Why steam games are the new dime store novels?

Recently I’ve developed a fascination with old pulp fiction books, not just because of the hilariously exaggerated covers and the ridiculous storylines, but also how their cost made them available to everyone. Don’t get me wrong, the majority of them were written to entertain people in an era before TV and weren’t designed to stand the test of time, but without them we wouldn’t have such excellent writing as Tarzan, and the HP Lovecraft collection. At their core, dime store novels were designed to be short and exciting, using the cheap wood pulp to make affordable books and provide a boom in the creative industries of the era. However despite the rise and fall of the pulp literature industry I believe there is still a market for this kind of fiction. Short, snappy stories for the times when we don’t want to invest a month into binging our favourites, and just like everything else in this world, the future of this industry is online.

My current favourite source of excellent short content is the internet, with Titles such as “Black Mirror,” and “Stranger things” proving that exciting short narratives still have a place in the world after the rise of the 24 episode mega-series. These pieces of media can provide both a quick shot of entertainment and an intelligent conversation afterwards, and for every Black mirror that took off there are three lesser known series hidden in the back of the internet waiting for you to discover. Unfortunately shorter projects from streaming services like Netflix are few and far between, with the majority of popular shows such as Game of Thrones and orange is the new black spanning over 24 episodes per season.

Luckily in the race to make quick and affordable independent media, there is someone better than any other industry. I am of course talking about Steam games. Indie games on the platform “Steam” are infamous for being a wild west of variation, from games that sparked a new genre into the world such as Five nights at Freddy’s and the Stanley Parable, to games that make you question why people would spend hours of their life developing such tripe (*cough cough* goat simulator *cough cough.) The ability for anyone to post encourages a Youtube-like community and its anonymity allows for the media to be judged blind causing a true variety of available content ranging from the excellent to the downright weird depending on what you look for. The interesting thing is that these titles are becoming household names, with FNAF receiving 4694 downloads a day in 2015 and its creator Scott Cawthorn giving $249,999 to charity from fundraising via a charity livestream. Similarly the Stanley parable sold over 100k of individual downloads in the first three days.

So what can we all take from this? If you’re a budding writer and you don’t want to go down the route of getting a whole series made from scratch or carving a bestselling novel that could take years to create and much longer to refine, there are still plenty of options for short, quick, exciting content, you just need to know where to look, and if you’re a company looking for some fresh ideas, then maybe in a world filled with the media equivalent of a long term relationship, give the audience a one night stand.