14 DAY TRIAL // Gary Newman is best known for launching both the original Garry’s Mod and Rust recently on the Steam digital distribution service and he believes that recent calls to reduce the number of titles delivered on it by Valve do not make any sense.
Plenty of gamers and analysts have complained that so many experiences are being launched every day that it is getting hard for players to decide which one of them is good enough to pay for.
Newman tells MCV that he believes that it’s good that the audience has plenty of choices to make and that developers should see the current situation as an opportunity rather than a problem.
The game creator adds, “The focus should be on the users, not the developers. Users getting the choice of thousands of games is a good thing. The attitude that Valve should only allow X games a month on Steam is insane. Why would you limit it? Have you released a game and it isn’t selling? Make it better. Do some marketing.”
He continues, “Steam is a digital distribution platform; they put your game on their store and allow people to buy it. Any extra exposure you get by being featured should be seen as an extra-unexpected bonus. It shouldn’t be relied on to sell your game.”
Some developers have claimed that indie games are suffering because they do not spend enough time on the Steam front page, but to Gary Newman, visibility is just a bonus and developers should try to only create good experiences and then make them as accessible as possible.
Steam has been launching more titles than ever using the Greenlight service and Valve’s leader, Gabe Newell, has said that he wants a future where every user has the ability to set up their own stores in order to promote the titles they are fans of.
The company also plans to give game creators more tools to interact with their fan community and to respond to their requests about patches and new content.
Steam currently dominates the digital distribution market on the PC, although other companies have tried to create competition with Origin, Uply and Green Man Gaming.
Valve is also working on a special controller, with haptic feedback features, and on the Steambox hardware, in collaboration with a number of partners.
They are now set to be launched in 2015, with complete support for the new SteamOS.