泥中蟠龍's Game愛歌 [A love song for games of the dragon waiting for an opportunity] Past, present, and future of Steam (Part 5)

泥中蟠龍's Game愛歌

[A love song for games of the dragon waiting for an opportunity]

 

Past, present, and future of Steam (Part 5)

 

Steam is now a video game distribution service based on electronic software distribution (ESD). The platform will keep making up for the weaknesses and building on the strengths. It will also expand its service into many diverse fields using its dominant subscriber pool. Steam users are expected to choose controller hardware including Steam Controller, which lets users play its entire collection of Steam games, and select a currency or a language as they wish as it expands its service to many countries. It is attempting to support VR content and to expand the business into non-PC games. The Steam platform is supposed to sustain steady growth based on its extensive experiences and a flood of users. So, let's find out what domestic developers should prepare to go into foreign markets through Valve's channel which has the potential to be a global video-game-distribution-platform superpower.

 

The Steam platform is an unfamiliar environment for local game developers. Some games made by national small and medium-sized businesses had performed poorly in recent years since they aimed at the global market using the distribution service from around 2015 until a couple of domestic games including PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds (PUBG) were a big success on the charts. Steam service is different from mobile game service which makes up the majority of South Korean game development. Most of the subscribers of the platform are hardcore gamers so that it is advantageous for a game developer to make a hardcore game if it wants to boost its sales. The top-ranked games are not mainly casual games but first-person shooter (FPS), real-time strategy (RTS), role-playing game (RPG), and sports games, etc. And a game maker that plans to launch its game on the Steam necessarily needs help from a publisher having the know-how to use the distribution service or pays a cost to learn for itself how to utilize the advanced platform through its long-term operation. The developer has to reach a certain standard after a public showing its game during the period supported by Steam if it wants to service the product for itself. The company should prepare video clips and social media sites in advance in time for the coming of the new game to meet users' expectations. Yet, poor translations for supporting multi-language do not help attain a high user-review-rating level. The seller also needs to draw up guidelines for various discount policies and make good use of them analyzing data between the appropriate discount rate and sales volume.

 

I took a loot at the leading distribution service Steam. The platform is continuing to grow and advance. My opinions in this article might be complete nonsense at this time next year. But I hope that it can be of any assistance to national video game developers which are now preparing for launching their games on Steam. I expect to see another Steam-released local game comparable to PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds soon.

 

 

※ This is from Kyunghyang Games column by 泥中蟠龍 since September 2013.

(http://www.khgames.co.kr)

 

Translation by Kim Ki-hui