There Were 215 New Games Released on Steam in the Last Week Alone

[ffronw]

There Were 215 New Games Released on Steam in the Last Week Alone

Last week saw 215 games released on Steam, a number that has been steadily trending up since the launch of Steam Direct.

Valve launched its new self-publishing program, Steam Direct, back in mid-June. Under this new program, which replaced Steam Greenlight, I thought it was too low as well [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/170477-Valve-Steam-Direct-Publishing-Fee-100]). So far, the numbers seem to be showing that we can expect a lot more games on Steam in the coming weeks.

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According to statistics gathered by Ico Partners' Thomas Bidaux [https://twitter.com/icotom/status/894556717735960576] (see graph above), the first week of July 2016 (when Greenlight was still in place), there were 28 games released on Steam. This year, that number was 84. Since that week, the number have been trending upward, with the number of launches peaking at 215 games last week alone.

It's difficult to point the finger squarely at Steam Direct, as we don't have access to the inner workings of Steam, and Valve did say that it would be approving a number of titles that were still left in its Greenlight program. That said, it does seem suggestive of a pattern that may continue, and certainly bears watching. If this trend continues, discovery is likely to become an even bigger issue on Steam than it already is.

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[Bad Player]

Valve claimed they were making the switch to reduce the flood of poor-quality games, but it should have been obvious that "pay a flat fee and get your game" would result in many more games than "only the top games as voted by the community get in."

 

[Pyrian]

Valve claimed they were making the switch to reduce the flood of poor-quality games...

Not really. Their official statement is "The goal with Steam Direct is to provide an understandable and predictable path for developers from anywhere in the world to bring their games to Steam. [http://steamcommunity.com/games/593110/announcements/detail/1265922321514182595]" Nothing in that about the flood of poor quality games. (They talk more about that in the changes to trading cards, not Steam Direct.) Indeed, there's quite a bit about how they don't feel confident picking winners at all, which seems to be their fundamental philosophy.

My suspicion is that releasing more games means its working as intended.

 

[MonsterCrit]

Gotta love the gaming industry. They go from complaining about too few games to too many games at the drop of the hat. Maybe it's because i don't search for games without at least an idea of what I'm looking for, but for me I have little trouble finding games I like.

I'm looking for a game the first stop is the store page of a game in my library I look at the tags and check out others like it. I don't go randomly searching through lists and queues. When I do use random searches I apply the same logic I do to google searches. If it ain;'t in the first 1-2 pages, refine your search terms.

Me thinks this is a confluence of two problems two small groupos are having. Games Journalists don't know which horse to bet on anymore. Old days there was a very small list of games and it was a snap to pick which one would be topical...nowadays, oh no!.

The other group are people who were too used to basically being told what to buy.
I suppose it;s like the shock someone gets when one is used to just following the books that get a lot of media attention like Twilight and such then decides to go to an actual book store where 95% of the books are series and authors they never heard of. They feel overwhelmed an more importantly embarassed because it dawns on them that the only books they read were those that media told them about and they didn't really think much about their own tastes.

215 new games. Swell. all the more chance that at least one person out there will find a new game they like.

Let's also be serious though. The spike was predicted since what we're sseeing is a combination of the games that were still in green light when it shut down coming in, and the actual new steam direct games. So you can expect the spike to continue but it will trickle off as devs realize that shotgunning games doesn't really yield any profit. They can't simply put a game up and rely on card farming drops any more since steam only allows games to start droping cards once theyve reached a confidence threshold. That is,m when they;ve actually sold (through steam) a certain volume.

 

[Erttheking]

So Steam Direct is ACTUALLY WORSE than Greenlight? Fucking hell Valve.

 

[J.McMillen]

It's probably just a flood of games from the last batch of Greenlight stuff that ALL got approved when Valve shut it down. That's right, apparently all Greenlight campaigns that were running when it was just down were given approval, regardless of how many votes a game may or may not have had.

 

[Xorph]

Honestly, I think Valve should just consider splitting their storefront in two. A main store, and an "indie" store.

For the main store, let in the AAA and AA publishers/devs, the big indie publishers (e.g. Devolver, Adult Swim) as well as people who have whatever the internal "verified" status is (That is, whatever status let Scott Cawthon upload Five Nights At Freddy's 3/4/Sister straight to Steam, skipping the Greenlight process he had to use for the first two).

Let all the people who want to pay $100 to upload their first Unity game end up on the indie section, but if a game sells particularly well/draws in good enough reviews/lands a publishing deal, let them move up to the main storefront.

 

[Elvis Starburst]

Honestly, I think Valve should just consider splitting their storefront in two. A main store, and an "indie" store.

For the main store, let in the AAA and AA publishers/devs, the big indie publishers (e.g. Devolver, Adult Swim) as well as people who have whatever the internal "verified" status is (That is, whatever status let Scott Cawthon upload Five Nights At Freddy's 3/4/Sister straight to Steam, skipping the Greenlight process he had to use for the first two).

Let all the people who want to pay $100 to upload their first Unity game end up on the indie section, but if a game sells particularly well/draws in good enough reviews/lands a publishing deal, let them move up to the main storefront.

I love it. Someone at Valve get on this shit

 

[Bindal]

So Steam Direct is ACTUALLY WORSE than Greenlight? Fucking hell Valve.

Not really, because the way Valve closed Greenlight was to give the go to literally every single game on there - resulting in about 2000+ confirmed games on the same day alone.
And I am pretty sure that for the next few months, we will keep seeing the flood of the Greenlight Remains before we get the first games that clearly come via Steam Direct.

 

[Chaosian]

It's probably just a flood of games from the last batch of Greenlight stuff that ALL got approved when Valve shut it down. That's right, apparently all Greenlight campaigns that were running when it was just down were given approval, regardless of how many votes a game may or may not have had.

I think those already went through. It was like 6000 games or something completely nuts (probably not quite that much, but that number comes to mind for some reason).

 

[Erv]

As someone that plays mostly indie games, I love the low barrier to entry. I hardly ever see shovelware being hawked at me except if I specifically go out looking for it. Steam is much more able to handle a flood of games than they were even a few years ago.

 

[Trunkage]

Honestly, I think Valve should just consider splitting their storefront in two. A main store, and an "indie" store.

For the main store, let in the AAA and AA publishers/devs, the big indie publishers (e.g. Devolver, Adult Swim) as well as people who have whatever the internal "verified" status is (That is, whatever status let Scott Cawthon upload Five Nights At Freddy's 3/4/Sister straight to Steam, skipping the Greenlight process he had to use for the first two).

Let all the people who want to pay $100 to upload their first Unity game end up on the indie section, but if a game sells particularly well/draws in good enough reviews/lands a publishing deal, let them move up to the main storefront.

Wasn't this Desura and its ilk?

I mean, the reason we have this situation is because Valve is worried about missing out on another Minecraft. They aren't going to put any barriers up in case one of those 6000 are a winner

 

[Maze1125]

Don't forget that means Valve is getting $20,000 a week just from new games getting added on Steam. Not massive for a company like Valve, but enough to pay for 30 or so employees.

 

[Vigormortis]

Did you know that over 100 new albums/songs were added to iTunes today?

Did you know several hundred new DVD/Bluray releases have or will come out this week as well? Same goes for novels and novellas.

Does any one here spend time bitching about it on any online forum? No? Then why is it an "issue" on Steam?

snip

Q.F.T.

 

[Ugicywapih]

Valve claimed they were making the switch to reduce the flood of poor-quality games...

Not really. Their official statement is "The goal with Steam Direct is to provide an understandable and predictable path for developers from anywhere in the world to bring their games to Steam. [http://steamcommunity.com/games/593110/announcements/detail/1265922321514182595]" Nothing in that about the flood of poor quality games. (They talk more about that in the changes to trading cards, not Steam Direct.) Indeed, there's quite a bit about how they don't feel confident picking winners at all, which seems to be their fundamental philosophy.

My suspicion is that releasing more games means its working as intended.

Exactly this. From what I remember of Jim Sterling's and Totalbiscuit's videos on their trip to Valve, rather than curbing the general output, Valve intends to work on refining their curation and discovery mechanics to ensure shovelware quickly gets buried.

If that works, games that are actually capable of capturing an audience have basically no barrier of entry, while crap (which will get through in varying volume no matter the barriers, I mean Aliens: Colonial Marines wasn't exactly released by a niche studio) is going to get filtered out reasonably well. Hell, we might actually see overhyped "AAA" failures get some comeuppance if they're subjected to this sort of independent quality control.

If it doesn't work... Well, Valve have pretty much shown they understand the root issue by pinpointing trading card exploitation. I understand that's fixed/will be fixed soon (I can say I've never really gotten into that scene so I hadn't paid enough attention to see if it already had its lifeline cut), so even if way more crappy games get released soon, I expect we won't see more drek cluttering up the storefront anyway since asset flips and the like no longer have the main reason why some of them became popular.

Don't forget that means Valve is getting $20,000 a week just from new games getting added on Steam. Not massive for a company like Valve, but enough to pay for 30 or so employees.

The 100$ fee for releasing a game is refundable though, if the game sells a fairly minor number of copies. They'll likely still see some income even if the game just barely hits the refund threshold, but considering server maintenance, payment processing and the works, I actually wouldn't be surprised if they could end up at a loss in borderline cases like that.

 

[J.McMillen]

It's probably just a flood of games from the last batch of Greenlight stuff that ALL got approved when Valve shut it down. That's right, apparently all Greenlight campaigns that were running when it was just down were given approval, regardless of how many votes a game may or may not have had.

I think those already went through. It was like 6000 games or something completely nuts (probably not quite that much, but that number comes to mind for some reason).

The approvals went through, but many of those games probably weren't ready to be released... yet. We'll be seeing those games eventually crop up for years.