That's basically the story of the whole economy.

Jesus, the gamesradar site is absolute ass

The data: https://weloveit.io/developers/steam-revenue-report/

That's basically how art and media have always worked. This isn't a function of Steam, or even the modern economy.

So what? The vast majority of games released on Steam are either hobby or student projects or just first time devs’ shitty pixel platformer. Many are low effort products, Steam will not even give those games “shelve space”. The algorithm will based on pre launch and launch metrics decide if it should push the game in front of customers in the recommendation sections of the store. If a game can’t even move the needle a bit after launch Steam will blackhole the game and basically make it invisible in the store unless a customer searches for it. Because even though it’s a virtual store, “shelve space” aka the recommendation section is still scarce.

The hidden gem games on Steam are rare. Every time I watch a dev’s postmortem on Youtube who talks about how little they sold I’m rarely surprised when I see the game.

Also Steam generates around $10+ Billion in revenue in a year. So the other games generate around $2 Billion. If that is generated by 2000 games that still averages to a million a game.

Misleading. There is so much slop made from free assets just thrown together or AI programmed messes and such on steam that it should read "little more than 1% of games on steam are worth your time" indie devs get a decent amount of love, especially at launch. But steam has such a backlog of games available that it gets pretty wild. If we're counting DLCs, OSTs, and games, I'm really not surprised.

And what percent of the "games that barely make anything" are asset flips and zero-effort slop? Like, "percent of new games that are trash" is going to be very high when the barrier to entry is "pay Valve $100 once". This is a total junk statistic.

Like, store A where you can buy 100 good games and 1000 asset flips will score 10x better on this un-metric than store B where you can buy 10000 good games and a million asset flips. And yet nobody would ever argue that store A is a better store.

OP, can you link the original research? It's an excellent site:

https://weloveit.io/developers/steam-revenue-report/

Barely make anything compared to multi million companies

Solo dev games can make a fraction of what those giant games and the dev can live a very comfortable life. Etc: balatro

Very pointless article.

I really dont get this, there have been and still are things you can very much criticise valve for but people come up with the most insane shit to criticise them for. "Uhh yeah this problem affecting the whole game industry is steams fault". Also the top 1% are prolly aldo much much more expensive to produce so i dont think its as bad as it sounds at first but yeah.

I don't see how that is "steam" economy.

That's just economy when you try to sell anything, specially anything art related.

If you made any art and try to sell it in any store the most probably amount of money made is the same number in every currency.

Hey op, I see a lot of your arguments in the comments.

I have a challenge.

Name 5 things Valve could implement to change this that would not be to the detriment of indie devs.

This is not a joke. You have opinions. I want to hear them.

I'm also curious (since I see you pushing a decentralized market place in the comments), how you think a decentralized marketplace would function and what would be better about it.

Pareto principle writ large.

That or Sturgeon's law.

Really topics against Steam are getting ridiculous.

Like ok. Is Steam supposed to force players to buy shit games too so that the distribution curve flattens?

I'm gonna pump so many AI shit games so I can get my fair share 🥰

Candy Crush makes about a billion dollars a year. GTA V makes about 500 million from selling shark cards. Whatever happening at the steam store to warrant an article like this isn't on steam, its 100% on consumers being dumbasses.

This isn't the shocking statement they think it is.

As you can see from about 2020 onwards, there was an absolute DELUGE of trash games. Of course the majority of games aren't going to make anything, Steam makes zero effort to curate anything. A thousand games can get released per day and the vast vast majority of them you never even notice.

It is not news to me that a handful of games have the most players, also considering people put low effort garbage on all stores constantly I don’t think the bottom 90% deserve anything

Did they include AI slop, dogshit mobile game ports, low effort games, and the like in the dataset? If so, I'm not surprised.

I'd argue that that is entirely a good thing overall.

It means that Steam is very open to Indie devs (something we already know) that don't make as much money but are passion projects for the creators.

If they're making enough from the...let's call them prestige titles...to be able to afford to give indie devs a place to host their passion projects and maybe get more eyes on it, than I see no problem with that.

No idie dev is going into it thinking they're going to be next giant thing. They just want to share their work and maybe make a few bucks. And Steam gives them that, PLUS the chance that maybe they'll be a Rimworld or a Hollow Knight; something that sparks a giant success for them.

It's called Zipf's Law and it's a fundamental statistical probability formula found in many, many things, from languages to distribution curves.

VSauce had a good video covering this too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCn8zs912OE

I think its unfortunate because there's a lot of games that fall into that next ~15-25% that are decently good games (though sometimes flawed) but won't make enough to let the developers survive a second game.

That being said I don't think there is a particularly easy solution, and to Valve's credit, they have tried unique approaches to combat this, but it's still a problem.

That's art for you. Music, fine art etc I'd guess is even more lopsided.

Okay, but explain how consumer preferences are somehow Steam's fault?

If you told me it was that way because Steam was boosting AAA games and suppressing indie titles, then okay, you have a valid reason to criticize Steam for that, but that doesn't seem to be the case.

Would think that could apply to most markets. Almost the weird 80-20 "rule" that goes for most things.

Is this presented as a bad thing?

It would be weird if it didn't follow a power law distribution.

Aka the Pareto Principle. Aka "80% of everything is shit".

Arguably more striking is the rate of Steam's growth. "Steam's catalogue grew faster than its revenue," the report says, and this has seen those earning extremes widen. A massive 19,714 games were released on Steam in 2024, and 2025 passed even that at 23,107.

Go back just five years and Steam looks very different with 7,427 games released in 2018 – more than even 2019, and the highest on record at the time. 2026 has already doubled that at 15,814 games released, and the year still has several busy months ahead of it.

How many of this are AI garbage? It seems like no coincidence that the number of games corresponds to the increased AI push.

I would love to know how this breaks down with you cut out all the slop products.

Behold the whole story of every economy

Alternative Headline: Sturgeon's Law Continues to Exist

A lot of games on Steam hold zero interest to me. AI is just the newest form of slop. Beyond that what I see is a hell of a lot more games are being released in the last 4 years. That means more competition but also many have not been around long enough to build up over time revenue. To a certain extent you are comparing life time revenue to launch revenue. On AAA that probably doesn't matter as much but on the lesser hyped indy games I think it would be an important distinction.