alt Hacker NewsThat firehose isn't pointed at everyone, being the newest game on Steam has a very fleeting value and then it's on you to find customers. It used to be that Steam played a much more active role in spreading traffic around games but these days the median game is doing $1,000 - $2,000 in sales which is like 100 - 200 copies sold. It's more and more like Google and Apple where what you get out of it is just a function of how much you spend on customer acquisition, how well you reach social media, and whether you can leverage these to become popular enough to achieve prominence.
Everyone launches on Steam because they are an utterly-entrenched monopoly, all other PC game distribution channels are collectively a very small percent.
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Right, all the games that they think will be successful. Most games won't- it's a power law market.
There's nothing preventing a game dev from selling exclusively on their own site. It's not as though Steam has exclusive access to Windows customers like the App/Play Store do on their platforms. Steam earns its customers and their trust and developers follow.
The firehose only ever pointed at "everyone" back when Valve was hand-picking every game that got released on Steam. Back then we only saw a few games released every week, and because of that they got that much more attention. But that also meant that most games never got any attention on Steam, since they were never released there.
However, Valve has since removed most barriers to entry and these days Steam sees more than 350 releases every week (nearly 20k in 2025), a number that is constantly growing. Add to the fact that there are already more than 130,000 games on Steam, that every new release has to compete with, and it is no wonder that median sales are low:
The low barrier to entry means that a lot of crappy games being released on Steam, that were never going to sell a lot, and the actually good games have to compete with all the other good games on the platform, that are probably also being sold at a much greater discount than your newly released title