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

 

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 4)

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 4)

 

In January 2017, Steam graded on 100 top games released in 2016 regardless of their sales rank. The highest selling 12 games were classified as 'Platinum games'. It included The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, Rocket League, Fallout 4, Sid Meier's Civilization VI, XCOM 2, No Man's Sky, Total War: Warhammer, Tom Clancy's The Division, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, Grand Theft Auto V, Dark Souls III, and Dota 2. In particular, the achievement of Rocket League—the only Platinum-tiered indie game—was exceptional. The other independent games such as Stardew Valley, Subnautica, and Astroneer were landed on the top 100 best games. The four smaller-developer-made games on the chart show that the PC gaming platform seems to be in favor of indie games so far.

 

Compared 2015 top-sales ranking list by Steam Spy to the 2016 data, more than a few games are still loved by subscribers in 2016. Also, one can know that upper-ranked games generate significant revenue. The highest-placed games are especially bringing in from between 10 billion won to 200 billion won a year.

 

The top 5 sales list in 2015 is as follows.

 

No.1 Grand Theft Auto V : $161,253,971

No.2 Fallout 4 : $122,571,232

No.3 Metal Gear Solid V : $41,252,772

No.4 Counter Strike : Global Offensive : $40,929,890

No.5 The Witcher 3 : Wild Hunt : $38,911,116

 

South Korean games have never been reached high on the annual Steam sales revenue, however, local games such as PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds (PUBG), Black Desert Online, and Knight Online, etc. are expected to move up the chart in 2017 for the first time.

 

When it comes to the genre of computer games, PC gamers, who usually sit for long periods, become less biased than mobile gamers because of their environmental characteristics and difference of interfaces. Therefore there are various types of games including First-person shooter (FPS), Real-time strategy (RTS), and role-playing game (RPG), etc. being ranked in the top range.

 

Steam has seen steady sales increases, given many indie game makers a chance to grow, and proved that various genres of games can coexist together in the platform. Next time, I'd like to talk about the future of the video game digital distribution service and what a developer needs to launch its game on Steam.

 

 

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

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

 

Translation by Kim Ki-hui

 

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 3)

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 3)

 

There are many strong points of Steam. First of all, it supports various operating systems. The digital distribution platform, which was originally based on Windows, now provides the best possible environment for not only Mac OS X and Linux, etc. but also console games on PlayStation and Xbox, etc. and it is finding a way to assist mobile games at present. Moreover, users can select a language among more than 20 ones including English, Japanese, and Korean and they can pay by credit cards, the payment system in smartphones, or various gift cards. The payment system includes many different currencies of the world such as dollars, euro, pounds, yen, and won, etc. so that Steam provides a convenient form of payment method for its consumers in numerous countries and various environments.

 

The other advantage of the platform is that it has countless users and content. Steam now has over 200 million subscribers with its over 10 million concurrent users and more than 10,000 video games are released on the platform. Most of the regular visitors are not beginners but video game-savvy people. A newly launched game on Steam is exposed to about a million gamers on average. And there are a variety of gaming communities targeting those customers; they include not only various categories from basic friends list to chat room, profile editing, achievement, event page, and leveling/ranking system to induce cooperation and competition between players but also provide features such as social networking service, news feed, gaming forum, and game channel.

 

While the platform has definite advantages, it has some vulnerable points. To begin with, as many users complain about its login system, it takes way long time to log in to the website. Even taking security issues and various users from all over the world into account, it's too tardy and a guest under different access environment has to go through red tape-like additional procedures for identification. Some functions which are disabled under no internet access seem to be needed to improve.

 

Furthermore, there is a credibility problem with the alpha-access that has been a hot issue recently. As I explained earlier, PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds was launched on Steam Early Access. The service of the platform doesn't guarantee perfection because it is supposed to allow users an opportunity to play an incompleted game in advance. Some companies' "eat and run" cases are serious problems to be ironed out.

 

Finally, there is a security issue. Steam has tons of personal data of over 200 million subscribers and a lot of information on their payment and digital goods. The website was hacked several times and I reckon that the company should make every effort to regain users' trust by stabilizing the system.

 

Let's take a look at the size of the market for Steam and its recent performance next time.

 

 

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

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

 

Translation by Kim Ki-hui