And many of those games that aren't porn or straight asset flips are... undesirable. And they will crowd out your middle game.
12,653 games were released on Steam in 2022[1]. I don't even want to know how many are released on Android/iOS. This is not 1992 where you need a assembly wizard to even make a game, and while the author tried to address this, the fact that any middle game will almost certainly be crowded out seems like an unavoidable elephant in the room.
> any middle game will almost certainly be crowded out
eBay and Amazon sellers have a trick for this: listing zillions of variations or combinations. Not sure if game devs already figured that out. Probably some of them did because 12k looks a lot.
Looking at the app stores, Android/iOS devs definitely figured it out.
I think straight up relisting would be harder on Steam, at least at this point in time. It's not quite to the point where there is so much sludge that Valve staff can't even handle community reports.
I'm not sure what's "between the lines". The chart shows the bulk of games released (~12000) being limited to the 4 of their 8 categories which have the lowest median revenue. Those categories being: (Visual Novel, ~4000, $1k), (Sexual Content, ~4000, $2k), (Dating Sim, ~2000, $3k), (Management, ~2000, $4k). The other 4 categories have a tenth of the releases and higher revenue. So there's a huge amount of "porn and visual novels" that are driving the median revenue down.
I think it’s mixed. Their blog has a little data tool.
Note that their chart doesn’t seem to show most game types.I presume this is because they do much worse. If I do a quick check for games since 2022, games with sexual content made a median of $1.6k whereas non sex games made $296.
If we use their advice to only check games that cost at least $10: sex games make $17k and non sex games make $11k. So maybe not so bad. Most of these games are selling about a thousand copies it seems.
Of the games released since 2022 that made at least 10k (4260 games) only A third were sex and dating sim games
Arguably that should be even easier to make. Find a good artist who's willing to take a bit of a gamble, program some excuse gameplay, usually some sort of puzzle game, and you're pretty much set. If your audience knows what they're there for, really the game is just a vehicle for the eye candy.
You won't build technical or design expertise, but I can see it being something that's easy enough to do as a side gig or as an experiment to see what it's like to publish a game on Steam or wherever. You can use that to decide if you want to invest more effort into it, while also making a bit of money. Low risk, low difficulty, low reward; perfect for learning.
To be honest, "erotic city builder" is such a novel concept that now I want someone to tackle it.
12,653 games were released on Steam in 2022[1]. I don't even want to know how many are released on Android/iOS. This is not 1992 where you need a assembly wizard to even make a game, and while the author tried to address this, the fact that any middle game will almost certainly be crowded out seems like an unavoidable elephant in the room.
1: https://steamdb.info/stats/releases/