I think its unfortunate because there’s a lot of games that fall into that next ~15-25% that are decently good games (though sometimes flawed) but won’t make enough to let the developers survive a second game.
That being said I don’t think there is a particularly easy solution, and to Valve’s credit, they have tried unique approaches to combat this, but it’s still a problem.
I agree. It’s not a platform issue it’s a market saturation issue. You see this in many fields where the product is frequently a passion project. (Mostly art, music etc.) Some people will keep creating regardless of the earnings and throw the stats. Not that the stats really matter. Not much you can do… aside from UBI.
Is this presented as a bad thing?
It’s a thing. If you’re an inspiring indie dev, it’s hard numbers to let you know if you can work with these numbers. If you’re just a gamer, they probably don’t matter at all.
The 1% numbers makes me question by there aren’t more AA initiates out there. we don’t get many 5-10m budget games these days, but the typical AA game is (conservatively) making 15m dollars. So if you can turnournd a game on the level of Claire Obscur (which IIRC had a 10m dollar budget) in 4 years, there should be openings for potential success.
Guess it comes down to the lack of investors who care at that level (who wouldn’t just throw it at AI)
Considering valve is a for profit company and that steam is centralized and closed source third party software launcher with ads i would say these numbers are not entirely the result of “natural law” like many idiots are claiming but the result of corporations shady business practices.
I mean as opposed to all the non for profit and open source video game stores I totally get it.
It’s certainly not a good thing for startup indie devs putting months of work into a project.
its indicative of accessibility for startups. the way a company would change the metric is not gatekeep the smallfry.
Or promote new and interesting works as opposed to maximising profit by promoting established studios and games with already high levels of prestige.
The reality is they want you to find those other games to maximize profit, which is where all of their work into recommendation engines and personalized release calendars has gone. But it’s not going to convince millions of people who want to play NBA 2K that they should buy the latest indie game instead.
And yet every time a Triple A title drops it gets a custom banner on the store page and a guaranteed panel on the recommendation window, even when those indie titles have outsold them in the past without preferential treatment.
Networking is always important. And those AAA studios probably have dedicated lines of support to Valve that can open up such deals way more easily than an indie trying to email support.
Valve also does try to highlight some successful indies, but that’s a small slice of indie pie. While every other AAA studio is that direct line gained from events, existing networks reaching out, etc.
Yes, I’m aware that what Valve does maximises profit, but it’s a trade-off with quality as we’ve seen the larger studios are more likely to be cashgrabs than even some asset flips.
Someone is probably far more likely to pick up a game like that that they just didn’t know was out rather than one they’ve never heard of before. If they could pull that trick on any game, they probably wouldn’t let a day go by without a banner, like today.
im surprised they do promotion for free honestly but I doubt it would have much of an effect but not being so accessible to indie would make them look a lot better for articles like this.
What kind of store doesn’t do promotion? What universe do you live in for promotion to have no effect?
Many stores the producers bring their things in. It was not uncommon to get stuff from them to put up but the store itself generally did not make it. They just put up what they get. I don’t know what universe you live in but that is how mine has in meat space where you are making the comaparison. Promotions were usually more and bigger for the big guys. the guy who sold his homemade stuff maybe had a bit of space by the register.
Did they include AI slop, dogshit mobile game ports, low effort games, and the like in the dataset? If so, I’m not surprised.
OP, can you link the original research? It’s an excellent site:
Pareto principle writ large.
That or Sturgeon’s law.
not that I like it, but isn’t it how the current economy works across most fields?
A lot more than just the economy, it’s like a law of nature. Even language itself obeys it
Ecactly, I think you’re referring to the Pareto distribution and/or Zipf’s law
A centralized third party software launcher that sponsor certain games over others follow the law of greedyness not the law of nature.
Jesus, the gamesradar site is absolute ass
The data: https://weloveit.io/developers/steam-revenue-report/
The top 10% of games make 98.80% of all revenue. Woof.
That makes sense right? Aren’t 90% of games just kind of trash? If you open the store page and it says 14 Mostly Negative reviews of course you’re not buying it. Top 10% is a huge number and basically encompasses all the thousands of videogames I would ever want to actually play.
If you check one graph down below on the page, you’d find that in 2021 amount of games released was around 11k which is quite a bunch of games released in a year. By 2024 amount has doubled.
I don’t want to make any statements, but my speculation would be that most of these games are UE/Unity asset flips or/and AI generated garbage that is worth no one’s time.
If only major devs and solid indie devs are considered, revenue gap would probably be much narrower.
Aren’t 90% of games just kind of trash?
Answer, per Sturgeon’s Law: “Ninety percent of everything is crap”
Right… Nobody is buying games with mostly negative reviews unless they’re under duress…
And even before all the AI slop flooding app stores we’ve had plenty of asset flip type games that barely counted as complete games.
Even before that. Atari kind of failed due to overproduction of bad games
almost suprised its that low, but I suppose “sex with hitler 2” has some audience
That’s basically the story of the whole economy.
Podcasts, music, film, paintings, novels…Linux distributions, ice cream flavor sales…literally everything.
Athletes, at least in the sports that make any money at all.
Twitch streamers, YouTube channels, book best seller lists, radio play lists…
Hell, the website I get knitting patterns from has the same situation. The top 1% of designers make all the dough. But it’s great to have a platform that anybody can submit patterns to. The top designers pay the bills and they keep people coming back.
The platforms also create the new top designers/performers by letting new talents submit for free.
Like live streaming, Twitch have no clue who’s going to become big and who’ll stay at 2 concurrent viewers. But you need to let everyone try, to be able to have the few that rises to the top
Upvotes on lemmy posts…
You could indeed argue that lemmy follow similar patterns, for example threads posted in popular subs predates all other content. If you ask me this is a big problem and the result of a design shaped around advertising and content manipulation inherited from reddit.
ice cream flavor sales
Strawberry’s fallen on hard times. We need to seize the means of chocolate production and distribute the wealth among all our fellow flavors.
Would Pareto be ecstatic or rolling in his grave at this disparity?
What? You never played Monopoly before? What do you think the endgame is?
The Monopoly endgame is spending as much time in jail as possible to evade property tax and fees.
Yeah but you gotta own the best properties before you do that.
For profit centralized economy perhaps
No, it’s a byproduct of differences in skill and fitness to tasks, it’s gonna happen even in centralised economies (that were never tried and if they were it wasn’t real communism, I’m sure) it’s just not going to be recognised and rewarded if everyone is supposedly equal.
I don’t think we should prescribe to the idea differences in skill are AS great as riches would imply.
Elon Musk is not MILLIONS of times better at making cars than the next manufacturer. Most would say he’s worse.
What will also be relevant is the degree to which companies now subvert each other. If one person got really good at baking, he could take out an ad in the paper, right? Except adspot prices have gone way up because of rich companies running the same promo 1000x into people’s eyeballs about their frozen imported bread, even though this one guy might have something people actually want.
Or, look at game companies that all have competent products but are carefully managing their release date to avoid GTAVI.
Yesn’t.
All your objections are valid, however all of these factors only add noise to the equation.
The Pareto distribution still observably happens in non-centralised, non-profit driven systems.
It is a byproduct of unequal output, not market type, provided there is some sort of reward proportional to performance.
I don’t think we should prescribe to the idea differences in skill are AS great as riches would imply.
They are only in the beginning. Money has the ability to compound and, in the case of competitive, elastic markets, this is even more starkly visible.
If I make more money one year due to higher fitness/better output, I have more revenue with similar expenses to my direct competitors, so I have more profit, I get to invest more, rinse, repeat, compounding my competitive advantage more-than-linearly.
This however is just more visible in economics. In fact, I would argue it goes for any type of competitive environment; the fewer limiting factors on individual faculties the more obvious it is.
Individual sports like tennis, swimming, running, or martial arts are usually dominated by a handful of individuals, who reach the peak and then get replaced as they get older, and new, stronger athletes join the competition (or sometimes if rulesets are modified to shake up the meta, but that would also change the parameters to determine fitness).
The only scenario where this does not happen is where there is no running incentive, or only weak ones, to excel in a particular pursuit.
Should they pool game sales earnings and distribute the money equally among developers? I can’t think of any other platform that based on my own tastes recommends me games that don’t even have double digit all time high concurrent players (at most just basic lists that end up burying old titles at the end of the queue) and that I end up buying.
There’s plenty of valid criticism for steam, I don’t understand why we should focus on nitpicking.
That’s basically how art and media have always worked. This isn’t a function of Steam, or even the modern economy.
That’s basically how art and media have always worked.
No, that’s how advertising has always work.
So, yes?
There is always going to be more art produced than people want to buy - nothing Valve can do to change that. Hell, it doesn’t even require capitalism - a similar ratio was seen when most art was produced via patronage half a millennia ago. If anything, Steam with whatever faults it has, democratizes it more by making it easier to discover niche stuff with limited appeal.
There are also always going to be big ass ads on steam
So just replying with meaningless and unrelated word salad now? Got it.
Dude, cmon. At least these ads are gaming ads and not some crap Ai bullshit or milfs nearby ads. That is a game store where games are to be sold. It is a no brainer to see ads for games there…
The argument is that ads promotes certain games over others.
It is not news to me that a handful of games have the most players, also considering people put low effort garbage on all stores constantly I don’t think the bottom 90% deserve anything
So what? The vast majority of games released on Steam are either hobby or student projects or just first time devs’ shitty pixel platformer. Many are low effort products, Steam will not even give those games “shelve space”. The algorithm will based on pre launch and launch metrics decide if it should push the game in front of customers in the recommendation sections of the store. If a game can’t even move the needle a bit after launch Steam will blackhole the game and basically make it invisible in the store unless a customer searches for it. Because even though it’s a virtual store, “shelve space” aka the recommendation section is still scarce.
The hidden gem games on Steam are rare. Every time I watch a dev’s postmortem who talks about how little they sold on Youtube I’m rarely surprised when I see the game.
Also Steam generates around $10+ Billion in revenue in a year. So the other games generate around $2 Billion. If that is generated by 2000 games that still averages to a million a game.
1 in 11 games released last year has 0 reviews.
https://steamdb.info/stats/releases/
~21.500 titles released in 2025, we’ve seen more than 16.000 games released this year so it will once again break a new record for titles released in a year.
That data also shows which games never got out of the “limited game status”. Around 16200 of games released in 2025 have the limited games status. Meaning these games were not making enough money or nothing at all and had not enough player engagement to unlock profile features.
If you look at the numbers of games that unlocked profile features the growth is much lower. Those are the numbers that matter anyway. 5000 games made actual money. And if we apply the Pareto principle than a thousand games made the vast majority of the new release revenue that year.
So what?
So if you release a game on steam not only you are promoting a centralized closed platform owned by a billionare but there’s a good chance you are not getting much in return.
Good chance if your game didn’t do well on Steam that you didn’t make a good game that has high product-market fit in the first place and didn’t promote it properly. We are now in an era where indie devs have become millionaires from their $15 games. And I’m not just talking about Edmund McMillen and Johnathan Blow. Go back to the days of brick and mortar retail and that was nigh impossible when a small studio would earn pennies on the dollar for every sold unit.
Also don’t forget all the shovelware low effort games for farming “achievements” achievements
The lower the barrier to entry, the longer the tail.
Surely coconut simulator makes up 80% of all revenue. It’s amazing
A lot of games on Steam hold zero interest to me. AI is just the newest form of slop. Beyond that what I see is a hell of a lot more games are being released in the last 4 years. That means more competition but also many have not been around long enough to build up over time revenue. To a certain extent you are comparing life time revenue to launch revenue. On AAA that probably doesn’t matter as much but on the lesser hyped indy games I think it would be an important distinction.
Well, I think Steam deserves a 30% cut of game revenue for doing literally nothing.
While Steam isn’t “doing nothing”, I do think 30% cut of sales for the first $10M is a lot especially for indie and single developers that will never reach this target, and the larger/more known the publisher the easier it will be for them to hit the lesser % of sales tiers (reduced to 20% after $50M, but I can’t remember the in-between tiers atm).
Itch.io, by comparison, takes 10% of sales as a default, but publishers can set it to whatever. Indie devs really should look more to using that as their store if they’re cash strapped, and people should really get their indies off of there if possible.
Yeah. Steam totally does stuff. They’re a file hosting service. You think that’s cheap? Well, you’re right, but that’s what tech feudalism is all about!
Rent Seeking.
Again, I don’t disagree with you regarding Steam sometimes getting way too gassed up by gamers, and not having any incentive to change because of it. That’s because the bar is so fucking low for the industry as a whole.
But I wouldn’t call it “rent seeking”. They make deals with publishers to have games come to PC instead of being locked into console exclusives, they are making consumer friendly hardware, they are pushing the Linux gaming sphere, and they have actual customer service for their storefront. All of this should be standard in the gaming sphere, but because it isn’t, Valve and Gabe are seen as gods.
steam community features and workshop are both significant value propositions for some games (rimworld, oxygen not included) and the remote LAN feature is cool
Exactly, the way Amazon takes 40% off the top for their incredible features. Indispensable for the 1% of folks who use “workshop” and “community.”Which I love because I use them all the time. Because I am one of you.
What features does Amazon shopping have other than haul, the ai, and the main buying thing?
Dont list your game on Steam then, sell it yourself.
good let’s repeat it louder: DONT LIST YOUR GAME ON STEAM
Exactly. Fools should make their own monopoly if they’re so jealous. I, for one, love Steam and Google. I think corps are more efficient if they’re super big.
So you admit there is value. Got it.
