[ThrowawayR2]

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.

[righthand]

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).

[ThrowawayR2]

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.

[righthand]

Yes I think volume is more telling than analyzing the consolidation angle.