The video games industry is having an interesting year.
On the one hand, the major studios, particularly EA, are facing major backlash over how they
use loot boxes.
Not only are micro-transactions a way to force players to pay in advance, many government
regulators now think the loot boxes are unlicensed gambling.
But on the upside, it’s been a fantastic year for indie games, with titles like Cuphead,
Hollow Knight and What Remains of Edith Finch, among many others.
Cuphead was made by two Canadian brothers, with a lot of the beautiful animation, drawn
by hand.
It came out at the end of September and it’s already sold over a million copies.
Just to give you some context, probably the biggest selling game overall this year is
PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, which has sold about 20 million copies.
Today, we’re going to look at how the game marketplace, Steam, has had an impact on the
sales of indie games.
We’ll look at what use to happen before it and whether this indie renaissance is a
growing genre, or just a bug.
In the early days of computing, games had a very small market.
The number of PC users was low and any computers would require extra hardware to handle gaming.
But a community of bedroom game makers did appear.
The games spread as shareware.
Free demos and early versions would be given out in magazines and then players could contact
the designer to buy the full version.
The numbers were small so this model worked.
In the 90s, there was a huge boom in consoles but an indie scene was impossible since they
would have needed to manufacture their own cartridges if they wanted to make a Mario-Kart-mod.
As for PCs, the rise of 3d gaming meant that a bedroom developer couldn't keep up with
cost and time involved.
So big commercial studios basically killed off the indie scene entirely.
They were saved in the end, by the spread of the internet.
Now games could easily be distributed without the cost of creating physical copies.
Developers also had better tools to work with, like adobe flash and Game Maker, designed
by Mark Overmars.
But it took a while for a market to appear.
There were popular flash games on sites like Newgrounds, but no one was making much money.
Steam began in 2003, but it was nothing like the platform we know today.
It was created by Valve, who had grown to fame with Half Life.
For their next game, Counter Strike, they wanted a way to control the patches and updates,
and to stop people from cheating.
It was controversial because they wanted you to play the games through the platform, and
in 2003, not a lot of people had broadband internet.
But, scepticism was swept aside when the hugely anticipated Half Life 2 came out in 2004.
If you wanted to play, you had to join Steam.
This is what drove it’s adoption.
And by the next year, they were allowing non-Valve games to appear there too.
As digital downloads became more common, Steam kept adding titles and eventually redesigned
its e-store to help people find their way around this growing library.
Like a number of other studios, Valve also supported indie developers who wanted to use
their game engine to make mods and games of their own.
Probably the first big hit on Steam was Garry’s Mod, based of Half-Life 2.
It came out in 2006 and has now sold 10 million copies.
The developer, Facepunch, went on to release another best selling indie game, Rust, in
2013.
The biggest indie successes didn’t come from Steam though.
Minecraft has sold over 100 million copies and it came to life on a forum.
But it’s an anomaly.
Even it’s creator couldn’t tell you how it got so big.
Steam is still an indie developer’s best shot at success.
One developer, David Galindo made a game called Cook, Serve, Delicious.
He found that he made $50,000 in a week, once his game made it onto Steam Greenlight.
He had only managed $35,000 in three years before that.
It used to be that getting on Steam was incredibly hard, but if you made it, there was big potential.
However, now the problem is that the competition on the platform is far too high at the low
end.
Steam simply lets too many low quality games into the ecosystem.
There are over 20,000 titles in there now and 20,000 is also the average number of sales.
However, the big titles skew that data.
Thousands of games have no sales, or just a few hundred.
With Steam Greenlight and Early Access, Valve tried to create a level playing field so anyone
had a shot.
But, it seems like a stronger filtering process would help developers.
It’s customers would certainly appreciate it.
What’s more, most unknown games only get picked up in the sales.
Steam often takes off as much as 75% so unless you get a breakaway hit, it’s going to be
very difficult to find financial success.
And bear in mind that Valve take 30% of any sale on Steam so, even at full price, that’s
a big chunk of revenue gone.
Big developers often choose not to sell through Steam, since they have platforms of their
own that can easily handle the sales.
They also have giant marketing machines so they don’t need Steam’s promotion.
Blizzard Activision only sell their own games and with EA, while they do sell others on
their platform, Origin, the visibility is low.
GOG.com and Itch.io do offer competing options but they are only taking a very small slice
of the pie.
So, Steam is not the golden ticket that some developers think it’s going to be.
But, it certainly breathed life into the indie games scene, after it recovered from the 90s.
Steam have a major monopoly over the PC market, and monopolies are bad for developers and
fans.
But until a good alternative platform grows, at least there is some place where indie games
are seen and promoted.
Otherwise it would probably be EA everywhere you look and, no one wants that, right?
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