The majority of anything sucks ass and fails, no shit Sherlock, this isn't a problem unique to Steam
this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2026
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Why is this written like some kind of hit piece.
Behold, it's easy to make a game and hard to make a good one
Yah it feels targeted, I'd ask who paid this writer to make this.
Epic store would be my guess.
The same is true in literally every industry, and practically every sphere of society. Nothing new.
Read more here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_distribution
The ideas described in Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody and Chris Anderson's The Long Tail made the mid-2000s super optimistic about having fewer gatekeepers between those who would create something and those who would enjoy that thing: you no longer needed to convince an agent and publisher and distributor for the funds or approval to publish a book, or release an album, or even distribute a short film or movie, because you could just do those things and see if you could find an audience.
And it worked, because on the internet it became economically feasible to publish for a small audience, and it became economically feasible to aggregate a lot of small creators and small audiences into big content-agnostic platforms for the thing being distributed. And a few of them would make it big, too.
Yes, app stores still funnel the overwhelming majority of the money on the platform to a small handful of developers. But I'd argue that the recent moves towards consolidation and concentration is because the ecosystems have betrayed the democratic, decentralized, nondiscriminatory/content-neutral ideals that we built the user-created Web 2.0 on, and instead of descended into enshittified monetization of the platforms' algorithmic control, SEO-like strategies so that slop isn't filtered out, and our utterly hacked brains that can't resist clickbait and ragebait and hornybait to where it's mostly sorting through slop instead of organically finding the niches we enjoy.
And now instead of traditional gatekeepers, we have tech gatekeepers. It was a fun run, though, from 2005-2015.
What's with these news pieces, they exclusively focus on steam, industrys slinging mud.
There is a hell of a lot of shit and slop games on Steam, though,
Yes, that happens if you have freedom. That is something I take, rather than having no freedom. At least the algorithm and how the store is organized handles this. Because, if not, who is to decide what slop is? Valve? Does that mean Valve has the power to decide what game is slop or not? Yes, it would prevent lot of slop, but then Valve would be in charge to decide this and that is not something I want to.
Edit: As an example, Nintendo seems to allow publishing a lot of games too without holding much back. The difference to Steam is, that Steam does an excellent job of organizing the games, with a good algorithm and user engaged reviews and tagging. That helps a lot, which Nintendo lacks. So yes, if you dig deeper in Steam or just list newest titles released, yes you will find a lot of slop. But going with the algorithm and looking through recommended games Steam does pretty good job hiding most slop.
I'm not judging, just stating it as a reason why so many games make so little money. It's because they deserve to. They're easy to avoid, and I honestly rarely even see them on my store page.
I also recently finally got around to blocking certain publishers that do pop up so I see even less slop now - Blizzard, Activision, EA, Playstation, to name a few.
I'd be more worried about most people buying from Amazon or communicating through services owned by Meta.
Too many games on Steam (and any other store) and too many people believing if something trends and/or has extensive marketing it must be great. Added to this is the fun fact that any live service multiplayer game that's not part of the most played is considered "dead". I miss the days when I'd visit someone, each would grab a controller and have a blast playing some weird ass game nobody talked about. Good stuff that can still be done over long distances when someone bothers to purchase local multiplayer games and stream them through Steam's Remote Play Together or some other alternative like Parsec (or less common still, games with LAN multiplayer), but too many people are stuck on the loop of typical live service hooks.
It only costs $100 to list your own game on Steam, and that money is refunded if you make $1000. That's all there is. The rest is up to the dev or the publisher. That barrier to entry is absurdly low. If a game isn't making sales, it's not Steams fault, it's advertising. ANYONE can list games, which means there is a lot of chaff on the market. What do you want them to do? Increase the listing price so that trash games don't get listed as often? Then you cut out the good indie dev, too. Game dev is only half the battle. You still have to reach your market once you post your game.
Steam allows you to buy from whomever. Want to support an indie dev on their first title? Go for it. Steam won't stop you. You can be the change you want to see in the world.
Yep. You either allow the garbage or block the upcoming indie dev. One person’s trash is another person’s Power Washer Simulator 2024.
Couldn't stop playing it for days when I first got it.
As always, discoverability could be better. But mostly that's discoverability of recommendations and a smarter system for suggesting new games that would make a difference IMHO. Valve certainly isn't the worst at finding things you like, although their search is a bit clunky
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/sigh
They admit the numbers are estimates.
This doesn’t seem to take into account “paid games” that are mangles of free assets smashed into a scene.
I’m not saying there isn’t going to be disparity, because there absolutely is. But these numbers are just grasping at straws and don’t control for obvious issues.
I'm surprised it's not more extreme. There's lots of trash on steam.
When if true, why is this news? There's a ton of games on Steam and gaming is totally saturated at this point. There's just too many games.
Is ‘games that sell more copies make more money’ supposed to surprise me?
"Half of all paid games on Steam have earned less than an estimated $3,622 in their entire lifetime," the report reads. "A game at the 90th percentile has earned about $236,184, and the 99th percentile starts at $15,872,031."
10% making over $235k paints a very different picture tho...
Especially considering how 8/10 games seem to be utter slop lately.
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gaben looking like a completely different person
This is one of the reasons why the narrative is nonsense that renting games is better because you can easily own "too many games" if you keep buying them and then... oh no!!! You own too many digital games!!!
When you buy an indie game you are supporting art whether you get to the game or not, remember that, which isn't to say buy random games but I think this statistic underlines how much it does matter to the smaller game developers to take a leap and buy their indie games. It helps that they usually cost 1/50th the cost of a AAA game lol....
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Their analysis comes with the usual Steam research caveat: Valve doesn't publish revenue figures, so they're instead reverse-engineered using user reviews as a base that's then multiplied to estimate sales.
I didn't know how unreliable and bad the usual Steam research was. I always thought there must be a bit more sophisticated method of estimating.
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You get access to the largest game distribution platform in the world, but you end up being a single game in a sea of competitors. You gotta distinguish yourself from the lot, on top of being lucky that your stars are aligned.
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