An Algorithm for Discovering "Hidden Gems"

So you've probably seen that Ars Technica article that has magically reverse-engineered every steam game's  gross (sales+free-key-redemption) numbers.

Everyone's talking about this graph:

The obvious first statement is "WOWS! Video games are a hit-driven business!!!" For what it's worth, our game Defender's Quest is probably located somewhere between 800-1200 on that graph, and we're doing just fine.

But what about the game at 2600? And what's going to happen when Steam totally opens the floodgates?

Every developer I know has a list of obscure indie games they know are great, but just can't get the exposure they deserve. Jay Barson talks about this phenomenon in his recent article The Best-Kept Secrets. (Incidentally, if you like CRPG's and haven't bought Frayed Knights yet, do yourself a favor and grab it)

Here's Jay (emphases mine):

A friend told me about an experiment in inequality and the “cultural” marketplace. Test audiences were exposed to new music, and invited to download and keep some songs. The songs had indicators of how much they’d already been downloaded. Some of the songs had an artificially inflated number. What they discovered is that the artificially inflated number helped the popularity of some songs within the controlled audience, but could not others.

In other words – some songs had hit potential and others did not. If a song had both hit potential and an apparent wave of popularity behind it, it could take off. A song that sucked rarely did well. Hit potential could not guarantee success, but it’s lack could guarantee the lack of success – or at least a large success. In other words, the distorted perception of popularity had some effect, but was not the sole contributor to the success or failure of the song.

Right now stores like Steam and the App store are dominated by "top selling/grossing/downloaded" charts, which all suffer from the same problem -- the charts are self-reinforcing and prone to freezing, thus encouraging shady behavior. You can mitigate this effect in various ways (such as sampling over a shorter time, as Steam seems to do), but the problem remains -- the games on top stay on top.

My twitter friends are constantly trying to personally give visibility for such "hidden gems" and I think that's admirable, and we should keep doing stuff like that. At the same time, I think we can supplement those efforts with some mathematical tools.

Here's the idea -- if the above experiment's results are applicable to video games, there might just be a way to build a "hidden gem" detector, given access to the right data. What we're looking for is some quantifiable way to find a game that people really seem to like, but that hasn't yet had a chance to be popular. The kind of game my twitter friends are talking about when they say, "RT! Man, <game X> is wonderful, such a shame no-one has heard of it."

Building a "Hidden Gem" detector

What we're looking for is games with high engagement stats but low overall popularity. The data Ars Technica has been working with is truly awesome, but for these purposes it's a bit thin -- all we've got is gross units owned by players (lumping together actual sales with steam key redemptions), and some play time stats which have some known reliability issues.

But Steam has access to better data than that. Steam knows exactly how many copies of each game have been sold as well as the number of concurrent players, all down to the hour, region, and platform. It also has overall playtime stats per player, though that might be less reliable. There's also conversion rates for games that have demos, achievement data, and more. And of course, there's also the recently-added user reviews.

In short, Steam itself has plenty of data, both private and public, to make a pretty good guess at overall player engagement for a particular title. For "traditional" games, a higher-than-average playtime is a good heuristic for engagement, and for short-form games like Dear Esther, some metric for "completed the experience," such as a specially marked achievement, could work. Or we could just follow Kongregate's example and simply go by user rating, as I suggested in a previous article. (I personally prefer something closer to the Tomatometer over anything like MetaCritic scores).

The key is you have to be careful not only with what you measure, but how you measure it. Give these two articles a quick read before proceeding. It'll just take a minute:

How not to sort by average rating
reddit's new comment sorting system 

Back already? Great.

As those articles detailed, the ranking system should measure something other than raw popularity. Otherwise, the first item to get close to the top gets seen more, and thus collects more (sales/upvotes/downloads) and the cycle continues. The ranking system should also automatically take into account uncertainty based on sample size.

If you're ranking based on an engagement stat like play-time, or by user rating, then getting to the top does not guarantee that a game will stay there. In fact, the influx of new eyeballs will more than likely kick the game down a few notches as it gets exposed to a wider audience. This way, only games with high engagement --regardless of popularity-- will be able to stay at the top of the charts for a long time, which is how it should be. The chart is self-correcting rather than self-reinforcing.


Quick example: imagine a single-player RPG with median playtime of 5-10 hours -- well above the average for Steam games, but with less than 2,000 sales. This should be easy to detect. Or one of those crazy avant-garde "experience" games, the kind you only play once but it's amazing. Say that game has 2 hours median playtime, but 90% of it's 3,000 or so players have gone all the way through. This should stand out, too.

We don't have to get super-detail-oriented with this. In a world where 37% of player's Steam games haven't even been loaded a single time, it should be easy to make some simple broad-strokes guesses and pick out games that make you say: "wowzers! A small niche of folks really love this thing."

Let's make a "hidden gems" list for those.


Limitations

The "hidden gem" detector isn't a silver bullet. It doesn't make the game of platform power go away, nor does it solve the structural, sociocultural and/or economic issues that favor the big boys. It also does nothing for games that aren't already on Steam (though Valve has given every indication they're going to let just about everybody in eventually). Here's a few other issues.

Beloved by Niche, Hated by Mainstream
If the "Hidden Gems" list is featured right on the steam front-page, then a lot of cool, weird stuff that's beloved by small fanbases will shoot to the top of the list. Immediately afterwards, there's a fair chance the mass market will cast its withering gaze upon it like the Eye of Sauron and mercilessly smack it down faster than you can say "Walking Simulator." So, perhaps hidden gem lists should be segregated into their natural niches, using steam tags, or an amazon/netflix-style recommendation engine?

On the other hand, you never know what seemingly crazy game idea will actually catch on if it's just given a chance with the mass market. This is exactly the kind of tool that could bring us the next Goat Simulator.

Different Strokes for Different Folks
As I mentioned above, you can't use a one-size-fits-all engagement heuristic to catch all the gems. "Did you finish it?" is much more relevant to judging overall engagement for Dear Esther or The Stanley Parable than it is for World of Warcraft or Dwarf Fortress. Since the whole point of this is to identify interesting things that would normally be passed over, special care will have to be taken with the various heuristics used. And what about things that are harder to measure like Proteus? I'm confident there are ways to detect people's interest in these things, but we'll have to be smart about it.

We Won't Find Everything
This method can't possibly find all the gems, nor should we expect it to. It's just another tool, and that's important to remember. It won't fix everything, but it could help make things a lot "less worse."


Gaming the Charts
Anytime you have a system where charts drive sales, it encourages people to game the charts. If it measures downloads, you drop your price to zero, cross-promote, and use your own money to inflate your stats. So I could easily imagine similar scams if we're measuring user playtime -- with proverbial goldfarmers idling steam games to inflate their client's chart positions. Safeguards could be put in for this -- it should be pretty easy to look at other metrics to detect if someone is "idlefarming" for chart position. Of course, cheating of any form is always an arms race, with the only final solution being to make it not worth the cheater's time and money to cheat in the first place. Which brings me to my next point.

Moving beyond Charts

By itself, I don't think another chart on the steam front page is going to make a huge difference -- being hand-picked for a feature still makes a world of difference and most Steam developers put their marketing efforts into securing that rather than trying to micro-manage the charts.

Valve has said their vision for Steam's future is that anyone can make a steam front page and curate it themselves. The algorithm I've described above could be used not just by automated charts, but by actual human curators. You wouldn't have to expose any sensitive data (like sales or playtime), just give curators the ability to look for these kinds of patterns with advanced search tools.

Right now, if I want to promote an obscure indie game, it has to already be on my radar. How cool would it be if I could just whip out my Hidden Gem Detector and go treasure hunting instead?

The Stegosaurus Tail: when "The Long Tail" grows spikes.

You may have heard of "The Long Tail." For games, it means your sales start off strong and quickly taper off.  This force drives the retail marketing cycle -- launch a game to extreme hype, sell it like crazy, then immediately abandon it and move on to the next thing.

The Long Tail

Chris Anderson's book, The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More notes that given enough time, the "long tail" (the yellow part of the graph) can reach or exceed the size of the initial spike (the green part).

Basically, if you reduce the cost of inventory and distribution, there's as much money to be made from selling an ocean of niche products by the drop as there is in selling big hits by the boatload. This strategy is at the heart of industry titans like Amazon, Netflix, and Steam.
Of course, that strategy is reserved for big content aggregators who make their money regardless of whether any specific product does well. But can individual developers take advantage of the long tail, too? Bennet Foddy thinks so: in his GDC Talk, Learning to QWOPerate, he talks about how he self-published many small games on his site and used them to cross-promote one another. Eventually he stacked up all the long tails and made sustainable advertising revenue.

The Stegosaurus Tail

 

It's hard for me to take advantage of Foddy's method because I don't make lots of small games one
after another -- it would take me years to build up a back catalog at the level of polish and scope I'm used to.  So for now all I've got is one commercial title - Defender's Quest. And if all Defender's Quest's got was a Long Tail, I'd be screwed. Instead, it grew spikes and became a Stegosaurus Tail.

That's a chart* of our lifetime daily sales revenue over nearly two years. The far left side of the curve resembles the "Long Tail" -- a large initial spike quickly tapering off. But even this spike is noisy - as noted in Defender's Quest: By the Numbers, part 1, sales initially spiked with press coverage, then again when our demo was featured on Kongregate and Newgrounds. We had a few more small spikes from our big, free, "Gold Edition" update, but nothing major until our launch on Steam and GOG -- which brings us to where where we were at in Defender's Quest: By the Numbers, part 2.

But after that, we had the Steam Linux Sale, various GOG promotions, and another huge surge when we launched our Steam Workshop support. Spike after spike, often several months apart.

*Parenthetical: why distort the stats?

In previous sales articles I gave detailed sales stats, including per-platform revenue breakdowns, but recent changes in the terms of service with some of our distribution partners forbid me from doing so again. The sales chart is thus intentionally fudged -- our real chart has the same overall shape but the exact daily sales are arbitrarily different.

The portal(s) said they changed the rules because they have to keep developers' sales data confidential. So, in theory we could publish detailed stats, but people on the internet are too good at math -- they can combine those stats with sales chart positions to estimate another developer's confidential figures, and portals are afraid to indirectly expose another developer's confidential sales stats. I *am* still allowed to publish total PC sales stats across all channels mixed together, but I'm choosing not to do so at this time.

Implications

I suspect most games on Steam and similar portals have stegosaurus-tail sales charts -- for instance, here's the sales chart for Garry's Mod:

But so what? How does this change the game?

Well, first of all...

Long-term support can actually pay off!

Under the Long Tail, the post-release sales strategy is to abandon your game. Give it just enough post-launch support while it's still selling strong, then move on to your next project.
We took a different approach. Instead of immediately moving on to Defender's Quest II we put a lot of time into bug-fixes, patches, and content updates. Our biggest patch, "Gold Edition," upgraded our art style added New Game+ mode, and lots more. This was a gamble, improving the game to catch Steam's attention, and fortunately, it paid off (this was before greenlight). From that point on we looked for every opportunity to turn a content update into an excuse for a partner to promote the game. Examples include the Steam Linux launch and our Steam Workshop sale - the latter being one of our largest spikes ever. We've also had a lot of success in getting promotions from GOG.com.
But before you go off and spend a lot of time and money on a content update, it's best to get your distribution partner to agree to a promotion ahead of time, in writing.
The next implication is...

Don't compete on price!

When Defender's Quest first launched, the full price was $7. When we launched the Gold Edition upgrade, we raised the price to $10, and finally settled at $15 after launching on Steam. However, the game's full price is essentially a fiction -- you can see from the chart (and our previous articles) that pretty much all the revenue comes during promotional periods when the game is on sale. The full price is therefore just how much room you're giving yourself to go down during promotions.
Accordingly, here's an interesting stat - while the full price has increased over time, the average price per purchase has remained about the same. All that's really changed is how deep we can make our discounts. In a perfect world I'd just keep the same medium price all the time, but that's just not how human psychology works.
Developers often worry that players will complain about a higher price, but it's important to remember those players can always trade money-dollars for time-dollars by waiting for a sale. (You can see this process play out in this thread on our steam forum).

But temporary discounts won't do much by themselves - you also need...

Promotion!

"Sell your game for less and make up for it in volume" says conventional wisdom, but this only works if you can actually count on that volume to actually show up and notice that your game's on sale. The persuasive power of the promotion drives the sale, not the mere fact that it's discounted. For instance, Democracy 3 was Positech's fastest-selling game ever, even though it released at full price without the customary launch discount. Promotion drove those sales, not pricing.

Ever heard of Monroe's Motivated Sequence? It's a rhetorical structure from Communication theory, and if you've ever watched an infomercial you'll recognize it: attention --> need --> satisfaction --> visualization --> call-to-action. In other words, basic salesmanship. Take it away, Rhett & Link:

Video game sales promotions, be they Steam Sales, GOG Sales, Humble Bundles, etc, loosely follow this structure. They get your attention, show off cool games you've been waiting to play, give you lots of visuals, info, demos, and a ticking clock that presses you to act now!

This is nothing new - department and grocery stores have been doing this since the late Cretaceous, and I'm surprised it's taken the games industry this long to evolve beyond the "launch at Full Price, then chuck it in the Bargain Bin" cycle I grew up with. Promotions give games a second wind.

I define a promotion as strong consumer attention combined with a strong call-to-action. It's not just any attention. For instance, new developers often think exposure from a great review will make them rich, but I can say from experience it won't. Some articles have given us modest sales spikes, sure, but just as often we've had glowing write-ups that didn't even move the needle.  And that's fine -- critical acclaim and financial success have never been joined at the hip, nor should they be. But if you're looking for raw sales, it's promotions you want. And the best promotions are front-page attention from a major distributor.

So, if you're looking to add spikes to your stegosaurus tail...

Get real friendly with your distributors!

Ideally, the relationship between developer and distributor is symbiotic -- the distributor gets a cut of your revenue, you get access to their audience, players get awesome games at great prices, and everybody wins -- ideally. This assumes that your distributor is benevolent, or as Daniel Cook would say, in the "Engage" phase of the Game of Platform Power (more on this later).

But even if your distributor is on the side of the angels, it's still easy to get lost in their roster of other developers. "The squeaky wheel get the grease," as the saying goes -- if you don't ask for a promotion, you won't get it, and the only one advocating for your game is you. We talk to our distributors every time we start working on a content update, and we check in weeks or months ahead of every seasonal sale to make sure they don't forget us. Also, we frequently volunteer whenever our distributors roll out a new feature or promotional campaign.
And as long as our interests align, I'm happy to do little favors here and there. For instance, I'm a big fan of GOG.com, so I've done several promos for them to help them reach out to other indie game developers. Another example is Kongregate, who promoted our game when we added an in-game incentive for anonymous users to sign up for Kongregate accounts. Now, I'm not advocating for being a corporate sell-out or an amoral shill ready to do every horrible thing in the book just to get revenues. I'm just saying that in ideal circumstances, your distributor relationship is a true partnership -- you help them, they help you, and everybody wins.

All that said, it's important to remain vigilant because even the nicest portal today could turn to the dark side tomorrow, or the "Extract Phase," as Dan C. would put it. It happened with Big Fish Games in the casual market when they slashed developer revenue share, it happened with Apple and Facebook, and it tends to happen with console generations once they start to mature. The thing to look out for is "Rent-Seeking Behavior." Now, as above-board and transparent as companies like Valve are, nobody knows the future. Gabe Newell could always get struck by lightning, and an evil hedge fund could seize control of Valve and clean house. Wills can be and often are flagrantly ignored if the estate is valuable enough. As Moxie Marlinspike would say, it's not about trust, it's about trust agility.
So those are a few ways the Stegosaurus Tail phenomenon changes the post-release game plan. But if you look closely at history, Steggy has been with us all along.

The Stegosaurus Tail's Legacy

Some game companies have already been "riding the dinosaur" for decades, most notably Nintendo. Back in the 90's when other publishers would routinely consign their back-catalogs to obscurity as soon as their games were off store shelves, Nintendo never stopped coming up with new ways to re-sell us classics like Mario, Zelda, and Metroid.
GOG.com has been doing the same thing with classic PC games for years -- taking old abandonware gems, polishing them up, and giving them a new lease on life. Major publishers have since joined in and even Steam has joined the party, most notably with System Shock 2.
What's really cool, though, is Steggy's power to re-write history. Double Fine's Psychonauts was a critical classic but a financial flop, until it was re-released on PC many years later and finally got its chance to shine in the light of Steam Sales and Humble Bundles.
What works for the big boys can also work for us small developers -- if you're able to release multiple games, you can use them to drive interest in one another, giving your back catalog a kick every time you come out with something new. For instance, Zeboyd games sells Breath of Death VII and Cthulhu Saves the World as a double-pack, and included these and other games of theirs as backer rewards for Cosmic Star Heroine's Kickstarter campaign.

We've been doing the same thing -- Defender's Quest 1 now comes free with every pre-order of Defender's Quest 2, and we've updated the original game with a free in-game item for those who visit the Defender's Quest 2 page. Since we added that feature, not only do DefQ2 preorders closely track DefQ1 sales, daily DefQ2 preorder revenue exceeds daily DefQ1 sales revenue.

We still have a few tricks up our sleeve to add a few final spikes to our tail. When we first launched, nearly all of our direct revenue was driven by referral traffic from our web demo hosted on Kongregate and Newgrounds, so we're in touch with both of those sites about future promotions. Also, we'll soon be launching a Japanese translation as part of our new partnership with Playism, distributors of awesome Japanese indie games like La-Mulana and One-Way Heroics, and a German translation should go out any day now.

The Uncertain Future

There's some downside to maintaining a Stegosaurus Tail -- it's hard, boring, work. What I love doing best is making games, and although every new spike I successfully chase down feeds my family and keeps my career afloat, it also distracts me from pouring my soul into my next project. After over a year of nurturing her, Steggy's starting to wear me out.

And before I close, I want to note that no single strategy works for everyone, nor does it work forever. Much has changed since Defender's Quest first launched -- back then, Steam was hard to get into, but easy to get noticed on. Today, with indie games literally being greenlit by the hundreds, it looks like the future will be the reverse. Maybe Steam will follow my predictions and solve discoverability in a way that's both sane and equitable, but that's far from certain. Furthermore, the long-term effects of Steam-style promotions is unknown. With players building up huge backlogs, will they keep buying new games like they used to?

With the ground shifting underneath us, and amidst all this talk of an "Indie Bubble," I think it's best to double down on the fundamentals -- sell direct, know your audience, make sure they know you, diversify your sales channels, and if you've got a back catalog, milk it for all it's worth.
The last lesson I've learned is this -- a great game is not disposable. Just like a little kid watching Star Wars for the first time, someone out there is waiting for your awesome game to captivate them, they just don't know it yet.

The Holy Grail of Digital Distribution

Cross-posted on Gamasutra. Twitter handle: @larsiusprime

The challenge of being an independent developer is that so much of your game's success is out of your control. There's no Department of Internet Money where you can present your neatly wrapped Cool New Thing and be justly rewarded with crisp thousand-dollar bills.

Instead, you can either self-publish or work with one of the many third party stores.  Either way, you're still going to have to do a lot of marketing work yourself - and even if you get onto a major platform like Steam, success isn't guaranteed.

Perhaps one glorious day, an online store will descend from the Heavens that lets anyone submit a game, immediately approves it, presents it to an enormous audience, and lets the game succeed or fail on its merits alone.  Brother will no longer fight against and brother, the lion will lay down with the lamb, and a bright new age of meritocracy will shine down upon us all.  Also chocolate ponies.  Amen.

Until that magical day comes (if it ever does), marketing, networking and all those other "businessy" skills will be just as important to a developer's success as the quality of her game.  Furthermore, the perception that you have to sit at the same lunch table as the Indie "in-crowd" to succeed will persist (regardless of whether that perception is true).

Will this glorious day ever arrive? I wouldn't count on it.  My advice to any would-be developers is to stop asking for permission to succeed.  Don't wait for someone to come along and fulfill your dreams or make you the next Cinderella stories - make games, share them with the world, learn some business stuff, and do your best to make it work.

But you know what? It's nice to dream. What if this magical store really is possible after all? I'll give you a hint: there's already something out there that's not too far from the dream, and chances are you've already used it.

What We Want

First, let's talk about what we're looking for.  This magical dream store must:

1. Have a low barrier to entry
2. Reward merit with financial success
3. Connect developers to a large audience

Sounds great! However, these goals might not be compatible. Let's look at today's landscape.

Steam

Curated stores like Steam have a small number of hand-picked, high quality titles that are lavished with individual attention and promotion.  This is beneficial for both developer and customer - customers get great games, affordable prices, and excellent service, while developers get a huge audience both ready and willing to pay for their games.

The downside, of course, is that everyone wants to get onto Steam and there's simply not room for them all.  Even if Steam could reliably sift through their mountain of submissions, separating the undiscovered gems from the thousands of Minesweeper clones, there still wouldn't be room for all the great games that want to get in.  Steam is pretty close to our magic dream store in many aspects, except for the fact that you have a snowball's chance in hell of actually getting on there.

The App Store

On the other end of the spectrum, you have services like the App Store, which accept just about anyone who applies.  Not surprisingly, the App Store is flooded with games. Even worse, Apple shows no interest in fixing the store's fundamentally broken discovery channels. This forces developers to compete for slots on the "top app" charts, and leaves customers poking around in the dark, passing over countless games they would have loved.

Among other problems, the store is plagued by "race to the bottom" pricing. The only reliable path to success is to get on the charts, the most important of which are "most downloaded" and "most sold." Your game can't be "most downloaded" unless it's free, and your game can't be "most sold" unless it's 99 cents. There's no "most revenue" chart, so there's no chance of selling half as many units at three times the price and still staying on top. (Apparently there actually is a "highest grossing" chart, at least on iTunes. My mistake)

 This design pushes developers towards the free-to-play business model.  Free-to-play is fine and good, but it stinks that the store intentionally excludes a wider range of pricing models (The situation is somewhat better on the iPad, which can actually support games at various different price points).

There's also no way to sort the games by user rating, and search functionality is awful.  Given Apple's obsessive attention to design, there's every reason to believe these decisions are intentional.  Apple treats games like commodities, which drives developers to compete for visibility, which in turn drives down prices, which provides customers with a pile of affordable, disposable apps.  Every once in a while, Apple hand-picks a new "featured App" to be the next Cinderella Story, keeping hope alive for the next wave of developers.

The App Store falls far short of our magical ideal - it's easy to get onto the store, but success has a lot more to do with chance than merit, and game design choices are limited by Apple's preferred business models. Those that succeed despite these challenges usually have a focused marketing effort outside of the App Store itself.

A Different Way

It seems like there's some fundamental trade-offs at work here.  A strongly curated store like Steam or Xbox Live Arcade can be good for both customers or developers, but the bigger the store's audience, the harder it is to get accepted.  On the other hand, open stores like the App Store or Android Market will take just about anybody, but it's up to the developer (or the winds of fate) to actually reach that store's audience.

Couldn't there be some store that lets pretty much anyone submit a game, without drowning customers in a river of shovelware, or leaving developers up a creek without a paddle?

I think there is.

It's called Kongregate.

Full disclosure:  The lead designer of Defender's Quest, Anthony Pecorella, also works for Kongregate.  We started working together when he was looking for a programmer, and found a popular game on Kong that I had written.  

Now, as I said before, the magical store from the heavens doesn't exist yet.  Kongregate falls a bit short of the ideal, but it's leading the way.

What is Kongregate?

Kongregate is one of many free flash game portals on the internet.  Flash developers (like me) make games, and then distribute them to the public through these portals - the biggest ones being Kongregate, Newgrounds, and Armor Games.

Most portals run ads to make money, some of which they share with developers.  A few portals support games with microtransactions, which lets developers sell virtual goods with a small cut going to the portal.  Developers can also make money from sponsorship deals, where a portal pays a flat fee to brand a game with their logo.  Kongregate has the best developer support in the business - they were the first site that I know of to share ad revenue, they have the best microtransaction system, and their support staff is both friendly and helpful.

Even so, there's not much to see here.  Flash portals have been around a long time and most of the scene's developers aren't rolling in dough.  Here's what makes Kongregate different.

Discovery

Kongregate has, hands down, some of the best discovery in the business.  If you create a game that Kong's audience will enjoy, it will succeed, because the players that love it will find it almost as soon as it's uploaded.  This is not the case on the App Store - there are lots of iOS games that the audience would love, but will never find.

Kongregate's excellent discovery consists of a simple and powerful user rating system, excellent search functionality, lots of categories, and an easy-to-navigate website.  In stark contrast to the app store, the user rating is the primary way in which games are sorted and displayed to the player.  These ratings come directly from players, who can only vote once each, but can change their vote at any time.  By tying visibility chiefly to "how much players like this game" rather than any other metric, Kongregate gives each game the best possible chance of succeeding on its own merits.

This makes many undiscovered gems rise to the surface that any curated platform would dismiss.  A good example is Shopping Cart Hero, which can only be described as "ugly as sin," but has nevertheless earned a loyal fan base and over five million plays on Kongregate alone.

(To be perfectly fair, Newgrounds created an excellent discovery engine first. Kongregate built on the idea and laser-focused it on games.)

Sifting out the Crap

Since Kongregate will accept pretty much anything, a whole lot of crap gets uploaded to the system.  This includes outright broken games, plagiarized games, and semi-interactive slideshows of pornography or disturbing images.  The worst of these are pre-screened by site admins, and anything that doesn't violate the terms of service goes into a holding pen with minor visibility.  These games are held off of the main site while they are "under judgment" until they get enough user ratings for an initial score.  In this way, Kongregate itself imposes as little value judgment on submissions as possible.

As of this writing, Kongregate boasts "57,941 free games!"  About 1% of those have a score greater than 4.0 stars, and only 14% have a score above 3.0.  All of the games on the front page are among these high-scorers, and the site keeps things fresh by with weekly and monthly categories for top-rated new material.

The most important part of this procedure is that it is not  arbitrary.  Subjective taste is still involved, to be sure, and it doesn't mean some "good" game won't get passed over - it just means that the audience itself is the final arbiter of what's good or bad, not an accident of the platform's design, or the whim of a curator individually picking the winners and losers.

That said, Kongregate does give personal, curated attention to select titles by featuring them on the front page, and giving them "badges" for players to earn (when a game gets badges, it's swarmed with players).  Unlike the "featured" games on Steam or iOS, however, there's a degree of objectivity to these selections - featured games must meet a minimum rating score to qualify, and there's usually few enough of these that Kongregate can just pick the top three or four out of the latest batch of games.

Finally, Kongregate has started experimenting with a Netflix-style recommendation engine, where it uses your rating information to show you other games you might like, offsetting the mass-appeal bias of the global user rating.

Money

Kongregate has a huge audience, provides a great service to their players, and a top-notch discovery system. What more could you want?

Well, the one thing holding Kongregate back from being the store to end all stores is that... it isn't a store :)

Most of the games are free, and they've only recently begun experimenting with microtransactions. Furthermore, their focus is browser-based games, rather than downloadable titles or stand-alone apps. They have, however, expanded well beyond flash games, and now support Unity, Java, and HTML5.

Kongregate has been particularly successful with free-to-play flash MMO's, such as Spiral Knights and Realm of the Mad God.  The more traditional format that we see on Steam, giving away a free demo to sell a premium game - has only been used in a few Kongregate games so far. Successful examples include our own game, Defender's Quest, as well as the strategy fan-favorite Creeper World. While Defender's Quest did well with this model, we took a hit to our review score because some players didn't like the fact that it was a demo. Creeper World, on the other hand, managed to drives sales and avoid any backlash to their business model.

As these experiences attest, there's potential here, regardless of whether your business model is traditional or free-to-play. Given that Kongregate's parent company, GameStop, also owns the more traditional digital distribution platform Impulse (a Steam Competitor), I can see some potential synergy.

Summing Up

My magical meritocratic game store hasn't arrived yet, and it might not ever, but I think there's hope.

Today's stores each have their pros and cons - Steam is awesome but inaccessible, whereas iOS is open, but crowded and arbitrary.  Kongregate comes the closest by accepting everyone, and then dutifully sorting the wheat from the chaff and directing players to the games they'll love. The only missing piece - and it's a big piece - is turning it into an actual store.

Who knows what Kongregate will do - I have no idea if this business move would actually be good for them (although it would certainly be good for me!).  Furthermore, there's no reason someone else couldn't build the magic dream store, building on Kongregate's model just as Kongregate built on Newgrounds'.

There are a few "indie" alternatives to Steam like Indievania that are taking steps in this direction, but are still relatively small.  Kongregate's main advantage is that it already has a huge audience.

Regardless of who actually does it, however, the outlines of the blueprint have been drawn. There's still a lot of work to be done, but I don't think the dream is impossible anymore. Someday, someone might make an online game store that lets anyone succeed if their game is good enough.

A man can dream, right?

-Lars out

P.S.
Kongregate: if you're reading this, feel free to use these ideas. In exchange, please send one (1) billion of your Earth Dollars to my orbital battle-station, c/o the Department of Internet Money.

P.P.S.
Newgrounds: forget Kongregate! I always loved you best. Please send me a thousand squadrons of tanks, piloted by your witty and insightful Tank Men(TM). With them we will conquer the world and remake it in our glorious image.