"I'm not saying you should make a deckbuilding rougelike vhs horror game, but the numbers..."
"Eleventy billion steam games are released every day, what are you doing to stand out? you need to...make a good game"
"Luck doesn't exist, success isn't random"
"wishlist my game on steam"
I stopped paying attention to this shit several years ago. It all sounds so smart when you get on stage and tell everyone that the numbers are overwhelming, but if you do things just right, you can be like this other successful indie game or whatever
recently Cory Doctorow had an essay about how tiktok regularly takes random users and manually gives them a bunch of views, so it's like a carnival game where the carnie demonstrates that the game isn't rigged when in fact it is. Also the carnie will let someone win the big stuffed bear, so people will see them walking around with the big bear they just won and think it's possible to win.
Steam is the same way, it's a fucking carnival game like tiktok is. I know so many people who told me to make a tiktok account so I could promote my indie game, because that's how musicians get views and an audience now, except that happens because tiktok randomly decides to manually give you attention. From the outside it looks like it's organic success and all you have to do is...make good content.
So then you get these hordes of indie developers telling me to make a fucking Deckbuilding Roughelike with Crafting because that's what sells on steam. All they have are sales numbers, they don't have the internal data that steam does and can only guess at sales numbers via...the incredibly opaque metric of number of reviews. Then there was steam spy. People wrote entire promotional campaigns around these scraps of information and I was supposed to follow all them because my success or failure is totally atomized. If you talk against this kind of thinking people will accuse you of not thinking rationally.
There's probably someone at valve, or a small team, who just randomly decides which games are worth promoting and their existence is a secret. This would make more sense than a bunch of people making high quality games and then getting no attention or underselling.
Also nobody talks about how valve takes 30% of all sales and then doesn't help with promoting your game or making anything easy at all. They're like amazon in that the interface and documentation are all shit, but they're the only game in town, so fuck off to itch.io
anyway I stopped paying attention to this shit years ago. I remember about 5 years ago there was a big thing about giving thousands of steam keys away to streamers in the hopes of getting attention that way, and there was even an automated service where a developer could automatically distribute thousands of keys to thousands of streamers...and I don't think anything happened with it.
hoping one day I can get on a stage, have my slides, and tell everyone to fuck off
