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Steam and Africa

rustybroomhandlerustybroomhandle
edited in General
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2014/01/16/steam-dev-days-steam-at-75-million-greenlight-going-away/

Have a look at Steam's sales chart by region. You will notice that our entire continent is not even on there, and "Other" is at 1%.

Considering that for PC games our primary (only?) real option is digital distribution, and Steam has the biggest share of that distribution, it's another metric to show where our market is. Of course we knew this already, but it's always nice to have numbers to back stuff up.

Comments

  • iPixelPierreiPixelPierre
    With Greenlight going away what does this exactly mean for Indies now?
    Are they going back to their previous method?
  • AlphaSheepAlphaSheep
    edited
    Rami Ismail reckons that Steam will soon be allowing anyone to put a game onto Steam, and then using the social features Steam already has to overcome the issue of good games being invisible amongst the trash. For example, you can see what games your friends own, and how often and how long they spend playing each of those games, and use this to decide what to buy. He also thinks that in the future, developers will be able to have their own stores on Steam. [Source]
  • rustybroomhandlerustybroomhandle
    No need to rely on speculation from Vlambeer. :P

    Gabe Newell has already said their eventual plan is to make the Steam store into an API that developers can use, and there will be the ability to create storefronts.
  • iPixelPierreiPixelPierre
    Interesting...
  • KarujiKaruji
    Though I have to add, which is all well and good when it happens, but for now if you want to get your game on steam there is still Greenlight, and as @BlackShipsFillTheSky said: Greenlight is a good narrative vehicle for journalists ;)
  • DarkCarnivourDarkCarnivour
    edited
    Also noticed how tricky it was to notice us in that graph. I'm just glad it isn't our market that is the tiny slice we're trying to find in there.

    I wonder how much difference it will make when/if they change the Greenlight system. I suspect much of the same battle will still apply, i.e: getting noticed and getting people interested in a sea of other interesting things. As we've seen, the amount of noise it makes in one place is a lot like the noise it makes in all the other places at the same time.

    Maybe it will be different with their vaguely proposed future system, perhaps if one makes a great strategy game it then wouldn't have to compete with non-strategy games for the Greenlight top spots and would show up on the horizon of a strategy store in front of players interested in strategy games. That's the theory, right?

    Overall, I would say the current situation of Greenlight is better than no Greenlight. It gives one a way to get to Steam at all and provides feedback on the progress of the marketing rather than Valve arbitrarily rejecting the game because it has no marketing or because they just didn't get to it.
    It puts the game past a good few eyes which, I think, is decent publicity at the price ;)
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