Developer criticizes Steam design update - he believes it created a threat to the future of indie games

News 1
07 Jun 06:25

In June, Valve introduced a major update for Steam. Developers decided to make changes to the design of the main page. For example, the update affected the "Popular Upcoming" section.

In a diary dedicated to the update, Valve stated that "at the request of players," it changed the content of this tab to better reflect the most anticipated releases of the next month. "More niche" upcoming releases can be found in the "Personal Calendar."

Developer RegisKillbin criticized this innovation — he believes that this change "will hit future indie games." He explained that previously, in the "Popular Upcoming" section, games were displayed chronologically by release date. If a project had enough wishlists to get into the selection (approximately 6–7 thousand), it could stay at the top of the list for some time, and players could notice a small new release.

However, according to RegisKillbin, new rules came into play, and larger projects with many wishlists are now more likely to appear at the top:

Now the list is formed by an algorithm: it has many more large projects from big companies and publishers, including those that are only coming out in two weeks. Currently, the minimum number of wishlists there is about 80 thousand, whereas before there could be dozens of indie games with indicators from 6 thousand.

According to RegisKillbin, after this update, developers of small and medium-sized games lost one of the ways to find their audience, and Steam users were left without one of the tools for discovering interesting small projects:

Now Steam prioritizes large games with budgets and time to accumulate huge numbers of wishlists, or rare indie hits that have gone viral, much more strongly.

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