Hold up folks: games industry analyst Chris Zukowski has cracked it, and knows exactly what you're all like. Nothing but a bunch of hoardy hoarders! Yes I'm looking at YOU with your huge Steam library, bulked-out greedily during every big sale, and which you've only ever played half of (and that's being generous). The truth… is in there.
"The amazing thing about Steam and its player base is that they buy games they aren’t going to play," says Zukowski in a new post (first spotted by GR+). "More than likely the person buying your game is not going to play it."
I resemble that remark. Zukowski conjures up the spirit of Reed Hastings, the co-founder of Netflix, and specifically his remarks that the streaming platform isn't just competing with the likes of HBO, but also things like Fortnite and, in the extreme cases where you get hooked on a box set and it's past 1 am, sleep. In such a scenario, what chance does a poor little indie game have of snatching an hour?
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Zukowski reckons that's just not the issue: "The reason Steam makes indies so much money compared to all the other platforms is that they have built up an audience that is full of super die-hard hobbyists… Basically, hobbyists buy stuff not because they actually want to consume it, but because they are collecting it."
This is illustrated by the so-called "pile of shame" from various hobbies: great stacks of Lego sets waiting to be built; a room crammed with Warhammer model kits; the Everest-like mounds of yarn that knitters call their "stash." Apparently the Japanese even have a word for those who buy books and pile them up knowing they won't read them: "tsundoku."
We make a brief stop by an older article from Simon Carless that analysed Steam collections and found the median player on there has 51.5% of their collection unplayed. The take-home message?
"Valve cracked the problem that Netflix was struggling with: how do you sell to people who have so much entertainment at their fingertips that they don’t have enough hours in the day to play and watch it all," says Zukowski. "Valve basically added infinite hours to a gamer’s day, it is a theoretical future day where gamers might someday spend hours playing your game (but let’s be honest, won’t).
"The reason game developers are willing to give Valve 30% of their revenue is because the Steam marketplace is packed with super gamers who throw money at games they have no intention of playing."
While there's no denying Zukowski has a point, I would just slightly put the brakes on before applying this to Steam as a whole. Player habits are constantly changing, and so are players themselves. I'd definitely have fitted this description of Steam players years ago, and remain guilty as charged when it comes to the tsundoku label, but these days am much more careful about what I buy on Steam: purely because I've had that experience of blowing $40 in a Steam sale on a dozen games that I never played, multiple times. I agree that most of us are hoarders of some sort: I'm just not sure that behaviour persists across our lifetime on Steam. Anyway.
"Steam players get satisfaction out of finding a hidden gem and adding it to their collection," posits Zukowski, because "...hobbyists find satisfaction in collecting. Even if they know deep down that they will never actually play it." The fact that loads of people will buy a game but never play it is actually, drum roll please, a massive boon for developers.
"If Steam shoppers were rational and only bought games they were going to play, we would sell a lot fewer games," says Zukowski. "Half this industry would be gone.
"Knowing Steam players are hoarders explains why you give [Valve] that 30%: you get access to a bunch of drunken sailors who spend money irresponsibly."
There are a lot of common sense observations Zukowski makes about this: developers can't really take advantage of such information, and ratios of played / not played aren't worth obsessing over. If a game is either popular or in some sort of bundle, it's also more likely to have higher numbers of owners who haven't played it. Zukowski also has a pet theory, which I find persuasive, that having a clear genre helps games do better on Steam: because people know that they like, for example, open world survival crafting games, and will buy yours even though they've got 20 more in their library to get through first.
Zukowski ends with a mea culpa, showing that he hasn't played 2/3rds of the games in his Steam library (you can check your own stats via SteamDB's calculator).
"It’s just important developers have a more realistic understanding of who their audience is," says Zukowski. "You should probably be more jaded. Not everyone who buys your game is a ravenous fan who will join your discord, do cosplay of your main character, and participate in art contests. Your game is just another brick in their tsundoku pile."
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