[lofaszvanitt]

In gamedev, the only thing that matters, once you have a good product is how to market it. Without exposure your project is dead, no matter the quality of it.

Who will talk/write about it and for how much? Yters have steep pricing, and they usually don't give a F about your project.

That's why Steam and other similar platforms are a trap. And yet, people protect/love them, like it's the 8th wonder of the world.

[dxuh]

I feel like actually good indie games have a much better chance, because from all I have heard the Steam algorithm actually wants to make money. It will show the game to a bunch of people regardless of the number of wishlists and if it does well, it will show it to more people. Of course Steam can not even do half the work for you, but it's still a much better system than just needing to have enough followers on Twitter or knowing someone at Kotaku or IGN.

[lofaszvanitt]

How, when you have to compete with thousands of games from the same genre? How do you find the outlier amongst the mediocre stuff? Who takes the time to fish out the real gems among the moissanites?

[saghm]

> That's why Steam and other similar platforms are a trap. And yet, people protect/love them, like it's the 8th wonder of the world.

Sure, if you only look at it from the developer perspective. From the player perspective, having a centralized location to find and download games is massive. I'm not saying there aren't tradeoffs, but looking at it from only one side ignores all of the reasons that it's successful in the first place.

[antimemetics]

I’ll take YouTube and Steam over the olden days of game „journalism“ any day.