this post was submitted on 14 Dec 2025
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Fair.
What’s to be done about that, though? Steam does not control social media, and customer attention is finite.
Is the issue organizational? Should all these solo/tiny devs have better ways to collaborate so they make fewer, better games?
Or is it mostly a structural problem with the Steam Store?
There are two ways to do this, as far as I'm concerned:
You can come up with an algorithm and let it cook, which is how Steam handles almost everything...
...or you can have an editorial team curate your storefront, negotiate sponsorships and marketing deals and manually set up promo slots based on their judgement.
Both have pros and cons, both prop up a certain type of game and hide others. Neither is particularly great if you're a tiny dev with no budget, though, unless the storefront in question actively curates for that specific type of product (which no current first party really does outside Itch).
I don't think you're going to get fewer, bigger indies. The real problem the original corpo guy is forgetting to flag is that there is no longer speculative investment in gaming, so all that venture capital money went to AI.
Games are about cash now, so there's no room to fail. Unless you have money in the bank to make many games, failure means you're out. It doesn't matter if your game is big or small. Gamedev costs what it costs if you need to pay for the devs' salaries directly from your game's sales with no investment cushion.
That leads to a mobile-like landscape. The big stay big forever, the small fry keep gaming the algo hoping to go viral. It's a bit grim.
I'd argue that if Steam played kingmaker based on less math and a bit more discernment they are in the best position to split the difference. Instead, you weirdly get more of that from Sony, Nintendo and... well, what's left of MS for as long as it exists as a gaming first party.
And that's what I think is needed. If Steam wants to be the Google of gaming that's fine... as long as someone else is competing with a different approach to split the difference. Just Steam's approach by itself would be bad, I think.
FYI I didn't get a Lemmy notification to your reply. This is really annoing, and its just about pushing me to try Piefed...
But yeah, I buy this. But problems:
It costs Valve a lot more money.
It requires more employees, or at least contractors/grants.
It requires finding expertise/passion in niches, and categorizing a whole lot of games.
Given Valve's sort of libertarian/hands off ethos, I don't think they're going to take the "1st pary editorial team" approach. Heck, they seem to be aware of the issue, hence the Steam Curators program, but its not the same as bankrolling an editorial team that does it for a living.