Log in member
Are PC game developers in more trouble than we think?
"Hi there, welcome back to GRTV News, I'm Alex, as always, going to the afternoon's latest and greatest when it comes to gaming, technology, entertainment, whatever you like and indeed whatever you love, we always have it here for you at GRTV News and in the wider Gamereactor network as a whole."
"So if you like what you see and you want to see more, be sure to check out Gamereactor wherever you get it from for more gaming reviews, gaming previews, movie reviews, series reviews, exclusives, interviews, world news, sports news and of course so much more.
Without further ado though today, we're talking the PC games industry, I guess sort of PC games distribution in general because a new study has come out from Rocky in collaboration with Atomic Research that points to what the biggest challenges are in PC gaming today."
"So PC has been a steadily growing, well, a largely growing market for the past few years, obviously I think COVID gave gaming a big boom in general but as more and more people realise the adaptability of PC, the fact that you can sort of play a lot of games without necessarily having the best hardware or more people are willing to spend more money to have the best hardware and play the latest games on PC, there's a lot of people joining in the platform."
"Now Steam has and likely could always be the king of PC games distribution and some people think that is a monopoly or some people are fearful of that monopoly I should say.
72% of 306 executives surveyed in the game industry said they believe Steam effectively exists as a monopoly and 53% said they were concerned about their reliance on Steam with that."
"48% of developers have tried other game distributors like Epic Game Store, 30% had tried like Kinguin and G2A and only 10% of developers had distributed on GOG without dropping to 8% for H.io.
So GOG and H.io are seen often for smaller games, H.io I know especially is for indie games and solo developers and things like that so perhaps people are looking for a broader outreach will go to Steam because that is still where the majority of users are."
"It's why when we report on concurrent play accounts we use Steam, it's why when we look at how a game is doing with a user review rating we look at Steam, it's not just because Valve makes that stuff kind of easy to find and thanks to SteamDB as well but we also know that the vast majority of PC users pretty much solely use Steam. Epic Game Store tried and failed to woo gamers with constant free games and yet even if your Epic Games library might be you know worth hundreds and hundreds of pounds despite you spending nothing people will still rather spend money than get the game for free on Epic which is strange but yeah that was a real thing a few years ago with with Epic desperately trying to counteract Steam's dominance."
"Also when we look at other problems and other challenges that people are facing in the PC gaming market today the rise of free-to-play games was seen as the greatest threat to selling PC games by about 40% of the developers surveyed so it is hard to compete with a game that people are just playing for free. Fortnite, Dota 2, League of Legends, Counter-Strike, Marvel Rivals, Deadlock I played personally you know all of those games are free and yet you can spend hundreds and hundreds of hours in them and why would you want to spend money if you can just go back to your favourite game that is going to constantly give you more and more entertainment despite you not having spent a penny. That's a big thing as well market saturation and competition was picked as the biggest threat by 35% of developers and 33% said discoverability is the largest hurdle that they need to overcome so basically making your game seen and making your game stand out amidst a massive market of other games it's very very hard to make a game stand out nowadays you need you know sometimes games come out from nowhere and overtake massive franchises sometimes games require loads and loads of marketing to make that success you know something like Claire Obscure this year doesn't really do as well as it does without a lot of trailers beforehand and a lot of hype leading up to it especially with things like the big names involved Charlie Cox, Andy Circus, Jennifer English, all those people that are coming in, Ben Starr you know so it is interesting to see what do you think about pc games today do you think it's fair that steam has a monopoly should it continue that monopoly and what do you think games developers can do to sort of counteract the issues that they've seen there let me know all that and more and i'll see you tomorrow"
