It was a crazy abuse of this loophole in the marketplace. These games would even give players trading cards that they could trade for real money. Then there were “Achievement Spam” games where you could pay $1 and play for 1 minute and get 100s of achievements. Everyone suspected they were money laundering schemes. Jim Sterling did this really mean video about those supposedly horrible horrible people who did asset flips.Īlso there were these scammers who would create quick games and price them for absurd amounts like $200. In the post-greenlight era, scammers of all stripes released a bunch of games made up of assets downloaded from the Unity Asset Store. Remember the indiepocalypse where all indies freaked out when Valve essentially removed any curation and allowed anyone with $100 to release a game on Steam? But first… why does Steam hate small games? Many of these algorithms are only hinted at or winked at by the staff at Valve but I am going to state them loud and clear so you know how they work and why they keep small games down. In today’s blog I am going to outline specifically how the Steam algorithm works against these types of games. The algorithm is purposely trained to suppress games that are made and launched in rapid succession. The Steam algorithm (1) actively works against these types of small games with short pre-launch marketing periods. Let’s call this the “rapid release” marketing strategy. In this blog when I say “small game” I am referring to games that are short in development time, have a pre-release marketing of less than 5 months, have limited content (1-3 hours total), and do not receive many updates post launch. I did this test because I think that most game developers spend WAAYYY too long on their game. It sounds like a great plan, and I actually considered doing it with my series 1 Screen Platformer. I release 12 games a year, each one earning 5K! Awesome – comfortable middle American lifestyle. Think about it: 30 day development times, quick and out-of-the-box ideas, and just hope people fall in love when I drop the game on steam out of nowhere with no dragged out marketing campaign. I truly wish I could just create a bunch of quick jam games, polish them up, hire an amazing artist, and release them.
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