loath wrote:> are there any quality metrics about this huge influx of games in the market? i.e. is the market being saturated with high quality games? or is it a spread similar to what the store had in the past?
is the market growing, or is the pie staying the same but being cut by more and more games?
Well, I'm not sure about quality, but there are a couple of data points about this on Steam Spy. A comparison of April 2015 to April 2016 yielded this result:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Cg-NyAJW4AApBzD.png
In that, it shows that 1) More games out there, 2) Declining units shipped in that 24 day period. 3) Declining estimated price copy.
He also released a nice graph here:
http://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/qFaqtK ... 650-80.png showing that there are now more games as a percentage with <22,000 sales than there are with more than that.
The steam spy guy also a nice overview of 2016 on his blog:
https://galyonk.in/steam-sales-in-2016- ... .bz6zcogke in there you'll find that the median revenues for a game on Steam is down to $25,000/year. And that Steam as a whole has roughly $3.5Billion in revenue, in line with what he predicted Steam's revenues to be in 2015. Assuming his predictions are correct, Steam is flat with sales, but has more games released. Which is inline with the first picture I linked.
Digital Video game sales as a whole are supposedly up by around 10% in 2016 according to a number of sources. However most of this is not on Steam. As most of the "big" games this year are not attached to steam. Think Battlefields, Overwatch, LOL, Wow, etc.
Brings me to GC. I haven't crunched our numbers fiscally for the year, but off the top of my head, we saw about a 35% decline in revenue 2016 vs 2015, despite our review score going from 72% to 80% (And the fact we're still in Early Access which means frequently improved and updated...) This is roughly in line with the number of games added to Steam this year.
How much of that is saturation and how much of that decline is age? Well, GC's 2015 H1 did better than 2014's H2, and that was a launch half... So I don't think the full 35% decline is purely age related.
You see this sort of comments all over the place though:
http://steamed.kotaku.com/what-happens- ... 1784062530
I've read some private forum post of folks who've released games on Steam in 2012 and made bank and then released ~better~ games in 2016 and flopped pretty hard. That's a bit anecdotal, but Steam (or enough developers) think visibility is big enough issue that they're reworking their store front stuff pretty frequently now.
also - what are your thoughts about a smaller store but with less saturation like the windows 10 store via desktop bridge. (i.e. you can now bring your classic win32 games into the windows store without changing your code.
see
https://msdn.microsoft.com/windows/uwp/ ... o-uwp-root)
as always, thanks for your analysis!
My personal thoughts is that you want to put your product in as many store fronts as possible for the least amount of costs (time/money). Unless you're being paid for exclusive licenses.
For instance, GC is still in development, so it wouldn't make sense for me to spread it outside of Steam at the moment (for management/support reasons).
But once the game is done, I will seek out other distributors. I'm not too keen on the Windows 10 store. (I'm still on XP64 when it comes to Windows.)
But I do know the "App Store" on OSX only takes 64-bit Cocoa programs now. GC uses Carbon and OIS (which is 32bit only on OSX). I probably wouldn't make back the time invested into porting the game to cocoa/sdl/64bit on the App Store, so i'll by pass it.
Whereas GOG, if they accept the game, is just an installer. Low barrier of entry, no excuse not to launch the game on there. So if porting your game to Windows 10 will get you more sales than the time it takes to do it, go ahead and do it!
