Cannibalizing our own business
If you're working in indie games, you're competing for a small slice of a small slice of the games industry pie. The obvious reason for this is that you can't compete for attention with hundred-million-dollar titles. But the other reason is that you are, on PC where most indies live, competing with every game that has ever existed.
Everyone who's likely to buy your game probably has dozens, if not hundreds, of games ready to play on Steam. If they're the kind of real enthusiast who takes risks on games that aren't already famous and well-regarded, they're probably also the kind of person who has multiple consoles at home, or a bunch of emulators on their PC - so thousands of games, really, at their fingertips.
So... you are competing for their attention with the entire history of the medium. This is very cool for us as artists, but very frustrating for those of us who want attention!! There are so many good games out there that deserve attention, and they never stop deserving it - even ten or twenty or thirty years after they release.
The most recent Steam Next Fest threw another wrench into this problem. People have been telling me that their games did worse than they expected during the most recent Next Fest... and anecdotally, it's because Next Fest became suddenly very un-fun for players. They're now wading through a massive volume of AI generated crap games. If they're abstaining from AI for moral reasons, this is very frustrating... but it seems equally as frustrating for people who just want to entertain themselves and have no moral stance on AI use in indie games at all. It was pretty easy to find people raging out about the low quality and overwhelming volume of AI slop in Next Fest on Reddit, for example. It was extremely easy to find people saying that they'd disengaged with Next Fest entirely.
The only strategy available for most people seems to be retreat. Instead of wasting your time sifting through piles of crap, you can turn to sources of curation in your life - more adventurous friends, your past purchases on Steam, Youtubers and writers you like, etc. It takes too much work now to choose what to play, so you can just stop looking for things to play. Let other people do that work instead. Peruse your backlog, even.
So... we were already competing for attention with every game ever made. Now we may be competing for a much smaller slice of attention than we could grasp before!
In the future, people are going to be hungry for sites or stores or people who can provide them with extremely picky, restrictive samplings of games. If you are, against all odds, currently building a PC game sales platform to compete with Steam, take this as your sign to pivot entirely to curation. (I doubt anyone is doing this - it's not the 2010s anymore.) If you work at Steam, I don't know what to tell you. That sounds rough!!
The future is a platform that only launches a limited number of new games a week and can guarantee you that they're all actually good.
Itch is closer to that already than Steam is. I am not sure exactly how Itch.io's front page works, but I've heard that it involves much more curation than Steam plans to do in the future. I know games of mine have ended up on the front page of Itch in the past because the site operators chose to give them attention.
What's happening to Steam is exhausting - and pretty predictable. I find that when things are predictable, they gain a massive exhaustingness exponent. I'm tired, boss!!