Weirdo gamers who think daddy gaben will love them if they lick his boots enough: "Oh but steam offers download infrastructure!"
My good dude, my man, my bro. I make little fucking indie pixel games. I'm lucky to crack 200 megs on a single install for my games. I could serve all my downloads off a raspberry pi zero I run off my home internet that i pay less a month for than a moderately discounted AAA title. This is not worth the 30% of my revenue that I could have used to heat my home in winter, but can't because daddy gaben needs another yacht for his armada
You know who needs that? Big AAA with games that are a trillion megabytes in size. You know who doesn't fucking pay 30% to daddy gaben? Those AAAs. They get sweetheart deals where they pay as little as 10%. So why are you making the case that little empoverished indie devs are responsible for subsidizing the download infrastructure of big multi billion dollar AAA studios?
Oh and the best part is: the 30% was set back in the day when getting a game on steam meant you got like half a million guaranteed front page views. Like yeah you could argue 500k impressions for any new release might be worth 30%
Anyway you uh. You get 0 guaranteed impressions now and also visibility rounds appear to do nothing now, like those fake buttons they put in at crosswalks cause it makes people feel good to press a button while they wait for the light to change
tangent: as a steam user I don't look at the store page anymore because it makes no sense and seems user hostile
I do not think I'm in the minority, it's usually worthless for discovery to me, even during sales, worse than going "what game good now 2024" in Google. will i like this? how can i tell, i have to click through a thumbnail to even know the genre of 3/4 of them
paying people with exposure, when you can promise it to everyone, makes it even worse. Because it foods the zone.
