Are they “raking in tons of cash” ? I’m not sure where you see the figures for such things. We can say it, and believe it, but, it doesn’t make it true or a fact.
I would love to see stats on the asset flip examples.
Steam is handing over the likes of 125 MILLION users and proving them sight to your game. Now, if the issue is MARKETING itself, right, they do not MARKET or provide specific coverage to said title. They only FAIRLY provide the same marketing coverage for all items.
“Devs are too busy spending it on development” … are they tho? Really? Some yes, most no. From what i see is a marketplace copy/paste of items without intent to update/remove/replace/recover those said items. Do i use some? Sure do. I already have in place the setup for replacement of 100% of those items.
Funny thing …
EverQuest director has a new “EverQuest” coming out. Obvy, its not called EverQuest, but, it was the original dude thats making it.
We are using a lot of the same assets haha. thought that was funny …
I agree to a point with what you stated, but, i disagree simply based on your opinion being tossed as fact. I am cool with that, but, when stated as opinion and sold as such.
And it will continue, until Valve gets over their irrational fear of hiring someone to actually take a quick look at the games to separate the uninspired pixeltrash and asset flips from the maybe 4-5 games that come out each month that had genuine effort put into their creation.
Other way around. EA removed their games from Steam to sell exclusively on Origin.
That isn’t how it works. The fee is completely recoupable; you don’t pay the 30% until you’ve earned your fee back, so at $5000 you don’t pay 30% until you’ve sold nearly $17,000 worth of games.
It’s easily observable that this statement is fallacious, since estimated stats for asset flips on Steam are easily obtainable. Your average $1.50 asset flip sells between 500 and 1500 copies, and generates additional revenue on the back of trading cards. From here you can easily determine what kind of barrier you need to prevent these from being profitable.
Simple fact is that if you sell the game you get your money back if you don’t sell you still get your money back!
The reason why I made the thread is because i felt this:
First fact is that no matter how much developers or others complain Valve was or still is never going to put humans in charge for this, it’s a broken record guys we can’t make a difference there forget about it. For whatever reason Valve will not budge.
Where we COULD have made a difference (maybe, possibly) was the fee argument, this was slightly evident on the surface at least when Valve invited people over to discuss the issue some while back and they where internally ‘contemplating’ a fee margin to be ‘suitable’ for their store, and during this time they where closely, very closely, monitoring the feedback from the community.
I personally felt that an overwhelming majority of developers in UE forums as well as some in Unity and other places, where against a high fee! This I felt perhaps had shifted Valve’s final decision in favor of the lowest entry fee possible. In other words they didn’t feel the ‘heat’.
And yet again we felt the repercussions, more than ever the submissions increased in 2017! And flood gates wide opened without any delays this time (no Greenlight).
So there you have it, what can be done now? Probably nothing, but it was worth a mention because I feel it’s a minor reminder of what could happen sometimes if we don’t look a few steps ahead and not think of just today and look at the bigger picture.
In this field you hurt your fellow successful or hard working developer you will hurt yourself, maybe not today but most definitely tomorrow.
Honestly. I think they should force a demo release. If the demo gets a percentage of positive feedback then on to green light. I dont like buying recycled, or broken junk. If it’s a good sized demo, and game is good then it’s on. This would help reduce the shams, and scams. If a ■■■■ dev wants to release an incredible trailer, and a ■■■■ to steam. They can find another platform to sell on.
I think Tencent should start assisting UE4 devs with getting content on that side of the world, or on this side. They have a big stake in Epic, and a huge popular game store.They’re porting pubg to mobile.
If you don’t sell any copies, the fee is effectively lost - but at the moment that $100 fee is so low it’s practically impossible *not *to get it back. At $1000, you’re starting to look at selling one or two hundred copies depending on your pricing, which isn’t exactly unreasonable.
Greenlight was a failure, trapping genuine games and letting a metric fuckton of awful games though. Removing the Greenlight barrier might have allowed the genuine products through, but it also removed the only barrier to scams and minimum effort asset flips.
2016 was the year Shovelware started to take hold on Steam; at the end of the year, 40% of Steam’s entire library (4500 games) had been released in the previous 12 months - courtesy of Greenlight.
With that barrier removed, that number is approaching 7000 this year - more than had even been released in the decade prior to Greenlight - that puts things in perspective - the vast majority of these will have been utter crap.
While the vast number of new titles on Steam has had a negative effect on a lot of us, I don’t think there’s really an easy solution here.
The biggest problem is a lack of exposure for new games because you scroll so quickly off the New Releases list. That particularly hurts indie developers as they have less money to spend on things like marketing. But ideas like free demos and stuff, that’s ridiculous. Best thing you can do is make a game that stands out. The better games still make a ton of money. Upping the entry free is not a solution. That just makes it more difficult for indies.
I honestly don’t even think it’s a problem with Steam at all. I think the issue is that there are so many solid packs available for both UE and Unity that it has become a lot easier to make games. That isn’t a bad thing. It does mean that you are going to see a lot more games that are subpar or mediocre than you might otherwise, but you are also going to see some gems that would have never been made 10 years ago.
Steam only exist for people to play Dota and CounterStrike.
Nobody there is interested in your game. You might sell a bunch when event sales hit; meanwhile anyone have better chances going with a publisher and a game built as a service.
The people I’m working for never published anything on Steam and they are paying us just fine
I’d say even facebook is a better publishing platform than Steam if you have no marketing budget. 2004~2008 is long gone guys.
Once they started requiring Origin for their games they weren’t able to release their games on Steam, though I don’t know why it would apply differently to their games compared to Ubisoft games which require Uplay.
I’m not sure I agree, besides game as a service is only reserved to mega corporations because they are the only ones who can afford it. Also finding a publisher is a huuuge deal as an indie, that is if it is worth it.
It’s funny that indie developers were complaining it was too hard to get onto steam before green light. Then the main complaint was green light was broken. And now the complaint is it’s too easy to get on Steam.
Well i consider myself an indie developer and i did not complain. Greenlight was a great indicator to figure out if a you could make a living with your idea/project or not. You could quickly prototype and make a very early alpha-build of the game and show it to a large audience - my first game got greenlight in 8 days, that showed me that the title will sell. Now we don’t have that anymore, now you don’t even have exposure anymore because all those morons who were complaining they couldn’t get past greenlight forgot that without greenlight they wouldn’t have at least a few thousand people putting the game on their wishlist - giving it a ‘popular game’ exposure and the needed critical number of sales during the first week. So my first game sold about 80.000 units compared to my 2nd game on Steam direct aprox. 5000 units.
I personally gave up on Steam, nowadays it’s better to sign a deal with an established publisher and just grab some cash upfront. I just feel sorry for those who couldn’t get past greenlight, because with the ■■■■ they are trying to sell they won’t get a publisher deal for sure, kinda hit themself in the foot.
For Steam it doesn’t really matter what they are selling, every sale is extra money for them.
Greenlight didnt work, Direct doesnt work, higher fee wont fix that. (I also dont expect valve to change the fee, it works as intended.)
No one cares how many stuff is on steam, it drowns together with all the other stuff that is there.
If it were not for certain YouTubers that dig up these assetflips etc. they would mostly go unnoticed and wont sell anything.
In the end it was PewDiePie who made “Fidget Spinner Simulator” (this dude is btw. now banned from steam) a success.
He sold a bunch of copys for 79 cents, but not much… and then PewDiePie happened and he sold tens of thousands of copies. (a completely broken game, technically and gameplay wise.)
A higher fee will only affect the people who have no money, and the people who want to make their game free to play on steam.
The actual bad people will just wait a bit longer to break even, or get the recoupable fee back, but the small indiegames that are legit wont exist anymore. (Especially since these people do now have a bit of money due to previous abuse of the system…)
Even after all the pewdiepies and sterlings of youtube show actual gameplay and harshly criticize the game, people still go and buy the game.
This is why whatever Steam decides, it won’t work, because: people are stupid and delusional.
Higher fees? Well, it may filter a few honest and also some dishonest devs, but when you have 8 years old playing with $1000 smartphones, you should think twice before believing that money is the best obstacle for delusional devs that believe their games are AAA or for scam games.
Partly true statements, and while there are rich kids who would have their parents throw money for their micro transactions and wouldn’t hesitate to throw equal amounts for an entry fee for their side project, I still think money talks either tough or soft. In steam’s case perhaps we will never really know until it is put to the test, even a temporary period would show some stats about how it would be working.
And if that period was allowed to take place then raising prices argument would’ve been the last one they would hear, as human intervention would be the go to and one that Steam doesn’t wish to take.
I’m saying it wouldn’t have hurt to try for the sake of the bigger picture, say one year period would be a good assessment time.
All this is just talk on behalf of all of us but it’s good to have a discussion from time to time.
Fully agree, as long it’s a “temporary” solution.
If it works, then they can make it permanent. But if it doesn’t, then the last thing we all want is end up paying $1000 or more for nothing (but would Valve decrease the fee if that’s the case?).
An incremental solution would also be good. Every 3 to 6 months, the fee would increase: $100 -> $250 -> $500 … until a max or until satisfaction.
