And by professional developers, I mean developers who make games as a full time job. The rise of the couch developer (people who don’t make games for a living but make them for fun in their spare time) is honestly one of the worst things to happen to the indie gaming industry. Yes I understand that people like making games but understand that there are hard limits on what you can do if you aren’t working on your games full time. And in fact even IF you are working on them full time there are still massive limits anyway if you are just a solo dev. Just about nobody is going to make a great game all by themselves by spending 4-6 hours a week working on their game.
What makes my blood boil is that a huge number of indie “developers” don’t seem to even understand that once they start selling their game, their game development isn’t just a hobby anymore and instead becomes a job. A business. If they are going to expect others to pay for their game, they should be able to deliver professional quality. No, I don’t think it has to be as good as a 200 million dollar triple A game, but it still needs to look at least good enough that it doesn’t look like a glorified mod. And this is not something you can do if you don’t work on your game as a full time job.
People will say this isn’t realistic. Well then make it realistic. Make a prototype and then put it on a crowdfunding site like kickstarter or indiegogo and get the money needed so that you can quit your job and start working full time as a game dev. Or join somebody else’s team/studio.
Point I am making is basically this: Couch developers are harming the indie industry by creating harmful PR. Even if you are a legit good indie dev people will still assume that you make bad games if you tell them you are an indie dev simply because that is what most of their experience with indie devs has been like. Not to mention that it’s harder for good devs to stand out when anyone can upload a game because of the garbage flooding the store.
What places like steam desperately need right now is a much higher entry fee. Something like 3000-6000 dollars. This would purge most of the couch devs while still making it possible for small teams or those who had successful crowdfunding campaigns to sell their game.
Do you agree that couch devs are harming the indie industry and that the price of admission should be raised to solve this?
Steam is now what Newground was 15 years ago. A place where practically anyone with a computer can create and submit games. Sure, it creates a marketplace with a lot of junk, but there’s some really compelling games among the junk. Although, I believe Newgrounds did a better job at visibility, and it worked better since games where free so users could literally try anything, and quickly.
I get there’s a bunch of developers upset that getting on Steam is no longer automatically means your game will be successful, and that feel like developers shouldn’t have to spend so much time and money on marketing. But it isn’t Steam’s job to sell a game for you. Artificial barriers are only good for the people that can pass the artificial barriers. Would rather see games succeed or fail based on their own merits.
Kickstarter or Indiegogo are pretty much dead for games. Early access has replaced that, which is a better option for consumers and developers anyway.
We had a very long discussion regarding Steam in these forums not too long ago.
I do understand your frustration but at the same time I understand that it’s a free market to a degree here (but I will explain my point of view on this below), I do agree that many garbage games are clouding the good ones, even if you pay lots of money for marketing, these games will still make the store waters too murky for passerby’s. All good games still need strong marketing and if your game is good it will stand out regardless of the ■■■■ that is out there.
I may also not agree with the term ‘Couch dev’ even though I think I know what you mean by it, however I do agree that there are so many kids out there with such ease of access to current technology these days and countless free assets enough for them to show how they slapped a dik and two ballz together and made it a ‘scrolling shooter’ in under an hour, called it a game created a new Steam account using Dad’s provided daily HotDog money (yes it’s almost that cheap) and uploaded it online readily accessible to millions in the world.
Growing up in the 80’s and nineties we were lighting candles and celebrating every time we were lucky enough to find a book that could provide 10% of information that would solve a given problem. Time’s have changed and gotten spoiled, I don’t like it but it’s the way it is now and you must learn to adapt.
Now adding my two cents on the free market idea here it ahs become a little more complicated in the digital world regarding this matter and has made that line blurrier. In the real world when you want to put your goods in actual stores, almost entirely for all goods you have to really go out there put your time, take risks and produce and then negotiate, pay a moderate sum to the store, and make sure your product is at the very least competitive enough somehow even if its mediocre.
On Steam and such digital sales this free market has been pushed to abusive levels well beyond your everyday capitalistic terminologies. Producers no longer bother with product quality neither does the store for that matter because it’s cheap to click a button and upload, producers also pay nothing to put up their products on the storefronts and could care less if they sold the product or not since they didn’t spend any penny making it in the first place and just move on to the next thing all the while piling the site up with endless scrolling of endless titles God knows what.
The problem is (hypothetically speaking) if a store was crazy enough to do this type of business in the real world with physical goods involved and you don’t like it, then as a producer of these goods you will have countless other stores with countless other sales options and negotiations to choose from each competing against each other with each having lots of their own customers, but in the indie game’s world you just have Steam and then maybe GOG, after that it’s just Sony and Microsoft. That’s it! that is all. and that situation is somewhat of a perplexing thorn in the free market conundrum in our case.
What I don’t understand is why valve is so accepting of this. Do they actually make more money by allowing all this shovelware? I refuse to believe that not having any quality control actually makes them more money. In mean, logically no quality control should lead to a drop of consumer confidence which then leads to fewer sales. So by that logic, allowing fewer but higher quality games to be sold should lead to an increase in sales, right?
Whatever you deem is “high quality,” isn’t the same as what I deem as “high quality.”
If Steam cut down on the games they’d lose sales because people would look elsewhere for the quality they desire.
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Steam doesn’t have to rate each individual game. It just needs to raise the entry fee from it’s current price of 100$ to something like a few thousand dollars. A full time game dev would not find it hard to cough up the money for this. In fact it would probably be a tiny portion of his overall game budget. Consider all the costs of running a indie game studio. If you can’t even pay the few grand needed to get unto the steam store then you also can’t afford to run a indie game company, in which case you can’t make anything good.
Whatever you deem is “high quality,” isn’t the same as what I deem as “high quality.”
If Steam cut down on the games they’d lose sales because people would look elsewhere for the quality they desire.
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This is something like saying " There is no truth, I am free enough to decide what is true and not true", I wonder if justice works that way let alone the notion of morality. A little extreme but it was an analogy I couldn’t help but put up. There is definitely a crap game and a good game, there is also most definitely a good artwork and a crap artwork at least in its technicality and expertise, it’s the content and subject matter that may vary and may have subjective standpoints. Games take it a step further there is an utterly broken game and a working game how about starting there.
There’s hundreds of games on there that are either unplayable, or they are manipulating a system like steam achievements, or they’re asset flips (using game templates wholesale with little to nothing changed), or the quality is so low that they obviously shouldn’t be there.
A basic judge of each game would help the situation dramatically, but Valve is very resistant to actually trying to do any manual game evaluations.
Sometimes people buy a *■■■■■■ *game just because the situation can make them laugh.
Now, if a game is so bad that you can’t help but ROTFL when you play it… is that game really a bad game ?! You had fun, you laugh, didn’t you ?!
Forget about Valve, they don’t really care about games or quality. They only care of keeping their users happy, that’s what feed their families.
If some Steam users buy ■■■■, Valve will sell some ■■■■, that’s all.
I’m not worried about Valve not being able to feed their families if they cut down on crap games, lets not go there. If Valve wants to make money out of them, it can by opening a sub site dedicated to crap games no one would complain. But bottom line is we know this is Valve and they wont change unless they decide to that is not the issue here, my personal problem is when I see posts trying to justify Valve’s move as OK, it is not OK it is bad for everybody and very unfair for many, BUT it’s a free market so be it, let’s just not justify it.
Greenlight isn’t a thing anymore (not that it helped either), all you need is $100 to get a game on the store, the issue is that the store is cluttered and it becomes hard to find good games.
As far as Epic is concerned, they haven’t been able to manage their marketplace as much as they need to, so them making their own store would be out of the question until they can get that stable.
I think any suggestion of establishing a “gatekeeper” for content is at the very least impractical in this day and age.
“Quality” and “Fun” are and have always been subjective terms. There is someone, somewhere, who will enjoy and pay for literally anything.
Furthermore, the concept that any group of people, large or small, regardless of their qualifications, should determine what anyone else may play (or see, hear, say, read, and so forth) is, to my mind, reprehensible.
A commercial market will always reward some products and punish others, and in general – though certainly not always – those rewarded will have higher “quality” for some arbitrary definition of quality.
As others have indicated, advertising is the key to sales – that is, connecting with a product’s target audience.
What I don’t understand is why ppl still arguing on this.
This is past water, things have already been set on stone, the market is what it is and babbling about how bad it is won’t change anything.
Everybody was warned about what was coming, many managed to adapt and survive, many are gone or resurrecting this discussion because cannot adapt and instead want to world to work the way they believe is the right way.
When Steam was a closed garden everybody was crying because Valve wouldn’t accept their game and “-oh this is just because I’m not EA or Ubisoft m’Irigh!”.
Everyone asked for this, now ppl want the old way instead zzz.
As I’ve said before, there are many small indie companies out there selling their PC games to millions of players and they don’t even publish on Steam.
The world isn’t Steam, when everybody is looking at right, try looking to the left…
Find a niche you know and can serve well with a distinctive product.
But if you don’t have a polished and unique product, well, then your problem isn’t Steam and cough developers to begin with.
What I don’t understand is why ppl still arguing on this.
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Because the problems it’s been causing haven’t gone away and won’t?
And understand, as more people get into game development this is only going to get even worse. What will happen once 500 new “games” get released on the same day? Or 5 thousand? What will happen once your game will literally only appear on the front page for a few min before it vanishes? Do you really think there isn’t going to be a massive backslash against this from consumers?
It blows my mind people here don’t understand the MASSIVE potential for damage that this flood of shovelware poses to the indie industry. Do you really want to live in a world where the only way for your game to sell is for people to hear about it from youtubers or other gaming media who picked it up by complete random chance because literally nobody browses the store to look for games anymore? If nothing is done, 5-10 years from now nobody will even bother browsing through the store. Either people will hear about the game in the media and buy it, or it won’t sell period. It would turn indie success into pure random luck. Do you really want this? Really?
Valve has spent more money trying to figure out an automatic way of doing it than what it would have cost to just hire people to review each game submission. The worry that good games would get rejected is unjustified, Valve can do a very small amount of work to block the really terrible stuff and it would improve the situation drastically. Even reviewing screenshots of the apps that are on there would indicate hundreds of things on Steam that have no business being there.
This is something like saying " There is no truth, I am free enough to decide what is true and not true", I wonder if justice works that way let alone the notion of morality. A little extreme but it was an analogy I couldn’t help but put up. There is definitely a crap game and a good game, there is also most definitely a good artwork and a crap artwork at least in its technicality and expertise, it’s the content and subject matter that may vary and may have subjective standpoints. Games take it a step further there is an utterly broken game and a working game how about starting there.