During that time, there's always been a reliance on a group of people to make tough choices on which games to release on Steam. In Valve's own words: "Over the many years that Steam has been selling games, the release rate of games on Steam has continued to grow significantly. It was designed to take the load off, essentially, handing over some of the curation work to its community. In 2012 Valve introduced Steam Greenlight, its idea for dealing with the growing number of developers who wanted to sell their games on Steam. Usually you'd get a few days, because the number of games that launched on Steam was smaller than it is today. The front page defaulted to new releases, so if you launched a game on there you would be guaranteed at least some time on the front page. It was curated, to a large degree, by Valve itself, ensuring a degree of quality control. If discoverability is an issue now, it wasn't a few years ago, when Steam worked in a very different way. I rely a lot on people on my Steam friends list telling me you totally need to play this game or that game. "So it can be very hard for me to discover games. I only picked it up when I went to Rezzed. I missed Maia because it came out right when we were releasing DayZ. So, I do find it frustrating because I'm super lazy and I miss stuff. "This is probably over the last few months the most talked about conversation I've had with developers. "This is something everyone has been talking about a lot," Dean Hall, the brains behind zombie massively multiplayer survival game DayZ - one of the biggest and most enduring hits on Steam - says. A lot of people browse the Steam store looking for something to play, and they see what's hot in the carousel, what's on the top sellers list, or spot a crazy bargain, and go from there.īut what if your new game isn't a "featured item", or doesn't show up in the "top sellers" list, or isn't on sale? Then there's a good chance it won't be displayed on the front page of Steam. You'll search for it in the Steam search box if it isn't displayed prominently on the Steam home page. If a new games comes out and you know you want it (perhaps you read a review on Eurogamer, because you're good like that), you'll seek that game out. There are a number of other sections below "featured items", including "recently updated", but the one we're interested in is the one the Steam front page defaults to: the "top sellers" list - a chart of the best-selling games on Steam at any given time. "When you're on that banner it's a big deal." Steam Featured Items. "I get as excited being on that banner as I do funding the Kickstarters," Brian Fargo, boss of Wasteland 2 developer inXile, tells me. Getting on the carousel can have a big impact on sales, developers tell us. At the time of writing Divinity: Original Sin, Firefall, Dungeon Defenders Eternity, Sacred 3, Unturned, ArcheAge, Robocraft, Trails in the Sky, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive update Operation Breakout, Pixel Piracy and Dark Souls 2 DLC Crown of the Sunken King are featured items. With so many games available, how will new games be discovered by Steam's 75 million strong audience?Ĭurrently (that's an important word - Valve often tweaks the way Steam works), when you load up the Steam front page it presents you with an image-based carousel of "featured items". What could possibly be the problem with a service that is as close as we've got to a video game library?įor some developers - and, to an extent publishers - the problem is one of discoverability. You even find games that aren't finished yet. And within that catalogue you find pretty much every type of game there is, from big budget shooters made by hundreds of people to experimental games made by just one person. The Steam game catalogue bulges with over 3500 titles. It seems counter-intuitive to say it, but Steam, the biggest and most popular digital video game shop we have, may be selling too many games - or rather, it may be selling too many of the wrong kind of games.
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