Game-Onomics: The Not On Steam Sale Enters Its Last Days, Offers Big Indie Savings

When we talk about the resurgence of PC gaming, it’s impossible not also to talk about the role played by the Steam digital distribution and sale system, and of its owner, Valve Software. Valve has been very much in the headlines recently as the universe conspires to troll fans and media about the possible appearance of the long-awaited Half-Life 3 - but it is worth remembering that it used Half-Life 2, in its time the most hotly anticipated PC game on the market, to launch and promote Steam.

Now, a decade later, Steam commands an estimated 70% of the digital download market, and has expanded from Microsoft MSFT +0.03%Windows (where it cannot be said to have been hurt by the problems of Microsoft’s own Games for Windows Live) to Mac and Linux. Shortly it will spread to Valve’s own gaming-oriented custom Linux distro, SteamOS.

If you are not on Steam, the conventional wisdom goes, you face an uphill struggle when it comes to getting your game in front of buyers. Conversely, the addressable market of Steam users is so vast that even a niche game will sell far more than it could without a place on the storefront. Just as importantly, being available on Steam gives developers – in particular indies who may know little of the business of games – the benefit of Valve’s huge retail experience, and its resulting uncanny ability to discount games to the right level to spark new desire.

For those smaller producers who do not have the guarantee of presence on Steam, this shining city on the hill can seem inaccessible. Greenlight, the voting-driven system for indies to get their games onto Steam, is controversial and often considered unreliable, as the voting only goes so far – a popular Greenlight game will be reviewed by Valve, but has no guarantee of inclusion.

Under pressure

Aaron San Filippo of Flippfly games has his own experience of this dilemma. Without Steam, Race the Sun, despite strong reviews, sold a total of 771 copies in its first month – representing a return of $7,000 or so on two person years of work. That story, at least, has hopes of a happy ending: Race the Sun has now been “greenlit“, and Flippfly is working with Steam to get it ready for its Steam store debut, which will bring it to a far wider audience.

For others the struggle continues – which is why San Filippo set up the Not On Steam Sale, as a way to highlight indie games, and perhaps to help their creators to make some sales. Starting at around 30 titles, he found that more developers were contacting him, with the sale now standing at around 60. Among the games on sale are Richard & Alice and Derick the Deathfin, which are simultaneously available as part of the Savygamer Bundle – a demonstration that indie developers often need to spread their bread upon the waters and exploit every morsel of publicity they can get. In a statement to press, SanFilippo was quick to make clear that this was not intended as a criticism of Steam:

We love Steam! It makes buying games easy, and managing our game library even easier. We wanted to highlight the fact that not every great game is available on Steam, and help shine a light on a bunch of great games that many players may be missing out on.

However, the reality is that Steam is very much on the minds of indie developers. Alan Hazelden is the co-creator of Sokobond, a clever and finely implemented reworking of the classic sokoban puzzle using atoms and chemical bonds – currently seeking approval on Greenlight.

I asked him for his thoughts on the sale, where Sokobond is available at a 30% discount, and the challenges of retail in the Steam generation:

The harsh reality of the situation is that for 99% of games, after the initial wave of interest at launch your sales will allow down to a very slow trickle.

There’s not a lot that you can do about this, but one of the only factors that’s actually under your control is the price of the game. Being involved in promotions to keep your game in the news is useful both to A) in the short-term to get a few more people playing and enjoying the game, and B) in the long run hopefully raise your exposure enough to create opportunities down the line.

David Gallant’s I Get This Call Every Day, a multiple-choice examination of the horrific drudgery of working in a call center, is on sale for 50 cents in the sale. Despite its simple gameplay and crude graphics, IGTCED is a genuinely worthwhile game experience. And, where we often create narratives where millionaire game designers are praised for their integrity when they decide to go indie with a well-publicized Kickstarter, Gallant has actually suffered for his art – the Candian Revenue Agency, when they found out he had created a game lampooning the mutually horrific experience for caller and callee, fired him. He noted that the sale is about more than just sales.

The Not On Steam sale is an interesting thing: some participants are hoping it is a means to being Greenlit on Steam, while others see it as almost a celebration of not being a part of Valve’s platform. But the fact that the sale exists at all shows just how hard it is for an independent game to get noticed without being on Steam, a platform whose current method of accepting new titles is fundamentally broken. It will be interesting to see how all the sale participants will benefit from the sale in the coming weeks.

Certainly, the success in sales terms of the sale will be interesting to see – it now has a little over three days left to run. However, its existence – and the interest from media and developers it has generated – already shows that the power of Steam, although the main driver of the current PC pride movement, is a wholly unmixed blessing.

Meanwhile, Sokobond, I Get This Call Every Day and Richard & Alice are all interesting games – not as long or as polished as their AAA counterparts, but interesting, and with the interests and passions of their creators showing through. With bedfellows as unlikely as Jonas Kyratzes’ offbeat, conceptually dense adventure The Sea Will Claim Everything and Scania Truck Driving Simulator - a simulator of driving trucks made by Scania, it is worth a look for anyone interested in the state of independents.