JAM
Valve didn’t start the indie content glut. But Gabe & Co. might just be the ones to finish it...
I recently had the privilege of attending the launch of a Games Jam – a 48-hour contest where dedicated young amateurs toiled around the clock to make innovative new video games from scratch. Held at a shiny new North Sydney TAFE facility the event was a human hive of activity, with a multi-camera Twitch live stream broadcasting interviews with academics, developers, and middleware executives. They even had a celebrity TV host. The Games Jam was classy, well-attended, well-run, and lent astonishing insights into why the video game market is submerging under such a staggering content glut.
The clues were not subtle. There was the staff member who eagerly pitched TAFE courses to the viewers at home: “You can be a game developer in six months!” There was the panel of four experts who drew blanks when asked what books on game design they’d recommend – only one of them could even think of one. Then there was the creator of a slick application for rapidly generating landscapes who rattled off some statistics to champion the appeal of the Unity platform. Specifically: There are now 770 million Unity gamers in the world, and 5.5 million Unity developers.
I’m not an economist, but I’m pretty sure the world economy can’t support 5.5 million video game developers. The vast majority of that number must be students, and hobbyists, and aspiring professionals destined to have their dreams denied them.
Valve’s digital distribution service Steam is an accurate weather-vane to measure this trash typhoon. The deluge began in 2014, which saw the
Steam is an accurate weather-vane to measure this trash typhoon
launch of more than three times the number of Steam games released in 2013. This trend has only accelerated, with almost 40% of the Steam library released in 2016 – 4,207 games!
When I spoke recently with Stardock founder Brad Wardell he estimated that there would be over 7,000 Steam games launched in 2017. “I can be persuaded that we’re in the middle of a pretty big bubble, when it comes to games. There are just a lot more games sharing the same sized pie. And right now, a lot of this growth has been funded by venture capital. Little startup studios getting money to make a Unity game. Or, now we have VR. The PC market is healthy, it just has a glut of games. Unless that changes, we’re going to start seeing some real... it’ll be a really interesting couple years.”
He told me that part of Stardock’s strategy for survival in this market is their unique technology – the Nitrous engine can exploit modern hardware in ways that Unity simply cannot. But as for all the other indies... Read between the lines, and Wardell is predicting a bloodbath.
To their credit, Valve management isn’t letting the long tail of crumby content wag their digital distribution dog. The new Steam Direct initiative will replace Steam Greenlight, and set a minimum cost for access to the world’s leading online game store. World of Warcraft co-creator Mark Kern has estimated that the number of new games released on Steam will be cut in half.
As of this writing the fee for Steam Direct has yet to be determined; Valve has hinted that it could be between US$100 and US$5,000. That may sound steep, but five grand isn’t a lot of money in the grand scheme of things. I know people who’ve spent that much on Magic: The Gathering cards. Also, devs with successful games will eventually be able to recoup the fee by paying a temporarily reduced cut of their profits to Valve – the whole point of Steam Direct is to weed out games that don’t make any money in the first place. Games that are, in the literal sense, utterly worth less.
The lush fields of shovelware fertilised with Unity stock assets and watered by Steam Greenlight rorting will wither and rot, and leave behind a majestic desert dotted with the ruins of laughably piss-poor visual novels. A certain number of abysmal vanity projects will still make it through, but they also serve a purpose: grist for the mills of YouTube satirists. By this metric alone, Revolution 60 was a rousing success.
Seeing as Steam Direct will benefit both gamers and (legitimate, competent) developers, it would be tempting to attribute these changes to Valve’s benevolence. But remember: this is the same company that only cracked down on the toxic practice of Counter Strike: GO skin gambling when legally forced to do so. After four years of this content flood, one suspects that the Valve bureaucracy was perilously close to drowning.