Erik Peterson Says Showing Your Game On Steam Shouldn’t Be Pay To Win

Erik Peterson, head of Business Development at Valve said that developers aren’t allowed to buy the spotlight on Steam.

In a talk today, he explained that Steam’s featured page was instead about making sure good games made their way to the top of the Featured list on Steam.

Instead, games would find their audiences through other features, like Steam Next Fest or the various themed events like Genre events and publisher weekends.

To ensure Steam’s commitment to organic discovery, he said the platform doesn’t take any kind of money to boost games to the top of the feature list.

“It’s not Pay-to-Win”, he explains.

Instead, Erik talked about how not offering boosted visibility was a way to level the playing field and not rely on money or “secret handshakes” to find success.

“We react to player interest”, he says.

Erik also highlighted several other points about Steam, such as the language breakdown  for users.

According to him, Simplified Chinese is the second-most used language on Steam, with 26% of the userbase preferring the option- nearly three times that of the third-most popular Russian option.

Similarly, he also brought up Steam’s recent decision to support Bahasa Indonesia as well.

“There are over one thousand games with Indonesian language support, we think that’s cool”, he says.

Additionally, Erik Peterson highlighted the importance of Early Access on Steam, saying that 30% of featured games on Steam would be titles either entering or leaving Early Access.

“It’s a testament to the concept of a game that’s in development that 30% of the top releases are entering or leaving Early Access”, he says.

Finally, he also gave the audience a peek at an upcoming feature for Steam- letting developers show if the game has support for the Dualshock or Dualsense controllers specifically, with a little visual icon representing either controller.

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