Do you have the answer yet? In reviews? Sales? Dollars? Actually it doesn’t matter what units you chose. Because to a first approximation they’re all the same. • Zero reviews • Zero comments on announcements of the game launching • One curator, who has depressingly enough not even played the game • Two comments in the entire forum section Things have been asymptotically approaching zero. Now we’ve arrived. We’ve arrived at the worst it can get because you can’t sell less than zero. An experienced game designer with multiple shipped titles and a moderately sized following shouting into the void and getting no response whatsoever.
Steam's dominating position in digital game distribution means that saturation is felt as inflation, all tucked into the folds of its own internal attention economy. The currency -- the games -- can be devalued at will. Privately-owned, Valve/Steam could eat a recession or even a collapse of its own internal market and not skip a beat. Products representing years of labor (or, more likely, mere hours of it) all take on the same ephemeral, vaporous quality, disappearing into the void as easily as tweets.
