Making an excellent game isn't even enough these days, that's just table stakes. With so many games out there it's a market of lemons. You need to have a way of rising above the noise. For AAA, it's having budgets to make games on a bigger scale than everyone else. For mobile games, it's generally about leveraging a large war chest to fuel an advertising-driven margin game. For prestige/indie games you need something that people will want to talk/write about, or build a dedicated fanbase over time. For tiny games like flappy bird / wordle you need massive built-in virality and lots of luck.
An excellent game is, practically by definition, a game that people would recommend. And the Steam algorithm does a pretty good job of snowballing success. My favorite example here is Kenshi. [1] It started with modest interest and within a few months it was down to literally tens of players. This is normally where somebody driven by profit would just shrug, complain, and go try something new. But they guy clearly believed in his game, kept going, and now a decade later it's an extremely popular game that still has thousands of regular players - verging on overcoming Hogwart's Legacy.
I think a lot of smaller developers are misled by things like game jams. Get a highly enthusiastic group of people in a room and the games they're going to respond well to, and the feedback they're going to give is going to be utterly worthless. What's fun to play in a highly social setting with lots of other hyper enthusiastic people, for 5 minutes at a time, does not translate at all to what people are interested in buying and playing at home.
>>> An excellent game is, practically by definition, a game that people would recommend. And the Steam algorithm does a pretty good job of snowballing success. My favorite example here is Kenshi. [1]
Steam early access launched with only 12 games in 2013 and Kenshi was one of them! This is not evidence of the algorithm working, it's evidence of Valve employees personally going out of their way to try to sell this game to you!
For every Kenshi there are many dozens of excellent indie games that languish. The steam algorithm is not as cooperative for surfacing small niche games as it was of Kenshi, and it's harder to get your game seen in a more saturated market. There has been a gradual shift from the 2010's where nearly all great games we're handsomely rewarded.
Personally I've dug quite deep into steam and come to the conclusion that there are just a lot of bad games, and that a good indie game most likely will break out eventually.
I've found steam review percentages to be one of the biggest tells of a games quality, and so many games don't even have good reviews.
Sure! Pinning down some shared criteria for quality and obscurity might be a challenge, but I can give it a try. I'll only include games that I've played recently with an overall steam review score of >=%94 and less than 1000 cumulative steam reviews.
There are a ton of indie multiplayer games that at one point would have appeared on this list, but as small multiplayer games are starved of population they enter a death cycle where new reviews are negative as a result.
Surely you're not claiming that a game with fewer than 1000 reviews is "languishing"? Any indie game with 1000 reviews is very successful.
Picking your first example, Deadeye Deepfake Simulacrum has about 460 reviews, roughly 20,000 copies sold, an estimated revenue of about $120,000 while it's still in early access, and apparently a developer team size of 1. I'd guess that this game will net the developer several hundred thousand dollars over the next 10 years.
(Regarding multiplayer games: yes, these are a different case because they need to reach some critical mass to have a chance.)
Deadeye deepfake Simulacrum has been in development for ~4 years and is still getting updated, so even at this estimate we're looking at a take home pay of 30k - 40k per year before taxes.
1. He isn't working on this exclusively. In the update notes, he mentions that he's making the game in parallel to a job. He recently finished his degree and sometimes takes time off for his next project. In 2021 he said, 'As I’ve mentioned before, game development is not a full time job for me, it’s just a hobby that consumes a lot of my nights and weekends.' Obviously this must be considered when evaluating the revenue.
2. After he finishes the game, it will still have a long tail of sales over the following years. He can develop another game, whose long tail will overlap with the first one, then with a third game, etc. But I don't know how to estimate these long tails after the first couple of years.
3. It seems to be his first game on Steam.
This is actually a very interesting case. I think he does most things right (though he doesn't seem to do enough marketing on Twitter). I assume that he'll arrive at a place where he has the option to go full-time sooner or later.
I'd drop the max reviews down by quite a lot. Sales:reviews tend to be around 60:1. So a game with 1000 reviews has sold tens of thousands of copies. We can look at something like the PS2 for some reality checks. It sold 1.5 billion games through 4000 titles. So an average of 350k sales. And of course that's going to follow something like a typical 80/20 ratio, which would leave us with a median sales in the ballpark of 70k! Of course Steam has far more players, but also way more games. The PS2 was a ring-fenced minimal competition domain with an attentive and [relatively] content starved audience!
I decided to look up Tandis first. First off the game has been featured on Ars Technica [1], Rocker Paper Shotgun [2], and lots of other places. So it's definitely not like nobody heard of it. But it just doesn't really seem to drag people in. The reviews, positive as they are, all seem to stop playing after an average of around 3 hours. In fact a huge number of the positive written reviews have less than 1 hour of lifetime gameplay, which is pretty weird for a game that comes at a relatively premium price. And the peak players, a month after release was 7. [3] I'm guessing the players that moved on after such short timeframes probably weren't actively recommending this game outside of those reviews. Would you have actively recommended it, outside just filtering your library and seeing it there?
This article explicitly mentions that that ratio only holds for hit games, and mentions that the ratio for smaller games is roughly 1:20, which is still a high ratio compared to figures I've heard in post mortems.
Assuming a game with 1,000 reviews that takes ~3 years for 1 developer to make and support that sells for $15 at a 1:20x ratio. We're looking at 210,000 after steam's cut and before taxes, this developer at top of our review range is making ~70k a year before taxes that are calculated on one year of income. Many small indie developers lose ~35% of their income to taxes alone on game sales and so even under nearly ideal conditions for this 1000 review max constraint we have a developer earning <$50,000.
Note that many of the games I listed are highly rated but have less than 200 reviews
EDIT: I often reccomend Tandis to people, it's a great puzzle game that builds geometric intuition, and it's designed to distill that intuition into a roughly 5 hour play time.
Here's a search for you with about a zillion results. [1] It's definitely way above 20:1. Your link references that number only for games with less than 1000 sales, and provides the data - which is super biased towards games with very near 0 sales, but tons of reviews. It could just be the games were terrible, but another potential issue is shilling. Many developers buy fake positive reviews. To my knowledge nobody has ever been banned for this (though devs have been banned for naively writing fake reviews themselves), but I expect these games end up getting some sort of a deranking or soft shadow ban, because it'd be absurdly easy to detect on Steam's side, and the games that do it seem to often end up buried after what's presumably an extremely low sales:review ratio. Here's an article that also includes some of the games that are hiring shills. [2]
Do you specific recent sources that back that up? The source I originally linked as well as this writeup[1] suggests that the review to sale ratio has shrunk over the years and is shrinking for games with lower sales. The sales & owner estimates that steamDB offers also generally pegs the games I listed has having a 10:1 - 30:1 ratio. Here's deadeye deepfake simulacrum as an example:
Note that many of the highly rated games I shared had sub 300 reviews, so even if you were to have a great 60:1 ratio for a game with 300 reviews priced at $15 you're looking at a $185k gross after steams cut and before taxes for potentially 3+ years of development and support.
I really hope I'm wrong here because I would love a meritocratic indie game scene to keep flourishing, but the greater trend I see is a bifurcation between indie games that synergize with streaming and social media to become breakout hits and excellent games that prove more difficult to market that struggle to tread water.
In your link, look at the median data he offers for literally every single thing except date. I think the following matches your overall selection of games pretty well:
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Indie - 65:1 sales:reviews
$10-$20 - 65:1
>90% (review positive) - 51:1
250-1000 reviews - 89:1
Casual (genre) - ~70:1
---
The only thing that contradicts my 60:1 claim is the date datum, but I would take it with a grain of salt due to a endless quite obvious biases. For instance that article is based on the data 'leaked' up to 2018, but that leak was closed in June 2018. So you not only are missing half the year's data, but the two most critical holidays. There's also lots of different demographics that will have different purchasing/reviewing trends. For instance many people don't buy new releases, or buy them and only play/review them much later, and so on. There's just lot of biases in date alone.
On this site we often get a very unrealistic sampling of economic reality, because a lot of tech stuff is based in locations with extremely high local inflation both in costs and in compensation. For the US as a whole, median personal income is $41k, about $55k exclusively for full time workers. [1] $185k with ongoing passive income is doing wayyyy better than average even in America. And of course with independent development, you're not tied to any location. You could move to anywhere in the other 95% of the world where $185k would spend much closer to something like a million dollars. Places like San Francisco and Seattle are absolutely pricing out small scale entrepreneurship of all forms, but all that means is that we'll instead see things coming disproportionately more frequently from the other 95% of the world.
> You need to have a way of rising above the noise.
if you believe in the social media discuourse, "making a good game" is enough, and Steam algorithms + word of mouth will boost it up for you. I think that's highly unrealistic, but I do think making "a really good game" will guarantee a certain minimum sales on Steam.
I also don't think that minimum sales is close to sustainable compared to a minimum wage job, but that's always the part of the conversation left out. $10k in a year is a great side hustle and well above the median. It's a complete failure even for the most humble game dev that lives in a carboard box and survives off of potatoes.
Just get some popular streamers/channels to do a review/let's play and if they like it you'll get tons of free exposure. I've spent probably hundreds of dollars on indie games in the last year or so from first seeing them on a gaming channel and then pulling it up in steam.
One doesn't start with the marketing. One starts with the great game. This is the one of the biggest issue now in culture – one is taught to promote one's awful films, music novels, games, paintings. Instead the creators should teach themselves how to make great, or at least good, art first.
Then the division of labour was to find the editor or the producer to take your work to the next level.
do you know how much it costs to even get a small but recognizable streamer to stream your game?
Remember, Microsoft gave Ninja a $55m contract to stream on the now dead Mixer. And ofc Ninja mostly streams the most mainstream of mainstream games anyway. These top streamers are way more expensive than any ad program to just approach and inquire to.
anyways, to answer my rhetorical question: I hear the rule of thumb is either $0.10-0.20 per video view, or $1 per concurrent view as a starting point. you can use that to guestimate whoever you had in mind when you were thinking of paying a streamer.
Competition doesn't have excellent games. There aren't that many excellent games released per year, if you have an excellent game just getting noticed is enough.
Part of the scale is that unlike an indy game, whatever junk EA puts out will end up on every platform and in physical and virtual game stores around the world. Every year when they rerelease the same game.
I don't know what you mean by this. It sounded like OP was talking about scale of content. But it does not take a triple-A budget to be on multiple platforms on physical disk. It takes a relationship with a distributor (through your publisher).
I would even go as far as to say it's easier to distribute indie games to different platforms, for a lot of reasons. Mainly that you have a lot less people to pay and you're likely using an engine that can do a lot of that technical work for you instead of an in house engine.
>> Making an excellent game isn't even enough these days, that's just table stakes. With so many games out there it's a market of lemons. You need to have a way of rising above the noise.
Maybe if your goal is to "win", to be the biggest and most profitable game. But most of the best games become so because they don't try to rise above the noise. Do something very very well and you can abandon all the trappings of the top-tier games. I just paid 20$ for a game about puzzle boxes. It isn't flashy. It is just a fun game about a very niche topic. It will never top any steam charts, nor is it trying to do so. It is just a fun game for people that want to do puzzle boxes. It is still "great" imho because, frankly, I bought it and don't regret paying for it. That alone puts it above 99.99% of games on steam, all those games I would never consider paying a dime for.
This thread is rooted in a comment saying that the median revenue for a game on Steam is $800.
There's a large, large gulf between "the biggest and most profitable game" and "I spent months of my life working on this, and made less than a month of rent."
The puzzle box game may be awesome and well-worth your $20. The developer still might rightly have concluded that "damn, this was a huge waste of time. Gotta go back to my Wal-mart job."
