The indie game dream is (mostly) dead: 99% of Steam games vanish without a trace

It’s hard being an independent developer these days. While indies are genuinely the last saving grace of this industry, actually getting your share of attention seems to be genuinely impossible. And, with new figures now gracing our sorry eyes, it seems 99 percent of all Steam games fail to captivate any sort of meaningful audience.

That is according to GamesRadar, which cites We Love It’s recent report on Steam’s sales figures, which revealed Valve’s storefront has grossed nearly $130 billion since it was first released as an online patch tool for Half-Life 2 (not including free-to-play giants and their revenue).

The same report outlined that 84.5 percent of Steam sales revenue is generated by the top one percent of titles, meaning the remaining 99 percent account for only a fraction of the total cash pool.

These 99 percent are, of course, mostly independent and smaller projects, many of them even shovelware or first-time attempts at game development. Steam gets literally thousands of titles released on it per year, with an estimated 120,000 titles total on the platform.

As We Love It explains, the average Steam game earns $3,631 in lifetime sales. Though, as the above indicates, these figures are heavily skewed to the higher end due to the top one percent earning so much money overall. Though that figure is the median and therefore more accurate than the pure average, it still leans into the more successful and ideal figures than the more realistic ones for 99 percent of Steam’s library.

We Love It writes that half of all paid games made less than that figure I just cited, which includes, well, around 50,000 titles.

These estimates were made through the usual sales formula, which multiplies each review by 35 to get a rough number of copies sold. More conservative formulas use 25 as the standard multiplier, though 35 remains the standard.

However, there is an issue using this as a method since, as the report indicates, over 8,000 paid Steam games had zero reviews, meaning their proper sales figures could not have been calculated, though it’s safe to say that they made next to no money if no one even bothered to leave their two cents under their store pages.

In this environment, indies truly struggle. I’ve also recently learned that having your game on the Steam frontpage on launch can lead to a 10- to 100-fold increase in sales, but that review bombing campaigns, usually from the same regions every time, can cause a tremendous amount of harm since Steam completely disqualifies you from these free adverts if your game has under 72 percent positive reviews.

With everything that you need to account for, it’s understandable why only AAA supergiants can come out on top despite review bombings and negative campaigns. Indies simply do not have that luxury, and thus we get ratios like these.

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