Entertainment Has A Value Problem
Some time ago I released my very first Steam game. It was nothing special, just a small game that I used as a learning experience and ended up being “okay”.
At the same time, I’ve been making games for 15 years, which is what allowed me to deliver a professional finished product to Steam on my “first try”. At least, I like to think that I have quite some skill and experience already, much more than an amateur or “newbie” game developer.
Why is that important?
Because I’ve seen the same pattern over and over, and by now I know that it’s not because of the quality of my work.
The very first games I uploaded online (as a young kid!) all had the same response. A few people played it, they left angry feedback as if they had expected some AAA experience for free, and that was that. It was a bit disheartening, to be honest. If I wasn’t a stubborn creative person, I might have stopped developing games right then and there.
These people downvoted my games, left 1-star reviews, even called me lazy or stupid. Why? Because the game only had 5 levels. Because the game didn’t have a pause button. Because they saw a lot of similarities between my game and another one, decided I was “stealing” my ideas, and that was that.
I hope you agree with me that those are not very valid reasons. I made a tiny game and put it online for free. Why were people expecting so much from it? Why is it so binary—either 5 stars if they love it or 1 star if they find ANY issue with it?
Anyway, I made some more games. They were slightly better, bigger, less buggy, reaching more people. They arrived on Itch.io instead of the old platforms like Kongregate.
What changed? Nothing! The comments/reviews for my games became stuff like “Why paid?”, or “Release on Steam, then I’ll buy it”. (Obviously I’m paraphrasing here—those reviews usually don’t check their spelling and take some deciphering.) Even if people gave no feedback, they’d just give a 1-star review. I had made a fully functional game, which looked quite good, which was tested by friends/family and they enjoyed it, and you’re telling me it’s a 1-star experience for the majority of people?
At some point you become experienced enough to know your games have value. To know they look good, they work well, they are fun to play for a wide audience.
But the bad reviews, the negative comments, the downvotes and dislikes … they never go away.
When I made my first Steam game, I obviously made sure to take my time and get it right. If I’m going to pay 100 bucks to Steam, and then sell a game for money, I’m treating it like a professional job. As such, this game of mine is the most battle-tested game I’ve ever made, with way more features and improvements and revisions than I ever did before. I have seen people repeatedly play and enjoy the game. I have shown people the art and they smile and want to play, because it looks fun and playful.
So I submit my game to the usual places for it. For example,
- I place a free demo on Itch.io, clearly mentioning it will release as a paid Steam game in the near future.
- I submit the game to IncrementalDB, a database of incremental games (which is reviewed and curated too, you don’t get in for free).
- I upload the trailer and some devlogs (screen recordings of me working on the game) to YouTube.
The game on Itch receives only a single rating and it’s 1 star. Really? This fully functional demo with at least an hour of playtime, with polished graphics and localization and everything, is 1 star and that’s it?
Within a day, my game receives ~10 downvotes on IncrementalDB. Downvotes. People aren’t just “not interested”, or just ignoring the game, they claim to actively dislike its existence without even playing it. At the same time, some other games recently added to the database, which look like they were made in Paint and barely exist yet, get hundreds of upvotes.
And like old times, on YouTube I only get 1 dislike, and a comment saying the game should be free.
At this point, I’m starting to think there’s some conspiracy against me :p Or I’m somehow not cut out for game development at all and everything I make is actually utter trash that infuriates people.
Both of them, however, seem very unlikely by now. I have sold games! I’ve been paid thousands of euros to put some of my games onto the biggest web game portal there is—and those games were far more “amateur” than what I make now!
I apply my scientific brain and research other games and demos. Maybe I can learn something from it, you know? Maybe I can decipher why my games seem endlessly hated, and some other games that don’t even function properly receive lots of positive engagement. Maybe I’ll find the secret sauce.
But the secret sauce is more like an open well-known issue in current society.
I found a clear separation in the data.
Games that are free (and/or “freely accessible”, so no account needed) are always beloved, all games that are paid receive a downpour of downvotes.
I could be friendly here and say it’s a matter of perspective. The “meaning” I assign to upvotes and downvotes is the same as like and dislike. If you’re neutral about something, which is most cases, you do nothing. But other people seem to assign a different meaning: upvotes for things they agree with completely, downvotes for everything else.
But then we look at Itch and YouTube and all the other places where my work exists, and the pattern is the same.
A large majority of people expect games to be free and game developers to do as they say. If they do not, it’s always completely 100% bad (downvote, dislike, 1-star review, personal attacks, you name it)
I have never released anything for money that didn’t receive a large chunk of angry comments/reviews/whatever from people who demand that it becomes free. (This includes all the other entertainment sectors in which I work, such as books.)
I have never released anything, of any kind, that didn’t receive negative feedback saying they basically wanted a different game and that I should make that instead. I can try to be polite and inform them it’s simply not the game I’m making, but then they just get more angry. Especially if they bought your game, they believe they own your life now and you shall update/fix it forever. The best solution—which all professional developers learn over time, it seems—is to just ignore all negative reviews.
At the same time, I have never released anything for free that wasn’t immediately disregarded and buried. Friends and family hear you put up the game “for free” (perhaps with ads, donations, or some other monatization), and you’re instantly demoted to a hobbyist developer making a useless toy. And it wasn’t a serious project anyway, right?
A large group of gamers automatically filter out any free games because they tend to be trash, unfinished, monetized with dark patterns, etcetera. They are absolutely right to ignore any game below 3 or 5 euros (sometimes even 10) and only treat games in a higher price range seriously.
And yes, this is getting worse! I’ve had more response and more positive response to my oldest games—which were barely-functional trash, believe me, I was just a kid!—than on my current games.
Mobile players expect free games, always. Even if they play that game for hundreds of hours, for months or years, they still would not pay a dime for it.
Console players are now paying 80+ euros for a single title. We have this huge number of players that buy the new FIFA game (or EA Sports FC now) for a similar ridiculous price.
Those same people will happily pay 30 euros to see a movie once in the cinema. Or subscribe to four different streaming services just so they can watch that mediocre movie at home.
And that’s why I say that entertainment is both undervalued and overvalued at the same time.
It seems like half the people will never pay for any entertainment. No matter how much they love it, how much they use it, they make up all sorts of excuses why they will just never give an artist/entertainer money.
And then, on the other side, you have people who are paying through the nose for entertainment that should not be that expensive. In the end, games are toys. Books are pieces of paper with a story. They are not on the same level of importance as food, or shelter, or tools. Yet entertainment is the biggest and most profitable industry in the world (mostly thanks to games) and some people pay more for their games than for anything else.
Just like the “middle class” is disappearing in real life, so I feel that the “middle segment” has largely disappeared from everything. Games, books, music, everything.
You’re either a completely broke musician, or you’re a millionaire not even writing your own songs.
You’re either a completely broke game developer who only receives negative feedback, or you rake in millions and super positive reviews with some silly game you never expected to pop off.
You’re either a completely broke novelist who publishers won’t even talk to, or all your books become bestsellers no matter their actual quality.
There’s no in-between. There’s no fertile middle ground where most people could live off of their work. There’s no “middle class” in entertainment anymore, which is crucial to sustaining the industry and actually creating a functional system.
I’ve heard many stories about how this used to work. Game developers who never had a hit, never “made it big”, but they regularly put out okay games and could live on that income. Novelists who write one okay book a year, which is able to sustain them (after a few years of building a backlog and getting experience). Musicians who do small-time gigs where they sell their self-made album, would not earn any big money, of course not, but they could live off of that.
And then those stories dried up … because these opportunities mostly disappeared. Like I said, almost years ago now, I could earn a decent income on some “okay games”. My first serious games, which I made once I had some experience, actually led to some sales, some donations, some positive feedback, and further opportunities within the game dev scene. But the past five years—I’m tempted to say “since covid”, but have no further proof of that—this has just become impossible.
In real life, our taxes are almost entirely paid by the middle class, which means our government almost entirely runs on burdening the middle class. Those with low incomes don’t have enough to tax. Those with high incomes evade it (and don’t have to care because they can just pay any lawyers or any fines). And now governments are scratching their heads and “baffled” (here in the Netherlands as well) about why they don’t have as much money as they used to have—and “solving” it by just taxing everyone even more.
We have, in my view, created the same situation in gaming (and other sectors of entertainment).
Entertainment is a huge industry that is extremely profitable for a few (who are able to convince people their products have massive value and often a massive price tag), and wildly undervalued by everyone else. The entire industry runs on a few massive studios and massive hits, while the floor beneath them has been falling away for some time now. And one day, the lack of support will send the whole thing crumbling down.
No, games should not cost upwards of 80 dollars. But these massive, complex, technological, high-value wonders also should not be reduced to the price of, like, two eggs.
Yes, you’re free to not like every game or let the developer know about criticism. But you can’t just blindly dislike and downvote everything that isn’t free or isn’t 100% perfect what you wanted at that moment. (The only consequence is that all game developers who’ve released one or two games have decided to stop reading and stop listening to what you’re saying. And a very negative mind-set that you have to live with at all times :p)
It seems people lost the ability to just say “not for me” and move on. Just like people seem blind to the fact that if they’re willing to spend 30 bucks on a 2-hour movie, then maybe spending 10 bucks on a game they’ll play for 20 hours is absolutely fine. Stop demanding free games, stop endlessly waiting for sales, stop pretending you can’t miss the money or the developer somehow doesn’t deserve to be paid.
And, perhaps most of all, stop blindly following the algorithm and only playing the hits that are already hits and played by many. There are loads of amazing games, books, musical albums, whatever waiting to be found and enjoyed by many people. But nobody will even see them, nobody even knows they exist, because they’re not important enough for the algorithm and most people aren’t actually consciously searching for new games anymore.
Again, the middle class is gone. The upper class gets the spotlight and the algorithm’s favor. The lower class doesn’t even join the game and just uses rogue marketing tactics or hopes to blow up on Itch with a silly free game. But the middle class, those who make pretty good games that deserve to sell for at least 5–15 bucks, those that actually intend to do it full-time and make a living, are drowning in-between.
The money is there. The audience is there. Again, entertainment industry is the biggest industry in the world. Games and movies are made for millions of dollars. Just publishing my first game page on Steam made them send hundreds of thousands of impressions my way—towards a tiny uncompleted game by an unknown developer! We have the numbers and the interest to spare.
But because we both overvalue and undervalue entertainment, all that money and attention disappears in the hands of only a few. Everyone else is left wondering why their polished game is receiving downvotes, hateful comments asking for it to be free, and not earning them anything.
Now, you might have read this whole article and believe I am just salty or annoyed. That I think I’m some amazing developer and my games deserved to be hits.
But no! That’s not true! (Well, I am bit annoyed after a lifetime of negative responses from strangers for no logical reasons at all, but that’s besides the point.)
I know my games are far from perfect and not for everyone. I’ve made a lot of trash, I’ll keep making stuff that misses the mark, and some of the criticism is absolutely fair and I tried to listen to it. If you read my other article about that first Steam game, you can find out in gruesome detail how hard it was to finish the game, and how mediocre I think the end result became. Which is why I didn’t expect much from it at all and just promised to do better on my next game.
My point is that I am earning nothing from most of my work. Not pennies, not a small sum, not “beer money”, but nothing. Whereas I used to earn something from work that was way worse 10+ years ago. What I make now is objectively better in all possible ways than what I made 10 years ago, and it’s earning nothing, not even a trickle.
And one reason I am earning nothing is the immediate downvotes and dislikes and bad reviews left for no valid reason at all, while the other reason is the algorithm governing it all and putting a lot of stock into just that. A few people who happen to have a bad day can ruin the entire launch of your game, its quality be damned.
It’s not about getting rich. It’s about getting some part of that pie; it’s about distributing it somewhat fairly and logically. (I’m reminded of that statistic that the vast majority of game developers/teams only release a single Steam game. It doesn’t earn some massive amount of money they wanted, they realize it’s not viable, they quit.)
If people stop undervaluing and overvaluing entertainment, then way more creators would be able to earn a living, and they would actually get more/better/diverse stuff for better prices. The overvalued stuff is forced to come down. The undervalued stuff doesn’t have to go out of their way to leap into the upper class (by asking much too high a price … or just shutting down their game four weeks after launch because it hadn’t earned the massive amounts of money they needed).
I’m sorry, this has become a bit of an incoherent ramble!
I am annoyed, but mostly because I’ve been seeing this happen everywhere for years.
The middle class will always be the thing holding up the entire sector (be it in real-life, in housing, in games, whatever). And our current algorithms, internet habits, consumer behavior, everything has eroded the middle class. So now I have to read in the paper, every single day, how every system in the world is strained and strained and strained, and government just keeps pretending it will magically fix itself before it snaps. You used to be able to buy a house and support a family of four on any bang average job. Now you need two jobs just to support yourself, and government wonders why nobody is having kids :p
I guess I just believe it’s better for the world (and for individuals, for everything and everyone) if anyone who makes a finished, functional, okay-looking game that passes Steam’s strict policies was able to earn a reasonable amount of money from it. If anyone who creates a finished, edited novel with an okay-looking cover who passes all the publishing steps and policies should be able to earn at least something from it.
Maybe that’s the real problem. Entertainment is one of the few industries where we’ve decided to use the policy “you’re only paid for your work if some people decide they like it after the fact”. All other industries ask payment beforehand, all other industries require payment for the work and not your subjective feelings about the result, which is what makes them more robust and makes people able to earn an income there.
It’s the same with sports tournaments really. Most tennis players earn nothing, even if they play many matches, which are televized and sponsored and have a crowd—and thus earn money in many ways! Only if you reach top 16/top 8 that’s when you get some massive prize money. Everyone else, who still played, who still put in the work and generated income, gets nothing from it.
Athletics would be a way more healthy sector, with more people participating and also getting better results because of it, if you were paid for your work. Not your end result. Not if you happened to reach the final or not. Like all other industries.
The same is true for games. And books. And all other entertainment or creative pursuits.
I don’t know how we get there. I don’t know if it’s possible. But we used to be much closer to that ideal when we still had a middle class of games, because people just valued entertainment by always paying a reasonable price.
Those were my rambly thoughts today,
Pandaqi