Your audience isn't on Steam (and that's ok)
A few years ago, I had coffee with a very successful game designer whose game had achieved what many would consider a dream: significant sales success on Steam, critical acclaim, and financial sustainability. But as our conversation continued, he offered a confession that stuck with me. "The only reason we succeeded," he said, "was because there were so few games on Steam in 2016. We could just draft off of others."
When I chat with artists about what they want for their game projects, invariably, they point to “the indie dream.” There’s a collective fixation on Steam specifically as the primary path to success. This is increasingly misguided, particularly for artists and creators developing culturally ambitious work, and is out of step with artists in other communities.
The conventional wisdom remains seductive, of course. Steam represents the largest PC gaming marketplace, offers direct publishing capabilities, and provides the tantalizing possibility of overnight success. Every other month, titles seemingly emerge from nowhere to fame and fortune.
Given that games are now easier to make and distribute, as expected, the number of games on Steam has increased by 30%. Meanwhile, the number of active users increased by 18%. More players – but significantly more games, but less than 3% really make it out of purgatory.
More importantly, not all games are created equally. Like all technologies, Steam has what designers call “affordances”–it is not a neutral platform, desires certain types of things, and rewards specific behaviors. Action, role-playing, strategy, and horror titles are by far the most popular. Games that reward building and crafting things are also in its sweet spot. These platform preferences generally constrain the what and the how of something becomes a hit. While Steam the company isn’t as aggressive a curator of its brand as Apple Music or Netflix, Steam the product absolutely picks winners and losers.
Steam, despite its dominance, runs on a surprisingly lean team relative to its market position. Spotify, for example, employs over 9,000 people, compared to just 80 who work on Steam. The platform's approach to ecosystem development reflects this: rather than actively seeking wide-ranging content that shows the breadth of the medium, Steam's algorithms optimize for engagement metrics that favor established patterns. Steam's algorithm learns from player behavior, surfacing games to users based on their purchase history, playtime patterns, and wishlist activity. The result is a recommendation system that overwhelmingly serves the platform's most active users—a relatively small segment that generates the majority of Steam's revenue. One can quibble about whether this is what players want, but it’s a like arguing with the tide. It’s either moving for you or against you.
This creates what economists might recognize as a classic customer concentration problem. The platform's financial incentives align with extracting more value from existing heavy users rather than expanding to new audiences. This dynamic is not new and is the natural direction for platforms in the absence of meaningful competition and/or regulation. In 2021, for example, the artist Drake generated more streams from his twelve-month catalog than all music released before 1980. For artists creating work that challenges genre conventions or speaks to broader cultural themes, platforms can pose a fundamental mismatch.
This tension between your creative desires and the realities of “the market” is surely familiar to you as an artist or game-maker. You need to either change “the thing” to make it conform the shape of what Steam wants. Or you need to find an audience that will love it unconditionally. Sometimes your personal creative interests will intersect with where the “gamers” are. But often they won’t!
Am I telling you not to publish on Steam? Of course not! Are your best chances of life-changing wealth closed if you don’t prioritize Steam? Most likely! But if you’re making work that doesn’t fit neatly into Steam’s success box, you’ll need to be honest about that.
First, there are a couple table stakes-y things you’ll need to cover. Make sure you understand what your costs are and align them to your expectations. Set a deadline for release so that your project doesn’t sit in limbo forever. Make a marketing plan and stick to it.
Beyond that, the current moment also presents unprecedented opportunities for creators willing to think beyond traditional gaming distribution channels. The tools for game-making have democratized significantly, yes, but so have the tools for audience development and direct marketing.
The most effective approach I've observed involves what I call "ambassadorship"—positioning games within the contexts where their themes and aesthetics already resonate. Remember, Steam’s audience comes to the platform with certain expectations about what your art should be. You can’t lie to them. They don’t like ambiguity. They’re very, very focused on “gameplay.” It’s a bit like showing up in another country that doesn’t speak your language.
Ambassadorship requires a fundamental shift in how we think about audience development. Rather than asking "How do we get Steam to notice us?", the more productive question becomes "Where do people who would connect with this work already gather?" A game exploring dance and live performance, for instance, gains more meaningful traction through partnerships with dance organizations and performance venues than through Steam's discovery algorithms.
Is the audience smaller? Absolutely. But consider a “bilingual” approach—check the boxes on game distribution platforms like Steam and then look outside of that community for your fit.
Learn a new language! (Credit)
Second, prioritize places where you can own your relationship. The email lists and social followings that developers often dismiss as "low-hanging fruit" represent something more significant: direct relationships with engaged audiences. These connections operate outside algorithmic gatekeepers and compound over time.
For game-based artists whose work speaks to broader cultural conversations—artists with gallery experience, musicians with established followings, writers with literary audiences—the opportunity lies in leveraging existing cultural capital rather than starting from zero within gaming's established hierarchies.
This doesn't mean abandoning Steam entirely, but rather recognizing it as one channel among many rather than the primary validation of success. Musicians might distribute their music through digital platforms, but also go on the road and look to license their music. Filmmakers “window” their releases moving from film festival to theatrical to digital platforms, adjusting their approach along the way. The goal shifts from hoping Steam elevates your work to building sustainable audiences that follow your creative development wherever it leads.
Third, think deeply about distributing everywhere, but especially on your own website. When you send someone to purchase your game on Steam (or Amazon for that matter), you do not own that relationship. They do. Expand your surface area, but prioritize places where you can reach someone whenever you want–a mailing address, SMS, or an email. (I advocate for running two different outreach campaigns—one specifically for Steam and one for direct distribution.
The developers I see thriving in this environment understand that standing out as "the gaming person" within non-gaming cultural contexts often proves more valuable than competing for algorithmic favor within gaming's increasingly crowded landscape. They're building careers rather than chasing viral moments, cultivating communities rather than optimizing for metrics.
Take heart. The challenge you having finding gaming audiences are the same challenges independent artists and creatives have always faced. A new approach requires different skills and longer timelines than the Steam-focused strategies most developers pursue. However, for creators who are serious about building sustainable creative practices around culturally ambitious work, the alternative paths are increasingly becoming more realistic.
(1.) I cannot stress enough that my focus is on artists, not gaming studios.
(2.) There is no true apples-to-apples comparison, but a close approximation would be the employee per user number would be 72,000 users per employee and vs. 1.6m users per employee for Valve. On a revenue per employee basis, a common metric to evaluate a company’s output, Valve is an outrageously successful outlier. Great work if you can get it!
