That's basically the story of the whole economy.

Okay, but explain how consumer preferences are somehow Steam's fault?

If you told me it was that way because Steam was boosting AAA games and suppressing indie titles, then okay, you have a valid reason to criticize Steam for that, but that doesn't seem to be the case.

Behold the whole story of every economy

I really dont get this, there have been and still are things you can very much criticise valve for but people come up with the most insane shit to criticise them for. "Uhh yeah this problem affecting the whole game industry is steams fault". Also the top 1% are prolly aldo much much more expensive to produce so i dont think its as bad as it sounds at first but yeah.

Candy Crush makes about a billion dollars a year. GTA V makes about 500 million from selling shark cards. Whatever happening at the steam store to warrant an article like this isn't on steam, its 100% on consumers being dumbasses.

Barely make anything compared to multi million companies

Solo dev games can make a fraction of what those giant games and the dev can live a very comfortable life. Etc: balatro

Very pointless article.

Like, lots of games just aren't very good, and lots of games are pretty niche. If you want to make a lot of money in the games industry, selling an indie game on steam is not the way. make a preditory mobile game instead.

Jesus, the gamesradar site is absolute ass

The data: https://weloveit.io/developers/steam-revenue-report/

That's basically how art and media have always worked. This isn't a function of Steam, or even the modern economy.

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 on Youtube who talks about how little they sold 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.

Really topics against Steam are getting ridiculous.

Like ok. Is Steam supposed to force players to buy shit games too so that the distribution curve flattens?

I'm gonna pump so many AI shit games so I can get my fair share 🥰

not that I like it, but isn't it how the current economy works across most fields?

Misleading. There is so much slop made from free assets just thrown together or AI programmed messes and such on steam that it should read "little more than 1% of games on steam are worth your time" indie devs get a decent amount of love, especially at launch. But steam has such a backlog of games available that it gets pretty wild. If we're counting DLCs, OSTs, and games, I'm really not surprised.

Alternative Headline: Sturgeon's Law Continues to Exist

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

It would be weird if it didn't follow a power law distribution.

Aka the Pareto Principle. Aka "80% of everything is shit".