It's been a rough year for indies on Steam.
To be fair, many of the 12 indie developers I've spoken to over the last six months might gently rap on my window and inform me that, no, it's been a rough several years for indies on Steam. But the last year has been especially rocky thanks to a series of discoverability and communication missteps that have left many independent developers feeling ignored at best or deliberately hamstrung at worst.
For example, a sudden, unexplained change in Steam's algorithm in October caused sharp traffic drops for many. And just a few weeks ago, confusion about the Steam Summer Sale resulted in indie games being removed en masse from users' wishlists -- a critical feature for indies.
It's easy to see how all of this in the scope of a year could be disheartening for a small developer, especially one struggling to get noticed on gaming's largest PC storefront. And most of the developers I spoke with acknowledged that the basic challenge of discoverability when there are just too many video games isn't Valve's fault. Valve has the unenviable problem of figuring out how to categorize tens of thousands of games so users can find and buy what they wanted while still giving deserving games necessary visibility.
However, many of those same developers also expressed frustration that, while in the early days of Steam Greenlight there were numerous benefits to having a game appear on the platform, those benefits have largely dissolved as the library of games has exploded. They say Steam's decision to rely on a changing algorithm rather than curation has hindered rather than helped their games, resulting in steep drops in traffic, unpredictable game sales, and an increase in the amount of time and expense needed for marketing that had not been as critical when Steam was a smaller, more curated platform.
"Steam gives you a bare minimum package now," said Tom-Ivar Arntzen of Tinimations, developer of Klang. "It's not anything at all. When the indie movement started out, that wasn't the case. If you actually made it to Steam, you got some exposure for that. Being on Steam gave you bragging rights."
Some developers are lucky enough to have a Valve representative they can speak to directly, who might be able to provide some of the answers Hanna mentions. But how specifically one gets one of those seems to be a matter of confusion among many I spoke to, and some have never spoken to anyone from the company directly at all. A few developers told me that their posts with concerns on the Steam developer boards are often ignored entirely, and there's no clear avenue to go down if you need assistance.
"We have had no help, no guidance, love or support," said MidBoss CEO Cade Peterson. "It's a black box they operate in, and I get that at such a size they are now it's probably impossible to do more, but every major change they've made in the past four to five years has been at the cost of helping developers and pretty much every new change has hurt them."
The picture doesn't seem optimistic, but there is evidence things may be improving slightly. Some developers saw their traffic return to normal after Valve responded to the issues with the algorithm. Some reported surprise successes during the Steam Summer Sale despite wishlist frustrations. The Epic Games store, though still closed off to most developers, appears to have challenged Steam sufficiently that Valve is re-examining things like revenue share and recommendation. And everyone I talked to was at least cautiously optimistic about a brand new feature announced last week, Steam Labs.
Steam Labs is an experimental area on the storefront where Valve is currently testing new discoverability features. There are currently three available to play with, two that involve short trailers and the most interesting of which is a new take on game recommendation that uses machine learning to suggest titles based on what the user has played in the past.
Can't quote the whole thing but I'd definitely recommend reading the full article, as it delves into the issues Valve ran into last year, and how Steam Labs is their inroads to correcting the discoverability issue they're running into for devs.
