10 reviews means like 500-1000 sales. The vast majority of people dont leave reviews. Not much, especially for low priced games, but also not nothing. As long as you enjoyed the game making process and didnt invest anything except for time its not really an issue.
10 reviews means the developer has some combination of the following:
friends/family/classmates
developers on the actual game
multiple Steam accounts with the same owner
10 is essentially 0 and cannot be extrapolated into sales.
I agree that if game development is a hobby and not a career, this isn’t a problem for those developers.
I also submit that if you are attempting to make money from your efforts and don’t yet have a following, and can’t afford a marketing budget, and have actually made something unique, interesting, or otherwise worthwhile, it is more difficult to stand out in a market whose signal to noise ratio is continuously and exponentially growing noisier.
Agreed, my first thought was about the stats for Twitch streamers where having more than something like 10 concurrent viewers consistently for a 30 day period puts you in the top 15% of streamers on the platform or whatever. I forget the exact numbers, but it’s something crazy like that.
can’t help but feel like this could be solved by increasing the deposit to a couple thosuand $'s or something. worst of the shovelware would become unprofitable immediately
Well, that’d mean missing out on some really cool stuff.
Games like Vampire Survivors and Stardew Valley were made by a solo developer. A couple thousand bucks is a LOT of money for some people. I’d hate to have missed out on either of those.
We certainly do need some quality control, but I don’t think the financial route is the way to go.
What is there to be solved? It’s not a physical store with scant storage space. It has been solved by the store algorithm. Games that do well in the first week will rise to the front page and will get recommended to other customers, while crap will basically become invisible. Does it really matter that these crap games exist when you’ll rarely see them and the storage space they take up is insignificant to Valve’s bottom line. Like when was the last time you ever saw shovelware on the front page? If you see shovelware then the algorithm thinks you like that stuff. You can solve that by giving shovel ware in your library low reviews and by curating the queue.
Sure this will hurt some devs who made a hidden gem, but these devs would have failed in the physical retail space as well. Studios have the responsibility to do the leg work of promoting their own game. That’s not Steam’s job. The Steam algorithm will basically give each game some visibility during its first few days of release and if a game can’t generate sales momentum the algorithm will drop it and basically becomes invisible unless you search for it. Games that do well in that period get pushed to the recommendations. And no the threshold isn’t millions in sales it’s basically a couple of thousand copies in the first days.
Raising the fee would hurt devs on a budget, like devs outside high income countries and students.
Something I tried to do earlier to help with it, in this very channel, was a “Downvote any game you’ve heard of before” thread. It was a nice exercise to help people post odd games no one had heard of.
One of those things people waste energy getting concerned about. Better than highly stringent curation that has no chance in being representative of all different taste/demographics. It’s a more level playing field. Happened to music and books. Then video/movies. Video games followed quickly after. Better than the days of payments for every patch you push through Xbox live/PSN. Better than needing to get 35mm prints and access to theaters
Oh, no! Competition in the games industry causing the slop to fall to the bottom! We better ban steam immediately put everything behind a walled guardian and have “AAA” companies be the only ones allowed to publish! What if the plebs start making money? Then what?
Slop falls to the bottom but I bet a lot of hidden gems do too. The greater volume of games coming out, the harder it’ll be for individual developers to get recognized!
Old school indie developer Jeff Vogel has a whole talk about how difficult it is.
Competition in the games industry causing the slop to fall to the bottom!
Do you really believe that markets and competition creates better products and services? How do you square that with basic observations about how the world is? If success was linked to quality, then Subway would be the worlds best food; Clash of Clans the best video game; and Tesla the best car.
The markets of the world say that Nvidia is worth more than the Pharmaceutical Industry.
I think this statistic would be more interesting if it filtered out all of the blatant cash-grab, asset-flip, AI generated shit that makes up a large portion of new releases.
Is it 19,000 releases with 10,000 actual sincere efforts at making a game, or 19,000 releases with 1,000 actual games.
And what’s the average number of reviews for actual games versus garbage?
I don’t disagree. It would require manual labelling by a group of people with enough patience and understanding of gaming to be able to reliably label ~60 new games every day. I’d have thought that the Steam community was large enough to achieve this though.
Do you have an example of this? I read Steam Reviews every once in awhile if I’m interested in a game and I’ve seen a few jokes but mostly full reviews that sometimes are so long I just can’t even read the whole thing.
So skip those reviews and scroll down to the ones that resonate with you.
Any bigger game with meme/stream potential is gonna get a few idiots writing nonsense reviews for the lols , but in guarantee that there are still plenty of very relevant reviews that are useful for deciding if you’ll vibe with a game
How often do people leave reviews? I rarely see a profile with +100 reviews.
I only leave reviews after 100% completion or a lot of time (hundreds of hours) in case of fighting games where sometimes 100% is ridiculously difficult to attain (oh hi, Plus R)
I think the average time between my picking up a game and leaving a review is like 3~12 months. Definitely even more if I’m not vibing with the game.
As I recall, its around 5%-20% of players leave a review, usually closer to 5% unless something about the game makes people want to talk about it, for both good and bad.
Same. I’m often in the process of breaking down why I like/dislike the game, what works about it, and what doesn’t as I’m playing. I can’t give honest feedback with incomplete thoughts.
Speaking only for myself, I only leave a review if I loved or I hated a game. A “meh” game doesn’t get a review. I’d hazard that many people do something similar.
Haven’t you heard. Indie games have to launch on steam or they fail miserably.
Seriously though. This is why I roll my eyes at people who claim steam makes it breaks these games. Humble bundle? Runs sales events where these games get showcased. Itch.io’s whole schtick is selling indie games.
It’s nice that Valve gives studios a platform to help market their games and all that, and yes, by dint of being one of the largest gaming sale platforms out there launching on steam helps their chances. But most of them weren’t ever gonna reach the success of AAA titles regardless and we pretend that that’s Valve’s fault for reasons I have never understood.
It’s the same problem with each of the online stores including the Nintendo E-Shop. Your game still has to be decent and be marketed to the people who want to play it.
Additionally they have to have time to play it. Which means you’re fighting every other game in the category in order to claim each players time.
There’s a whole lot to making and marketing a successful game at literally every level and not every studio can be a Team Cherry.
Indie games have to launch on steam or they fail miserably. Seriously though. This is why I roll my eyes at people who claim steam makes it breaks these games.
Those two things aren’t opposed though. Launching on Steam doesn’t guarantee success, but I believe what they’re claiming is that not launching on Steam more or less guarantees its failure.
I can definitely understand why not selling a game on the most popular marketplace would detrimentally affect a studios ability to make money.
But a lot of the reason games aren’t successful has as much to do with the quality of the game and the amount of money spent developing it as it does with marketing. And plenty of developers/small indie studios assume that they can ouvert over-stretch themselves monetarily and with other resources like time, and still come out on top because Indies are becoming more popular.
But what it often comes down to is if what you’re selling is worth it to the consumer and they know about it. On steam an indie game is just as likely to get caught up in the influx of games and lost in the noise as it is to get noticed.
I don’t know if it’s true or not, but I’ve heard a rough proxy for modest success “above breakeven” in the indie sphere is 1,000+ reviews.
The chart doesn’t break out the 1,000+ review count band, but it looks like under 5% of the 19,000 games released in 2025 on Steam were even able to go above 500 review count.
The 1,000+ review count band as a measure of success does make sense in a back of the napkin kind of way.
Assuming 5% of buyers leave a review, that would be 20,000 in sales. At a net unit revenue of $10 (after Steam’s cut and the payment processor), that would be $200 K net revenue.
An unfortunate ‘secret’ for most indie titles is that the vast majority of their sales are on discount, usually during launch or one of the big week long sales. Not a lot of people buy indie games at full sticker price unless its a pretty high quality title.
So your $200K net revenue would be at absolute max, but is realistically ~50-80% of that.
Assuming 5% of buyers leave a review, that would be 20,000 in sales. At a net unit revenue of $10 (after Steam’s cut and the payment processor), that would be $200 K net revenue.
A unit revenue of $10 means your product is going for ~15 base price. I don’t know about you, but I rarely buy stuff above $10 anymore. So like the other guy said, you’re looking at like half of that based on people buying during sales.
Other people have mentioned removing asset flips and AI slop. I’m wondering what this dataset looks like if you remove all of the shitty NSFW games that get shoveled out en masse.
Our first game barely got past 10 reviews in a 2 years, despite real original assets etc. It just didn't click with people. While 'filtering out the slop' will improve the numbers, I'm sure there are many games in a similar boat as ours.
As someone that regularly goes through new releases, I really wish there was a way to filter out all of the slop so that I even see games like yours. I’m sure I miss games I’d enjoy all the time due to the deluge of garbage, it’s a shame.
I don’t know if that’s still the case, but when this game launched it required you to be online while playing (despite it being single-player), and you had to login with a Ubisoft account.
I think it will continue to rise. People are updating their rigs all the time. Whenever they update their rig they’ll have to ask themselves whether they want to continue with Windows on their new rig, or try with something new.
Most will stay on Windows of course, but some don’t. And those who switch to Linux are likely not returning to Windows (for gaming at least).
Yeah, for me personally, I’ve got one or two devices that see irregular use that are linux now, but my main rig is still windows and will continue to be so, since I have a number of friends on xbox that I can get more cross play for via gamepass But since I’m currently boycotting microsoft, and don’t know how much longer friends will stick with xbox given their general market decline, and given all the stability issues with win11 lately due to an increase of AI code usage, and all the everything… It might be a matter of time
I think it will continue to rise. People are updating their rigs all the time. Whenever they update their rig they’ll have to ask themselves whether they want to continue with Windows on their new rig, or try with something new.
The vast majority of this increase is from people playing on Steam Decks, which run on Linux, not from people switching to Linux on their PCs.
If it continues to rise, this is the reason. The general public is less and less into using a desktop at all as time goes on, much less running, and much less changing to, an extremely niche operating system on one.
EDIT: The previous sentence is actually more of the reason, upon further reflection. The total number of people playing on desktops period is falling, and the vast majority of desktops are Windows, so non-Windows OSes will comparatively gain ‘market share’ as that happens, even if their numbers don’t change at all.
Actually, the raw number percentage shows that the increase is due to Mint, Ubuntu, and Bazzite. Maybe people are installing Bazzite on their Deck but likely not the other two.
I want to say that I’ve been helping people get onto Mint and Bazzite. Going to pat myself on the back for contributing what little I can to grow this awesome community
I switched from Windows to Bazzite on my main rig 2 weeks ago. Likely won’t go back to Windows for gaming as I’ve had pretty much no issues with Bazzite.
I did also get a Steam deck recently, so anecdotally, both above answers are right.
The vast majority of this increase is from people playing on Steam Decks
I believe this is incorrect. The Steam survey break down GPUs by description and the Deck’s GPU appears in the results as “AMD Vangogh”, which only accounts for 0.39% of respondents. That implies that the vast majority of survey respondents using Linux are actually on PC, not the Deck.
That’s not true. You can see on Steam Hardware Survey what OS people are running, and SteamOS only makes up 27% of Linux users on Steam, so the vast majority are on regular PCs.
Certainly interesting to look at the fastest-growing distros: Ubuntu (the well-known, popular option), Bazzite (the gaming-marketed one), Freedesktop (someone else can answer this for me), and CachyOS (the side-gaming one? Not quite a gaming OS but very good at it)
The vast majority of the increase, is what I said. In other words, I’m saying it wouldn’t be nearly at the 3% mark without those users, and with over a quarter of all Linux users coming from the Steam Deck userbase, that is, in fact, true.
Without the Steam Deck there’d be 27% fewer Linux users. So while that would indeed mean Linux wouldn’t yet be 3% of the total Steam userbase, I think you will find that 27% is not the majority.
GamingOnLinux aggregates this data in a nicer way and as you can see there, the total Linux market share has gone from <1% five years ago to the 3% it is now. If that increase was mainly thanks to the Steam Deck, it would have to make up more like 75% of the Linux userbase rather than only 27%.
Instead, as others have pointed out, SteamOS’s share has actually gone down rather than up, which is a natural consequence of the Steam Deck being relatively old now so fewer are being sold.
Actually I wish that was true but the reality is still that unfortunately a lot of online multiplayer games do in fact not work without issues on Linux
5% at the end of the decade is quite a pessimistic take 😉
Looking at the graph 1% was crossed mid/late 2021, while 2% was crossed mid 2024, so almost 3 years later. Now 3% is crossed a little more than a year later. Next year we would be likely to have crossed 4% and 5% should be no later than 2027, even if it doesn’t speed up much further.
gamingonlinux.com
Aktywne