Hytale has incredible publicity for an indie release and caters to a target group that’s used to a separate launcher. Not comparable to the usual release.
Notably, almost none of those are indie games, and almost any indie game that you did list came out in the 2000s like Roblox, before Steam was the behemoth it is today. Half of them are games by the same sets of AAA studios like Epic Games, Blizzard, and MiHoYo, and most Blizzard games have an entire franchise of games older than Steam itself to piggyback off of. Speaking of, anything by Blizzard isn’t even true… their most recent games like Diablo IV and Overwatch 2 are both on Steam. Tarkov is also on Steam now, but I’ll admit I’m splitting hairs here since it spent nearly a decade off of it. Though the fact that it released on Steam with its 1.0 update does say something.
So I really don’t think any of those games aside from debatably Tarkov shows that the average modern indie dev can be successful outside of Steam.
looks at Hytale doing quite well without even touching Steam
Hytale has incredible publicity for an indie release and caters to a target group that’s used to a separate launcher. Not comparable to the usual release.
Got any other modern examples than just the one game that had a massive following for the last 7 years of development?
Anything by Blizzard, Escape from Tarkov, Minecraft, Roblox, Valorant/LoL/TFT, Genshin Impact/HSR, Fortnite and more.
Notably, almost none of those are indie games, and almost any indie game that you did list came out in the 2000s like Roblox, before Steam was the behemoth it is today. Half of them are games by the same sets of AAA studios like Epic Games, Blizzard, and MiHoYo, and most Blizzard games have an entire franchise of games older than Steam itself to piggyback off of. Speaking of, anything by Blizzard isn’t even true… their most recent games like Diablo IV and Overwatch 2 are both on Steam. Tarkov is also on Steam now, but I’ll admit I’m splitting hairs here since it spent nearly a decade off of it. Though the fact that it released on Steam with its 1.0 update does say something.
So I really don’t think any of those games aside from debatably Tarkov shows that the average modern indie dev can be successful outside of Steam.
Star Citizen I guess. If by “well” it is meant “making lots of money”
But yeah it’s not realistic at all for 99+% of devs/games