Why Steam is Not a Strategy

“No matter how I slice and dice the customer base, customers give lower ratings to obscure titles. A balanced picture emerges of the impact of online channels on market demand: Hit products remain dominant, even among consumers who venture deep into the tail. Hit products are also liked better than obscure products. It is a myth that obscure books, films, and songs are treasured. What consumers buy in internet channels is much the same as what they have always bought.”

– The Harvard Business Review, Should You Invest in the Long Tail?, July/August 2008 Issue

Comments

[The Guy]

But it says "ratings." Ratings are always a universally bad idea when implemented in web 2.0 (unless the community is close-knit and civil, and even then it's usually so small everybody knows what everyone else's opinion is already.)

Take out the ratings system (which Steam doesn't even have, last I checked) and create a semi-balanced advertising field (or have so many choices like iTunes that ads hardly matter) and you can create an environment where the fish tail can survive.

[Matthew]

I don’t think the tail can’t survive, but I do think there are some unrealistic expectations of what life is like there.

[Merus]

There's a consistent misunderstanding of the Long Tail: it mostly applies to the content aggregators, not the content producers. The producers are only slightly better off compared to relying on brick-and-mortar retailers, which they usually can't get in.

[Nur-ab-sal]

"Take out the ratings system (which Steam doesn't even have, last I checked)"

It lists the Metacritic score for games that have them.

[Macguffin]

Interesting reaction from Chris Anderson, the guy who wrote The Long Tail, on his blog: http://www.longtail.com/the_long_tail/2008/06/excellent-hbr-p.html

I think one of the real benefits of long tail style sales outlets are that you can, as a content creator, really leverage the viral aspects of the search/community/etc. functions those sites have put in place to drive customers down the tail with their buying.

[Grassroots Gamemaster]

This perspective suffers from the typical closet megalomania that unless a product is a *top-seller* it's not worth making. (I.e. "go big or go home"!)

It's a homogenizing cancerous concept which assumes that the philosophical reason games (or anything else) are on this planet is to just be the biggest of all the big and crush the competition.

What I say to him is STFU! We need to make games because they're worth making. If they're good, people will buy them. And sometimes the ones that are hits will be unexpected. But for sure there's no way to make an unexpected hit if nobody will invest in stuff that doesn't look like yesterday's stuff already.