It’s called Zipf’s Law and it’s a fundamental statistical probability formula found in many, many things, from languages to distribution curves.
VSauce had a good video covering this too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCn8zs912OE
whales prop up the whole industry
Did they include AI slop, dogshit mobile game ports, low effort games, and the like in the dataset? If so, I’m not surprised.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Right… Nobody is buying games with mostly negative reviews unless they’re under duress…
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”
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
Income inequality! We need to do something!
That’s art for you. Music, fine art etc I’d guess is even more lopsided.
Sales tend to be proportional to the marketing budget. You see this in every entertainment media. Movies and Music, in particular, will have marketing budgets equal or in excess of the actual production costs.
It isn’t simply that 1% of the games make 110% of the money. It’s that 1% of the games get a marketing allowance at all, while the majority of indie projects and first round game offerings just get spat out into the void with little more than a whisper.
That’s basically the story of the whole economy.
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.
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.
Podcasts, music, film, paintings, novels…Linux distributions, ice cream flavor sales…literally everything.
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.
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
Athletes, at least in the sports that make any money at all.
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.
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.
Would Pareto be ecstatic or rolling in his grave at this disparity?
That seems like a good distribution for digital art and entertainment.
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.
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.
So, yes?
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
Gamedev is a pipe dream folks, meant to create steady labor force for publishers to squeeze work from for profit because they fire you after your game gets released, even if it does well.
By the way, Valve can do more here. This is something they can choose to invest more in. People don’t have to be satisfied with the effort Valve has made so far and can instead choose to expect more.
Indie games pump Valve’s stock, popular or not—they should get some profit sharing even if they don’t sell IMO but that’s just me. Like a community dividend. Unfortunately, not too many people demand more from Valve.
How do you decide what qualifies for the community dividend? Does every publisher get an amount from the dividend? Is the dividend a pool of earnings that has to be split evenly? Are there devs that don’t qualify for the dividend? Is it because they make too much money? Or because the thing they created is ai slop uploaded specifically to syphon free money away from the dividend? You either have very wealthy devs taking from the pool or you have people who shouldn’t be allowed to call themselves devs taking money from the pool, either way it’s unfair to the devs who poured their heart and soul into a project nobody heard of.
Its just an idea to get the ball rolling homie, my point is is there is room for investigation into this and Valve have the resources to do it, and no one demands anything from them to use their massive resources to alleviate an issue they have the data on and can choose to work on.
Stock? They’re private bub.
Indie games pump Valve’s stock, popular or not—they should get some profit sharing even if they don’t sell IMO but that’s just me. Like a community dividend. Unfortunately, not too many people demand more from Valve.
Hopefully, by “stock” you mean available supply of games and not stock as in the stock market, since Valve is a private company and isn’t traded.
As for profit sharing… no. That would incentivise even more porn AI slop games to be dumped on there, as if that wasn’t already a problem. The “content farms” that are just going to churn out crap… would get all of the community share. And large companies would very likely ignore Steam going forward because again, potentially less profit. Unless it comes from Valves share, which that doesn’t make a lot of business sense to give up revenue in order to pay those who weren’t successful, a “participation award” of a paycheck.
