That's a lot of games to choose from.
  • Lootboblin@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    8 hours ago

    and my 2024 Steam year report said I played 0 games released in 2024. Not any must have titles in day one and also my RTX 2060 can’t handle these new AAA titles anymore. Starfield was the last one that was still playable. Well time to start playing all the other hundreds of older games in my library.

  • .Donuts@lemmy.worldEnglish
    40·
    2 days ago

    Discoverability is a huge problem on Steam because there’s so many games releasing, you can’t really keep up.

    18,000 games is almost 50 per day on average. That’s 50 titles fighting for your attention and wallet every single day.

    If you don’t get noticed because you didn’t spend half of your development budget on marketing, or your game didn’t pick up well with influencers or more traditional media like reviews, you’re just kinda fucked. No matter how good your game might be.

    Speaking about quality, how many of those 18k titles were uninspiring, asset flipping slop?

    • Ulrich@feddit.orgEnglish
      262·
      2 days ago

      It doesn’t help that Steam store is a nightmare to navigate.

      Releasing demos is a great way to succeed. It doesn’t take me more than 5 minutes to decide if it’s something I want to continue playing.

      Putting videos of nothing but cut-scenes is a great way to ensure I keep scrolling but every title seems to take this approach.

      • Pogbom@lemmy.worldEnglish
        7·
        2 days ago

        I’ve always dreamed of a world where game demos were mandated by law. Some products can’t be tested out easily, but just about any video game really can.

    • Cornelius_Wangenheim@lemmy.worldEnglish
      10·
      2 days ago

      The Steam Next Fest is how I found most of the good indie games I’ve played. Making a good demo will put you above 99% of the cruft out there.

  • Ogmios@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    261·
    2 days ago

    That’s unironically the reason I don’t even attempt to find games on Steam anymore.

    • Zahille7@lemmy.worldEnglish
      10·
      2 days ago

      I’ll only go looking if I see a cool game in a YouTube video or see a cool article about something coming out soon that looks interesting. Otherwise, same.

    • bassomitron@lemmy.worldEnglish
      6·
      2 days ago

      It depends, sometimes I go down the rabbit hole on their “Games Like This” suggestions on my favorite games’ store pages. I actually just found a cool one that way the other day called Ad Fundum. It was a funny coincidence since it came up suggested on a completely unrelated game, but I’d been wanting a game centered around digging underground.

      But yeah, with literally over 100,000+ games on Steam, it’s become way too difficult to find quality stuff that isn’t AAA or indie games that struck it lucky with popular streamers giving them exposure. Which sucks for indie devs that actually put out their passion projects since it makes discoverability so hard, as others have pointed out here.

      • Ogmios@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        61·
        2 days ago

        I’ve always found the “games like this” section to be so superficial that it very rarely actually has games which I’d consider to be similar to the one I’m looking at. Just looking at the store right now, for “Aquaria” which I really enjoy, it recommends Skyrim as a similar game. Sure they both are open world adventure RPGs… but I definitely would not consider them to be similar games.

        • bassomitron@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2·
          2 days ago

          It’s definitely a crapshoot a lot of times. But there’s usually at least one or two on there that are similar enough that I might genuinely be interested in it. You can also forcefully hide games from showing up in suggestions, iirc. I’ve never done it, but some of my friends have recommended doing so in order to make Steam dig deeper for finding lesser known stuff. I’m not that big of a connoisseur, though.

          Edit:

          I recalled correctly, and it seems they’ve even made the Ignore button a lot easier to find (or I just never noticed before):

  • gmtom@lemmy.worldEnglish
    13·
    2 days ago

    Guys we have soooo much shovelware, asset flips and softcore porn that’s barely a game. This is very much a good thing!!!

      • GeneralEmergency@lemmy.worldEnglish
        212·
        2 days ago

        On a single platform. Giving a single company complete control over the marketplace, forcing any company looking to sell their game to a large audience to go through steam.

    • mnemonicmonkeys@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      53·
      2 days ago

      Do you seriously have nothing better to do on a holiday than just bash Valve? Jfc, go outside and touch grass you terminally online neckbeard

      • GeneralEmergency@lemmy.worldEnglish
        29·
        2 days ago

        nothing better to do on a holiday

        Maybe don’t include that part when replying to a message on the holidays. Especially when you’re defending a monopoly.

        I know G*mers like you aren’t known for their critical thinking skills.

        • mnemonicmonkeys@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          21·
          1 day ago

          I’m not the one getting worked up an letting it ruin my day.

          I was just browsing Lemmy for a few minutes while visiting my parents and eating soup. You on the other hand have been acting like you spent Christmas alone because noone can stand you

          • GeneralEmergency@lemmy.worldEnglish
            12·
            1 day ago

            Can I borrow you for a bit in the new year? The projector in work hasn’t been working recently and we could use you to project PowerPoints for us.

          • stinky@redlemmy.comEnglish
            22·
            1 day ago

            You sure? You’re doing a lot of insulting people in this thread. Maybe take a break for a while, ok?

            • mnemonicmonkeys@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
              21·
              9 hours ago

              No, I’m just insulting this guy because he deserves it.

              Also, I’m not blind - it’s pretty obvious you only replied to my comment here because I pissed you off in a completely different post and you decided to rummage through my comment history. I’d like to point out that that’s kinda sad on your part. Not my fault you’re bad at making an argument. You don’t need to stalk me for it.

    • sunzu2@thebrainbin.org
      55·
      2 days ago

      You ain’t got to buy the game on there, you can get codes at other retailers

      But steam is de facto PC store

      • TyrianMollusk@lemm.eeEnglish
        11·
        2 days ago

        You ain’t got to buy the game on there, you can get codes at other retailers

        You actually can’t buy the vast majority of Steam games elsewhere. 18,800 games released new this year on Steam. Do you know any legit retailers that even sell 18,000 games total?

        It’s something I’ve been noticing with all the routine seasonal complaining about sales on Steam not being worth looking at anymore… Sure, I don’t only buy from Steam, but I do buy more from Steam than elsewhere, because those games–good games–just are not other places to be bought. So on the one hand, I see a lot of value from Steam sales and people shouldn’t dis them so out of hand, but on the other, yeah Steam clearly controls the market. And that’s not even getting into how Steam deliberately reduces the value-to-the-devs of your off-Steam purchases, so buying elsewhere keeps your purchase and reviews from helping the dev earn much needed Steam visibility.

        So it’s far from as simple as “You can just buy codes elsewhere”.