A Necessary Evil: Creative and Commercial Tensions in Australian Game Development

In Australia, the professional video game industry overwhelmingly consists of smaller game developers (Keogh 2021). Games created by developers are frequently released and sold on commercial game platforms such as Steam, allowing for the possibility of generating revenue. When utilizing the Steam platform there is a relatively low barrier of entry into the market, with 34 games per-day released in 2022 (Kontus 2022). Therefore, to stand out in a crowded marketplace and reach an audience, developers must consider Steam’s platform specific commercial factors. To do so, they may engage in marketing activities such as promotion through social media (Clinnick 2017; Kerr 2017; Zackariasson & Dymek 2017), and within the Steam platform itself, via developer-facing analytics and other tools including forums and embedded social-media capabilities. Many of these tools allow for consumer engagement and input. One such example are Tags. On Steam, Tags allow developers and consumers to influence how a game may surface on the platform and to whom. However, tags can be manipulated by consumers in bad faith (Muscat 2018, 65), requiring developers to spend additional time and resources monitoring how their games are perceived and engaged within the Steam ecosystem. Despite the high level of involvement required to make a game available on a commercial platform, and pressures to commodify a game so that it meets consumer expectations, many small Australian developers do not see themselves as a business, and largely focus on production (Keogh 2021).