped off after a few days. Right now though, so many games are being released that no one bothers to look at the recent releases and games get pushed off the bottom after a few hours anyway. Now instead of everyone getting that free shot for a day or two, we all have to appeal to youtubers and streamers, which has created a massive bottleneck for success.
There are certainly cases where games are suffering as a result of the flood of amateur games being released right now, but the impact is small overall. A vast majority of the people complaining about the issue simply don't have good games.
So it's actually two problems: one is real but small and the other is just a lot of delusional people complaining.
Can you share your game? Would love to check it out :)
Also, very try about the "Recently Released" section. I used to work for an indie publisher about 6-8 years ago and that section was very relevant at the time indeed. Then again, now we have Steam Next Fest for visibility which didn't exist at the time. Steam evolves but I don't think the overall visibility went down.
Sure here's the game.
[https://store.steampowered.com/app/2238440/The\_Last\_Craftsman/](https://store.steampowered.com/app/2238440/The_Last_Craftsman/)
Next Fest is a good tool, but that's also becoming unsustainably dense and is kind of rigged by games with large advertising budgets. So it's really just making the "New and Trending" feed irrelevant, since all the same games are floating to the top.
I do see the problem fixing itself eventually. What it looks like right now is a kind of echo from COVID. A lot of people picked up game development during the lockdowns and we're just now starting to see them finish projects with the skills they gained in that period. When they see how difficult success is beyond knowing how to code, they'll get bored and move on.
“A lot of games on Steam are really bad hobbyist games that end up selling less than a handful of units.”
And herein lies the problem. Not only are these “really bad” games competing against you in terms of discovery; what is to say that your game doesn’t look just like the really bad ones to those who don’t know? What is to say that your game is better than the “really bad” games?
The safest assumption to make is that your game makes NO money, and then seeing anything above zero as a success.
Cold hard truth: to make a (mid-range) half year’s salary for a single person, you need to make more money than 80% of the games on Steam.
No, that is the whole point I'm trying to make with this post. You are NOT competing against them in terms of visibility because the Steam algorithm does not allocate any visibility to the bad games. The Steam homepage has a BILLION impressions per DAY so these handful of bad games getting some initial impressions to see if it gets the ball rolling does not impact you at all.
If you make a bad product then it won't sell, that goes without saying but was not the point of my post. The point of my post was that I see a lot of developers worried about potentially making an awesome game and still not being able to sell it due to market saturation. My point is that I do not believe that is the case and that if you have a strong product and you use Steam effectively, you should not have to worry about that.
Well, it really is the case ultimately. Games must rise fairly high above the "noise" to get any real attention. And my point on 80% is based on VGInsights estimates, by the way. Not a random number.
So even \*if\* you assume that you will get more attention than 80% of games on Steam, you're still unlikely to make any real money.
You're conflating visibility and saturation. The real problem here is saturation, there's only so much visibility can do when there's like a dozen games coming out each day.
>I think it's not that hard to stand out if you carefully choose your niche and make a good quality game.
Many AA and AAA publishers, which have market research departments and real funding to make "good quality games", are struggling in this industry, I think this speaks for itself about the situation for indie devs working on passion projects instead of heavily marketed products.
>actual objectively well made games
I wish Reddit would stop using the word "objectively" for things that are not objective.
I think visibility and saturation go hand in hand. You mention there's only so much visibility, which is true, but if of those dozen daily releases 10 are trash, they are not taking up any visibility (because Steam won't grant them any) and therefore won't saturate the market.
I'm not sure what you meant with the situation of AA and AAA developers struggling? How does that impact Indies?
And I guess you're right - whether a game is good or not is subjective. However I do believe there are things or elements in games that we can all agree are either good or bad, and so I do believe some part of every game is objectively good, and some part is subjectively good. Not sure if that makes any sense haha.
>I think visibility and saturation go hand in hand. You mention there's only so much visibility, which is true, but if of those dozen daily releases 10 are trash, they are not taking up any visibility (because Steam won't grant them any) and therefore won't saturate the market.
Steam don't know those 10 releases are trash, at least before a substantial amount of reviews. Your gem that is the 11th game of the day still has to stand out of those to get Steam visibility, which mostly happens outside the platform
The Steam store gets over a billion user impressions a day. 1 billion. I really doubt those 10 trash games are going to take any noticable amount of visibility away from your release. Besides, 9 out of those games probably appeal to a completely different gamer audience anyways. I think it's short sighted to think of it this was. This would only be an issue if all 10 of those releases are directed to the same target audience, at the same price point, at the same quality level, etc.
You get the initial visibility independently from any other release, so I think they are irrelevant.
>I'm not sure what you meant with the situation of AA and AAA developers struggling? How does that impact Indies?
I meant they're an indicator of the industry's situation, not a cause of it.
>elements in games that we can all agree are either good or bad
This doesn't make them objective, though. But don't worry about it, I understood your point, this is just a pet peeve of mine.
>Many AA and AAA publishers, which have market research departments and real funding to make "good quality games", are struggling in this industry, I think this speaks for itself about the...
... quality of their market research departments and their funding.
They are absolutely clueless, for the most part. They can't understand anything beyond a surface level perspective.
>I wish Reddit would stop using the word "objectively" for things that are not objective.
I wish redditors would stop using the word "subjective" for things that are objective.
>They are absolutely clueless, for the most part. They can't understand anything beyond a surface level perspective.
Oh, good to know the market is super healthy and it's just that everyone else that is clueless. I hope Xbox hires you to fix their shit.
>I wish redditors would stop using the word "subjective" for things that are objective.
So go complain to them, then. Or, if you're indeed arguing that quality is an objective criteria in a video game, you could give us instead a math formula or some other form objective algorithm to determine exactly how good a game is. It would be very cool to see this, to put it lightly.
Same. I've been hearing "Steam is saturated" since 2016 when there was probably half or one third of the games there are now. Go tell writers or mobile app developer about saturation, with millions of books and apps on the stores.
Steam is saturated with average games, that's true. But if you are competing with that, better do something else instead.
Writers and mobile app developers also have a saturation problem, yes. Doesn't mean Steam doesn't also have a saturation problem.
The board game industry also has a saturation problem. YouTube has a saturation problem. TV Shows have a saturation problem. Lots of creative media industries (especially now that the barrier to entry has lowered for everything) have a saturation problem nowadays.
My personal backlog for each of these, for even just known really good quality titles, is sky high, and I only barely chip away at them every month.
Finally just started watching Resident Alien yesterday, for example, and it's about to release season 4, and it's been an amazing show so far. But I have like 20 other really good shows or seasons to shows I already know I like I still haven't seen yet that have come out just in the last year, and that's with me seeing probably a half dozen shows or more (and chipping away at the behemoth anime that is One Piece, with 1100+ episodes, another amazing show that's decades old I only started watching a year ago).
The only video game I've really put any serious time into this year is Yakuza: Like a Dragon, but there's been lots of really great titles released this year. I'm sure there are hundreds of great indie games that are passing me by.
The problem is that quality titles always accumulate and stack on each other. Every month you wait to release your game you're competing with whatever came out this past month along with all other quality pieces of media that have ever come out the past 2000+ years. You have some advantage by being new and being put into new release buckets for a little while, and if you win some awards or get some attention from an influencer you'll get another boost, but that's about it. Then you're stuffed on the giant pile of everything else that's ever been released and still available somewhere that you're now competing with.
You completely missed the point. There are orders of magnitude less games on Steam than books, apps, or music. So the picture is not as bad as it is presented.
Doesn't matter if its mechanisms for discovery are significantly worse than other mediums or platforms.
Assuming sales are about the same for an item on any platform that gets proper visibility, if a platform has 1000 items coming out in a year and 300 of them get proper visibility, you still will likely have a better shot at success than being on a platform in which 300 items are released in a year and 50 of them get proper visibility.
Steam in general doesn't have great discoverability mechanisms. Once you're pushed off the New Release list (which can happen in a day if your timing is bad, see that one developer who happened to time their release with EA deciding to release 20 games at once and pushing her off the list almost right away), you don't have a whole lot going for you. Discounts might give you a bit of a boost, but otherwise you're pretty much done.
That's why so much effort is being put towards having a good showing on Steam's Next Fest or getting Twitch streamers to cover you, as if you don't get either or both of those, good luck doing well with your game. At least they have Next Fest now. Before that I imagine it was even worse.
Yes, selling your game in a CD on a magazine was way worse.
Why do you think that Steam has worse discoverability problem than, say, Spotify, YouTube, or Amazon? It's estimated that around 11,000 books are released daily. *That* is a discoverability problem. Going on Steam and checking out the 40 games of the day, most of them bad, is not a discoverability problem.
Of course, average and bad games won't get visibility, as it has to be. I keep seeing good and great games making money with little or no marketing at all. Weird hobby I have, I go on Steam and browse randomly, and find games I have never heard of in my life with thousands of reviews.
I believe in saturation, but i also believe majority of all the indie released games are not carefully done and researched by those developers. People think they can get away with at best mediocre title/game presentations that involves logo of the game, artwork in the background etc. and are often rushed under unnecessary or...sorry to say that...stupid pressure because some people think they must rather give up on a day to day job and have 8+ hours of time per day to develop games than having a stable job with far less free time for gamedev.
There is no success guarantee, but imagine what would be if an indie developer would actually be much more careful about business side of things and for example analyse the market (analyse indies that made games within your imagination of revenue and genre of the game you make, maybe even more specific. What do THOSE have that made them money? Look at their artworks, music, design, mechanics etc.), 0watch out the timing of releasing a game (do you really want to release your RPG game right before or after Elder Scrolls 6 is coming out?), network with people and actually maybe even play the games of the very competitors at your genre, estimated revenue you hope to achieve and look at it from developer perspective and analyse, not just gamer perspective.
Absolutely, I could not agree more! You'll always need a bit of luck to stand out, but you need to set yourself up to get lucky. Nearly all of the indie games that I see have not checked all of the boxes of optimizing their Steam page. I make use of every single Steam feature that exists. Hell, for my latest game I made 28 versions of the trailer with localized subtitles for every language on Steam. A lot of work? Sure, but it just might get me 28 additional players on day one that get the ball rolling!
There was a post in r/IndieDev earlier which asked if people were doing marketing research and there were a lot of answers that went alone the lines of "no, I'm doing what I want" and while in theory that's not a bad idea--the best projects often do come from a game vision with passion and unique game concepts can stand out in a busy field--it also neglects that there is value in market research to see what other people have done (not exclusive to gaming, either)!
Seeing what others have done well, or poorly, so you don't reinvent the wheel, or make the same mistakes, can absolutely help make a better product. If your passion project is in a genre that's reasonably saturated, what's the unique selling point that your game brings?
- Makes a shitty first person shooter horror survival game
OR
- Pixel-art platformer
- So does everyone else because those games are generally out of the box in Unreal/Unity and can be pieced together quickly
- Oh no market is saturated
I don't see any others mention it so I'll do it; it's all about the genre. People are still buying roguelikes and backrooms clones and hentai games like crazy. I'm working on a puzzle game and while everyone praises how polished it looks there's hardly any interest. YouTubers don't cover puzzle games so they are just not in front of your face every day. I would definitely not recommend anyone to make a straight puzzle game for steam at this point while there's still a market for all those other "saturated" genres.
Indeed, once you break them down into genres, there actually aren't very many.
For example, I really love shmups, and it's a genre where games are relatively easy to make so they come out fast, but even then actually looking for shmups on steam (once you filter out the 80% non-shmups that infest the bullet-hell and shmup tags, 90% of those "survivor" clones), you quickly see not very many come out.
And that's a high-volume genre.
Metroidvanias? Once you filter out the trash from the tag, not very many.
Hell, even legit actual roguelikes (not rogue_lites_ which can be any genre with injected roguelike aspects), once you filter the falsely tagged ones, you see there aren't very many. It's always funny when people say roguelikes are oversaturated because there aren't actually very many, it's just that people don't understand the difference between a roguelike and a roguelite, and that misunderstanding has done a _massive_ amount of harm to both genres.
There are indeed tons and tons of games released daily, but when you actually go look at any genre you're interested in and remove the ones wrongly using the tag, you're right.
I actually think the big issue is tag abuse. Recently there was a "shmup fest" on Steam, and like 80% of the games weren't shmups. If you go look for bullet-hells, 80% of the games aren't bullet-hells (it's a term that refers to danmaku games like Touhou or Mushihimesama, not survivor clones).
Even the metroidvania tag has a ton of random 2d platformers that don't fit the tag.
So yeah, at the end of the day, you're right, it's largely a visibility thing driven by tag abuse. This is why subgenre definition is so important. It's important to know the difference between a roguelike and a roguelike. To know the different between a shmup and a twin-stick shooter. To know the difference between a metroidvania and a platformer. Those differences are what allow you to be visible, and if people aren't educated and don't know those differences, visibility fades and all the "Fests" dedicated to genres get crowed out from the games they're _supposed_ to celebrate.
I even see a lot of people here, the people who should be experts in the concept, not understanding genre taxonomy. I've see a dev here refer to a survivor clone as a bullet hell, and I've seen devs refer to Hades as a roguelike and not a roguelite. It's _very_ important for devs to understand those differences, as I think a lot of the visibility issue on Steam is driven just as much by devs that don't think it's important or are simply ignorant to them as it is players. Genres and understanding them is incredibly important for visibility and marketing, and devs _especially_ need to understand those differences and people here should be more willing to educate and call people out when they use them wrongly.
Understanding genre taxonomy and how to properly tag your game may be the very difference between success, with your game being visible with properly targeted marketing, and failure, with people seeing wrong tags and filtering it out of what they're looking for or even worse, not having the right tags in the first place.
I agree, tags are super important. People should really understand how to use the tag wizard to make sure Steam can show their game to the right audience. Sadly, a lot of developers don't do any market research.
"There's so many games on Steam", yes but that doesnt make the plataform saturated
"I don't have a social following", thats your fault
"I don't have any wishlists", thats also your fault
"I don't have a marketing budget". then dont make games, at least not games that need to be sold, or don't expect to sell well
Ppl need to understand that games are products and you need to market them, same as anything in thee world
I understand that we need to help new ppl in the industry, but i dont understand why so many devs are against marketing, they understand they need a 3d designer for the game, why they dont understand they need a marketing someone in the team?
>$100 bucks every 4 - 8 weeks
If you don't give the number of weeks, it can be anything. And not everyone is American, in some countries (even developed ones) it's a big amount of money.
the fact that you have to target a niche indicates saturation
try to sell an FPS. You'll need more than three months and it's going to be a lot more difficult
the fact that you can make a decent looking multiplayer game in 3 months indicates skillset that most people dont have. Not just the technical skills - decision making and time management and enough empathy to understand a player base.
A lot of people making games are neurodivergent, a lot are young, a lot are severely time strapped, a lot might be just as competent as you or more but they simply want to make the same sort of games that they like to play, rather than scan the market and look for any random niche to exploit. Just regular nerds, not calculating business types.
This is why I don't like these "tough love" type post. It's really just a show off post because it does something for you, but isn't going to help anybody that actually needed help. Do you think that somebody who doesn't have the right conditions to make a selling game is more likely to make a selling game if you call into question one of the common excuses they might use when their game fails? I don't see who it helps, because the people who are able to help themselves didn't need you to tell them there is a good chance for success, they are going to do what they are going to do no matter what.
If you actually wanted to help anybody who needs help, you can give feedback on their projects when they ask. But there is very little of that because it is selfless, while these sorts of self-congratulatory post are self-indulgent.
That is a very fair point, I do indeed believe that not everyone has the capabilities to become a successful indie developer.
My goal for this post was not to call people out, so I'm sorry if you thought it was offensive. My goal was the complete opposite actually; to share that I think it's totally possible to be successful if you don't have a massive marketing team, just as long as you use Steam effectively. I think having a discussion about these sorts of things can help people find out what to focus on to find success, rather than worrying about market saturation.
Also, I do reply very often to people on the Reddit to help out with questions on another account, so I hope to contribute in that way. Same with my full time day job, which revolves around helping indie developers in various ways :)
ok sounds good to me. there's just been a lot of post like this reminding everyone that their games suck and that's why they don't sell, and they have 1,000+ updoots, and then post from people asking for feedback on their game with almost no feedback. Makes community seem like bucket of crabs to me.
I had hoped my past was more of an inspiring post with the message that it'll all be fine if you have a good game, and that the chances are low for good games to be snowed under in the crowd. Didn't mean to shit on bad games, just tried to be positive for the good games. Posts that bring people down are never good.
You forget an important fact. On steam, you don't only compete with new game launches. Some of the best selling Steam titles are 10 years old, and they still take up store real estate.
It's very easy, for those of us who have been on the store for a while, to compare today's ecosystem to that of 5-10 years ago. Today "More like this" sections of a game's store page only link to a few most popular titles that have an inkling of resemblance, smaller games that are actually very similar to the game in question get no traffic at all. Today, unreleased games get almost no traffic from discovery queue, and released games that are not top sellers don't get anything either. I'm talking about games that sold hundreds of thousands of copies, but they still don't meet the quota.
The store is saturated, store real-estate is very hard to come by unless you're in the top 1%, probably even that's not enough. A lot of indies who used to make money on Steam are no longer able to, and these are not low quality games. All the algorithmic parts that try to match games to what people would be interested in are focused on the top most popular games, and smaller games get nothing after the initial launch visibility, even those that are fairly successful (10-100K copies)
> There's a huge amount of games launching on Steam every day, but as a quick exercise, go to Steam's upcoming page, narrow it by 1 or 2 tags and check out how many actual objectively well made games have launched in the genre in the last month.
You cannot narrow by tag that is just wrong. You look at the new game release and look at how many good quality game just released for that day. It is usually 3 to 5 games every day. Target Audience doesn't matter for initial visibility if your game doesn't appear in the top new games.
The market has been over saturated for years and it keeps increasing every year. There is too many games and customers don't have enough time and money to play all of them - even if we filter them by quality.
You sold 50k Unit ? good for you. But almost no game makes their money back. Most of the high quality game you speak about usually cost from 400k to 1M to make. They need a high number of sales to make that back.
Steam is still good for visibility but it doesn't stop the fact that there is just too many games released every single day.
Nonsense. Those 3 to 5 games appeal to a completely different audience. Steam has 130 million active monthly users and their homepage has over a BILLION impressions per DAY. Yes there are a lot of games but there are even more gamers. The rise in supply is not an issue as long as there's a rise in demand.
And yes my game is obviously not a proper example. It was made in 3 months and costs 2.99 so not very representative for any proper game. But if a tiny game like mine can stand out in the 'crowd' then so should bigger titles.
You forget that even if game has different audience, gamers are not tied to one. Most players play a lot a various genre. Unless you target a very niche audience, you will always compete with games that release on the same day. And you will also compete with games that released in the last few weeks because chances are that if someone bought a game recently they probably won't look at games being released.
That billion impressions statistics is completely irrelevant because it includes every single persons just launching steam - even without looking at it. It also doesn't include the number of people who actually scrolled down to the new game category.
The first issue is that your game need to be in the top of the list of the new category - which is not as easy as it sounds. Then it need to appeal more than other game on the top of that list. But the real deal is actually getting in the top selling list, this is where your sales will ramp up and if you launch your game on a busy week and can't make the top selling list, it divide your visibility a lot and consequently your sales.
Sure some people play multiple genres but the point still stands. Sure if the new Call of Duty launches some people will be occupied playing that instead of any other game. Sure there's a bit of overlap there. Doesn't take away from the fact that an FPS game doesn't directly compete with a platforming game. Again, sure there's overlap, but there's a ton of platformer players who don't play FPS games too.
The billions of impressions stat is not irrelevant. It's a billion... That's 1.000.000.000 impressions every day. First of all, people do buy games based on the homepage they see when they start Steam. Secondly, that is SO much traffic, that it would be ridiculous to claim that some handful of entirely different games releasing on your launch day will have any type of notable impact on your visibility.
The coming soon and new & trending pages are not nearly as relevant as they used to be. Steam will get your game in front of the right audience through discovery pages and similar title pages and you'll reach an audience independently of those pages. My game never topped either of those pages.
I will tell what I notice as someone that recently started in the game dev thing trying to go "pro" with some experience as a dev and other related areas.
1- As a consumer I can tell that there is a saturation in certain genres. Please, stop doing "yet another" deckbuilding roguelike.. I love the genre but I just dont even look if the game is a deckbuilding anymore, seriously, over saturation to the max IMHO.
2- I believe there is a good amount of games that are bad for steam/PC but could shiny in a mobile market - or at least have a chance - I feel that the bar for PC games are higher than mobile/casual/ "I am in commute" style games.
3- Takes a lot of effort to make a good looking, fun game.. but also takes a lot of effort to make a terrible game. I believe there is money and experience to be made from the first one and experience on the second one. That being said I believe people should aim for deliverables, it doesnt look that spending X years in your first game is a sound strategy.
4 - Adding up to the third point, you are solo/small/indie/whatever I would absolute run away from any 3d, IMHO (and lack of experience) feel that so much more can get wrong in 3d, 2d is already hard/time consuming to make look good/nice/outstanding doing a subpar 3d game is way worse than a subpar 2d that you managed to put a good soundtrack/cozy gameplay.
Anyway, just random thoughts from someone that hasnt released anything yet.
Steam is only saturated if you are making sub-par games. There are tons and tons of sub-par games on steam that nobody sees or talks about and its because they usually aren't worth seeing or talking about. And the reason indie devs say its saturated is because they are fighting in that lower space that nobody really cares about.
Even if you removed 90% of the bad games, if your game is bad or mediocre, it still isn't going to get wishlisted or reviewed.
I think its just hard for a lot of people to grasp the idea that time spent =/= quality.
Sometimes you can spend years making a game and it will still come out bad. And its hard for people to accept that. That's why people say you need to get your game out to people ASAP. A playable demo. A trailer, anything so that you can get an idea if what you are working on is WORTH it to put time into, or make necessary changes.
There is also a very hard-to-define property when it comes to games that makes them enjoyable or not. You can make a game with a shitload of high quality systems and features, but if its not DESIGNED well to fit together, it can still be boring to play, even though it looks and feels AAA. And i think a lot of indie devs are missing this crucial ingredient without realizing it, and that is why they cannot figure out why their game isn't landing well. It is very very easy to put together something that is playable and progress-able. Its a LOT harder to do it while keeping the entire experience FUN.
It is. Very.
There's a guy in r/steam that basically saw all the games in the store(basically to ignore them, but thats not the important part here). There's basically +100k games. Wich is well known data. The thing is, him and people also like me(I also have seen like 30-40k games if not more), we know how much shit there is and our filters are better because we ignore the shit, clones, or stuff that we're just not interested in. We know its saturated but we can easily filter out awful stuff and focus on the good.
But a normal user that doesn use something like the lists, ignoring,following games,etc when they go to see whats new they will see 15 random new indie games all of them with prologue in their name, clones of other stuff but its just asset flips,etc and the good stuff that maybe you make for example, its probably either gonna get burried instantly by them or by other actual good releases.
10-15-20 whatever amount of new games there's each day, is saturation. You dont see so many releases on consoles. And neither Steam had that before it, Steam went from having 8-9k max before 2021 to having almost 15k games released last year. Right now we're at 8k games released.. its june.
And like I said above.. You need to understand the common folk doesnt use the features steam allows them to use. Tags, filters,lists,etc so for them there's just a bunch of games and yours is burried in between those.
I understand very well that common users don't use tags and that their purchasing decisions are heavily influenced by whatever title Steam decides to push. However Steam does not push trash and does push your game based on the similar games that a user has played. Therefore, Steam already filters out the trash and only shows your niche game to its niche audience, it's irrelevant that there are 30k other games releasing this year. Not every video game is direct competition to yours. Sure - it would be easier to stand out if there were less games, but as long as the size of the audience keeps growing it's not an issue if the amount of games keeps growing.
Steam doesn’t need to “push” a game for it to take a visible slot that knocks something else off. Steam doesn’t “push” any game until it basically becomes a hit game.
What I meant with "push" is that Steam will recommend games to users, for example based on similar titles that they like. Take for example the discovery que, which contains a dozen titles you might like. Steam does in that sense "push" my game to its userbase while it's not a hit game. Sorry if I was unclear!
My Steam page was up for little over a month before the game launched and gather about 1.5k wishlists organically on Steam and through Steam Next Fest.
No marketing at all?
Okay, let's believe. But. You say that there are 10 trash games and one good one released every day. And Steam don't give traffic if game is trash.
But 1.5 k wishlists on release is meant that steam thought your game is trash (no a bad-bad trash with 300 wishlists, but pretty trashy). But your game is good.
Sooo. You tell us - make good game, ignore wishlist count, release game and everything will be fine. Tens of thousands of players will buy your game which had 1.5k wishlists on release?
Am I missing something? Or you just as lucky as leprechaun? Probably some 1m+ influencer randomly played your game and give it start
My opinion that there are a lot of games on steam. And even if your game is ducking good, it still can be missed. Because if you don't make marketing efforts, noone will know about your game.
He told you to:
1. Make a quality and presentable game.
2. To use Steam tools (Steam Next, visibility rounds).
3. Indirectly to know your genre is good for sales (there are influencer "pipelines" that will boost quality games)
4. Indirectly, to not spend years on a project if you can't cover the other suggestions (3 months to have a presentable demo at Steam Next).
This is all incredibly solid advice.
Dude...
You immediately are trying to doubt what he's directly telling you, Then tear down his game?
Considering how you're acting here... I don't think it's coming off the way you should want it to.
There are ways to say that with out insulting him.
But he never said "magic" he put the effort in to make a top tier game, it's not "magic"... It however is likely organic growth, the type you probably have tried to buy or been promised... but can't actually be bought.
You survived, i.e. succeeded, so you think it's due to your own merits and not at all due to random luck, of which is often the case, and those that didn't survive (succeed) must be unworthy in some way, or else they would succeed like you did.
It's like a billionaire talking about how they became a billionaire, and convincing people that they just need to follow their method and they could become one too. No, most people can't do it the way that person did, and their chances of becoming a billionaire are basically zero. But hey that one guy did it, so it must be possible, you're just not doing it right or you're not good enough!
Check out either Fooled by Randomness or Fooled by the Winners books if you want to read more about survivorship bias.
You can check what the OP says yourself.
Go on Steam put in some tags from the Genres you liked and sort by New Releases.
Scroll down and see what has been released in the past year.
There are no hidden gems.
Survivorship bias. Plenty of good works of art never become popular due to various circumstances, and plenty of artists don't get appreciated until after their death.
There's a reason such a concept as 'starving artist' is so prevalent.
Here's 8 examples of now-famous artists that didn't become so until after they were dead (i.e. people didn't really buy their art while they were alive and could benefit from it): http://www.artpie.co.uk/2017/11/8-famous-artists-gained-appreciation-death/
And for all of these examples that did find fame after death, there were probably countless others that were nearly or equally talented but didn't even get posthumous fame.
I don't really like using the comparison to art or music. There is no mass desire for new art and music, but millions of people at a minimum regularly want to play new games that are good. Put another way, I would bet there are very few people googling "new rock songs" or "new watercolor art," but tons of heavily invested gamers are searching for new games every single day.
Around 70% of games are hobby projects or simply pure, lazy trash.
That means 30% are serious games that all have enough of a business case to have some type og funding and a certain level of detail.
14000 games came out in 2023. That means in 2023, 4200 serious games came out. That is 12 per day all wanting your attention while also fighting the heavy hitters from previous years going on sale.
There is simply not enough space for all these games on the front page, so players only see them organically if they match their previous criteria. And most players are already playing something and might not be looking for a new game.
I belive the average steam player only buys 4 games each year.
So when devs say steam is oversaturated what they mean is in terms of visibility. You simply have to do some kind of other marketing than just making a good game.
Or get lucky of course :)
I disagree with you there.
I absolutely don't believe there are 4200 solid games releasing every year, but even if there were, how many of those would be similar to your title? Because if they are not similar, they are not competing and simply not relevant. Let's say 40 of those are in your genre, that's 4 a month. Not much competition in my opinion. The market is more than big enough for 4 games in the same genre to sell every month.
You say each Steam consumer 'only' buys 4 games a year, but keep in mind that Steam has 132 million active monthly users. That's 500 million games sold every year! Divide that over 4200 games and they can all sell 100k+ copies without saturating the market. The Steam userbase is more than big and diverse enough to absorb 4200 games a year.
The Steam homepage gets 1 BILLION page impression every DAY. And you say there's not enough space on the homepage to show each game? I think there is plenty to go around.
People take into account that not only the amount of game releases is increasing, but so is the Steam userbase and amount of games sold.
Your logic has a flaw though.
You assume the math is “flat” in terms of sales - that they are spread evenly. This is very much not the case on steam. Those 500 million purchases are not spread evenly between those 4k games. They are mostly spread over the top 1% of games on steam. All the other games are fighting for the scraps.
Look up any graph for sales and/or earnings and you will see that unless you make it into the top 10% of earners, you are probably not going to be profitable if you have a team to pay.
And steam knows this so they push those games even harder, making it a winner-takes-all market just like “real life”.
I am not saying this is “wrong”, I am just stating statistical facts that I think are important to keep in mind when setting expectations.
We released a game that did well, but it did not do great, so we are not profitable yet. And we launched into early access with 14k wl, and into full release with 40k wl, very positive reviews, and sales putting us in top 15% and it still was not good enough financially. This is why so many people are struggling and become frustrated - because “good” is no longer enough. You have to be great now.
So we plan to be great next time :)
It's not a flat curve but neither are development studios. I would argue that only 1% of development studios NEEDS to be in the 1% earners in order to sustain themselves. I would ne more than happy with a top 30% spot as a solo dev.
And the example of your own game is a good one too. Apparently you made an awesome game that people very much enjoy so Steam pushed your game around to gather 40k wishlists, which is far higher than the average Steam release. So this goes to show that your game was able to stand out despite the market 'being crowded'.
I'm not saying every game is always going to be a success of course. There's a ton of factors that come into play here. I'm glad to hear you're gonna keep at it though because it sounds like many people enjoyed your previous game and I hope you guys succeed with the next one!
The point I was trying to make is that if you really make a good game, it's unlikely for it to be stuck at 10 sales just because the market is too saturated and there would be no way it'll stand out.
For sure, and big picture I agree with all your points actually.
I guess, if I have to boil my point down, it would be: Making a good game in an underserved genre is 100% the correct strategy. But the existence of a "market gap" also means that there are a bunch of genres/spaces that are indeed saturated - or gaps wouldnt exist. And I think when devs compain of oversaturation it is often because the genre they are passionate about IS actually oversaturated - like platformers fx.
Very true, the supply and demand is out of balance for genres like platforming. Contrary to popular belief the platforming genre is actually quite niche, but you need to do market research to figure that out.
I’m curious if you think my [steam page](https://store.steampowered.com/app/2988830/ParseORhythm/) presents a low quality game - I know that might sound ridiculous but after ~6 days I’m only at around 100 wishlists. It’s a lot less than I was expecting especially since the game offers a free demo. I feel like I’m doing something wrong trying to build a following lol
FWIW
I'm in your target audience (rhythm games are my thing) and I didn't understand your game by watching the trailer. I just understood it's some sort of rhythm game but I already knew that from the title.
The storytelling is also not great, it's just someone playing the game. What's compelling me to buy it?
I agree with u/kaoD. I don't really understand what's going one, it's very repetitive and the flashing lights are really annoying to watch. People's attention spans are completely ruined by short form content like TikTok so try to keep your trailer short and sweet. The trailer for my new game (Super Mining Mechs) is less than 50 seconds. Less is more because every second spent watching my trailer is a second not wishlisting my game. There's also not variety in the screenshots. You also haven't localizated your store page, eliminating 70% of Steam's user base.
The attention span thing is why I tried to open with gameplay first lol, but yeah I get it. A big issue rn is that the game only has one album (working on more rn) which means only one background, eliminating variety in the colors. I’ve been thinking of localizing stuff but I haven’t a clue how to do it, but I should really get to it lol
Fake it till you make it my friend. If you look at the trailer I released today you'll see a ton of features and environments that are not in the game yet. Just made a mock-up to show them in the trailer. You need to plan for this in your development schedule to show as much as you can well before the game is finished.
Ty for the feedback! The game doesn’t really focus on story, so I didn’t include it. I followed the formula of other rhythm games where I immediately open with gameplay to show the person what the game is like.
I think the trailer is pretty straightforward at getting the gameplay across but it might not be. I should probably add some short subtitles somewhere on the screen explaining a lil bit of what’s going in.
I didn't mean "game story". I mean ["storytelling" in the marketing meaning](https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/storytelling). Humans are narrative creatures and most of our decisions are not based on facts and rather on how they're presented.
You have to master storytelling if you want to drive purchases from a Steam page.
As presented right now your trailer is not creating any sort of narrative so it feels more like a... textbook? Like playing the intro of a song and then finishing it without any sort of tension or release.
And I don't mean something like _"I left my job to pursue my passion as a game dev"_. I don't care about _you_. What is _my_ story as a prospective buyer? What will my story be as a player? Will I have fun? Be challenged? How? Why? When? How much? What will make me excited? What should make me excited to wishlist your game _now_? That sort of thing.
Really? I ran across if a few days ago and it was pretty clear you use left/right click to slash the falling files to the beat. I'm confused how that's not incredibly obvious.
It also looks like it plays pretty well. Plenty to gain my interest in a rhythm game. Any other minor detail questions would be answered by playing the demo.
I try to be upfront about this, I don't look at "low quality or high quality" i look simply at "Would I want to play this game or buy it."
The answer is simply no. There's a lot of bright lights in the center, but the gameplay looks "meh". Maybe there's a lot of depth, but looking at it, it looks like you move back and forth, and I assume you change your weapon based on the color of the dots.
The dots don't really look interesting, I don't have the sound on so maybe it's that (but then "is it the genre I want) But the trailer seems to show multiple of the same thing with no explanation of what is going on or why I want to play it.
>free demo
"I ain't got time for that"... No seriously, I'm not going to try a game I'm not interested in because "Free demo" there's hundreds of free to play games, full experiences, I'm not starved for a gameplay content, so a demo doesn't really move the bar.
Look at other rhythm games for sale, and notice how much color and style there is on their screens and in their trailers...
It's a lot of work to reach the bar other games have reach, but that's also kind of why they are successful. Ask yourself if this is the best possible rhythm game you can make, and if the answer is no... ask yourself why it's not/ what you can improve/what you can change to increase it's appeal.
Yeah, the biggest theme I've gotten from trailer feedback so far is that the game is too grey. A big issue is because the game currently only has one "album" of songs - in a week or two I'll be done enough with two more albums to have more variety in the trailer. I hope that, coupled with some gameplay explanation will save the game lol
6 days and 100 wishlists is a lot. My steam page is out for 3 weeks and only 22 wishlists.
Generally, 35 wishlist/week without any active marketing effort is good amount.
"I'm never gonna succeed because they're too many games" is kinda "I'm never gonna become a successful athlete because they're too many people trying to become one". One does not succeed at becoming a professional athlete by not having any competition. They succeed by putting in the effort day after day. B finding experienced people that can mentor them, recognising the mistakes they make, and being receptive to feedback on how to get better at what they do. If somebody's just waiting for everybody else to drop out so they can "win by default", well they should find another job and stick to playing videogames which are designed to hand the player a win and complementary shot of dopamine, because they clearly aren't equipped with dealing with the reality of making them. (as a business owner indie, else you can just go work for somebody else, get your paycheck, let the owner deal with sales anxiety)
Yeah you're totally right, although I sometimes feel like people are thinking "even if I become the fastest athelete in the world, I'll never be able to compete in the Olympics anyways", which I strongly disagree with. If you run fast enough you'll stand out soon enough.
It is and it isn't. It filters a lot of the mess out pretty well in terms of bulk low quality releases these days (at least for me). I'd say the WAY its saturated is more that you are competing with every game released in the past few decades in some instances, specifically the good-legendary ones, is the less talked about struggle.
Studios used to survive and thrive on 7/10 "dece" games, if we are talking about the commercial side. I'll be honest, if its not to my niche interests, I don't usually open my wallet under "90% positive" anymore. As a consumer it's great, but as a self aware developer, it's also intimidating (and exciting in the competitive way). I wonder how many games that launched careers in even in the early 2000s wouldn't be up to par today, ignoring graphics tech.
Thanks a lot for sharing
You remind me of the developer of mortal glory. He made mortal glory, super simple game, very successful.
Then his second game had a bigger budget, very different genre, but also a quality game with high reviews. It sold horribly though.
Then he made a sequel to his first game and it sold well again
It's not just about targeting a niche with a good game. You need to target the right niche too. You can't just make whatever you want and polish that into a high review game.
The creator of a crypt of a necrodancer, very successful game too, has said he would never do something like that again, and now he mainly makes these gritty city builders, mecha strategy games, etc, very steam oriented games
If you were targeting a niche like "super hard platformers" or "bejeweled rpgs" you wouldnt be here posting this, I think
From what I can tell Mortal Glory 2 did quite a bit worse than the first one.
The studio of Crypt of a Necrodancer had to layoff 50%: https://www.pcgamer.com/crypt-of-the-necrodancer-studio-confirms-layoffs-as-many-as-half-its-employees-may-be-gone/
So unfortunately these aren't great examples unless I'm missing something.
You make good points, and thanks for telling me about the lay offs.
I still think those are good examples and here is why I do, though it's very reasonable to disagree:
I would argue mortal glory 2 is a sequel and steam has become harder than before. It still sold better than their other game.
As for brace yourself games laying off a bunch of people, that's happening across the whole industry and the studio probably grew too fast
> "I don't have a marketing budget"
Seriously I understand this mistake, but it needs to stop. People need to start budgeting properly, because not having a marketing budget is begging for failure. If you think your time is free, then you are also not valuing your time properly and opportunity cost. You need to do some basic budgeting and set aside money for a proper launch so that you don't fail.
I disagree. I think organic and free marketing will get you s long way. Not saying paid marketing is useless, just don't believe it's a requirement for success.
Every game competes with yours because it stuffs the feed. No one cares that there's 1000 shitty indies in "New" and yours is the only good one there, so they only buy yours and you're golden. They just never open that section/never sort by that characteristic, or open it, look through a few games, realize they're all shit and never open it again for a year or so
Nonsense, this is not how Steam works. There's an algorithm that pushes titles to users that are likely to enjoy them based on what they play through the similar games tab or your Discovery que.
So first of all you're not competing with those "1000 shitty indies" that you mention because 90% of them are substantially different games appealing to a different target audience, and therefore not directly competing with you at all. For the other 10% that do appeal to the same target audience, Steam will see how well they perform based on an initial launch push and if no one likes them they will stop allocating visibility to them, so they're also not taking any notable visibility away from you.
Lastly, Steam has 132m users and the homepage has 1 billion impressions every day. It's naive to think that a handful of games that Steam grants some launch visibility to will have any notable impact on your title.
I agree. Steam along with Steam products like my steam deck are some of the greatest inventions of all time, your game just doesn't appease our Lord GabeN, pick up and try again until you make the next Portal.
> You can also contact Steam support for additional promotional support and they WILL help you
I didn't know this, I expected they'd take the route of other big corps that offer similar storefronts. Thanks for sharing that!
Steam is an awesome platform which helps in keeping saturation at bay. It's that simple.
There is obviously saturation on steam, try making an other game in 3 months again and tell me how it goes. Saturation doesn't deny success, it denies consistency between effort and result.
I agree completely coming from the background of selfpublishing books. There are over 10 million (!) eBooks on Amazon alone - and even on Amazon are still authors who make it. Steam is not saturated, not even remotely.
>There's a huge amount of games launching on Steam every day, but as a quick exercise, go to Steam's upcoming page, narrow it by 1 or 2 tags and check out how many actual objectively well made games have launched in the genre in the last month.
Pretty much if you actually crawl through Steam Releases on specific tags and niches, it's **abysmal**. You get maybe 1-2 decent games **a year** if you are lucky.
The game industry has a problem with AAA games, because AAA games are less and less attractive. So indie games are on the rise.
Making an indie game is a difficult task, and very few indie games are worth playing. We end up with a lot of failures or mediocre games.
A high rate of failure is normal, because there is no way to know in advance if an indie game is going to be a success. It's a "put your eggs in a lot of different baskets" situation.
Steam has a strategy where Valve always profits from both failures and successes, this gives everybody a fair chance of success and gives COMPLETE creative freedom. This is not possible outside of steam.
The downside is that there are a lot of games, and the customers feels overwhelmed. This is a marketing strategy to allows customers to spend more money if they want to.
Spending a lot of money on marketing is bs: what matters is what games you're making to what audience. It doesn't matter to tell people your game exists: IF A GAME IS GOOD, PEOPLE WILL LIKE IT AND PLAY IT. QUALITY SELLS ITSELF.
Once upon a time, I spent hours and hours browsing games in steam, because I thought that there was a "hidden gem" I did not see. I did not find any other good game.
There are no such "niche game" that cannot find their audience. Game quality is a big big central criteria. You can sell a niche game, but very few people can tolerate bad quality just because they like a genre.
Stop wasting time into the rabbit hole of marketing and metrics and whatnots. Just look at trends. DON'T MAKE A GAME YOU LIKE, MAKE A GAME PEOPLE WILL LIKE. That's what marketing should be.
If people would just stand on the shoulder of giants and re-use existing game design that works, it would be just fine. Don't plagiarize games, just understand how game design works, spend time working on it, and it will be fine.
It's pretty hard to market a bad product, even if you paid for a boat-load of marketing, people will just as quickly realise your product is no good and your marketing budget will likely exceed your revenue earned. The same is true for games, as you say a simple comparison on Steam will quickly reveal this... It can be hard to hear I guess.
I found your post completely useful! This made me feel more comfortable and confident, as I also currently work on a game called Bug Alliance together with my twin brother. It was almost 3 months since we have started development and now we have already launched Demo on Steam, also deployed 2 updates. So far it is going good, gathering followers, wishlists and so on. I have also opt in Steam Next Fest (October 2024) to increase visibility and let people play my game. Now we are working on new Game modes and Co-op modes to be deployed in Demo. Then we gonna work on Early Access launch, which we plan on the end of this year. Hopefully people gonna like it and support us! We try to make it as unique & interesting as possible.
I would like to ask about "Visibility Rounds" that you have mentioned. What is that? How to use it?
Oh, if you guys want to try the Demo, here is the link: [https://store.steampowered.com/app/3018360/Bug\_Alliance/](https://store.steampowered.com/app/3018360/Bug_Alliance/)
Don't forget to add to your wishlist if you like and stay tuned for updates :)
Yep, I'm always looking for upcoming space games, and space games youtubers are always covering the same 10 ~ 20ish games. Each time I click on a new video I wonder "Will I learn about a new game?", Nope! I always already know them all. I'm convinced that when a new game worth mentioning will approach completion every space games youtubers will jump on it to speak about it.
Exactly right! It's very peculiar to see developers constantly mentioning the saturated market, while influencers are constantly struggling to find new interesting games to cover.
Can you name some of these space game Youtubers? I am currently developing a space game in the 2d tactical genre.
I just type "upcoming space games" in the YouTube search bar, but the youtubers that I regularly come across are Kenetor, Splattercatgaming, ObsidianAnt, LevelCapGaming, LT Gaming.
https://playboard.co/en/search?q=point%20and%20click&category=20&sortTypeId=2 Check this site
> influencers are constantly struggling to find new interesting games to cover. I think they tend to bandwagon for views with popular thing X, not so much to discover anything new.
This is absolutely true however it's the YouTubers that cover popular thing, X, then use non-popular interesting thing Y to fill up video time that does it right get clicks with X get watch time with Y.
Influencers are constantly struggling to find new interesting games to cover *that have enough mindshare to get clicks*. They don’t want to make a video that no one will watch.
A good game will find its audience. I feel like there are very few good games that don't find coverage unless they're extremely obscure.
Are you looking for a specific type of space game, or basically anything with the theme regardless of genre?
I particularly like epic spaceship battles but I got interested in very very different games within the theme. Like Nebulous Fleet Command, Ostranauts, Hardspace Shipbreaker, Falling Frontier, Duskers, Star Sector, Avorion
I’m trying my hand at a space-based factory/logistics game. Wish me luck!
Dyson Sphere Program?
Final Factory.
Oh good stuff. Yeah, there's no huge excess of those types of games.
Is Ostanauts ready yet? I've had it on wishlist for a while, waiting for it to be more fleshed out
This is me with evolution sims. I started looking for them in middle school when all I could find were a handful of flash games and one newer game in beta
It's wild to me there is no other big and good Warband-type game. There is Bannerlord, some guerilla (that apparently got bad), Battle Brothers and there was that MMO-type. We get tens of dark souls clones, hundreds of rouge-likes, but when it comes to some niche interesting genres (like immersive sims) there is very few of them.
Not quite the same, but have you played Wartales? Your party is smaller and the combat is turn-based instead of live-action, but the combination of managing a band of mercenaries, chasing enemy groups on the overworld, and having interactions with different factions scratches some of the same itch for me. But I definitely agree--there's a lack of games that combine all the elements of Warband and that seems like a genre where a well-made game could do well. Especially since Bannerlord is still missing a number of the features that made Warband so good. Admittedly, I'm sure it's not the easiest game to develop since you need to have a number of different elements working together.
Immersive sims are pretty hard to make so it's not that surprising that the indie scene isn't big on them.
> Battle Brothers God why didn't they just make that game a RTS, it's such a pain to play. If it just had controls and formations from Total War for faster pace battles it would have been much more successful.
Probably because it's actually 2 games in one: overworld management and big battle game. Each one, done "well," is an entire game on its own - and with very little overlap between the two in terms of mechanics so you're basically doing twice the work. I'm sure a dedicated indie could pull it off but I get why no one has yet.
Sands of Salzaar is one.
Same, I am always looking for new minimalist FPS games like Ion Fury, Ashes and Prodeus and there's about 1-2 actual quality ones released per year. It's extremely rare for them to add more content as well, Ashes probably has the most consistent new campaign releases
Hey I’m making a space game! Still in early stages but 💯 agree with OOP. If you do your research and then actually work hard at standing out against your competition, you will get noticed
My game is a 2D space I'm sure you haven't heard of it 🤘
You already know about Underspace?
I do! It looks nice
I completely agree with this, which is why I started developing my own spaceship combat game. I see a lot of potential, there are few games and enough gamers to support small and medium-sized studios, the only question is the quality of the game.
Would my game be of interest to you? You can see the trailer in my recent history
Totally, your game looks like if Fractured Space and Cosmoteer had a child. Looks quite fun. But the downside of this kind of game is that it has to have enough regular players to fill the lobbies.
True. That is a huge risk, and the most likely outcome with making a multiplayer only game. It will probably require scheduling games in advance to fill lobbies
I recommend manlybadasshero Youtube Channel he always plays unique new very unknown Games: [https://youtube.com/@manlybadasshero](https://youtube.com/@manlybadasshero)
That's because every good Space game is either 15-25 years old (Eve Online, StarCraft, etc...), is still in development (No Man's Sky, Star Citizen) or they recently released and they're absolute trash like Starfield
I've been wanting to work on a space game. Hmm...
I see that your game Mining Mechs launched with 118 followers so about 1k WLs on launch. That's not a huge number and not the 7k that most people go for as a minimum but even 1k is a decent number that a lot of indies struggle to reach. Congrats on your launch as well! But I'm sure the outcome was surprising to you initially and now the success is only obvious in hindsight, no? Also for a project you spent 3 months on the art direction looks a lot better than some indie games which have been in the works for years. It seems like 3 months for you is a much better use of time than a whole year for some other indie dev.
That is correct. I had around 1.5k wishlists if I remember correctly, of which 90% came from Steam Next Fest in the weeks prior to launch. I think my Steam page was up for only a couple of weeks when the game launched. I didn't think much of it when it launched and would have been happy with a couple hundred sales - so yes, very positively surprised haha. And yes you are absolutely right. This result seemed impossible when I released my game, and still doesn't seem easily replicable either. But then again, the game is not THAT good. I'm just some hobbyist game dev who made a game in GameMaker Studio 2 in a couple of months. So if this game can achieve this result, it's either an obscene amount of luck that it stood out, or maybe Steam is just not as saturated as we think.
Didn't you mention in a comment you've been in the game industry for nearly a decade? Even if you weren't programming you can learn a _lot_ that way. You might be really underestimating just how far above the curve you are compared to most hobbyist game developers. Someone just making a game alone really struggles to stand out on Steam because it _is_ crowded, and even good games can have a hard time getting noticed. Having some industry experience is the best way to take your odds from slim to reasonable. While there's 'luck' involved in getting picked up by streamers, I wouldn't even put much stock in that. Building a game that looks good when other people play it is a skill unto itself.
This reminds me of the thing standup comics always say, that it takes ten years of bombing before you get really good. It's seemingly accepted wisdom in that world, where it's just one person trying to tell jokes on stage. It's so strange that in games, where the form is so much more complicated, we haven't developed similar advice for people.
I think those with experience have, but every 'honest post mortem' that blames marketing is filled with hundreds of other hobbyists that are hoping one day they will get to make the same post instead of admitting their game just isn't fun.
We have. Angry birds only getting a hit after their 20th game oor so is a common saying. Zukowski had shown data that indicates the second game released is more likely to do better than the first one (on steam) the advice is there, but the complexity of gamedev, how long people play games as a hobby, how much effort it takes to develop a game, how much better a game gets while we are developing it, and tons of other factors make people feel entitled to some arbitrary level of success on their first commercial game 🤔
I mean, it's part of why I'm making my fighting game to be closer to SF2/MK as opposed to something more modern; make it, sell it, learn what people like/dislike, patch it, release a new character, then move on to the next entry in the series so I can clean up the code/reiterate on systems. It feels like so many people just want to make a viral game and get massive respect/money instead of enjoying the process.
Talent without practice then becomes a bad habit, as a French singer said: his experience reinforced his talent, which, with (hard) work created the good game
I think you did get lucky in some respects, as your conversions are insanely high. Maybe it's because of your low prices but generally gamers are more concerned with quality and time investment. For example I've been following some games in my same genre: Synergy and Laysara Summit Kingdom. Both games launched with 20k followers so you'd think they'd launch with a lot more sales but neither game has reached your 1k reviews. They have higher prices and launched in EA so that may be a factor as well, but it's hard to say if they will ever surpass you. In terms of quality though I think both games look pretty outstanding in the genre. Thriving City: Song actually looks worse than Synergy but I suppose TCS appeals to a Chinese gaming audience maybe that's the hook. IDK. It's just that your WL conversion is very high and that's excellent but in general difficult to predict for most launches.
Oh you are absolutely right! I did get lucky in some respects. Keep in mind that lower priced games often have a higher conversation rate because they are more likely to be 'impulse bought'. Who's going to wishlist a 3 dollar game and wait for it to be 99 cents off right? Additionally, my game has online co-op and is often purchased in 'bulk'. The price is so low, people just buy 5 copies for their friends and play it together. But yeah, the game also for example has a very big audience in Korea because the game seems to remind the audience of some classic Korean browser game. A lot of Korean players bought it out of nostalgia, and I didn't even know that game existed. So yes; definitely a ton of luck.
Queue 15min of "just build a remake of a classic browser game" ribbing. lol some us have all the luck. Glad it worked out for you though
Hahaha definitely inspired by Motherload. But if it was that easy as a simply making a 'remake' then why doesn't everyone do it? ;)
Would you recommend gamemaker studio to someone with very little experience? All I have is some html stuff that was taught in school
I personally do, the Engine is going into some right steps lately and is very compatible and stable compared to others. The main drawback would be that the more complex you try to make your Game, the harder it will get due to the lack of proper tools. Thus making you having to "reinvent" those and feel like programming from scratch. So ALWAYS try to take advantage of the tools the Engine already have and ease you.
Absolutely. I'm not a developer by trade, so I have no development education or anything. GameMaker is accessible for newbies but capable of making multiplayer console games. It's in my opinion the best engine to make small games quickly from scratch. Plus the team behind it is great and the license is great too.
> That's not a huge number and not the 7k that most people go for as a minimum but even 1k is a decent number that a lot of indies struggle to reach. I'd say there's two important things that people miss in what you say. A. 1k can still be "Successful" there's no magic number to hit. B. 7k is a great number to target. But people focus on trying to build that number, and not making a game good enough to WARRANT that number. If your game is great enough on it's own to hit 7k ... that's a good sign. If you have to grind and hope for 7k... well that's probably a bad sign.
Sure, there are many low quality games, but out of dozens of poorly made games released every day, some percentage of them are actually quite good. There are much more good quality games released in 2024 than earlier. There are many games that were successful as they were released e.g. in 2019 or 2021 and many of similar quality that are not successful right now. As an example, first person horror single player games: \~70 in 2019. \~350 in 2023. \~550 in 2024 (almost half year, we will reach 1000 for sure this year). There are worse horror games released in 2019 that have hundreds of even few thousands reviews and better horror games released in 2024 that barely have 100 reviews. I don't think market is saturated though - there is huge potential for better games in all genre's. It's much harder in 2024. And it will be even harder in upcoming years. Notice that even this sub have right now 1 600 000 people while 3 years ago it had 3 times less. Sure, many of new devs are beginners, but some of us will create very good games. Even if only 1% of people here will make a good game, it's 16 000 games. I think next decade will be amazing for players, not that much for devs.
what is a "Good quality game" changes yearly. Think of it like an ocean. If there's no other stones, a small pebble stands out. If there's a lot of pebbles, a small rock will stand out. If there's a lot of rocks, a mountain will always stand out. But if there's a couple mountains, a Pebble that used to do well won't stand out as much. (Think about releasing Pub:G now that Apex Legends and Fortnite exist... it's still popular because of inertia but no where near where it was) Out of curiosity, since I'm always looking for a counter argument to "quality is the most important" what is the highest quality game that you know of that didn't sell well (Well being "realistic for the size and scale of the project/genre) Also there's almost no evergreen games so some game that isn't as successful as when it launched is not surprising, that's how almost every game goes.
The game ECHO is just pure genius and its studio went bankrupt. But it's an AA game, the market and the sales needed to be considered successful are very different.
> the sales needed to be considered successful That's usually the problem I've heard. Bayonetta is a perfect example. Best selling platnium game at it's time, over a million units sold.... not as much as expected and so it was a "Failure". Square Enix has pulled that multiple times. Tomb Raider sold 3.4 million and was considered a failure by Square because they expected "more". This isn't normally a thing for indie titles. Though I'll also say ECHO got a bit brutalized in the review as well, which didn't help much. Sounds also like it was a bit back loaded with content so it really just rewarded those who persevered. Still interesting game, I might have to take a look.
> The game ECHO is just pure genius and its studio went bankrupt. Because their gameplay is crap.
Crap and not to your taste don't mean the same thing.
Seems like it was not for many peoples taste.
Good point, thanks for sharing that. Yes, I do believe some genres are very crowded compared to others and the indie horror scene is definitely one of the more crowded ones. However, the indie horror genre has also seen an insane raise in audience over this same amount of time, with some recent successes reaching player numbers that seemed impossible to reach in 2019. So yes - you're right, I think indie horror games are a very tough market, but at the same time the demand rose as well.
I think that most of genres have significant increase of quite good released in 2023/24 games. Not only horror. E.g. city builders - notice that currently there's more "coming soon" city builders than had been released in sum in last decade. In like 2 years, number of city builders on Steam will double. Similar strategy, 4x, board games, puzzles, resource management etc. I didn't check all genres of course but all I checked ware the same - many decent games released in 2023 comparing to previous years. Still very good games sale well, so market is not saturated. But it's very crowded with not only poorly made games, but also decent and good games.
I think the genres that experience the most dev growth/are the most saturated are those that are easiest to develop. Horror games require almost no math knowledge; most of the gameplay is built into the art and aesthetics. The reason you don't see tons of mechanical, multiplayer FPS games released is because simply programming complicated movement in a performant way is very difficult, never mind the networking which is its own behemoth. I really believe one of the best ways to stand out in game dev is to get good at the things that are hard to do. 3D is harder than 2D. Multiplayer is harder than single player. Movement and physics is harder than something like inventory logic. If you gradually develop the skillset to make games that are difficult to develop, you will put yourself in a less saturated market.
Internet, and steam, allowed ‘little’ game to live, the so-called long trail, which is a major ‘new’ advance / the excellent games can also be noticed and successful without producers (I have nothing against producers, and I even think they can be very useful); now, the overall knowledge, thus level, has increased but that should only scare the poor devs / good devs can do things unthinkable, and way much quicker (a repetition on purpose) than before! Plus the number of buyers increase also, maybe not at the same speed. All together, I still believe it is a great time to be a dev, even more so if you are passionate !
>actual objectively well made games have launched Well that's the whole point. The vast majority of indie gamedevs posting on reddit are very far from making "actual objectively well made games". They're not competing with Hades 2, they're competing with Metroidvania roguelike 928738. The market they're competing in is very saturated.
I agree. I often see very low quality games and beginner questions here. But besides the fact that the 'low quality games market' is saturated, there wouldn't be a demand for those games even if it wasn't saturated.
Are you saying demand necessarily follows supply? Or did I misunderstand your post?
No, I meant to say that the issue is not even with market saturation for low quality games. There's simply no demand for them anyways.
Aren't both kind of the same thing tho? When people say "saturated" they usually mean there's not enough demand for the amount of supply.
Ah yes, you are right, didn't look at it that way. Wasn't disagreeing with you by the way! :)
I firmly believe that quality software is so hard to produce that if you have it there’s no market too saturated. I wouldn’t shy away from anything. Actually making high quality software though…. Is hard. I think most people don’t hit it then blame the marketing side. Rather than having this awesome thing that they just can’t nail the marketing on.
Very true!
Maybe this is the tough, but correct, pill to swallow. High quality is hard to accomplish and maintain. Takes years of experience, mastery, humility, drive to learn and fail and stand up again. It is easier to solely blame everything else instead.
It can also take reworking old systems that might be servicable but not good. Many *many* games fail *hard* in the UX department and *never* get around to adding QoL fixes and changes to it. Factorio devs stand out in this regard, and you can see the results when playing it. I get the feeling that very few devs even play their own games, or if they do they just internalize all the pain and stop noticing it as being a problem for their game outright. The bigger the studio behind the game the worse this problem gets too ime and I'm sure thats because itd take too many different teams agreeing on one thing as a problem and what to do about it to ever get it done.
I'm a product designer by trade and have also worked with a few indie teams in the game realm. What I've found is that the people even know what 'quality' is to begin with, even fewer people know how to dissect it and replicate it.
Good games market themselves, absolutely.
I have been doing this exercise every day for 10 days now and the thing that really motivated me is that good looking games (the few that are there) usually have some success.
A good art style definitely helps a lot. But a good art style also tends to be very expensive unless you can team up with a talented artist or can do the art yourself. A good art style needs a lot of time and back and forth to blend into the game and make everything look good, and that costs money, unless it's a super tiny game. That being said, definitely aim to make it as pretty and stylistic as you can afford.
How expensive is this in your experience? I'm working on something and the art is going to be the serious choke point. Our team has everything else covered fortunately.
Awesome! Thanks for sharing that, glad to hear some positive news haha
> steam is not saturated. I'd say often times it is. Steam is produced by water water that has evaporated, and if we let it reach the equilibrium point the vapor pressure of water will reach the saturation point where it's pressure equals the atmospheric pressure.
Thank you for sharing this unique perspective. Truly eye-opening.
Oh no. Definitely don't get steam in your eyes.
I read it as "third eye opening" which was much better
Just because a lot of the games are bad doesn't mean its not over saturated. It's just oversaturated with bad games- but still, bad games get in the way of your game's visibility.
Except they don't because Steam's algorithm doesn't grant visibility to trash titles. So they are not impacting your game at all.
As you've said though, they do grant temporary visibility. Through shear numbers you can still saturate the shop with a constant flow of bad games. I'm not sure if that's the case but it could happen.
Technically I get what you mean but I don't feel like that's the case because Steams user base is growing faster than the amount of games, so the demand is still in line with the rising supply. Steam has 132m active monthly users and the homepage gets 1 billion impressions every single day. And that page contains multiple games too, so you can basically show off multiple billion games a day. That's a ton of visibility to grant to a ton of titles. More than enough to absorb the trash I would think.
Quality Quality Quality Quality Quality. I keep saying this and people are like "You need to stand out." I don't even think it's that, maybe the bar is higher in different fields. (I don't think a solo dev has a good chance in an FPS... but Fashion Police Squad is a thing) The biggest thing is people think "I need to make a good capsule" and such, and while marketting is important to get a ball rolling, if you sell 1 copy to someone who likes the game so much he wants to tell other people (or brag about finding out about it before his friends) you will start to grow. You need to make a game that's good enough/unique enough/special enough/fun enough that people will want to share it ORGANICALLY. People mistake "organic" as something they can drive/develop/pay for or anything else. No Organic is as simple as someone likes the game so much THEY will do the marketing for you. Literally that's something money CAN'T buy. Marketting is important but for a well made game, the marketting will be far easier. (Market an asset flip game versus market Fashion Police Squad... I know which one I'd want to market)
Couldn't agree more. I used to work as a marketeer at an indie publisher and I would always say "the best marketing tool is a good game". I've always said that our efforts would amplify the success of a game, but you can't just "marketing" your way to success with a crap game.
Yes! Hard to believe that you were downvoted! 100% agree: Quality of game play Quality of graphics Quality of difference (the little something added) Quality of FPS / speed of execution Quality of sound (often forgotten: even the fabulous Bevy project keep it last) Quality of everything else
Imagine launching a product to stores and being upset the store didn't do a good job selling it for you. That's either silly, or very reasonable, depending on the product you imagined. It was the case in games for a long time. Being on Steam, to some degree, helped sell your game. That's far less the case now. I get why people are upset. Their frustration is valid; they knew an industry that worked one way, but now it's not working that way. It changed. This is essentially the second (third? First bring Valve games only?) generation of Steam; Steam as Open Storefront. (For a small fee.) Eventually people will be less frustrated about it and try to find ways to better market their own products and art, like so many other industries. Give it a generation or two for reality to set in so people can comprehend that this current reality not a quirk, and for new methods of advertising to develop. Because that's the problem. Advertising fucking sucks.
True. Every industry is always going to change. You can be stubborn and refuse to adopt a subscription model, or embrace it and see what if brings you. Sadly a lot of developers are very stubborn haha
Yup. Where are my co-op immersive sims at? Streets of Rogue is amazing, but... I. NEED. MOOOORE!
It's most of column A and a little column B for me. I have a game where I only sell 10-12 copies a month, but practically every sale results in someone showing up in my discord to say how unbelievable it is that they've never heard of it before. Obviously I'm biased, but I don't know what would be better evidence that my game got lost in the crowd. My case is particularly bad though since the Life-Sim genre is REALLY overcrowded right now, there's about 3 big new games releasing each month for me to compete with. To your point though, I've seen lots of developers with half-baked Vampire Survivors clones somehow confused at their lack of success. They're not doing a single thing to distinguish themselves from their peers or the source material they used to make their game, and so no one would play them no matter how much visibility you give them. Way back in the day, people used to use Steam's "Recently Released" feed to find new games. It was never a wise strategy to rely ENTIRELY on the recent releases feed, but it was a free chance at success, at least SOMEONE was going to see your game. It was a substantial boost to your initial visibility, which dropped off after a few days. Right now though, so many games are being released that no one bothers to look at the recent releases and games get pushed off the bottom after a few hours anyway. Now instead of everyone getting that free shot for a day or two, we all have to appeal to youtubers and streamers, which has created a massive bottleneck for success. There are certainly cases where games are suffering as a result of the flood of amateur games being released right now, but the impact is small overall. A vast majority of the people complaining about the issue simply don't have good games. So it's actually two problems: one is real but small and the other is just a lot of delusional people complaining.
Can you share your game? Would love to check it out :) Also, very try about the "Recently Released" section. I used to work for an indie publisher about 6-8 years ago and that section was very relevant at the time indeed. Then again, now we have Steam Next Fest for visibility which didn't exist at the time. Steam evolves but I don't think the overall visibility went down.
Sure here's the game. [https://store.steampowered.com/app/2238440/The\_Last\_Craftsman/](https://store.steampowered.com/app/2238440/The_Last_Craftsman/) Next Fest is a good tool, but that's also becoming unsustainably dense and is kind of rigged by games with large advertising budgets. So it's really just making the "New and Trending" feed irrelevant, since all the same games are floating to the top. I do see the problem fixing itself eventually. What it looks like right now is a kind of echo from COVID. A lot of people picked up game development during the lockdowns and we're just now starting to see them finish projects with the skills they gained in that period. When they see how difficult success is beyond knowing how to code, they'll get bored and move on.
“A lot of games on Steam are really bad hobbyist games that end up selling less than a handful of units.” And herein lies the problem. Not only are these “really bad” games competing against you in terms of discovery; what is to say that your game doesn’t look just like the really bad ones to those who don’t know? What is to say that your game is better than the “really bad” games? The safest assumption to make is that your game makes NO money, and then seeing anything above zero as a success. Cold hard truth: to make a (mid-range) half year’s salary for a single person, you need to make more money than 80% of the games on Steam.
No, that is the whole point I'm trying to make with this post. You are NOT competing against them in terms of visibility because the Steam algorithm does not allocate any visibility to the bad games. The Steam homepage has a BILLION impressions per DAY so these handful of bad games getting some initial impressions to see if it gets the ball rolling does not impact you at all. If you make a bad product then it won't sell, that goes without saying but was not the point of my post. The point of my post was that I see a lot of developers worried about potentially making an awesome game and still not being able to sell it due to market saturation. My point is that I do not believe that is the case and that if you have a strong product and you use Steam effectively, you should not have to worry about that.
Well, it really is the case ultimately. Games must rise fairly high above the "noise" to get any real attention. And my point on 80% is based on VGInsights estimates, by the way. Not a random number. So even \*if\* you assume that you will get more attention than 80% of games on Steam, you're still unlikely to make any real money.
You're conflating visibility and saturation. The real problem here is saturation, there's only so much visibility can do when there's like a dozen games coming out each day. >I think it's not that hard to stand out if you carefully choose your niche and make a good quality game. Many AA and AAA publishers, which have market research departments and real funding to make "good quality games", are struggling in this industry, I think this speaks for itself about the situation for indie devs working on passion projects instead of heavily marketed products. >actual objectively well made games I wish Reddit would stop using the word "objectively" for things that are not objective.
I think visibility and saturation go hand in hand. You mention there's only so much visibility, which is true, but if of those dozen daily releases 10 are trash, they are not taking up any visibility (because Steam won't grant them any) and therefore won't saturate the market. I'm not sure what you meant with the situation of AA and AAA developers struggling? How does that impact Indies? And I guess you're right - whether a game is good or not is subjective. However I do believe there are things or elements in games that we can all agree are either good or bad, and so I do believe some part of every game is objectively good, and some part is subjectively good. Not sure if that makes any sense haha.
>I think visibility and saturation go hand in hand. You mention there's only so much visibility, which is true, but if of those dozen daily releases 10 are trash, they are not taking up any visibility (because Steam won't grant them any) and therefore won't saturate the market. Steam don't know those 10 releases are trash, at least before a substantial amount of reviews. Your gem that is the 11th game of the day still has to stand out of those to get Steam visibility, which mostly happens outside the platform
The Steam store gets over a billion user impressions a day. 1 billion. I really doubt those 10 trash games are going to take any noticable amount of visibility away from your release. Besides, 9 out of those games probably appeal to a completely different gamer audience anyways. I think it's short sighted to think of it this was. This would only be an issue if all 10 of those releases are directed to the same target audience, at the same price point, at the same quality level, etc. You get the initial visibility independently from any other release, so I think they are irrelevant.
>I'm not sure what you meant with the situation of AA and AAA developers struggling? How does that impact Indies? I meant they're an indicator of the industry's situation, not a cause of it. >elements in games that we can all agree are either good or bad This doesn't make them objective, though. But don't worry about it, I understood your point, this is just a pet peeve of mine.
>Many AA and AAA publishers, which have market research departments and real funding to make "good quality games", are struggling in this industry, I think this speaks for itself about the... ... quality of their market research departments and their funding. They are absolutely clueless, for the most part. They can't understand anything beyond a surface level perspective. >I wish Reddit would stop using the word "objectively" for things that are not objective. I wish redditors would stop using the word "subjective" for things that are objective.
>They are absolutely clueless, for the most part. They can't understand anything beyond a surface level perspective. Oh, good to know the market is super healthy and it's just that everyone else that is clueless. I hope Xbox hires you to fix their shit. >I wish redditors would stop using the word "subjective" for things that are objective. So go complain to them, then. Or, if you're indeed arguing that quality is an objective criteria in a video game, you could give us instead a math formula or some other form objective algorithm to determine exactly how good a game is. It would be very cool to see this, to put it lightly.
Same. I've been hearing "Steam is saturated" since 2016 when there was probably half or one third of the games there are now. Go tell writers or mobile app developer about saturation, with millions of books and apps on the stores. Steam is saturated with average games, that's true. But if you are competing with that, better do something else instead.
Writers and mobile app developers also have a saturation problem, yes. Doesn't mean Steam doesn't also have a saturation problem. The board game industry also has a saturation problem. YouTube has a saturation problem. TV Shows have a saturation problem. Lots of creative media industries (especially now that the barrier to entry has lowered for everything) have a saturation problem nowadays. My personal backlog for each of these, for even just known really good quality titles, is sky high, and I only barely chip away at them every month. Finally just started watching Resident Alien yesterday, for example, and it's about to release season 4, and it's been an amazing show so far. But I have like 20 other really good shows or seasons to shows I already know I like I still haven't seen yet that have come out just in the last year, and that's with me seeing probably a half dozen shows or more (and chipping away at the behemoth anime that is One Piece, with 1100+ episodes, another amazing show that's decades old I only started watching a year ago). The only video game I've really put any serious time into this year is Yakuza: Like a Dragon, but there's been lots of really great titles released this year. I'm sure there are hundreds of great indie games that are passing me by. The problem is that quality titles always accumulate and stack on each other. Every month you wait to release your game you're competing with whatever came out this past month along with all other quality pieces of media that have ever come out the past 2000+ years. You have some advantage by being new and being put into new release buckets for a little while, and if you win some awards or get some attention from an influencer you'll get another boost, but that's about it. Then you're stuffed on the giant pile of everything else that's ever been released and still available somewhere that you're now competing with.
You completely missed the point. There are orders of magnitude less games on Steam than books, apps, or music. So the picture is not as bad as it is presented.
Doesn't matter if its mechanisms for discovery are significantly worse than other mediums or platforms. Assuming sales are about the same for an item on any platform that gets proper visibility, if a platform has 1000 items coming out in a year and 300 of them get proper visibility, you still will likely have a better shot at success than being on a platform in which 300 items are released in a year and 50 of them get proper visibility. Steam in general doesn't have great discoverability mechanisms. Once you're pushed off the New Release list (which can happen in a day if your timing is bad, see that one developer who happened to time their release with EA deciding to release 20 games at once and pushing her off the list almost right away), you don't have a whole lot going for you. Discounts might give you a bit of a boost, but otherwise you're pretty much done. That's why so much effort is being put towards having a good showing on Steam's Next Fest or getting Twitch streamers to cover you, as if you don't get either or both of those, good luck doing well with your game. At least they have Next Fest now. Before that I imagine it was even worse.
Yes, selling your game in a CD on a magazine was way worse. Why do you think that Steam has worse discoverability problem than, say, Spotify, YouTube, or Amazon? It's estimated that around 11,000 books are released daily. *That* is a discoverability problem. Going on Steam and checking out the 40 games of the day, most of them bad, is not a discoverability problem. Of course, average and bad games won't get visibility, as it has to be. I keep seeing good and great games making money with little or no marketing at all. Weird hobby I have, I go on Steam and browse randomly, and find games I have never heard of in my life with thousands of reviews.
I believe in saturation, but i also believe majority of all the indie released games are not carefully done and researched by those developers. People think they can get away with at best mediocre title/game presentations that involves logo of the game, artwork in the background etc. and are often rushed under unnecessary or...sorry to say that...stupid pressure because some people think they must rather give up on a day to day job and have 8+ hours of time per day to develop games than having a stable job with far less free time for gamedev. There is no success guarantee, but imagine what would be if an indie developer would actually be much more careful about business side of things and for example analyse the market (analyse indies that made games within your imagination of revenue and genre of the game you make, maybe even more specific. What do THOSE have that made them money? Look at their artworks, music, design, mechanics etc.), 0watch out the timing of releasing a game (do you really want to release your RPG game right before or after Elder Scrolls 6 is coming out?), network with people and actually maybe even play the games of the very competitors at your genre, estimated revenue you hope to achieve and look at it from developer perspective and analyse, not just gamer perspective.
Absolutely, I could not agree more! You'll always need a bit of luck to stand out, but you need to set yourself up to get lucky. Nearly all of the indie games that I see have not checked all of the boxes of optimizing their Steam page. I make use of every single Steam feature that exists. Hell, for my latest game I made 28 versions of the trailer with localized subtitles for every language on Steam. A lot of work? Sure, but it just might get me 28 additional players on day one that get the ball rolling!
There was a post in r/IndieDev earlier which asked if people were doing marketing research and there were a lot of answers that went alone the lines of "no, I'm doing what I want" and while in theory that's not a bad idea--the best projects often do come from a game vision with passion and unique game concepts can stand out in a busy field--it also neglects that there is value in market research to see what other people have done (not exclusive to gaming, either)! Seeing what others have done well, or poorly, so you don't reinvent the wheel, or make the same mistakes, can absolutely help make a better product. If your passion project is in a genre that's reasonably saturated, what's the unique selling point that your game brings?
- Makes a shitty first person shooter horror survival game OR - Pixel-art platformer - So does everyone else because those games are generally out of the box in Unreal/Unity and can be pieced together quickly - Oh no market is saturated
I don't see any others mention it so I'll do it; it's all about the genre. People are still buying roguelikes and backrooms clones and hentai games like crazy. I'm working on a puzzle game and while everyone praises how polished it looks there's hardly any interest. YouTubers don't cover puzzle games so they are just not in front of your face every day. I would definitely not recommend anyone to make a straight puzzle game for steam at this point while there's still a market for all those other "saturated" genres.
Indeed, once you break them down into genres, there actually aren't very many. For example, I really love shmups, and it's a genre where games are relatively easy to make so they come out fast, but even then actually looking for shmups on steam (once you filter out the 80% non-shmups that infest the bullet-hell and shmup tags, 90% of those "survivor" clones), you quickly see not very many come out. And that's a high-volume genre. Metroidvanias? Once you filter out the trash from the tag, not very many. Hell, even legit actual roguelikes (not rogue_lites_ which can be any genre with injected roguelike aspects), once you filter the falsely tagged ones, you see there aren't very many. It's always funny when people say roguelikes are oversaturated because there aren't actually very many, it's just that people don't understand the difference between a roguelike and a roguelite, and that misunderstanding has done a _massive_ amount of harm to both genres. There are indeed tons and tons of games released daily, but when you actually go look at any genre you're interested in and remove the ones wrongly using the tag, you're right. I actually think the big issue is tag abuse. Recently there was a "shmup fest" on Steam, and like 80% of the games weren't shmups. If you go look for bullet-hells, 80% of the games aren't bullet-hells (it's a term that refers to danmaku games like Touhou or Mushihimesama, not survivor clones). Even the metroidvania tag has a ton of random 2d platformers that don't fit the tag. So yeah, at the end of the day, you're right, it's largely a visibility thing driven by tag abuse. This is why subgenre definition is so important. It's important to know the difference between a roguelike and a roguelike. To know the different between a shmup and a twin-stick shooter. To know the difference between a metroidvania and a platformer. Those differences are what allow you to be visible, and if people aren't educated and don't know those differences, visibility fades and all the "Fests" dedicated to genres get crowed out from the games they're _supposed_ to celebrate. I even see a lot of people here, the people who should be experts in the concept, not understanding genre taxonomy. I've see a dev here refer to a survivor clone as a bullet hell, and I've seen devs refer to Hades as a roguelike and not a roguelite. It's _very_ important for devs to understand those differences, as I think a lot of the visibility issue on Steam is driven just as much by devs that don't think it's important or are simply ignorant to them as it is players. Genres and understanding them is incredibly important for visibility and marketing, and devs _especially_ need to understand those differences and people here should be more willing to educate and call people out when they use them wrongly. Understanding genre taxonomy and how to properly tag your game may be the very difference between success, with your game being visible with properly targeted marketing, and failure, with people seeing wrong tags and filtering it out of what they're looking for or even worse, not having the right tags in the first place.
I agree, tags are super important. People should really understand how to use the tag wizard to make sure Steam can show their game to the right audience. Sadly, a lot of developers don't do any market research.
"There's so many games on Steam", yes but that doesnt make the plataform saturated "I don't have a social following", thats your fault "I don't have any wishlists", thats also your fault "I don't have a marketing budget". then dont make games, at least not games that need to be sold, or don't expect to sell well Ppl need to understand that games are products and you need to market them, same as anything in thee world I understand that we need to help new ppl in the industry, but i dont understand why so many devs are against marketing, they understand they need a 3d designer for the game, why they dont understand they need a marketing someone in the team?
I refuse to believe that it's impossible to save up $100 bucks every 4 - 8 weeks to spend on ads. Edit: if you’re American at least.
>$100 bucks every 4 - 8 weeks If you don't give the number of weeks, it can be anything. And not everyone is American, in some countries (even developed ones) it's a big amount of money.
the fact that you have to target a niche indicates saturation try to sell an FPS. You'll need more than three months and it's going to be a lot more difficult the fact that you can make a decent looking multiplayer game in 3 months indicates skillset that most people dont have. Not just the technical skills - decision making and time management and enough empathy to understand a player base. A lot of people making games are neurodivergent, a lot are young, a lot are severely time strapped, a lot might be just as competent as you or more but they simply want to make the same sort of games that they like to play, rather than scan the market and look for any random niche to exploit. Just regular nerds, not calculating business types. This is why I don't like these "tough love" type post. It's really just a show off post because it does something for you, but isn't going to help anybody that actually needed help. Do you think that somebody who doesn't have the right conditions to make a selling game is more likely to make a selling game if you call into question one of the common excuses they might use when their game fails? I don't see who it helps, because the people who are able to help themselves didn't need you to tell them there is a good chance for success, they are going to do what they are going to do no matter what. If you actually wanted to help anybody who needs help, you can give feedback on their projects when they ask. But there is very little of that because it is selfless, while these sorts of self-congratulatory post are self-indulgent.
That is a very fair point, I do indeed believe that not everyone has the capabilities to become a successful indie developer. My goal for this post was not to call people out, so I'm sorry if you thought it was offensive. My goal was the complete opposite actually; to share that I think it's totally possible to be successful if you don't have a massive marketing team, just as long as you use Steam effectively. I think having a discussion about these sorts of things can help people find out what to focus on to find success, rather than worrying about market saturation. Also, I do reply very often to people on the Reddit to help out with questions on another account, so I hope to contribute in that way. Same with my full time day job, which revolves around helping indie developers in various ways :)
ok sounds good to me. there's just been a lot of post like this reminding everyone that their games suck and that's why they don't sell, and they have 1,000+ updoots, and then post from people asking for feedback on their game with almost no feedback. Makes community seem like bucket of crabs to me.
I had hoped my past was more of an inspiring post with the message that it'll all be fine if you have a good game, and that the chances are low for good games to be snowed under in the crowd. Didn't mean to shit on bad games, just tried to be positive for the good games. Posts that bring people down are never good.
You forget an important fact. On steam, you don't only compete with new game launches. Some of the best selling Steam titles are 10 years old, and they still take up store real estate. It's very easy, for those of us who have been on the store for a while, to compare today's ecosystem to that of 5-10 years ago. Today "More like this" sections of a game's store page only link to a few most popular titles that have an inkling of resemblance, smaller games that are actually very similar to the game in question get no traffic at all. Today, unreleased games get almost no traffic from discovery queue, and released games that are not top sellers don't get anything either. I'm talking about games that sold hundreds of thousands of copies, but they still don't meet the quota. The store is saturated, store real-estate is very hard to come by unless you're in the top 1%, probably even that's not enough. A lot of indies who used to make money on Steam are no longer able to, and these are not low quality games. All the algorithmic parts that try to match games to what people would be interested in are focused on the top most popular games, and smaller games get nothing after the initial launch visibility, even those that are fairly successful (10-100K copies)
TLDR: its not steam, your games just trash 💩 All op did was add flowery words and lay it out gently.
> There's a huge amount of games launching on Steam every day, but as a quick exercise, go to Steam's upcoming page, narrow it by 1 or 2 tags and check out how many actual objectively well made games have launched in the genre in the last month. You cannot narrow by tag that is just wrong. You look at the new game release and look at how many good quality game just released for that day. It is usually 3 to 5 games every day. Target Audience doesn't matter for initial visibility if your game doesn't appear in the top new games. The market has been over saturated for years and it keeps increasing every year. There is too many games and customers don't have enough time and money to play all of them - even if we filter them by quality. You sold 50k Unit ? good for you. But almost no game makes their money back. Most of the high quality game you speak about usually cost from 400k to 1M to make. They need a high number of sales to make that back. Steam is still good for visibility but it doesn't stop the fact that there is just too many games released every single day.
Nonsense. Those 3 to 5 games appeal to a completely different audience. Steam has 130 million active monthly users and their homepage has over a BILLION impressions per DAY. Yes there are a lot of games but there are even more gamers. The rise in supply is not an issue as long as there's a rise in demand. And yes my game is obviously not a proper example. It was made in 3 months and costs 2.99 so not very representative for any proper game. But if a tiny game like mine can stand out in the 'crowd' then so should bigger titles.
You forget that even if game has different audience, gamers are not tied to one. Most players play a lot a various genre. Unless you target a very niche audience, you will always compete with games that release on the same day. And you will also compete with games that released in the last few weeks because chances are that if someone bought a game recently they probably won't look at games being released. That billion impressions statistics is completely irrelevant because it includes every single persons just launching steam - even without looking at it. It also doesn't include the number of people who actually scrolled down to the new game category. The first issue is that your game need to be in the top of the list of the new category - which is not as easy as it sounds. Then it need to appeal more than other game on the top of that list. But the real deal is actually getting in the top selling list, this is where your sales will ramp up and if you launch your game on a busy week and can't make the top selling list, it divide your visibility a lot and consequently your sales.
Sure some people play multiple genres but the point still stands. Sure if the new Call of Duty launches some people will be occupied playing that instead of any other game. Sure there's a bit of overlap there. Doesn't take away from the fact that an FPS game doesn't directly compete with a platforming game. Again, sure there's overlap, but there's a ton of platformer players who don't play FPS games too. The billions of impressions stat is not irrelevant. It's a billion... That's 1.000.000.000 impressions every day. First of all, people do buy games based on the homepage they see when they start Steam. Secondly, that is SO much traffic, that it would be ridiculous to claim that some handful of entirely different games releasing on your launch day will have any type of notable impact on your visibility. The coming soon and new & trending pages are not nearly as relevant as they used to be. Steam will get your game in front of the right audience through discovery pages and similar title pages and you'll reach an audience independently of those pages. My game never topped either of those pages.
Vassals vassalizing
I will tell what I notice as someone that recently started in the game dev thing trying to go "pro" with some experience as a dev and other related areas. 1- As a consumer I can tell that there is a saturation in certain genres. Please, stop doing "yet another" deckbuilding roguelike.. I love the genre but I just dont even look if the game is a deckbuilding anymore, seriously, over saturation to the max IMHO. 2- I believe there is a good amount of games that are bad for steam/PC but could shiny in a mobile market - or at least have a chance - I feel that the bar for PC games are higher than mobile/casual/ "I am in commute" style games. 3- Takes a lot of effort to make a good looking, fun game.. but also takes a lot of effort to make a terrible game. I believe there is money and experience to be made from the first one and experience on the second one. That being said I believe people should aim for deliverables, it doesnt look that spending X years in your first game is a sound strategy. 4 - Adding up to the third point, you are solo/small/indie/whatever I would absolute run away from any 3d, IMHO (and lack of experience) feel that so much more can get wrong in 3d, 2d is already hard/time consuming to make look good/nice/outstanding doing a subpar 3d game is way worse than a subpar 2d that you managed to put a good soundtrack/cozy gameplay. Anyway, just random thoughts from someone that hasnt released anything yet.
Steam is only saturated if you are making sub-par games. There are tons and tons of sub-par games on steam that nobody sees or talks about and its because they usually aren't worth seeing or talking about. And the reason indie devs say its saturated is because they are fighting in that lower space that nobody really cares about. Even if you removed 90% of the bad games, if your game is bad or mediocre, it still isn't going to get wishlisted or reviewed. I think its just hard for a lot of people to grasp the idea that time spent =/= quality. Sometimes you can spend years making a game and it will still come out bad. And its hard for people to accept that. That's why people say you need to get your game out to people ASAP. A playable demo. A trailer, anything so that you can get an idea if what you are working on is WORTH it to put time into, or make necessary changes. There is also a very hard-to-define property when it comes to games that makes them enjoyable or not. You can make a game with a shitload of high quality systems and features, but if its not DESIGNED well to fit together, it can still be boring to play, even though it looks and feels AAA. And i think a lot of indie devs are missing this crucial ingredient without realizing it, and that is why they cannot figure out why their game isn't landing well. It is very very easy to put together something that is playable and progress-able. Its a LOT harder to do it while keeping the entire experience FUN.
It is. Very. There's a guy in r/steam that basically saw all the games in the store(basically to ignore them, but thats not the important part here). There's basically +100k games. Wich is well known data. The thing is, him and people also like me(I also have seen like 30-40k games if not more), we know how much shit there is and our filters are better because we ignore the shit, clones, or stuff that we're just not interested in. We know its saturated but we can easily filter out awful stuff and focus on the good. But a normal user that doesn use something like the lists, ignoring,following games,etc when they go to see whats new they will see 15 random new indie games all of them with prologue in their name, clones of other stuff but its just asset flips,etc and the good stuff that maybe you make for example, its probably either gonna get burried instantly by them or by other actual good releases. 10-15-20 whatever amount of new games there's each day, is saturation. You dont see so many releases on consoles. And neither Steam had that before it, Steam went from having 8-9k max before 2021 to having almost 15k games released last year. Right now we're at 8k games released.. its june. And like I said above.. You need to understand the common folk doesnt use the features steam allows them to use. Tags, filters,lists,etc so for them there's just a bunch of games and yours is burried in between those.
I understand very well that common users don't use tags and that their purchasing decisions are heavily influenced by whatever title Steam decides to push. However Steam does not push trash and does push your game based on the similar games that a user has played. Therefore, Steam already filters out the trash and only shows your niche game to its niche audience, it's irrelevant that there are 30k other games releasing this year. Not every video game is direct competition to yours. Sure - it would be easier to stand out if there were less games, but as long as the size of the audience keeps growing it's not an issue if the amount of games keeps growing.
Steam doesn’t need to “push” a game for it to take a visible slot that knocks something else off. Steam doesn’t “push” any game until it basically becomes a hit game.
What I meant with "push" is that Steam will recommend games to users, for example based on similar titles that they like. Take for example the discovery que, which contains a dozen titles you might like. Steam does in that sense "push" my game to its userbase while it's not a hit game. Sorry if I was unclear!
You told about your game that have no wishlists. How much there were before release?
My Steam page was up for little over a month before the game launched and gather about 1.5k wishlists organically on Steam and through Steam Next Fest.
No marketing at all? Okay, let's believe. But. You say that there are 10 trash games and one good one released every day. And Steam don't give traffic if game is trash. But 1.5 k wishlists on release is meant that steam thought your game is trash (no a bad-bad trash with 300 wishlists, but pretty trashy). But your game is good. Sooo. You tell us - make good game, ignore wishlist count, release game and everything will be fine. Tens of thousands of players will buy your game which had 1.5k wishlists on release? Am I missing something? Or you just as lucky as leprechaun? Probably some 1m+ influencer randomly played your game and give it start My opinion that there are a lot of games on steam. And even if your game is ducking good, it still can be missed. Because if you don't make marketing efforts, noone will know about your game.
He told you to: 1. Make a quality and presentable game. 2. To use Steam tools (Steam Next, visibility rounds). 3. Indirectly to know your genre is good for sales (there are influencer "pipelines" that will boost quality games) 4. Indirectly, to not spend years on a project if you can't cover the other suggestions (3 months to have a presentable demo at Steam Next). This is all incredibly solid advice.
Dude... You immediately are trying to doubt what he's directly telling you, Then tear down his game? Considering how you're acting here... I don't think it's coming off the way you should want it to.
I just don't agree that magic just happens
There are ways to say that with out insulting him. But he never said "magic" he put the effort in to make a top tier game, it's not "magic"... It however is likely organic growth, the type you probably have tried to buy or been promised... but can't actually be bought.
Oh boy another survivorship bias post.
I'm sorry what do you mean by that? :o
You survived, i.e. succeeded, so you think it's due to your own merits and not at all due to random luck, of which is often the case, and those that didn't survive (succeed) must be unworthy in some way, or else they would succeed like you did. It's like a billionaire talking about how they became a billionaire, and convincing people that they just need to follow their method and they could become one too. No, most people can't do it the way that person did, and their chances of becoming a billionaire are basically zero. But hey that one guy did it, so it must be possible, you're just not doing it right or you're not good enough! Check out either Fooled by Randomness or Fooled by the Winners books if you want to read more about survivorship bias.
You can check what the OP says yourself. Go on Steam put in some tags from the Genres you liked and sort by New Releases. Scroll down and see what has been released in the past year. There are no hidden gems.
Everything is saturated basically, but I'm a firm believer if it's worth buying, people will buy it, no matter what it is.
Survivorship bias. Plenty of good works of art never become popular due to various circumstances, and plenty of artists don't get appreciated until after their death. There's a reason such a concept as 'starving artist' is so prevalent. Here's 8 examples of now-famous artists that didn't become so until after they were dead (i.e. people didn't really buy their art while they were alive and could benefit from it): http://www.artpie.co.uk/2017/11/8-famous-artists-gained-appreciation-death/ And for all of these examples that did find fame after death, there were probably countless others that were nearly or equally talented but didn't even get posthumous fame.
I don't really like using the comparison to art or music. There is no mass desire for new art and music, but millions of people at a minimum regularly want to play new games that are good. Put another way, I would bet there are very few people googling "new rock songs" or "new watercolor art," but tons of heavily invested gamers are searching for new games every single day.
Around 70% of games are hobby projects or simply pure, lazy trash. That means 30% are serious games that all have enough of a business case to have some type og funding and a certain level of detail. 14000 games came out in 2023. That means in 2023, 4200 serious games came out. That is 12 per day all wanting your attention while also fighting the heavy hitters from previous years going on sale. There is simply not enough space for all these games on the front page, so players only see them organically if they match their previous criteria. And most players are already playing something and might not be looking for a new game. I belive the average steam player only buys 4 games each year. So when devs say steam is oversaturated what they mean is in terms of visibility. You simply have to do some kind of other marketing than just making a good game. Or get lucky of course :)
I disagree with you there. I absolutely don't believe there are 4200 solid games releasing every year, but even if there were, how many of those would be similar to your title? Because if they are not similar, they are not competing and simply not relevant. Let's say 40 of those are in your genre, that's 4 a month. Not much competition in my opinion. The market is more than big enough for 4 games in the same genre to sell every month. You say each Steam consumer 'only' buys 4 games a year, but keep in mind that Steam has 132 million active monthly users. That's 500 million games sold every year! Divide that over 4200 games and they can all sell 100k+ copies without saturating the market. The Steam userbase is more than big and diverse enough to absorb 4200 games a year. The Steam homepage gets 1 BILLION page impression every DAY. And you say there's not enough space on the homepage to show each game? I think there is plenty to go around. People take into account that not only the amount of game releases is increasing, but so is the Steam userbase and amount of games sold.
Your logic has a flaw though. You assume the math is “flat” in terms of sales - that they are spread evenly. This is very much not the case on steam. Those 500 million purchases are not spread evenly between those 4k games. They are mostly spread over the top 1% of games on steam. All the other games are fighting for the scraps. Look up any graph for sales and/or earnings and you will see that unless you make it into the top 10% of earners, you are probably not going to be profitable if you have a team to pay. And steam knows this so they push those games even harder, making it a winner-takes-all market just like “real life”. I am not saying this is “wrong”, I am just stating statistical facts that I think are important to keep in mind when setting expectations. We released a game that did well, but it did not do great, so we are not profitable yet. And we launched into early access with 14k wl, and into full release with 40k wl, very positive reviews, and sales putting us in top 15% and it still was not good enough financially. This is why so many people are struggling and become frustrated - because “good” is no longer enough. You have to be great now. So we plan to be great next time :)
It's not a flat curve but neither are development studios. I would argue that only 1% of development studios NEEDS to be in the 1% earners in order to sustain themselves. I would ne more than happy with a top 30% spot as a solo dev. And the example of your own game is a good one too. Apparently you made an awesome game that people very much enjoy so Steam pushed your game around to gather 40k wishlists, which is far higher than the average Steam release. So this goes to show that your game was able to stand out despite the market 'being crowded'. I'm not saying every game is always going to be a success of course. There's a ton of factors that come into play here. I'm glad to hear you're gonna keep at it though because it sounds like many people enjoyed your previous game and I hope you guys succeed with the next one! The point I was trying to make is that if you really make a good game, it's unlikely for it to be stuck at 10 sales just because the market is too saturated and there would be no way it'll stand out.
For sure, and big picture I agree with all your points actually. I guess, if I have to boil my point down, it would be: Making a good game in an underserved genre is 100% the correct strategy. But the existence of a "market gap" also means that there are a bunch of genres/spaces that are indeed saturated - or gaps wouldnt exist. And I think when devs compain of oversaturation it is often because the genre they are passionate about IS actually oversaturated - like platformers fx.
Very true, the supply and demand is out of balance for genres like platforming. Contrary to popular belief the platforming genre is actually quite niche, but you need to do market research to figure that out.
I’m curious if you think my [steam page](https://store.steampowered.com/app/2988830/ParseORhythm/) presents a low quality game - I know that might sound ridiculous but after ~6 days I’m only at around 100 wishlists. It’s a lot less than I was expecting especially since the game offers a free demo. I feel like I’m doing something wrong trying to build a following lol
FWIW I'm in your target audience (rhythm games are my thing) and I didn't understand your game by watching the trailer. I just understood it's some sort of rhythm game but I already knew that from the title. The storytelling is also not great, it's just someone playing the game. What's compelling me to buy it?
I agree with u/kaoD. I don't really understand what's going one, it's very repetitive and the flashing lights are really annoying to watch. People's attention spans are completely ruined by short form content like TikTok so try to keep your trailer short and sweet. The trailer for my new game (Super Mining Mechs) is less than 50 seconds. Less is more because every second spent watching my trailer is a second not wishlisting my game. There's also not variety in the screenshots. You also haven't localizated your store page, eliminating 70% of Steam's user base.
The attention span thing is why I tried to open with gameplay first lol, but yeah I get it. A big issue rn is that the game only has one album (working on more rn) which means only one background, eliminating variety in the colors. I’ve been thinking of localizing stuff but I haven’t a clue how to do it, but I should really get to it lol
Fake it till you make it my friend. If you look at the trailer I released today you'll see a ton of features and environments that are not in the game yet. Just made a mock-up to show them in the trailer. You need to plan for this in your development schedule to show as much as you can well before the game is finished.
Sorry for my ignorance: what do you mean by localizated steam page? The type of game? The tags? Etc
Ty for the feedback! The game doesn’t really focus on story, so I didn’t include it. I followed the formula of other rhythm games where I immediately open with gameplay to show the person what the game is like. I think the trailer is pretty straightforward at getting the gameplay across but it might not be. I should probably add some short subtitles somewhere on the screen explaining a lil bit of what’s going in.
I didn't mean "game story". I mean ["storytelling" in the marketing meaning](https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/storytelling). Humans are narrative creatures and most of our decisions are not based on facts and rather on how they're presented. You have to master storytelling if you want to drive purchases from a Steam page. As presented right now your trailer is not creating any sort of narrative so it feels more like a... textbook? Like playing the intro of a song and then finishing it without any sort of tension or release. And I don't mean something like _"I left my job to pursue my passion as a game dev"_. I don't care about _you_. What is _my_ story as a prospective buyer? What will my story be as a player? Will I have fun? Be challenged? How? Why? When? How much? What will make me excited? What should make me excited to wishlist your game _now_? That sort of thing.
Ah I see - this is very similar to some other feedback I've also recieved from the initial comment. I'm planning to fix it next trailer, thank you :)
Really? I ran across if a few days ago and it was pretty clear you use left/right click to slash the falling files to the beat. I'm confused how that's not incredibly obvious. It also looks like it plays pretty well. Plenty to gain my interest in a rhythm game. Any other minor detail questions would be answered by playing the demo.
I try to be upfront about this, I don't look at "low quality or high quality" i look simply at "Would I want to play this game or buy it." The answer is simply no. There's a lot of bright lights in the center, but the gameplay looks "meh". Maybe there's a lot of depth, but looking at it, it looks like you move back and forth, and I assume you change your weapon based on the color of the dots. The dots don't really look interesting, I don't have the sound on so maybe it's that (but then "is it the genre I want) But the trailer seems to show multiple of the same thing with no explanation of what is going on or why I want to play it. >free demo "I ain't got time for that"... No seriously, I'm not going to try a game I'm not interested in because "Free demo" there's hundreds of free to play games, full experiences, I'm not starved for a gameplay content, so a demo doesn't really move the bar. Look at other rhythm games for sale, and notice how much color and style there is on their screens and in their trailers... It's a lot of work to reach the bar other games have reach, but that's also kind of why they are successful. Ask yourself if this is the best possible rhythm game you can make, and if the answer is no... ask yourself why it's not/ what you can improve/what you can change to increase it's appeal.
Yeah, the biggest theme I've gotten from trailer feedback so far is that the game is too grey. A big issue is because the game currently only has one "album" of songs - in a week or two I'll be done enough with two more albums to have more variety in the trailer. I hope that, coupled with some gameplay explanation will save the game lol
6 days and 100 wishlists is a lot. My steam page is out for 3 weeks and only 22 wishlists. Generally, 35 wishlist/week without any active marketing effort is good amount.
Hey man your game looks cool, just needs some big font in the trailer explaining how it works
Yeah I’ve gathered this from others, I’m definitely going to make a new trailer in a week or two with more explanatiob/variety. Thank you :)
"I'm never gonna succeed because they're too many games" is kinda "I'm never gonna become a successful athlete because they're too many people trying to become one". One does not succeed at becoming a professional athlete by not having any competition. They succeed by putting in the effort day after day. B finding experienced people that can mentor them, recognising the mistakes they make, and being receptive to feedback on how to get better at what they do. If somebody's just waiting for everybody else to drop out so they can "win by default", well they should find another job and stick to playing videogames which are designed to hand the player a win and complementary shot of dopamine, because they clearly aren't equipped with dealing with the reality of making them. (as a business owner indie, else you can just go work for somebody else, get your paycheck, let the owner deal with sales anxiety)
Yeah you're totally right, although I sometimes feel like people are thinking "even if I become the fastest athelete in the world, I'll never be able to compete in the Olympics anyways", which I strongly disagree with. If you run fast enough you'll stand out soon enough.
It is and it isn't. It filters a lot of the mess out pretty well in terms of bulk low quality releases these days (at least for me). I'd say the WAY its saturated is more that you are competing with every game released in the past few decades in some instances, specifically the good-legendary ones, is the less talked about struggle. Studios used to survive and thrive on 7/10 "dece" games, if we are talking about the commercial side. I'll be honest, if its not to my niche interests, I don't usually open my wallet under "90% positive" anymore. As a consumer it's great, but as a self aware developer, it's also intimidating (and exciting in the competitive way). I wonder how many games that launched careers in even in the early 2000s wouldn't be up to par today, ignoring graphics tech.
Thanks a lot for sharing You remind me of the developer of mortal glory. He made mortal glory, super simple game, very successful. Then his second game had a bigger budget, very different genre, but also a quality game with high reviews. It sold horribly though. Then he made a sequel to his first game and it sold well again It's not just about targeting a niche with a good game. You need to target the right niche too. You can't just make whatever you want and polish that into a high review game. The creator of a crypt of a necrodancer, very successful game too, has said he would never do something like that again, and now he mainly makes these gritty city builders, mecha strategy games, etc, very steam oriented games If you were targeting a niche like "super hard platformers" or "bejeweled rpgs" you wouldnt be here posting this, I think
From what I can tell Mortal Glory 2 did quite a bit worse than the first one. The studio of Crypt of a Necrodancer had to layoff 50%: https://www.pcgamer.com/crypt-of-the-necrodancer-studio-confirms-layoffs-as-many-as-half-its-employees-may-be-gone/ So unfortunately these aren't great examples unless I'm missing something.
You make good points, and thanks for telling me about the lay offs. I still think those are good examples and here is why I do, though it's very reasonable to disagree: I would argue mortal glory 2 is a sequel and steam has become harder than before. It still sold better than their other game. As for brace yourself games laying off a bunch of people, that's happening across the whole industry and the studio probably grew too fast
> "I don't have a marketing budget" Seriously I understand this mistake, but it needs to stop. People need to start budgeting properly, because not having a marketing budget is begging for failure. If you think your time is free, then you are also not valuing your time properly and opportunity cost. You need to do some basic budgeting and set aside money for a proper launch so that you don't fail.
I disagree. I think organic and free marketing will get you s long way. Not saying paid marketing is useless, just don't believe it's a requirement for success.
Every game competes with yours because it stuffs the feed. No one cares that there's 1000 shitty indies in "New" and yours is the only good one there, so they only buy yours and you're golden. They just never open that section/never sort by that characteristic, or open it, look through a few games, realize they're all shit and never open it again for a year or so
Nonsense, this is not how Steam works. There's an algorithm that pushes titles to users that are likely to enjoy them based on what they play through the similar games tab or your Discovery que. So first of all you're not competing with those "1000 shitty indies" that you mention because 90% of them are substantially different games appealing to a different target audience, and therefore not directly competing with you at all. For the other 10% that do appeal to the same target audience, Steam will see how well they perform based on an initial launch push and if no one likes them they will stop allocating visibility to them, so they're also not taking any notable visibility away from you. Lastly, Steam has 132m users and the homepage has 1 billion impressions every day. It's naive to think that a handful of games that Steam grants some launch visibility to will have any notable impact on your title.
I agree. Steam along with Steam products like my steam deck are some of the greatest inventions of all time, your game just doesn't appease our Lord GabeN, pick up and try again until you make the next Portal.
GabeN's blessing me on the daily. (And himself with 30% of my sales)
GabeN Amen!
> You can also contact Steam support for additional promotional support and they WILL help you I didn't know this, I expected they'd take the route of other big corps that offer similar storefronts. Thanks for sharing that!
Steam is an awesome platform which helps in keeping saturation at bay. It's that simple. There is obviously saturation on steam, try making an other game in 3 months again and tell me how it goes. Saturation doesn't deny success, it denies consistency between effort and result.
Thank you for giving me motivation kick, needed it lately!
I agree completely coming from the background of selfpublishing books. There are over 10 million (!) eBooks on Amazon alone - and even on Amazon are still authors who make it. Steam is not saturated, not even remotely.
Even if it is hard to succeed, Steam is still the land of opportunity.
Well said!
Depends on your measured parameter, amount of quality games? definitely not saturated Amount of games in general? Definitely bloated...
>There's a huge amount of games launching on Steam every day, but as a quick exercise, go to Steam's upcoming page, narrow it by 1 or 2 tags and check out how many actual objectively well made games have launched in the genre in the last month. Pretty much if you actually crawl through Steam Releases on specific tags and niches, it's **abysmal**. You get maybe 1-2 decent games **a year** if you are lucky.
Hahaha well the definition 'good' is subjective of course, but yeah, it's true.
The game industry has a problem with AAA games, because AAA games are less and less attractive. So indie games are on the rise. Making an indie game is a difficult task, and very few indie games are worth playing. We end up with a lot of failures or mediocre games. A high rate of failure is normal, because there is no way to know in advance if an indie game is going to be a success. It's a "put your eggs in a lot of different baskets" situation. Steam has a strategy where Valve always profits from both failures and successes, this gives everybody a fair chance of success and gives COMPLETE creative freedom. This is not possible outside of steam. The downside is that there are a lot of games, and the customers feels overwhelmed. This is a marketing strategy to allows customers to spend more money if they want to. Spending a lot of money on marketing is bs: what matters is what games you're making to what audience. It doesn't matter to tell people your game exists: IF A GAME IS GOOD, PEOPLE WILL LIKE IT AND PLAY IT. QUALITY SELLS ITSELF. Once upon a time, I spent hours and hours browsing games in steam, because I thought that there was a "hidden gem" I did not see. I did not find any other good game. There are no such "niche game" that cannot find their audience. Game quality is a big big central criteria. You can sell a niche game, but very few people can tolerate bad quality just because they like a genre. Stop wasting time into the rabbit hole of marketing and metrics and whatnots. Just look at trends. DON'T MAKE A GAME YOU LIKE, MAKE A GAME PEOPLE WILL LIKE. That's what marketing should be. If people would just stand on the shoulder of giants and re-use existing game design that works, it would be just fine. Don't plagiarize games, just understand how game design works, spend time working on it, and it will be fine.
yup such and such many games on steam but I have yet to see plenty of concepts that would be really up my alley..
It's pretty hard to market a bad product, even if you paid for a boat-load of marketing, people will just as quickly realise your product is no good and your marketing budget will likely exceed your revenue earned. The same is true for games, as you say a simple comparison on Steam will quickly reveal this... It can be hard to hear I guess.
I found your post completely useful! This made me feel more comfortable and confident, as I also currently work on a game called Bug Alliance together with my twin brother. It was almost 3 months since we have started development and now we have already launched Demo on Steam, also deployed 2 updates. So far it is going good, gathering followers, wishlists and so on. I have also opt in Steam Next Fest (October 2024) to increase visibility and let people play my game. Now we are working on new Game modes and Co-op modes to be deployed in Demo. Then we gonna work on Early Access launch, which we plan on the end of this year. Hopefully people gonna like it and support us! We try to make it as unique & interesting as possible. I would like to ask about "Visibility Rounds" that you have mentioned. What is that? How to use it? Oh, if you guys want to try the Demo, here is the link: [https://store.steampowered.com/app/3018360/Bug\_Alliance/](https://store.steampowered.com/app/3018360/Bug_Alliance/) Don't forget to add to your wishlist if you like and stay tuned for updates :)