PopCap got going by being largely inspired by older games and bringing their good ideas to new audiences hungry for content. Especially with someone who has experience and is motivated. I mean just an extra $50 to $200 a month would help a bunch. It’s not easy, especially for highly niche / experimental games for developers just starting out who have no way of sending people to the platform. That will give you an idea of how well the developer made the game for market, and promoted it enough to teach Steam that it was worth promoting. Look up some of the games you remember not selling on and see how many other game pages that game is on. So if your game does not align with their core demographics in some way, it will be demoted.
But Steam is also ruthless - it only promotes what sells. Steam is important because it still has the potential to sell many copies. There have been very many games released not only on PC but Mobile too that are well made, highly polished, but also games that no one asked for, games without a real market. I remember watching several game devs go under as they could not get any exposure on steam
And of course you need to be able to reach audiences, you need to do the marketing work yourself. If you really want to make money you need to look at what people are actually buying and learn from that. I do believe that the “midcore leaning casual” audience that PopCap targeted is underserved but it’s also not the biggest audience out there. But at the same time, most of the other portals are dead. GameHouse for example is one that still has some life blood in it. There are other portals too which you should consider if you want to focus on the casual niche. There is money on the table there for you if you have a good game for their audience. They have nowhere near the traffic they used to have, it takes far fewer sales to reach the top 10 than it used to. Don’t think that selling on a site like BFG will solve the marketing problems. You can still make some money… but you can make more selling direct on Steam (although there are always exceptions, some games still do really well on BFG and can’t sell at all on Steam).
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