Discoverability is a huge problem on Steam because there’s so many games releasing, you can’t really keep up.
18,000 games is almost 50 per day on average. That’s 50 titles fighting for your attention and wallet every single day.
If you don’t get noticed because you didn’t spend half of your development budget on marketing, or your game didn’t pick up well with influencers or more traditional media like reviews, you’re just kinda fucked. No matter how good your game might be.
Speaking about quality, how many of those 18k titles were uninspiring, asset flipping slop?
The Steam Next Fest is how I found most of the good indie games I’ve played. Making a good demo will put you above 99% of the cruft out there.
I have picked up the same habit. I’ll download and test a couple of dozen demos every next fest, and then wishlist/buy the ones that are good. I played 108 demos this year, and some of my favorite games this year were demos like this: Kill Knight, Last Plague Blight, Karate Survivor, Empty Shell…
that and word of mouth or just cool gameplay vids. dude parrying an explosion got me to withlist va proxy
Making a good game is one thing, making a huge amount of others want to play it is something else.
That’s unironically the reason I don’t even attempt to find games on Steam anymore.
I’ll only go looking if I see a cool game in a YouTube video or see a cool article about something coming out soon that looks interesting. Otherwise, same.
It depends, sometimes I go down the rabbit hole on their “Games Like This” suggestions on my favorite games’ store pages. I actually just found a cool one that way the other day called Ad Fundum. It was a funny coincidence since it came up suggested on a completely unrelated game, but I’d been wanting a game centered around digging underground.
But yeah, with literally over 100,000+ games on Steam, it’s become way too difficult to find quality stuff that isn’t AAA or indie games that struck it lucky with popular streamers giving them exposure. Which sucks for indie devs that actually put out their passion projects since it makes discoverability so hard, as others have pointed out here.
I’ve always found the “games like this” section to be so superficial that it very rarely actually has games which I’d consider to be similar to the one I’m looking at. Just looking at the store right now, for “Aquaria” which I really enjoy, it recommends Skyrim as a similar game. Sure they both are open world adventure RPGs… but I definitely would not consider them to be similar games.
It’s definitely a crapshoot a lot of times. But there’s usually at least one or two on there that are similar enough that I might genuinely be interested in it. You can also forcefully hide games from showing up in suggestions, iirc. I’ve never done it, but some of my friends have recommended doing so in order to make Steam dig deeper for finding lesser known stuff. I’m not that big of a connoisseur, though.
Edit:
I recalled correctly, and it seems they’ve even made the Ignore button a lot easier to find (or I just never noticed before):
All excellent, I’m sure.
How could the quality be anything but sterling with 50 new games each and every day?
Guys we have soooo much shovelware, asset flips and softcore porn that’s barely a game. This is very much a good thing!!!
So much absolute garbage.
On a scale from 1 to 10, how many of those games aren’t absolute shit and/or money grab scams?
0.001
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Removed by mod
That’s what happens when you have a monopoly.
You act like Epic, GoG and itch.io don’t exist. Steam has plenty of competition. They just suck in comparison.
GoG sucks?
Amazingly good in some ways, and bad in some other ways. Eg. Doesn’t work on linux.
I see, thanks for clarifying!
It’s because they got rid of their game standards
Do you seriously have nothing better to do on a holiday than just bash Valve? Jfc, go outside and touch grass you terminally online neckbeard
nothing better to do on a holiday
Maybe don’t include that part when replying to a message on the holidays. Especially when you’re defending a monopoly.
I know G*mers like you aren’t known for their critical thinking skills.
I’m not the one getting worked up an letting it ruin my day.
I was just browsing Lemmy for a few minutes while visiting my parents and eating soup. You on the other hand have been acting like you spent Christmas alone because noone can stand you
Can I borrow you for a bit in the new year? The projector in work hasn’t been working recently and we could use you to project PowerPoints for us.
