Mostly agree.

90% of the time they are asking other indie devs who are also bad at descibing their game. They have very likely never been told their Steam page looks awful or is described poorly.

The YouTuber part is difficult. If you go to contact them, many straight up say don’t send me your games to check out on their contact page, and out of the ones that do accept keys, you’re usually looking at a very small chance that they’ll stream it.

Most people leave the industry when you crunch through a game and then get laid off anyways when the studio closes.

Even so, its the team’s collective experience that’s important. An individual themselves might have a lot of experience shipping games, but getting laid off and joining a new team just means they’ll get to watch the new management make the same mistakes they just went through.

Edit: Fixed getting laid -> getting laid off lol

He’s right, its brutal that a single “failed” or even a break even title can end a studio and all the talent and experience gets lost.

A bad game is often valuable dev experience, even if it doesn’t feel that way when you’re going through it.

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.

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.

Its the Matthew effect - Steam is going to show you popular games because they’re popular, which leads to them being more popular. It’s usually games with big marketing budgets/efforts outside of Steam that eventually hit ‘popular’ and then stay there.

If I had to contribute my extremely biased two cents: Steam recommends ‘similar’ games based on tags, popularity, and if your friends play it. You play Valheim, its going to show you survival crafting games, viking games, and maybe a third person action game. If another relatively popular game has all three, you’re almost guaranteed to be shown it.

In the indie dev space you’re trying to leverage this by changing your tags to a popular game similar to yours so players of popular game will hopefully get recommended your game. (Also a lot of devs do this which dilutes its potential)

My biased take is that these tags fall short and it leads to ‘similar but different’ game recommendations which eventually had your storefront dominated by mass sellers or the big titles in a specific genre trying to muscle in on the space that Steam believes must be your favorite genre(s) because you bought the games marked as similar that it recommended to you.

If you actively try to find niche titles via labs or whatever then you can get it better tuned, but for most people I think they usually end up seeing just already big and successful games.

Sorry for the long rant, thanks for coming to my TED talk.

It most definitely takes a toll. Most devs don’t even talk about the weird sadness you get after finally getting something out the door either.

I don’t mean to make it all sound bad though, there is some genuine joy in making something and seeing it come together. Anyways good luck on your game dev projects.

As far as I understand it, the vast majority of ‘successful’ indie studios are in the same boat. You need to continual decent hits to keep afloat in an ever turbulent and flooding market. Even if the next title is successful, they already mentioned the other looming problem, burnout. You might be able to push yourself through one game, two is a struggle, and very few make it to three.

To me, and maybe I’m being a bit cynical, but this feels like a very foreboding article.

Its more likely they increased the price and immediately starting shaking down anyone who was paying for the old license price. Its a frustrating scummy tech company “strategy” that unfortunately works because someone at a developer or publisher will be willing to pay the hike if it means avoiding any legal battle.

Oh that’s true, I did forget about that one.

Looks glorious.

That’s pretty good for a first attempt, most people’s first games are barely functional, if at all, so I’d consider this a win.

This is a weirdo complaint but one thing I don’t like that some modern games keep doing is adding a lot of visual/texture noise by having a lot of details.

Sometimes its OK, but sometimes it gets difficult to tell what’s going on in the chaos of a fight. Combined with particle effects, reflections, and the DLSS or FSR or whatever and it gets to be a bit of an eye strainer.

Halos usually pretty good about strong enemy colors and easy to read room layouts but a few glimpses of this have me raising an eyebrow.

Depending on what you’re looking for in critique, Steam may not be a great place to get feedback. If you’re looking for just a handful of focus users, you’re better off uploading a game to itch.io and then asking people to try it via whatever relevant channels you’re looking at.

Steam is better for reviews. Though reviews are not aimed at the dev but aimed at potential buyers which is very different looking.

Per game.

I quite liked Fields of Mistria though its still early access.

KB/M is a little easier for placing things but its not at all bad with a gamepad.

I got several, I’ve found that some people really think about what I like in a game and nail a recommendation and some people just recommend things they liked, regardless how I feel on them.

The big ones would be Breath of the Wild and Helldivers 2.