I've always heard that steam store visibility algorithm is made to hide low quality stuff and push high quality stuff. My rant isn't even about AAA vs indie. Thats completely understandable and how the game is played, no news about it. What grinds my gears is that in the end it pushes solo devs / small studios against scammers and grifters
>If you're publishing the SAME LOW QUALITY PUZZLE GAME but reskinned 200 times you get complete visiblity in the store because you're making a lot of games and steam rewards this no matter reviews or type of game. You can even get visibility in incorrect tags that are never removed.
>If you're a grifter with a nice amount of following you can get all the visibility because of external traffic and wishlists, if you release the game and its the worst thing ever with overwhelmingly negative reviews you still get visibility (which means there's still residuals from clueless players), there's no consquence and you live to scam another day.
>If you're making a desktop app (now they call them "idle games") steam counts the time the app is open and thats it, if you make an app that can stay in the background for hours (because its not getting used at all its just "there" and most people forget about it) then steam rewards that as playtime and scores it better than actual games. And no matter what anybody says, having something open is not the same as gameplay time, all desktop apps should have their playtime reduced by at least 10x.
So every time you hear the "100 games release on steam everyday" well let's say at least half of these games are the above type and will get stuck in the pipe preventing real games from surfacing. Steam really needs to improve their store algorithm otherwise what I see is that we will get increasingly worse and worse games in the next decade and I'm saying this as a player, I enter the store to look for games that I might like and its all cat games, desktop apps and bait kickstarter games made by youtubers.