'One Man Dev' Projects need to be banned from the Store? Here is why ...

[Adam Beckett]

If you are a 'real' programmer, doing a side project on Steam is not the place to drop your prototype and then let customers hang for years and years, updating your project once in a decade, pretending to have worked on it, while you have a daytime job and maybe even a family. Finish is first, and THEN drop it, when it is ready for release or final testing?

If you are an 'aspiring game developer', the Steam Store is not the place for you neither. Even less so. You are asking people to pay for your education ("Early Access") and think that is quite clever from you. You might even make some money out of this scheme ... initially. But, you are most likely going to fail. You will absolutely fail. And the disappointed audience, that paid money for your broken excuse of a future game, will let you know it.

Btw, I totally get the 'loner' type 'single dev'.

We all first learned alone, on our own. Coding is a grind. You write alone. You test alone. You experiment alone. But, in the end, 'game development' - especially, as a commercial enterprise ( = trying to make money, trying to make a living out of it) with all it's player demands (hardware, monitor, gamepad support, etc, etc ... the localization nightmare, VO, and so on) - is a collaborative sport.

If you are trying to 'do it alone' - you are doing it wrong, from the start.

Successful 'one man' games like Minecraft, Spelunky, Dust, Axiom Verge, are the utmost rare exceptions. Most of these games are made by people who are professional coders, already. Some worked in big AAA companies before. Have shipped titles. This is all to say, they know what they are doing and understand the scope of their projects and what they can reasonably accomplish in a certain time span.

Not the rest of you.

The wannabe-devs amongst you just struggle to make a living, probably stuck in a bad job, or still in college, dreaming of 'making it' as a game developer. That is not how this works. Even with the amazing modern day free tools and game engines, you can use, it takes people, it takes a team (even the smallest one) to accomplish something. And 'the public forum' that the Steam Store is, is not the place to drop these single person hopes of what you are dreaming to accomplish, but never did before and probably will never reach?

There is a reason why publishers had pitch meetings with developers. Not only to say 'no' - but also to allow those devs to understand, that maybe that pitch was not a good idea to begin with. Somebody had to tell those devs what they did not want to hear.

Today, with the 'democratization' of development tools and free, open platforms, with publishing opportunities, everyone can publish everything on the web. Much, like everyone can now say anything on social media. No filters. No restrictions. 100 USD bucks Steam fee ... and you are 'in'.

I know, this is hard to hear - and nobody is going to read this here, anyway, who is convinced, they are making the next 'Vampire Survivor' or 'Stardew Valley' - but, is the truth.

If only Steam would have a filter button that would exclude 'one man project' from my Store searches. I know, this is not possible for obvious reasons (and excluding 'Early Access' does not do the trick. Many of these 'projects' are published broken, only to be worked on - or not - for years to come). But, man, I wish, I could avoid wasting my time when browsing the Store pages during 'Game Festivals', so I do not have to see those duds. It is like walking over corpses, each a personal tragedy gravestone in form of an unfinished wannabe 'video game'.

Meanwhile, actual devs and publishers complain about the flood of new releases every day of every week and the lack of visibility for Indie devs. The day Valve called it quits with approving and 'greenlit' e v e r y t h i n g, the flood gates opened. And guess, who is the ONLY ONE who is benefiting from this? Exactly.

[Aachen]

Don’t buy from the developers you don’t support.

Which facts lead you to believe the one-person-projects are being granted excess visibility?

[nullable]

You're free to "ban" them from purchases you decide to make. Other people are free to make different decisions. Valve isn't going to dictate to product owners how their business should be set up, number of employees, how the product is developed, timelines, deadlines or anything else.

Arbitrary rules would just mean dishonesty and workarounds to bypass silly arbitrary restrictions. For example: Five lone developers band together and release their individual sole developed games under a single shell company that nominally meets whatever arbitrary rules you imagine. Well that only took about six seconds to come up with and nothing changed. Sorry you wasted your time writing a wall of text.

I mean you're free to your opinions, but in this case they only matter equal to amount of your ownership of Valve or your own projects. And if that number is zero, well there you go. Some number of people might agree with you but 0 * X still equals zero.

[Taebrythn]

all i hear is i don't want things i don't like. lol there have been a few one man dev teams that produced moderate to great games.

[Crazy Tiger]

No, they should not be banned from the store. That's just nonsense.

[fluxtorrent]

nah

[Tito Shivan]

Originally posted by Adam Beckett:

'One Man Dev' Projects need to be banned from the Store?

And then it inevitably will come 'that one' project you actually do want in Steam.

Then it'll be 'Why one man dev projects are banned from Steam?'

[Wolfman-RIP]

Originally posted by Adam Beckett:

'One Man Dev' Projects need to be banned from the Store? Here is why ...

Meanwhile, actual devs and publishers complain about the flood of new releases every day of every week and the lack of visibility for Indie devs. The day Valve called it quits with approving and 'greenlit' e v e r y t h i n g, the flood gates opened. And guess, who is the ONLY ONE who is benefiting from this? Exactly.

So you want Stardew Valley, Axiom Verge, Braid, Dust: An Elysian Tail, Papers, Please, Undertale, Balatro and Animal Well to name but a few removed from steam?

I own and have played half the games on that list and they are excellent. I own a few of them on the Nintendo switch.

Some of the best Indie games on steam were released by a one man developer while some of the WORST were released by big developers and publishers.

Gamer's benefit from innovative one man developers who are not beholder to the wishes of some over-bearing publisher or subject to the whims of corporate greed.

If your failing as a Indie developer its not the fault of other one man indie developers. If you want visibility you first need to make a damn good game that appeals to a broad spectrum of gamers AND pay for marketing or get news sites and social media influences to promote your game. You also need a little luck.

The flood of crap you see on steam is more a result of Chinese developers / publishers pumping out stolen asset games but most people ignore the constant waves of rubbish. It has nothing to do with 1 man dev teams.

[Adam Beckett]

@nullable I hear you.

I share the opinion that there is no practical way to set rules anymore. The giny is out of the bottle the moment Valve decided to stop moderating what goes on the Store and what not.

------------

For context:

In 2022, the total amount of game releases was 12.477
In 2023, the total amount of game releases was 14.546.

How many more will be published in 2024, only time will tell. Only one thing is sure. There won't be less.

This post is not a real 'call-to-arms' to actually 'ban' solo projects. That would be ridiculous.

It is more an invitation to those solo developers-to-be-or-wannabe to make them see, that their approach is ... poor, ill advised and the outcome in 99.999999% bad (as abandoned EA projects and released 'mostly negative' games prove). "If you 'really' want to succeed, work with others" is 'my' message. There is no (good!) reason, not to?

Again, nobody will ever read this, except a few of you, who subscribed to this forum. In a few minutes this thread is gone. Maybe for the better.

I totally agree on the 'free market' aspect. Nobody needs to buy these. They can offer it. Each Steam users is free to buy or ignore those. Seeing these projects on the Steam Store is like watching the carcasses of dead or dying puppies. I do not want to look at dead puppies on the Steam Store. But, I will have to. Unless, the puppies can be saved. Working with others can save these Steam puppies?

[fluxtorrent]

People who make up statistics should be banned from making suggestions about anything

[sfnhltb]

How would you even enforce this nonsensical, pointless idea? Are you expecting steam to hire private investigators to bust into development studios worldwide to double check their developer headcount meets your silly suggested rule?

Bring on the developers whose Mum pretends to be an employee on social media to get around it, that will really improve game quality no end once every developer has at least two "employees" to beat this limitation.

[xBCxRangers]

Disagree with that. One man, made each of these games...

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1324780/Easy_Red_2/

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1163910/Brass_Brigade/

Two great games, and i even have to wonder, how they do so well, whilst the big Triple A's, stink.

And one man, and one juvenile made this game apparently...

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2381520/Unrecord/

[JamesF0790]

Originally posted by xBCxRangers:

Disagree with that. One man, made each of these games...

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1324780/Easy_Red_2/

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1163910/Brass_Brigade/

Two great games, and i even have to wonder, how they do so well, whilst the big Triple A's, stink.

And one man, and one juvenile made this game apparently...

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2381520/Unrecord/

While we don't often agree xBCxRangers in this I 100% agree with you. There's not a damn thing wrong with one dev games.

[craigal]

Originally posted by Adam Beckett:

@nullable I hear you.

...

This post is not a real 'call-to-arms' to actually 'ban' solo projects. That would be ridiculous.

...

Yet the headline in your first post is

'One Man Dev' Projects need to be banned from the Store? Here is why ...

[Heraclius Caesar]

There are certainly some high quality one man devs that should not be banned, but I wouldn't be against banning others that are notorious for consistently pumping out low effort low quality shovelware with janky/stolen/flipped assets. There are far too many games like that on Steam and it does get frustrating scrolling through so much trash just to find a decent game here or there.

[Ben Lubar]

The two most popular games on Steam (Dota and Counter-Strike) were each at one point a hobby project run by one or two developers. Team size doesn't determine how good a game is.