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by righthand 105 days ago
One medium where this isn’t really true is video games. Why hasn’t Steam or Itch fallen in this trap? Because they are honest stewards? Or because the software plane isn’t as large? Only news publishing and written word and movies. In fact movies even have a set number of prestige “risk” directors so they never have to reach too far out of the norm, see Yorgos Lanthimos.
2 comments
ThrowawayR2 105 days ago
The article doesn't apply to Steam because Steam is a marketplace, not a publisher. Valve takes on no financial risk in accepting a new game into Steam.

And there has been a fair bit of consolidation going on among publishers. IIRC there are only about a dozen giant corporations left that finance AAA games and they have been losing appetite for risk over the past year, cancelling many games in development and shuttering many game studios.

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righthand 104 days ago
But even if Microsoft buys out all the major studios, and Nintendo and Sony, there would still be a healthy counter-culture indie market, which is what the article discusses as a solution to the crisis in the other mediums. So again what makes video games special that it can nurture a healthy market across many (locked-in even) platforms? Arguably it might be the many available distribution channels (miniclip.com vs Steam vs Itch vs random website).
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ThrowawayR2 104 days ago
Indie games are almost always self-financed, the equivalent of an book author supporting themselves during the writing of the book and self-publishing, so the article doesn't apply to them either. I'd also wager that more people play games than read books and the volume of new games isn't as high (another post in this thread mentions 7.5k new books come out per day on Amazon per day versus 19k new games on Steam in all of 2025) so discoverability is less of an issue for indie games than for self-published books.
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righthand 104 days ago
Yes I think volume is more telling than analyzing the consolidation angle.
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cal_dent 105 days ago
It's the same point though. Steam/Itch haven't fallen into the trap, which I think is because the friction and barriers tonentry in video games are less of an issue than other mediums.

But video games in general have fallen into that trap. There were certainly more variety in the mainstream/AAA scene in the 90s and 00s than there is now. No more major publisher really is in that mid tier wacky but interesting 6-7.5/10 game space anymore.

It goes back to the point that consolidation long term ends up being bad and the smaller/indie press is good for culture (and that is a big part of what Steam is, and I'd argue where the most interesting things in gaming have come from lately

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