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Last week, Valve released an update as part of a recent effort to help users more easily find new games under the radar. This update was intended to reduce the presence of popular games in Steam recommendation algorithms, increase the overall variety, and provide users with a more personalized game selection. However, the update seems to have produced unwanted training effects, especially for games that are not yet available. Now, some developers say that the traffic traffic that their game pages were getting before is now almost entirely dry.
Over the weekend, many independent developers have voiced concerns over Twitter, posting graphs of their freefall wish list statistics and citing sudden drops in store page traffic. The developers of atmospheric puzzle-platformer Unbound: Worlds Apart launched with their own graph of users' wish list numbers, which is not going in a promising direction:
"Thanks Steam for killing the independent game," wrote UnboundThe developers.
Mark Viola, creator of the turn-based tactical JRPG Bright red sky, deplore similar data, writes: "'Noticed a huge fall too. "
Fléaufleur developer Thomas Altenburger called the new update a "disaster", claiming that the daily wish list of his unscrupulous platform game had dropped 66% – an "all-time record".
"Months of effort, ruined in an instant," he writes.
Other developers have sought to Kotaku with similar stories. "Our prints and wish lists have dropped 80% since the change, and it's a similar story with tons of others," said Alex M-O, developer on action-platformer. Runic fencer Illyia, told Kotaku on Twitter.
"Our upcoming game has gone from 30 to 40 wish lists a day to negative numbers today," Jan Cieslar, founder of Failcore Games. "Thanks to the changes, more people are suppressing [the game from] their wish lists than to add them. And it's Steam that tells us to put up a page as quickly as possible and give priority to wish lists if we want to succeed. "
«Our traffic and our wish lists [dropped] at 20% of normal, and the conversion of view to wish list has also dropped to 50%, which means that they show our games to people from other niches or to people who have them already seen, " Bogdan Radu, founder of Lowpoly Interactive.
Store page impressions and wish lists are extremely important predictors of the success of Steam games, especially those to come. The value of page impressions is pretty self-explanatory, but when users want to create a list of games, they receive Steam notifications when it's released, as well as whenever it's on sale. In this way, he will not get lost in the constantly shrieking whirlwind of Steam. Developers generally consider that wish lists are the most effective way to make sure that a game sells to its full potential when it is released.
Developers who claim that their games have entered the game have something in common: their games are not out yet. Two developers behind the already released games said their internal stats on Steam were waiting or slightly up. Nevertheless, this hardly reassured developers who, in addition to their own long-term marketing efforts, relied on Steam's recommendations to create pre-publication wish lists.
"For example, a game like Hollow knight, " wrote the developers of Unbound. "In the" More like this "section of the games page, they only have popular games and no smaller games, and games that will be released in the near future are not there at present. this section generates the largest organic traffic. "
I looked at the version of the algorithm generated Steam store for me and found that it was largely true. I had to go through the recommendations section for several minutes to find a game that I did not recognize or did not manage to achieve. Although I met a couple of convincing indies in the "More like this" sections of recent cult hits like Hypnospace outlaw and Wandersongeven many "More Like This" widgets of small games were dominated by independent mega-hits, well-known classics, and barely-related triple-A games. The new games, meanwhile, were not found.
In a statement to KotakuValve said that the update is "likely" to undergo further modifications, but that they are not necessarily intended for this particular problem. "We are monitoring the effects of the changes now that they have been scaled up and we are looking at the combination of comments from all sources," said a Valve representative in an email. "It's too early to say what changes will be made, but new features and adjustments are still likely after the initial release."
Meanwhile, independent developers with upcoming games on Steam are left behind.
"It's a pretty clear model," said M-O. "Priority is given to the visibility of upcoming games. "More like products" includes about 50% of relevant bestsellers, 50% of irrelevant bestsellers and one [triple-A game] or two … It's a comedy opposite to their declared intention.
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