Almost three quarters of developers responding to a recent survey by GameMaker company Yo Yo said that they would prefer to publish on Steam.
As published by GamesIndustry.biz, Yo Yo GM James Cox revealed that 72.2 per cent of the panel picked Valve's digital storefront, putting it far in the lead. Second place went to the lo-fi indie title marketplace Itch.io, which claimed 46.9 per cent of votes.
Meanwhile, Humble's storefront scored 24.6 per cent of votes, with GOG.com coming in fourth place with 22 per cent. Green Man Gaming landed the No.5 spot, with 7.2 per cent.
Steam took the No.1 spot for its high market share, obviously, with Cox going on to say that Valve's marketplace also won out because it had fewer issues with certification and customer service.
Itch.io claimed second place due to its ease of submission, as well as lack of submission fees.
When asked what stores they wished to purchase from, however, developers overwhelmingly chose Steam. 81 per cent of respondent chose Valve's platform, with fewer than one per cent of developers opting for Itch.io.
You can read the full results over on GI.biz.
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I fully understand with is huge captive audience not releasing via steam (unless you're a multi-billion dollar mega publisher like EA) is simply not an option.
What infuriates me is when companies exclusively release to Steam with no logical reason. If your game is ranked multiplayer and you've heavily used Steam API to support that I understand, but single player games that don't get released outside Steam I don't understand.
Yes there will be additional development costs to wrap or exclude those Steam calls you make, but in terms of total development cost those are negligible, a fraction of the return you'd get from releasing to additional platforms.