I didn't really care that the Steam "shmup sale" was mostly non-shmups, but hearing that actual traditional shmups from small indies got rejected from the sale is boiling my blood. Indie shmup devs are hustling every single day to get attention, and getting rejected from the one sale in years that bears their genre's name in favour of games that aren't even part of the genre is insulting. God.
Given that the Steam tags for shumps/STGs/bullet hell games are generally filled with things that apparently self qualify because they "have a gun" I'm saddened but not surprised that the Steam Sale is the same, but actual shmup devs not getting cleared is some bullshit :(.
curated storefronts have presented these same hurdles for over a decade: one of the obvious downsides to working within a niche genre is that you're beholden to gatekeepers who can't tell a good game from a bad one, or whose appetite for a certain type of game is so small that they'll blanket refuse anything once they feel they've hit an acceptable quota
(I'm not just talking Steam here, either... GOG was notorious for this, and might still be, I wrote em off after anti-trans gesture #746869)
there was a time when this stuff would infuriate me but I'm sort of resigned to it at this point... yeah, it sucks that the games I'm interested in are completely crowded out by people who played Undertale or Cuphead or Binding of Isaac or Vampire Survivors or [vague gesture in the direction of whatever fits their definition of "Touhou"] or Nier Automata or whatever, but I can't truly hate it because I really do believe that the elements of STG that most matter to me don't matter to the majority, and the aspect that do appeal to them are things they only really want or value as a garnish atop other experiences, and that they're not ignorant about "real" STG so much as they just are not interested in that specific type of game anymore, if they ever wanted it to begin with
there are a lot of reasons the dinky little publishing initiative I'm working on is skipping Steam, and one of them is based on the idea that whatever discoverability Steam promises is practically worthless when it comes to more traditional STG, not just because of all the bullshit demonstrated over the last week or so but because putting games in the faces of millions of people isn't especially useful when the overwhelming majority of those people will never give a damn, and so it's more beneficial for devs, players and everyone else to cultivate their own ecosystem somewhere else where they can be guaranteed an audience, a community and, ideally, a reliable and consistent level of financial support, however modest it might be
