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SteamSteamed is dedicated to everything related to the Valve PC gaming service. The summer sale of Steam on the theme of this year's Grand Prix was, to say the least, chaotic. Two weeks ago, Valve apologized and changed the meta-game of the sale, in which players find themselves to face and win prizes, after finding themselves unbalanced and confusing, and the developers were slaughtered by sudden deletions. Now that the sale has ended, it seems that Valve's efforts have not been enough to repair the damage caused by the confusing sales structure to independent developers.
In the Grand Prix meta-game, players joined animal-themed teams and earned points by completing quests in the Steam games and, of course, spending money on sales. Summer of Steam. Players can put points to use to strengthen their team, a simple system that resonates into a labyrinth of crazy nightmare systems of sub-rules and exceptions.
Confused and irritated players, but it would not have been so bad if free Steam games were not in play, random members of the top three teams receiving the first free game on their Steam Wish List at the end of each day. . Valve did not do the best job of explaining how it worked, which led to a situation in which thousands of people removed games from their Steam wish lists in the hope of "stealing". increase the chances of receiving their favorite game when in fact they would. We received the game they put on the front row of their wish list, anyway.
"The last sale, I have earned more than $ 2,000. This one, I barely made $ 200. Thank you."
After a few days of frowning and fury, Valve explained that, no, people did not need to change their wish list and was also trying to rebalance the meta-game of the Grand Prix so that it would be more difficult for a team to take command. He also introduced new challenges in sales, which included reviewing and even reviewing games to help developers recover lost traffic. Two weeks after these adjustments, it is clear that the dressings were not enough to hide the fundamental flaws of the summer sales. In the end, there were still a lot of bugs and balances – including a day in which Team Hare has traveled the entire diameter of the earth – and the award-winning team, the Corgi team, has won more than anyone else. Yesterday, Valve again apologized to the Grand Prix players.
"Thank you to everyone who participated in the Grand Prix," said the company in a note on the page of the event. "We realize that the track has experienced unexpected turns, we tried to straighten them when we could and we anticipate curves better the next time we invite you to race."
He also randomly selected 5,000 users who participated in the event to receive the best game from their wish list.
The developers did not even get such results. Wish lists are one of the biggest predictors of sales success on Steam, as they inform users whenever a desired game is sold or sold. This serves to resurface the games on a platform where it can be complicated to cut through the clutter. In the best case, an interesting independent actor becomes an impulse purchase instead of a game that you will never see again. However, as a result of The Great Spree Deletion Of 2019 and apparent changes in the Steam Algorithm, some developers experienced poor sales and a total number of negative wish lists during the sale, which is the opposite of what is supposed to happen during this.
"We have 4,000 wish lists out of 2,000 sales, so we should have 2,000 more," Sir, you are hunted, The signal of Tolva, and Light protects us developer Jim Rossignol (with whom previously I worked with Rock Paper Shotgun) Narrated Kotaku in an email. "Sales were also below expectations, so I'm not happy about that."
"Steam's message to users to stop deleting wish lists did not make any significant difference in the rate of our deletions," he said. Foxtail developer
Clockwork Giant Games in an e-mail, also noting that this sale did not include a mechanism to facilitate the consultation of lists of games recommended by users. In the past, the studio was getting "about 180" wish lists a day. by pulling about 40 to 60 additions, with our deletions arriving at 30-50. We are barely positive at this sale, and from what I can say, we are one of the most successful developers lucky … For a new indie title, Wish lists are our lifeblood; that's how we stand out on the platform. It is heartbreaking to see many of our fellow developers being hit hard by this sale. "
The restricted Steam developer forums were in different states of uproar throughout the sale, depending on the screenshots provided at Kotaku. There were discussions about irregular traffic to gaming store pages and bad sales. In a particularly eloquent article, a small developer compared his previous Steam sales prospects to those of this year.
"The last sale, I've earned more than $ 2,000," writes the developer. "This one, I just barely made $ 200. Thank you."
Developers see not only wish list issues, but also changes in the way Steam recommends games, as well as changes in the structure of the sale. Nepenthe and At the dark tower Developer Yitz pointed to Steam's data on his games, which indicated that the "vast majority" of his store page traffic came from outside Steam, as opposed to built-in recommendation systems such as the page. home, discovery queue, tags and games. "More like that" sections. Data for the first half of 2018 indicate that less than 20% of its traffic comes from external sites, while more than half comes from Steam. That, says Yitz, is a problem since October 2018, when a bug in the Steam algorithm resulted in big traffic gains in big games when small games were lost. Although Valve said in December that the problem had been resolved and the flow of traffic is normalized again, some developers say their games are never recovered. Yitz is in this camp.
"Before October 2018 (and for a few months after, while giving the benefit of the doubt to Steam), I told everyone who asked me that Steam was worth 100% worth for independent developers," he said. he declared in a Twitter DM. "Now this trust is gone, and it's not because I've changed or I've become more cynical … This Steam sale has been a disaster, but I'm much more concerned about the overall trend observed in the Steam Algorithm since October of last year: pass unpopular (including "mostly negative") triple-A games to titles for which Steam has enough data to be safe that it would be better for the consumer. "
Other developers have the same feeling. "The sale itself was a disappointment, but I do not necessarily think it will happen until the minigame of the Grand Prix," he said. Research to know, MidBoss, and Dimension Ultra Hat director Emma "Eniko" Maassen, whose wish list removes wish list additions that were largely out of date throughout the sale and whose number of sales is only half that of last year. "It was about as bad as the last winter sale, and this is consistent with the reduced earnings of many independent developers since Valve in October, where they changed something in their algorithm that resulted in a drastic reduction in sales for many developers … I I fear for the future of many independent developers who may well be preparing for a good summer sale after 6-8 months of depreciated earnings on Steam and who may start to run out of # Money now that summer sales are not better. "
"I fear for the future of many independent developers who may have held for a good summer sale after 6-8 months of reduced revenue on Steam and who may start running out of money now that balances summer are not better. . "
A developer who chose to remain anonymous provided gross revenue figures. "In 2018, we won about $ 100,000 with ONE game during the summer sales," said the developer in an email. "In 2019, we won about $ 65,000 with two games during the summer sales. But it's not just the summer sales. It seems that for many developers, 2019 is the year of the lowest traffic and therefore the least sales made so far. "
It was not a sinister destiny for everyone, however. Some games, like parkour FPS Reach the orange door, had great success at the sale thanks to the attention of YouTubers. Others, like a game of exploration The first tree, more or less stabilized after Valve clarified the problem of the wish list. In some cases, smaller games have even received big boosts (though brief) of Steam. Painting exploration game Eastshade wrapped in this last category.
"From a sales point of view, Eastshade We have achieved very good results compared to our past experience, "said Danny Weinbaum, founder of Eastshade Studios, in an email. "We sold 6.4,000 units, about $ 98,000 in gross revenue. Half of these units sold in one day, where we sold 10 times more than the normal rate. This abnormal increase in sales occurred precisely over a 24-hour period and resulted in a number of posts on the forum: Eastshade appeared in their recommendations "because you played Fallout 4. This suggests to me [that] Valve had a kind of rotation, pushing different games every day, and Eastshade was in this rotation. "
However, many small developers continue to to feel burned by this sale and are worried about a downward trend in their overall traffic.
"Unless a game is so exceptional or unique that word-of-mouth alone can make it viral (think Minecraft, Subtitle, etc.), there must be a support behind, "said Yitz. "If these games are hidden behind the Steam Store, even for the people who are looking for them explicitly, the developers of these games will never be seen by the majority of their potential audience, and the players will be missed. Dark favorites most loved, simply because they were hidden behind all the lenders filled with triple-A microtransaction, which Steam decided to push in. It's not the end of the world, but it's is the end of some careers, that's for sure. "
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