Welcome to the largest gaming community on Lemmy! Discussion for all kinds of games. Video games, tabletop games, card games etc.
1. Submissions have to be related to games
Video games, tabletop, or otherwise. Posts not related to games will be deleted.
This community is focused on games, of all kinds. Any news item or discussion should be related to gaming in some way.
2. No bigotry or harassment, be civil
No bigotry, hardline stance. Try not to get too heated when entering into a discussion or debate.
We are here to talk and discuss about one of our passions, not fight or be exposed to hate. Posts or responses that are hateful will be deleted to keep the atmosphere good. If repeatedly violated, not only will the comment be deleted but a ban will be handed out as well. We judge each case individually.
3. No excessive self-promotion
Try to keep it to 10% self-promotion / 90% other stuff in your post history.
This is to prevent people from posting for the sole purpose of promoting their own website or social media account.
4. Stay on-topic; no memes, funny videos, giveaways, reposts, or low-effort posts
This community is mostly for discussion and news. Remember to search for the thing you're submitting before posting to see if it's already been posted.
We want to keep the quality of posts high. Therefore, memes, funny videos, low-effort posts and reposts are not allowed. We prohibit giveaways because we cannot be sure that the person holding the giveaway will actually do what they promise.
5. Mark Spoilers and NSFW
Make sure to mark your stuff or it may be removed.
No one wants to be spoiled. Therefore, always mark spoilers. Similarly mark NSFW, in case anyone is browsing in a public space or at work.
6. No linking to piracy
Don't share it here, there are other places to find it. Discussion of piracy is fine.
We don't want us moderators or the admins of lemmy.world to get in trouble for linking to piracy. Therefore, any link to piracy will be removed. Discussion of it is of course allowed.
PM a mod to add your own
Video games
Generic
Help and suggestions
By platform
By type
By games
Language specific
"game" is a big stretch for a lot of the asset flip or AI trash that is currently on steam.
I think the bad reputation for asset flips is somewhat overblown. Like, of course some slop game is going to use assets but a lot of decent indie games do too. Using assets doesn‘t make a game bad. But yes a lot of games are just low effort bootlegs of whatever is popular right now.
But whats worse are games containing legit malware on Steam. Apparently that is becoming a growing problem.
AI has slop is a problem, and Shovelware has been a problem for decades, basically as long as videogames have existed.
However, a LOT of these cheap and obscure games on steam have more innocuous explanations, with that explanation often being "the dev doesn't really care about making money". Perception, for example, is a student project that was released for free and I wouldn't pay much for anyways, but it was a fun way to spend a couple of hours.
Or when I was in a band, one of the other members was a developer by trade who, as a hobby, connects with a couple of his other friends to develop game that he released on steam. I recorded and produced an EP for that band and we released it for free and we certainly spent more money buying drinks at the bars we played than we were ever paid for playing. I think his game was similar: they charged money for it to cover some of their costs, but he certainly never left his day job.
Or Mind Over Magnet, which was the project of the YouTuber GamerMakersToolkit. The whole thing was a multi-year project where the guy made videos covering the game development process and culminated in the release of the game. The actual business model was based on the video content, while the game itself was just a side piece that was probably profitable, but I doubt made enough profit for him to survive on for years.
The developer of Mind Over Magnet did a post mortem video where he covered among other things how much of gross he kept after paying the artists he hired, paid for things like assets, and after taxes, and it was about 43%. A very lazy search yielded somewhere around $300k in total sales on Steam, meaning he took home $129k. So yeah, not a bad chunk of change, but it's not exactly changing social class or long term working conditions.
Anyone doing a uBlock for Steam?
Steamdb lets you filter out games with less than x reviews which I’ve made liberal use of over the years.
There's no downside for consumers, sucks if you are making art for an oversaturated market.
But that's why artists should get a UBI
When I am supreme overlord, artists will get free food and housing. But like, it's gonna suck really bad because tortured artists make the best art.
We can just waterboard them
: warms up netti pot:
I am immune to your punishment.
That will be the only access to drinking water
That's actually more than I thought. I thought about 80% fall into complete oblivion.
This was my initial reaction too. I am making the assumption that less than ten still means not zero.
I rarely leave reviews so I’m surprised that 50% of all releases even see a single one.
10 reviews means like 500-1000 sales. The vast majority of people dont leave reviews. Not much, especially for low priced games, but also not nothing. As long as you enjoyed the game making process and didnt invest anything except for time its not really an issue.
10 reviews means the developer has some combination of the following:
10 is essentially 0 and cannot be extrapolated into sales.
I agree that if game development is a hobby and not a career, this isn't a problem for those developers.
I also submit that if you are attempting to make money from your efforts and don't yet have a following, and can't afford a marketing budget, and have actually made something unique, interesting, or otherwise worthwhile, it is more difficult to stand out in a market whose signal to noise ratio is continuously and exponentially growing noisier.
Agreed, my first thought was about the stats for Twitch streamers where having more than something like 10 concurrent viewers consistently for a 30 day period puts you in the top 15% of streamers on the platform or whatever. I forget the exact numbers, but it's something crazy like that.
big part of the ones with almost no reviews are such garbage its insulting to even call them games. But i bet there are some gems buried in there too.
Something I tried to do earlier to help with it, in this very channel, was a "Downvote any game you've heard of before" thread. It was a nice exercise to help people post odd games no one had heard of.
My game Drone Perspective is one of those. Such a good game, but I am a bit afraid that I can't turn it around.
Hey that looks good actually. Wishlisted it for when I have more time.
I think this statistic would be more interesting if it filtered out all of the blatant cash-grab, asset-flip, AI generated shit that makes up a large portion of new releases.
Is it 19,000 releases with 10,000 actual sincere efforts at making a game, or 19,000 releases with 1,000 actual games.
And what's the average number of reviews for actual games versus garbage?
I don't think that's trivial to filter.
I don't disagree. It would require manual labelling by a group of people with enough patience and understanding of gaming to be able to reliably label ~60 new games every day. I'd have thought that the Steam community was large enough to achieve this though.
Shit's turning into amazon. Lol.
One of those things people waste energy getting concerned about. Better than highly stringent curation that has no chance in being representative of all different taste/demographics. It's a more level playing field. Happened to music and books. Then video/movies. Video games followed quickly after. Better than the days of payments for every patch you push through Xbox live/PSN. Better than needing to get 35mm prints and access to theaters
Oh, no! Competition in the games industry causing the slop to fall to the bottom! We better ban steam immediately put everything behind a walled guardian and have "AAA" companies be the only ones allowed to publish! What if the plebs start making money? Then what?
Slop falls to the bottom but I bet a lot of hidden gems do too. The greater volume of games coming out, the harder it’ll be for individual developers to get recognized!
Old school indie developer Jeff Vogel has a whole talk about how difficult it is.
How often do people leave reviews? I rarely see a profile with +100 reviews.
I only leave reviews after 100% completion or a lot of time (hundreds of hours) in case of fighting games where sometimes 100% is ridiculously difficult to attain (oh hi, Plus R)
I think the average time between my picking up a game and leaving a review is like 3~12 months. Definitely even more if I'm not vibing with the game.
I'll click the thumbs up button then get intimidated by the text box that pops up. I'm not mentally prepared to give out a useful review.
Same. I'm often in the process of breaking down why I like/dislike the game, what works about it, and what doesn't as I'm playing. I can't give honest feedback with incomplete thoughts.
I just say "I like it", it's not very helpful but at least it counts for the rating
As I recall, its around 5%-20% of players leave a review, usually closer to 5% unless something about the game makes people want to talk about it, for both good and bad.
I leave reviews when the game does something exceptional (good or bad). Or sometimes when steam nags me to leave a review.
It's funny: if you leave a negative review and keep playing it asks you if you want to change your review.
I don't know if it's true or not, but I've heard a rough proxy for modest success "above breakeven" in the indie sphere is 1,000+ reviews.
The chart doesn't break out the 1,000+ review count band, but it looks like under 5% of the 19,000 games released in 2025 on Steam were even able to go above 500 review count.
The 1,000+ review count band as a measure of success does make sense in a back of the napkin kind of way.
Assuming 5% of buyers leave a review, that would be 20,000 in sales. At a net unit revenue of $10 (after Steam's cut and the payment processor), that would be $200 K net revenue.
An unfortunate 'secret' for most indie titles is that the vast majority of their sales are on discount, usually during launch or one of the big week long sales. Not a lot of people buy indie games at full sticker price unless its a pretty high quality title.
So your $200K net revenue would be at absolute max, but is realistically ~50-80% of that.
That's fair. A blended net revenue per unit figure of $10 might actually be high.
Assuming 5% of buyers leave a review, that would be 20,000 in sales. At a net unit revenue of $10 (after Steam's cut and the payment processor), that would be $200 K net revenue.
A unit revenue of $10 means your product is going for ~15 base price. I don't know about you, but I rarely buy stuff above $10 anymore. So like the other guy said, you're looking at like half of that based on people buying during sales.
Other people have mentioned removing asset flips and AI slop. I'm wondering what this dataset looks like if you remove all of the shitty NSFW games that get shoveled out en masse.
Our first game barely got past 10 reviews in a 2 years, despite real original assets etc. It just didn't click with people. While 'filtering out the slop' will improve the numbers, I'm sure there are many games in a similar boat as ours.
As someone that regularly goes through new releases, I really wish there was a way to filter out all of the slop so that I even see games like yours. I'm sure I miss games I'd enjoy all the time due to the deluge of garbage, it's a shame.
People don't even write honest reviews anymore anyways on steam. It's just cheap catering to get awarded points for shitty memes and jokes.
Do you have an example of this? I read Steam Reviews every once in awhile if I'm interested in a game and I've seen a few jokes but mostly full reviews that sometimes are so long I just can't even read the whole thing.
So skip those reviews and scroll down to the ones that resonate with you.
Any bigger game with meme/stream potential is gonna get a few idiots writing nonsense reviews for the lols , but in guarantee that there are still plenty of very relevant reviews that are useful for deciding if you'll vibe with a game
Haven't you heard. Indie games have to launch on steam or they fail miserably.
Seriously though. This is why I roll my eyes at people who claim steam makes it breaks these games. Humble bundle? Runs sales events where these games get showcased. Itch.io's whole schtick is selling indie games.
It's nice that Valve gives studios a platform to help market their games and all that, and yes, by dint of being one of the largest gaming sale platforms out there launching on steam helps their chances. But most of them weren't ever gonna reach the success of AAA titles regardless and we pretend that that's Valve's fault for reasons I have never understood.
It's the same problem with each of the online stores including the Nintendo E-Shop. Your game still has to be decent and be marketed to the people who want to play it.
Additionally they have to have time to play it. Which means you're fighting every other game in the category in order to claim each players time.
There's a whole lot to making and marketing a successful game at literally every level and not every studio can be a Team Cherry.
Additionally they have to have time to play it.
And money to buy it! Wages are down. I was unemployed for a while so I just didn't buy any games (or much else)
Indie games have to launch on steam or they fail miserably. Seriously though. This is why I roll my eyes at people who claim steam makes it breaks these games.
Those two things aren't opposed though. Launching on Steam doesn't guarantee success, but I believe what they're claiming is that not launching on Steam more or less guarantees its failure.