The Oversaturation of the Steam Marketplace (Gaming)

Today, on May 9th, over 35 games were released on Steam. Not yesterday, not last week, but today. Even after the discontinuation of Steam Greenlight on June 6th, 2017, new games are still being released left and right.

Although new releases and competition in the gaming industry are largely beneficial to gamers, the fact of the matter is that the system under which Steam currently operates allows waves of mediocre games to hit its digital shelves. Now almost anyone who has a game can have it published on Steam through Steam Direct. While I'm all for Indie Gaming, there should seriously be some more quality control on Steam.

However grateful I am for the contributions Steam has made to PC Gaming, this issue cannot be ignored. Some games are so lacking, so devoid of design, that their existence on Steam discredits the platform as a whole. This is unfair to Indie Developers who put their heart and soul into their games only for them to be lost within a heap of low-quality games, some that could be made by a 12 year-old in under an hour using only default Unreal Engine assets.

As more time passes, the more the Steam Marketplace resembles the Google Play Store, and that troubles me. The Video Game Crash of 1983 was caused by market saturation and led to the bankruptcy of several video companies. An industry flooded with awful games crashed from a 3.2 billion dollar industry in 1983 to a mere 100 million dollar industry by 1985. There was widespread doubt about the viability of gaming, and I don't want to see that happen ever again. But judging by the path that Steam is currently on, such a crash, at least for Indie Games, is not all that far-fetched.