Steam indie developers have seen a huge loss in traffic in the last few months.
The issue was first raised on Twitter by Shadowhand developer Jake Birkett, who posted on Twitter (below) saying that since October he had seen reduced traffic to his games on Steam. But it turns out that he is far from the only indie affected, with developers from the Weather Factory, Machine Studios and Minor Key Studios all replying to the original post (below).
It seems this all kicked off with a bug that affected search in early October - which Valve emailed developers about and has been fixed - that has had a knock-on effect on the amount of traffic that smaller projects are receiving.
Dean Hall - of DayZ fame - replied to another tweet on the subject saying that his new project, Stationeers, saw just ten per cent of the traffic it was receiving before from the Steam homepage.
This news comes as Valve makes changes to the way it handles revenue shares on Steam with developers of smaller projects looking likely to lose out compared to their more successful brethren.
We've reached out to Valve for comment.
Since Valve destroyed my revenue at the start of Oct with some changes to discovery, whether they take 30% or less doesn't make much difference sadly. I'd rather they just fixed what broke/changed.
— Jake Birkett - Making "Ancient Enemy" (@GreyAlien) December 1, 2018
Wow @GreyAlien wasn't kidding. In October @steam_games did something that killed traffic to loads of indie games. Here's mine. Look at that baseline drop to 0. Hmm. pic.twitter.com/8lOnOtT3Fn
— Simon Roth (@SimoRoth) December 2, 2018
Oof, that's rough! I went and double checked, and somehow whatever this is passed both our fairly tiny games by - no noticeable drop in visits or revenue. These are the charts for Detective Grimoire and Haunt the House respectively, and each had about 35,000 visits over 6 months pic.twitter.com/imr3rMvoZw
— Tom Vian (@SFBTom) December 2, 2018
Yeah, we're seeing 10% of the traffic we were before from Steam home page with @stationeers
— Dean Hall (@rocket2guns) December 3, 2018
Has there been any official response, do you know? It’s affected pretty much every indie I know, so valve must be aware of the impact. But I haven’t heard of anyone asking their steam rep/valve directly
— Lottie Bevan ✈ Fun & Serious Bilbao (@tronbevan) December 2, 2018
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