I see studios going out of business because their games are failing to reach their target audiences. The discovery ecosystem is more broken now than I’ve ever seen it in my decades in the industry. (If you’re a game developer reading this: it’s not just you! You can do everything right and still fail. It really is bonkers.)
I’ve spent years in this area. I helped create Steam Labs at Valve to improve game discovery. I’ve brought Steam down (gracefully, honest) on a Wednesday to commit changes to it. I don’t speak for Valve, but I have a reasonable understanding of this space. Steam’s discovery (my meager contributions aside) is miles ahead of every other media platform, but I also think—and I say this with love—that that’s like saying they’re the tallest hobbit.
I want to…
I see studios going out of business because their games are failing to reach their target audiences. The discovery ecosystem is more broken now than I’ve ever seen it in my decades in the industry. (If you’re a game developer reading this: it’s not just you! You can do everything right and still fail. It really is bonkers.)
I’ve spent years in this area. I helped create Steam Labs at Valve to improve game discovery. I’ve brought Steam down (gracefully, honest) on a Wednesday to commit changes to it. I don’t speak for Valve, but I have a reasonable understanding of this space. Steam’s discovery (my meager contributions aside) is miles ahead of every other media platform, but I also think—and I say this with love—that that’s like saying they’re the tallest hobbit.
I want to challenge the assumption that many developers hold, that storefronts exist to promote discovery. They’re actually the opposite—they’re mostly beneficiaries of off-platform discovery. A storefront’s primary purpose is to convert interest into purchase (and, for many storefronts like Steam, to allow them to play that purchase). Overwhelmingly, gamers learn about games elsewhere—historically in magazines and on gaming sites, and more recently through socials and video platforms (TikTok, YouTube, Reddit, Discord, etc.).
I often see developers think about gamers as generally being on the hunt for new games. While that’s true periodically (during seasonal sales with time-limited 80% off discounts, they become voracious hunters), most of the time, they aren’t. I believe it was Newzoo that found that gamers spend about 130B hours a year watching video or socials, taking in the meta around games. They do this because it’s good entertainment—and especially these days, discovery actually happens as a byproduct of this (i.e., "hey, I’ve heard of this game here and there; I should take a look"). Again:
1. **I have lots of love for the Steam team. They are awesome. **
2. But I’m going to throw them under the bus here:
3. Nobody browses Steam for fun.
Storefronts are built to be bottom of funnel: "You’re interested in this game? Let’s get you to the buy button." They’re pretty bad at introducing the uninitiated consumer to new games. You can still browse and find things there, but I would think of them more like the lower floor of the Ikea, with the racks of all the boxes. As a shopper, you go there because you generally know what you want, and are picking it up. Good discovery is the Ikea showroom—everything’s laid out, pleasantly and in context, and we just don’t have that in games.
There’s the old "Rule of Seven," that claims that a consumer need to encounter something about seven times before it clicks. Whatever the number, our brains are kinda wired to want to brush up against things lightly a few times and see if they catch. That’s why socials/video play such a huge role in a game’s success. Notwithstanding the fact that gamers will sometimes impulse-purchase during sales, they generally have to have been exposed to a game a few times before it sinks in. The Steam Store page is the factoid-dense polar opposite of that. When you point a user who’s never heard of a game at this checkout aisle stage, they’re more likely to bounce than to want to learn more. And that’s true even if it’s an ideal game for them!
Right now, there are over 15,000 games on Steam with 80%+ player review scores and 1000+ players, but which have not made enough money to recoup their development costs. We can show that putting more attention on these will yield more sales. And putting more attention on them specifically to the right audience will yield happy customers—we can tell this because revenue goes up and user reviews stay high. But storefronts generally expectg this attention to happen upstream; their job is to capture intent.
Based on the data, the outcomes, and what I’ve watched happen to tens of thousands of deserving games, and gamers who (as a whole) repeatedly say, "hey, how come I’ve never heard of this?", I absolutely agree with devs who feel that discovery is broken. At the risk of sounding like ChatGPT here: