The mode of distribution is similar, yes. However, the cost and effort of entry is different, unless writing games is infinitely easier than I think it is. A person with almost no skill can produce a Kindle book that downloads, opens, and allows you to read its pages. I think that producing a game that launches and runs for even a minute or two is a whole lot more work. Also, there are far, far more books than games. (Actually, I suppose this isn't "also", it's a closely related fact. More effort per product means fewer products.) A hurried Google tells me that roughly sixty thousand video games have been produced since 1950. I consider it highly likely that that many self-published books are created every two or three months. (A very hurried Google indicates that 700,000 were published in 2015, though I'm open to correction.) That means that the review/quality problem is of a very different scale. Since I believe that the review/quality/huge-sea-of-junk problem is the primary problem of self publishing, the fact that games are very different with regard to that problem means that they are very different.
Not so much any more. You can download a game engine, buy a few objects to use with it, and hook it all together into a basic game pretty quickly. There are a lot of games like that on Steam, particularly VR games someone put together in a weekend. A good game that will keep you occupied for weeks or months, yeah, that's a lot of work.
Also, the discussion of whether traditional publishers are irrelevant seems to be focused on whether authors need them to get their words out there. But a market is not defined solely by the producers; without consumers there is no market. As long as readers need traditional publishers in order to feel any assurance that the product that they buy will be of decent quality, traditional publishers will be necessary for readers and for authors who want readers. Yes, there are exceptions (go ahead, sing "The Martian" at me), but exceptions don't define the market. If and when the quality-evaluation problem is solved, self publishing may fundamentally change.
So that raises the quality-evaluation question: Does Steam, or does someone, have a decent review capability for games?
I think you're underestimating the amount of people where the bold bit above applies. My sample is small - I don't actively move in those circles, I just know a few people trying to make a go at it. But none of them want to spam dinky $1.99 games, they've got a labour of love they're building and want to sell. The most successful one I know has made about $15k gross from 2 solid years of work, and that just doesn't seem like a great return to me. I mean, I'm not saying it can't be successfully approached as a business - you and Chicken both make a good point that the barrier to entry is rather higher, so there's a better signal-to-noise ratio - but if the ones I know are anything to go by, the people doing that don't make up the majority of people trying to make money off Steam games. ETA: Check me out, 1000 posts. Only took me 10 years
You're right that making a game has more requirements than writing a book. When you write a book, you just have to write. When you're making a game, however, you need art assets, music assets, you must program the game, you must format it correctly so it works when resized, you must debug, etc. There's a lot more steps to a game than to a novel. However you also have to look at what gets published as an e-book versus what is released as a video game. You're making a slightly unfair comparison. Thousands upon thousands of e-books are basically just some dude writing an article or a brief essay about something and then throwing it up on Amazon for 99 cents. If you count that kind of stuff, then it's only fair to count iPhone and mobile device games, of which there are hundreds published every single day. A simple shovelware iPhone game is a much fairer comparison to the loads and loads "look at my youtube comment I published on amazon rofl" e-book submissions. But still. We're not comparing the volume of things created or the review processes they go through or anything like that. That doesn't matter: it's all beside the point. The point is that you can publish your book and publish your game on the internet and sell them yourself with no need for an external company buying rights from you and producing physical copies of your creation.
This is a big topic on its own, but basically Steam doesn't have much of a screening or review process for its platform. In the old days, it had none at all: you just submitted your game and Steam themselves decided if it'd be put up for sale on their platform or not. Then they introduced "Community Greenlighting" for awhile, where the people on Steam themselves voted on whether or not submitted products would be greenlit for sale. Now it's just a process of paying Steam 100 bucks and your product is added to Steam.
Our first game, Pixel Star, took a little less than a year to develop and made roughly around the amount your friend made (My partner doesn't like me disclosing stuff because Steam doesn't want you doing it, so I won't say too much). The thing about Steam is that they guarantee your product page will get seen at least 1 million times, then promote the product further depending on how many copies it sold during this '1 million hits' phase. For this reason, generally your game is going to make almost all of its money within the first few months of release and then after that you'll make basically peanuts off of it outside of sales or if you put it in bundles. The reason people make 1.99 dinky games is because it's very profitable to create simple 'good enough' games and then put them up on Steam. They get bought because they're cheap (people want to buy Steam games to get Steam levels and trading cards and crap like that). So people'll turn on that "show me games less than 1.99" filter and will go to town, buying up all the new releases for Steam levels.
That's your point. It's not remotely my point. And one similarity between books and games does not make them exactly the same thing.
The similarity is that they're both products you don't need a physical publisher for anymore. Are you arguing this point?
Sure, I get the reasoning behind it. So do the devs I know, they just actively don't want to use that model because they hate money. They don't want to make money coding games so much as make money coding their game - much like most people self-publishing don't want to make money writing, they want to make money writing their story. And that's rather harder.
It is rather harder, yes. For a stint I was writing porn stories on commission and while the money was decent (for what it was) and while my girlfriend harasses me daily to "just write some smutty e-books", I'd rather focus my efforts on writing the story I want to tell and not the ones that are easy to write and easy(ier) to sell. My indie team and I went through this kind of problem with one of our projects we were working on. It was a "do it for the money" project so we could make the cash to fund our actual dream project. In the end, though, our lack of true devotion to the concept made us all lose interest/focus in it and it ended up canned. It's no fun to do something 'for the money', because all you do is think about "man I wish I was putting effort into that thing I ACTUALLY want to do".
Now you say they're similar. Yes. They have that one similarity. You said: They are clearly not the same thing, much less exactly the same thing. Your assertion requires clarification.
You're taking that quote out of context, lol. In my post, I was asserting they were exactly the same thing as products that no longer needed a physical publisher.
Except for when you actually want or need a physical copy. Oddly enough some people don't like e-books, find them inconvenient, or impossible to use under certain conditions. That's why print books still exist. Bookstores and libraries still exist and there is a market out there things that are physically published, that's one reason among many as to why publishing houses still exist.
Ever since 2010, e-book sales have been overtaking physical books up until only a couple of years ago, where e-book sales have fallen very slightly (though they still out match sales of physical books). If you ever want or need a physical copy, it's likely that in the future most books will be self-published as an e-book first, and if your book performs well, publishing houses will print it into an actual book. We're at a turning point in history when it comes to no longer requiring publishers to produce real copies of your product, because the internet and electronic devices allow you to publish them yourself. I never said publishing houses were going to die for good (in fact, I explicitly said the exact opposite within my posts). Please don't put words in my mouth or twist my argument around, it's not helpful to anyone.
You mean like the Nazis overtook Europe until everyone realized how horrible they were? You're right, you don't physically have to print your book, some people have profitable careers that don't, but it's a huge market that you'd be a fool to turn down on nothing other than futuristic principles. And personally I see the trend swinging back the other way, more to physical media if only because the Earth simply doesn't have the resources to support the electronics boon we have for much longer and printed books are, weirdly enough, more environmentally friendly and less resource heavy than a tablet or e-reader.
You didn't actually give your quote appreciable context. Next time, consider doing so. Otherwise, people might think that you mean what you say.
Do you have a source to the "overtaking physical books" idea? My understanding is that e-books were growing faster than print sales were, but I'd classify that more as "catching up" rather than "overtaking". Last data I saw suggested that there were still significantly fewer e-books being sold than print books. Do you have different data?
Literally fucking what. It's not about no one printing physical books anymore, it's publishing houses losing the power they have over writers and writers, in turn, gaining more power for themselves. If a writer is able to create a good product and is able to market it well, then they don't need a publishing house. They can sell their product as an e-book and then turn around and have the ball on their side of the court when it comes time to negotiating physical copies with a publishing house. That's different than ever before in the world of books. Edit: Also, your claim that books are more environmentally friendly than e-readers is a bit dubious. Do you have any articles or data to support that?
I absolutely gave my quote appreciable context? What are you talking about? Here's the full original quote you cherry picked your isolated and out of context quip from: I state very clearly that I'm talking about them being the same product in terms of no longer needing physical copies created in order to sell and disperse them. Would you like to try explaining how I lack context?
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/aug/06/amazon-kindle-ebook-sales-overtake-print This is just from Amazon (In terms of the full market, e-books only make up like 20% of the market- but that number will shrink as more people start using e-readers.)
So... that's just for Amazon, and just for the UK. Do you have anything for the whole book market, and for the rest of the world?
Except that other thing happened, you know, the opposite of what you just said. It's so easy to publish books that literally (with barely any hyperbole) anyone and their dog is doing it. Instead of giving power to authors, it's drowned them in a muddling mass of mediocrity and publishing houses are almost a lifeline to authors trying to get their head above water. The same overall demand for books per capita hasn't really changes over the years, but the supply has absolutely skyrocketed to the point that people would rather go to a publisher and buy something they know will be alright, if not enjoyable, rather than take the time to wade through hundreds of really bad books trying to find one that might be great.
