To me, the interesting bit here is less about Steam in particular, but about the industry overall.
Fourteenthousand games. That’s insane. Sure, the vast majority is going to be asset flips and shovelware crap, probably a lot of AI generated spam games in there, too. But the sheer amount is still staggering. That’s a fair few games compared to when I started gaming in 1987, playing Squirm on a C16 with a tape drive.
But Youtube works on engagement. Their business model depends on people spending as much time on Youtube as possible and that’s the purpose of the algorithm, to keep the viewer on the site. Steam doesn’t need people to spend as much time on Steam as possible. If Valve wanted to be nefarious you could say the purpose of the algorithm would be to sell as many games as possible, but so far Valve has shown reason and understanding that the customers wallet is not infinite. There’s really no incentive on Valves part to shove the algorithm down out throat. And while I’m sure game devs would love to game the algorithm for visibility they also know that Steam is not a golden ticket to success (algorithm or not). If you want your game to succeed you need to do actual marketing and most of that marketing has to be outside of the Steam ecosystem.
I get where you’re coming from but I think it’s mostly an irrational fear rather than something that could actually happen (at least while Gabe is in charge). If Valve wanted to do it they could’ve done it years ago.
Marketing hasn’t been a viable way of gaining sales for years. No one watches ads, no one watches sponsored content, it doesn’t translate into sales. If you have a mega budget to put your ads on the side of the road, maybe, not for most.
Also remember there are more platforms than steam, I know you want to hope that steam won’t do something bad but you should remember steam does not exist in a vacuum and that steam does bad things for profit too.
The entire success of Vampire Survivors is built on accidental free marketing. For the first month of launch the peak players for Vampire survivors was 14 players. Then one youtuber made a video about the game and the next day it was 1000+ player peak. The some other guy started streaming it and Northernlion saw it. He then made a few videos and from there it just snowballed into one of the biggest games of 2022.
The success of Dave the Diver was clearly a marketing effort, it went from 700 player in early access to being The indie hit of 2023 days after release. And to show you don’t have to make a good game to get the word out, the reason people even know about “The Day Before” is because of marketing. That game was complete crap, but you had big youtubers and streamers talking about it because clearly their marketing strategy was on point. And finally it’s not just indie games, do you think Capcom launching a campaign to reinvigorate Monster hunter World has had no impact on the sales of a 5 year old game?
Marketing absolutely does work. If you want more you can always lurk /r/gamedev to see game developers discuss how to market games. You can look at it this way, either you’re smarter than the entire game dev subreddit (because nobody there goes “marketing is pointless”) or you’re wrong about it not being viable.
You do see how that part is entirely fearmongering? You’re pretty much saying that Steam has done bad things so we should expect them to also do this one bad thing and thinking Steam wouldn’t do it is just being hopeful. And if Steam for some reason actually won’t do it then there are other stores besides Steam that could do this bad thing.
Nothing even indicates that it might be a possibility beyond you just believing it is a possibility.