Game Dev

Steam 2024 Year in Review

We are now in March and Steam has just published the Steam Review 2024. This is an excellent detailed post talking about all kinds of Steam stats for the year 2024. It was yet another record breaking year, recently they hit 40M CCUs! That’s insane!

Steam has continued pushing towards improving Discoverability and Shopping. Every Next Fest they try new things, this recent one gave more visibility to more games at the start as opposed to starting off with fixed Top lists right away. Also more Themed Sales and Themed Festivals giving more opportunities for devs to get their games seen by players. You should participate in these as much as possible.

Player Reviews in 2024 got a new "Helpfulness" score with more helpful reviews showing up on top rather than memes/jokes. The Steam Workshop also got some major updates that impact how Subscriptions work and managing downloads. Crazy how it’s been 14 years since that launched!

Steam Families left Beta in 2024 and now anyone can create their own Steam Family and share games, along with various parental controls. It even has a "Child Purchase Request" feature, I did not know that existed! And Steam Recording is apparently pretty big! I've never used it myself but there have been millions of clips recorded by users.

For Developers, Demos got a massive update in June (dedicated pages). The backend store page editor got a big boost, easier to work with. The Calendar is awesome! Very easy to register for various upcoming events and themed sales. And they added a new "More From" section on a Game's store page that you can customize to display your other games.

Daily Deal also got a self-scheduling feature, if your game is successful enough it is now easier to get a Daily Deal. And like I covered in the last Game Dev Report you should definitely try to get a Daily Deal.

For some data, they tracked first time purchasers to see if they stick around and buy more games. The result was 1.7 million new users that played for 141 million hours and spent $94 million! Importantly they did not stay just on the first game they purchased, they actively bought other games.

Some major takeaways:

• New Release revenue per year has increased almost exactly 10x since 2014.

• In 2024, more than 500 new titles exceeded $250,000 in New Release revenue (up 27% from 2023).

• In 2024, more than 200 new titles exceeded $1 million in New Release revenue (up 15% from 2023).

And this is all despite increasing number of games released every year!

Steam is also global, with both players and developers coming from every country on Earth. TCG Card Shop Simulator was one of the biggest hits, and it came from a solo dev from Malaysia.

This is possible due to Steam investing in self-publishing tools, local currency support, localized documentation and regional outreach. This leads to more developers and tons more players, I really hope they keep doing this!

Make sure you localize your games! I have a Lecture on Unity’s super easy to use Localization Tool in my Ultimate Unity Overview course.

So it's all really impressive, another great year! It's great to see these stats and see everything they do in an entire year in a single blog post. The reason why they keep building upon Steam is the reason why it's still the best place for both Players and Developers. The more that Steam and Epic Game Store and other platforms try to improve, the better it is for Developers and Players.

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Tech

Android Games on PC

Back in 2022 Google released the Beta of Google Play Games on PC, it allows you to play Android games on your PC but only a handful of games were available to play.

Now that is apparently changing, starting today you will see thousands of new games along with better emulation and improved control support. This ArsTechnica report has more details on this program.

This video shows how you can map keyboard controls to an ingame joystick allowing you to play a touch joystick game with WASD.

Google also says Android is moving to a "modern rendering stack" using Vulkan as the default graphics API and promises deep integration with Unity 6. I'm guessing this will be mentioned during Unity's keynote/roadmap at GDC.

Tech

Vibe Coding is the Future (?)

There is a new term that is very popular right now, Vibe Coding. Apparently that's where you fully give in to the AI and just accept whatever code it gives you without question.

Meaning, if you want a Health System for your game, then just ask the AI and copy paste. Then if you want to expand upon it? Ask the AI again and accept the changes. If you find a bug? Ask the AI to fix it and hope that it does.

Personally this seems pretty insane to me, it turns programming (which is a very logical process) into complete randomness. Sometimes the AI might give you great code, and sometimes it might be terrible. Since the "programmer" has no idea what the code is doing, the only option is to keep rolling the dice and hope that the AI outputs something that works. And then if you want to modify some tiny piece of code it might modify the entire codebase.

There's a hilarious short that perfectly encapsulates this issue. First it generates an error, then it generates the perfect output, and then it generates something terrible. But since the dev doesn't know what changed they cannot manually get back into a working state, all they can do is keep pulling the lever on the slot machine and hope it generates a good output.