Steam is at the moment the most popular and most successful digital distribution service on the PC platform, but one of the people in charge of it says that those who use it should not expect it to actually grow very much in the coming years.
Valve, who created and evolved Steam into its current form, needs to play a careful balancing game, adding new games on Steam, especially indie offerings, while also keeping the number of overall titles manageable.
Jason Holtman, who is a manager working on Steam, has told the audience at the Develop conference that, “I think we’re now at about 1,700 games on Steam. We like to have lots of games on Steam but we’re careful about not flooding the market. We’re a software company, and we want to distribute software that has a chance to succeed. If we just try to commoditise, that would become a problem.”
He added, “We have that Netflixian problem. We have to expose great content and make sure none of it drowns. People need a good browsing experience. We have 1,700 games on the service, but we’re not eager to say next year we’ll have 5,000. If you do that, because you’re looking to flood the market, I think you’re going to lose.”
Steam has been very important to the indie scene as it allows game creators to quickly get their product to players without having to deal with the hassles of brick and mortar stores and without doing the publishing work themselves.
Holtman admitted that there are situations when Steam makes mistakes and refuses to publish a game that later proves a success, but he says that the team working on the service is actively improving its process for submissions.
The service will face tougher competition in the future, as GameStop will aggressively aim to take market share for its newly acquired Impulse.
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