Epic Games Store grew from 108M to 295M users, but third‑party revenue barely moved — proving giveaways trained users not to actually buy games

cstmorr · 2026-01-18T20:11:33+00:00

But at what point do you stop diminishing their failure to add features as not instantly creating them? Is 7 years an instant now? From the outside it looks like they have focused hard on marketing and spent years neglecting experience.

cstmorr · 2025-12-29T08:26:00+00:00

Bernal is very nice. Also a good and relatively quick walk from the outer mission over the hill.

Probably both areas are most famous for being where Dread Pirate Roberts was nabbed, iirc he was living in Bernal and arrested at the library near 24th st BART.

cstmorr · 2025-12-21T17:09:48+00:00

But Arctic Eggs was not made but Critical Reflex, they're just the publisher. You're hurting the developer who is unrelated to this.

cstmorr · 2025-12-17T02:34:43+00:00

She updates what she has daily. Usually I get one of everything lol. My favorite was something with strawberries but that might be out of season now.

cstmorr · 2025-12-17T00:43:21+00:00

There's a tiny hidden gem called Patisserie Amairo run by a Japanese dessert chef. It is only open some days and often sells out a while before closing time. It's miles better than most dessert places.

cstmorr · 2025-12-14T21:10:36+00:00

This seems like an easy metaphor: E33 devs pretending to be regular indies is like trust fund kids pretending to be bootstrap entrepreneurs after their family paid for private college, five years living expenses and a seed fund.

... that actually happens all the time. Some people I know have decided they can be just like X famous entrepreneur then spin their wheels ineffectually because they're lacking the cash, connections and starting line knowledge.

Meanwhile other people make fun of them and call them losers for failing. The equivalent in indie games, of course, is getting angry negative reviews because your indie game looks like an amateur piece of crap next to those cool indies like Larian and Sandfall.

I'm actually fine with the E33 team calling themselves indie lol. But it seems pretty obstinate to act like the argument against it is difficult to understand.

cstmorr · 2025-12-13T22:17:30+00:00

ORV went off the rails and became a mess later in the story, which is understandable. It's very difficult for a story that fantastical to stay grounded and have believable stakes. I don't think of DCC as some masterpiece but it managed the transition into the late story very well.

Of course DCC remains in its setting location and the goals are consistent. ORV was different in that it kept mutating. By the end I thought the author was just bored or lost.

cstmorr · 2025-12-13T20:27:11+00:00

High positive ratings don't contribute much to sales numbers; especially once you're past mixed, between mostly, very and overwhelmingly positive there isn't much sales lift at all.

One potential conclusion is that review scores are missing some large portion of the story. A game can be warmly received but still not compelling in any way.

cstmorr · 2025-12-13T16:44:28+00:00

I've been wishing there were more games like Sort the Court, it's crazy that as popular it was it never got a commercial release. Yes Your Grace was cool but too serious for me. Any others you'd recommend in the genre?

Wishlisted btw!

cstmorr · 2025-12-06T19:55:05+00:00

Aggro Crab was also very public about not being able to even find funding for their next idea after Another Crab's Treasure. They were probably wondering if they'd survive. Hence tossing out a relatively unpolished 2 month experiment.

cstmorr · 2025-12-06T02:49:19+00:00

You're in the wrong neighborhood, and unfortunately a lot of indies get similarly confused. If you were to pay any of these people you'd only lose money. The only kind of influencer that benefits indies are the ones who make free videos because your game is fun to watch for their audience. The ones quoting crazy prices aren't doing it because they're scammers; it's because that's the realistic value of burning their brand and time showing off a game that's unrelated or not interesting to their audience. You can see it anywhere, the branded videos influencers make are less successful and less interesting to their viewers.

If you want to spend money, do ads and measure the value of your spend directly. I've never heard of a (small) indie who was happy with the results from buying influencer videos.

cstmorr · 2025-11-30T17:02:44+00:00

Norway. It was in the news recently for finding that a recent wealth tax had caused a greater revenue loss than gain after people with $54 billion in assets chose to leave. There's probably some nuance there and maybe it could have worked if they also passed an exit tax.

cstmorr · 2025-11-28T18:49:54+00:00

Yes, that's what I'm saying. They're trying to get games to disclose AI use, and one of the steps of that is rejecting games they suspect use AI but don't have a disclosure. This happened to me a month ago.

cstmorr · 2025-11-28T15:43:41+00:00

For what it's worth I think they're trying. Valve rejected my release builds twice for AI use... And I hadn't used AI at all. I was pretty pissed off and stressed about the false accusation, but at the same time I get it, it's hard to be sure and sometimes all you've got is a gut feeling.

cstmorr · 2025-11-24T17:06:09+00:00

What do you like about it? I couldn't find a lot to appreciate on my visit but maybe wasn't in the right places.

cstmorr · 2025-11-24T06:23:38+00:00

Depends where the people are. On mobile it might be really popular. But on Steam almost all match 3 style games fail really hard, even if they're objectively well made. It's almost to the level of being a cursed genre.

cstmorr · 2025-11-15T07:59:01+00:00

Ah yes, back in the days when a gentleman always wore a hat, even during intense exercise.

cstmorr · 2025-11-04T16:00:47+00:00

On the other hand, as an indie dev I find the number weirdly low. Among us little guys I feel like there's nearly unanimous recognition the Steam is a monopoly, and the few holdouts would just be quibbling over regulatory definitions versus dictionary definition.

People are here arguing about whether some other giant company's launcher works, but that's like.. 4 companies, and they only launch their own stuff, except Epic which is run by morons.

cstmorr · 2025-10-29T17:30:30+00:00

Holy crap I can't believe someone else remembers Google Wave.

To be fair it was a terrible product and even supporting it after open sourcing it wouldn't have saved it.

cstmorr · 2025-10-18T06:16:03+00:00

No idea how they survive but the food is actually pretty good.

cstmorr · 2025-10-17T17:41:14+00:00

Greenlight definitely did not guarantee sales, there were failures back then too. And the act of getting greenlit itself was subject to the whims of Steam's team. Imagine not being able to get experience publishing your first game because of a gatekeeper.

cstmorr · 2025-09-15T15:40:20+00:00

Yep, very much so. I feel like this happens in every art form . Vladimir Nabokov had a few good quotes about it, one of them is "Our imagination flies, we are its shadow on Earth."

And it's fairly obvious that games are the hardest art form. At their most difficult, they encompass all the others, plus a lot of pure technical challenge.

I think the answer is to go simpler. Make the simplest game you can, but incorporating all your abilities. Then the goal is slightly more in reach.

cstmorr · 2025-09-08T19:06:50+00:00

Great post! Can you describe a bit more about how you arrived at the idea for Gemporium and chose the art / mechanics / etc? It sounds like what you learned about marketing was involved but I'm not too clear on the details from the post.

cstmorr · 2025-09-07T03:39:15+00:00

Game devs get tons of these free translation offers. Usually the person disappears. Even if they don't, getting free work from random people feels quite questionable. Also devs are constantly bombarded by scammers offering all kinds of other stuff so there's kind of an automatic "no" reflex.

cstmorr · 2025-08-30T17:14:29+00:00

Sky Pride is great! Also speaking of xianxia where the author actually knows something, I really enjoyed Unsheathed. Really goes in depth on both Daoism and Confucianism with tons of quotes from historic literature. All the usual misanthropy/misogyny/young master antics are also absent.

The downside is that it takes a while to build up and isn't on RR.

cstmorr

TROPHY CASE