That's art for you. Music, fine art etc I'd guess is even more lopsided.
this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2026
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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.
And what percent of the "games that barely make anything" are asset flips and zero-effort slop? Like, "percent of new games that are trash" is going to be very high when the barrier to entry is "pay Valve $100 once". This is a total junk statistic.
Like, store A where you can buy 100 good games and 1000 asset flips will score 10x better on this un-metric than store B where you can buy 10000 good games and a million asset flips. And yet nobody would ever argue that store A is a better store.
I don't know if you consider them "asset flips" or not. But the number of anime/furry porn "puzzle" games released every single day, has to be throwing off the numbers.
An asset flip imo is anything where it's basically identical to another game but with different art assets
And yet nobody would ever argue that store A is a better store.
I would argue it. Store B is just Amazon. They're the most successful retailer on the planet.
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(12 replies)
I don't see how that is "steam" economy.
That's just economy when you try to sell anything, specially anything art related.
If you made any art and try to sell it in any store the most probably amount of money made is the same number in every currency.
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(8 replies)
Hey op, I see a lot of your arguments in the comments.
I have a challenge.
Name 5 things Valve could implement to change this that would not be to the detriment of indie devs.
This is not a joke. You have opinions. I want to hear them.
I'm also curious (since I see you pushing a decentralized market place in the comments), how you think a decentralized marketplace would function and what would be better about it.
No solution, only angry >:(
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(16 replies)
I'd argue that that is entirely a good thing overall.
It means that Steam is very open to Indie devs (something we already know) that don't make as much money but are passion projects for the creators.
If they're making enough from the...let's call them prestige titles...to be able to afford to give indie devs a place to host their passion projects and maybe get more eyes on it, than I see no problem with that.
No idie dev is going into it thinking they're going to be next giant thing. They just want to share their work and maybe make a few bucks. And Steam gives them that, PLUS the chance that maybe they'll be a Rimworld or a Hollow Knight; something that sparks a giant success for them.
No idie dev is going into it thinking they're going to be next giant thing
I would argue that a significant amount of them are but that's not the point.
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(18 replies)
That seems like a good distribution for digital art and entertainment.
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