Chapter Six - The Platform Eats Itself

CHAPTER SIX

The Platform Eats Itself

THERE WAS A time when getting on Steam was a badge of honor.

You had to earn it. You had to be good. Steam was a curated space — a place where real developers went to launch real games to real audiences.

That era is dead.

Steam got too big.
Too fast.
Too hungry.

It opened the gates to indies. That was good. More voices, more games, more risk-taking. But then it stopped filtering. Stopped curating. Stopped saying no.

Steam let everything in.

First came the flood of Unity clones. Then the asset flips — games cobbled together in 48 hours from store-bought models and barely functional scripts. Then the shovelware: 99-cent clickers, broken simulators, fake trading card factories designed to exploit Steam’s economy.

At one point, more games were released in a single year than in the entire previous decade combined.
The signal drowned in noise.

Discoverability collapsed.

Good games vanished in the chaos.
Bad games rigged the system.

Bots upvoted trash. Devs scammed reviews. Fake games farmed trading cards for resale. Steam’s own recommendation engine couldn’t keep up — it became a slot machine.

For every Hollow Knight, there were a hundred Zombeavers Simulator 2: Apocalypse Edition.
For every Celeste, a dozen naked clicker games with stolen anime art and broken English menus.

Gamers called it the “Indiepocalypse.”

Valve responded… by doing almost nothing.

They didn’t want to be the gatekeepers. They didn’t want lawsuits. They didn’t want accountability. So they let the algorithm run the asylum — a libertarian dream turned storefront nightmare.

They killed Steam Greenlight, replaced it with Steam Direct, and charged a $100 entry fee. That was it. A hundred bucks and your game goes live.

No standards.
No vetting.
No spine.

The platform ate itself.
Too big to curate, too profitable to care.

Steam didn’t just become the Walmart of gaming.
It became Wish.com for video games.

And through it all?
The sales kept coming.
The backlogs kept growing.
And the empire kept expanding.