Indie developers see massive reduction in Steam traffic - Sensationalist Headlines

Steam indie developers have seen a huge loss in traffic in the last few months. The issue was first raised on Twitter by Shadowhand developer Jake Birkett, who posted on Twitter saying that since October he had seen reduced traffic to his games on Steam. But it turns out that he is far from the only indie affected, with developers from the Weather Factory, Machine Studios and Minor Key Studios all replying to the original post (below). It seems this all kicked off with a bug that affected search in early October - which Valve emailed developers about and has been fixed - that has had a knock-on effect on the amount of traffic that smaller projects are receiving. Dean Hall - of DayZ fame - replied to another tweet on the subject saying that his new project, Stationeers, saw just ten per cent of the traffic it was receiving before from the Steam homepage. This news comes as Valve makes changes to the way it handles revenue shares on Steam with developers of smaller projects looking likely to lose out compared to their more successful brethren. We've reached out to Valve for comment.

Valve seems to want to actively kill off their indie game market with all the decisions they've been making. First flooding the scene with steam direct and then removing any semblance of quality control, and now trying to get more and more AAA devs back on the platform with the new policies in that department. Kinda disgusting, tbh, I'm really liking valve less and less with each passing day.

They might be in more dire straights than previously thought.

This sucks because I have a huge love for Indies and they really need all the help they can get in terms of exposure in an oversaturated market.

Every time I get inspired to make my indie game ideas something like this happens reminding me that it will most likely never be worth the effort and I will get shut down in any way possible.

And there's literally no alternative, either. Everyone in the indie gamedev community suggests itch.io but I'm pretty sure there are more developers on there than consumers.

Mostly off topic, but there's always gonna be an easy out. Just do shit if you want to do it, profitability should could come secondary to an awesome hobby, that's like not learning a musical instrument because you're likely to never be a famous musician.

So what, is Valve just trying to make it to where the only games that seem to matter to the mainstream public eye are scummy AAA games that are jacked with microtransactions and lootboxes? Because that's what it kinda sounds like.

GoG could make an entire subsection of their store and their Galaxy client explicitly devoted to indies, separate from their catalogues of classic games and newer, current mainstream titles. This would be the kick the Galaxy platform could really use, now that they've had the client out there for a while. They're well known enough that marketing that they're now offering themselves as the primary indie-focused digital game distribution/store platform, since Steam seems to be dropping the ball, would probably work well if they had a plan to back it up. If they managed it, it might prompt Valve to get off their ass and improve visibility for indies and compete a bit. Come on, GoG, do it. You've always been the scrappy underdog serving the niches nobody else wants to bother with. This is your moment to shine.

I honestly feel borderline disgusted with using Steam by this point, it's almost like being forced to wear a Nazi uniform because all of your shit is owned by an SS officer warehouse that used to be owned by regular friendly dudes. If there was a way to transfer all of my shit outside and not rely on it for friends I would probably just leave that corrupted pile of garbage.

I said this in the TF2 thread, and I'll say it again: I am convinced that the management is so greedy that the only reason Gabe hasn't resigned (despite being too old and tired to give a shit) is because he knows that if any one of those managers became CEO in his place, they would immediately start shopping Valve around to the highest bidder. They would willingly tank Steam just for a fat paycheck. (Because for real, if Valve is sold to EA or another shitty AAA game company, or hell, Comcast or another giant tech conglomerate that wants to enter the gaming market, developers are going to pull their games off of Steam en-masse. What remains of Steam is going to be vastly inferior to what we have at the moment, flaws and all.)

honestly if Gabe has any goodness left in him he should probably be trying to fuck over Valve's current greedy bullshit as hard as he can up to the point of dismantling the fucking company and ensuring that no one gets their hands on it. However given the fact that he did not do that all of these fucking years makes it highly unlikely that he will, he should have done something like this in 2008-9 probably and I am positive that he saw this shit coming from fifty miles away.

For the record, I don't believe Gabe is innocent in all of this either. I think he's definitely a greedy fuck himself - but I also believe there's still part of him that wants to see PC gaming thrive. The managers, on the other hand? I legitimately believe they don't give a shit about anything other than money. That's why they've completely tanked Valve's own game development - and why I believe they would totally tank Steam too if it meant that they personally made a bigger profit.

Well in either case what is currently happening to Valve is pretty scary and feels like watching a real life social horror movie.

The managers don't care but the development staff are all in their own worlds eating lotuses; believing they're true visionaries and artists they pursue endless passion projects that never get completed unless the big cliques behind VR and others push them.

Valve is in a really paradoxical situation of ending up just as shit as the other triple A assholes but for polar opposite reasons. With Activision and EA basically having zero freedom and Valve having unlimited freedom.

TBH I've been buying all my indie games on my Switch now. Interface is serviceable enough for my needs and it's lack of "personalized content suggestions" and lower amount of releases makes it easier for me to find interesting games. Just wish more devs would upload videos of their games, screenshots don't always do justice.

But the biggest reason projects don't get finished is because the managers dock bonuses if you haven't made enough profit at fiscal years end. That's why projects like Left4Dead3 and Half-Life 3 get abandoned after a year or two - when the projects inevitably hit development roadblocks like groundbreaking games inevitably do, the development teams quickly dismantle so everyone can go back to work on the real moneymakers like Dota 2. The only reason Artifact managed to be released is because I guarantee you it was sold to the managers on the basis of it being a greedy P2W piece of shit. And VR projects, including The Lab and the rumored Half Life VR, get the managers blessing because they are tied to an expensive piece of hardware. Half Life VR is rumored to be an exclusive to an in house Valve headset - which undoubtedly has the managers seeing dollar signs, given that Valve won't have to split profits with Oculus if/when it releases.

The entire reason they're doing VR is to lock their hold on it like they did to digital distribution with Steam. They want to be as big in VR as with digital distribution.

There needs to be a better alternative to Steam for indies but their best asset for success is exposure so I'm not sure what would fix it.

Valve doesn't use managers, thats literally the entire thing and what people now choose to blame is the completely flat hierarchy. Keep in mind the guy people quote that stuff from worked at a lot of different companies and talked about many of them, Valve being just one of the companies in that umbrella. The flat system has been in use at Valve during the previous groundbreaking projects. Again, they don't use managers.

The closest that exists is Itch.io but that's got so little traffic. Also this screams of the same shit that Facebook did to kill organic reach, they reduced it to 50%, then 15, now its like 1%.

Managers are a lot more than just name and following. Like, there is a lot more that goes in to being a manager even on a small scale. And for something as big as a company like Valve, a manager is a whole world apart.

No, that was a previous bug that was fixed.

(Hey buddy, I quoted that text.)

Then you can't ready because that bug has been fixed and indie devs are detailing that they're getting cut viewership after the fix was released.

Exactly. Did you read my post or think you would just get to pull a "Gotcha" on me and jump the gun?

Then what are you even arguing? You jumped in here, broke both your legs on a 'Well they have a flat structure' gotcha post completely ignoring how humans tend to group so while you can say 'No, there aren't managers' you can argue that someone has to be managing something in regards to Steam, Steam VR, Artifact and more so your argument gets blown out of the water from the get go. And the article identifies as this being fixed back in October and it still being the case now. Which is the point of the article's existence. Even better! If you actually click o Jake's twitter, he gathered up all the data from several other indie devs to show that this is still happening. I wasn't doing a gotcha, I was pointing out you're talking out your ass.

Really sucks to hear that smaller Devs are suffering from this, especially considering I'm 90% more likely to buy some weird little indie game under 'New Releases' than I am some overpriced tire fire under 'Top Selling'.

Because he was wrong. If they're gonna bang on about dumb, actually incorrect shit like that, it makes me want to point it out. Yeah, being fixed doesn't automatically mean they'll go back to what it was before. Because if the bug was overinflating their numbers, they're now seeing what their numbers should have actually been this whole time. But here, lets do you one even better, because I do my homework: From Jake Birkett's blog post, the raw data: http://greyaliengames.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/TrafficSpreadsheet.jpg The primary culprit across the board is the "Other Product Pages" which is to say when you are looking at a game and it recommends similar titles: https://i.imgur.com/0gjR22k.png Something to note is that these games also generally saw an uptick in views leading up to this, in fact a pretty sharp one in many cases. One of the theories about the cause he even suggests in his blog post is about the bug causing a loss of data that was inflating numbers. Fellow indie dev Danny Day has suggested that the discovery algorithm may have a historical data component to it and after the initial October bug the historical data got trashed and so the algorithm is not giving the same results as before. Looking at many of them, I noticed some things: From the blog post: http://greyaliengames.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/RegencyTraffic.jpg This game from Jake Birkett has few views already so the data isn't great, but its pretty consistent if not slight better after the drop https://twitter.com/GreyAlien/status/1069245952156999680 This guy sees a drop, but his by and large go right back to normal. https://twitter.com/tomerbarkan/status/1069688172207136769 This one drops and stays down for a bit before beginning to trend back up and is now close to where it was on the green line, and better overall, and was close to normal overall before the drop. https://twitter.com/SimoRoth/status/1069238925468807169 This game is interesting because the impressions drop and stay gone, but visits are consistent with from before. https://twitter.com/ATOMICBREATHGUY/status/1069693189106360322 This one is the most severe because it stays down pretty much across the board, however it was trending downwards slowly to begin with. https://twitter.com/Melibellule/status/1069681840951357445 This guy seems to have lost the one for "Other Product Pages" like the girl above, those he sees a few spikes later in during the sales that she didn't see. https://twitter.com/magnolia_fan/status/1069373489675673606 And then this one that apparently has seen it happen twice, with the other one being related to Google Play: https://twitter.com/SnoutUp/status/1069315028015296516 One thing I notice among the Steam games is that there is largely an upward trend right before the drop, or in a couple of cases pretty big spikes. I also decided to checke them for player counts: James Birkett: Shadowhand https://i.imgur.com/1hYFwMT.png Regency Solitaire https://i.imgur.com/JtfZT68.png This seems to be the game released in June (July on Steam Page) Birkett mentions: Jewel Match Solitaire https://i.imgur.com/gqaDSqo.png Tomer Barkan: Judgment https://i.imgur.com/b0RJlEX.png Simon Roth: Maia https://i.imgur.com/6GlLpxY.png As far as Atomic Breath Guy goes, they didn't specify the game so I looked at all three of theirs: MEANDERS https://i.imgur.com/0ibtWeF.png Antirocketh https://i.imgur.com/xcJoJBz.png Overchunked https://i.imgur.com/btSMm3Y.png Melanie Christin: Dead Maze https://i.imgur.com/23ETJUh.png Sergio Aris (Has three games, didn't specify): Shadowhand https://i.imgur.com/U5FFLGj.png The Dreamlands https://i.imgur.com/JN1Z2sY.png "Project Whately" does not even appear on Steam Charts, and on Steamdb I just get this: "Project Whateley" https://i.imgur.com/pERIz7r.png Most see a spike in players on or just after the drop, although Dead Maze from Melanie Christin has a slight drop before continuing its downward trend. And a couple of them literally get just one or two players so their data is just piss. So like, something clearly happened leading up to and on October 1. The only two things I can find in that time period are these: https://i.imgur.com/kyGWlYI.png https://i.imgur.com/5FPEBro.png Both of which might have something to do with it if the bug wasn't directly responsible. Opening the system up to adult games almost definitely caused a shift in recommendations as a side effect, and the crackdown on the "Trolling" games might have included a change to the recommendation algorithm as well. But like the idea this is some attack on indies in favor of AAA is goofy at best. These were games that largely weren't even a blip on the radar before and are in the exact same position as after. And the player numbers provide an odd picture where player counts largely haven't been negatively impacted in a similar way, giving the impression that while this has cut down on overall views, they've been more focused on delivering them to people who might actually want to play them. So its possible the system is more accurately targeting them and the drop in views is a by-product of better focus. But going, "Well the revenue change is them trying to fuck over indies!" is stupid, its literally Steam approaching is from the perspective of scale. Economics of scale means that as you sell more, you need to charge less to maintain revenue. That is exactly what the revenue change is, economics of scale which has nothing to do with attacking indies. Its more just fundamental economics.