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this is significant is that it costs money to make and release a game, even with AI at least a few hundred dollars. Zero reviews almost guarantees it made no money. A handful of reviews is still generally less than $500 revenue. Are people willing to lose money on these slop games forever?

It's definitely not the case that more reviews = a better or more serious game. But it is significant that the number of games that made significant money have grown a reasonable amount yoy and the $0 revenue games have exploded in number. Two groups that are playing completely different games here

I think if I were valve I would start raising the price to submit a game to steam, maybe start with $300 instead of $100. Squeeze out the people trying to flip 100 games for $100 profit each.

My assumption is they are treating it like an expensive lottery ticket. Shovel out a dozen "cozy life sim" slop games a year and all it takes is one to go viral on some weird niche corner of gamer tik tok or whatever and all of the sudden that game has made back its investment 1000x

It doesn't have to be good, it just has to have a compelling enough trailer to convince a critical mass of people to buy it and push it into the charts. Even if 50% of the playerbase refunds it, enough people won't bother and they'll have made orders of magnitude more than they invested.

I think that's what they hope will happen but it doesn't really seem like that works now, much less a year from now when the novelty of this stuff has worn off.