Steam Direct publishing fee revealed... still 100$ :D

[Burnz]

@Yaeko;721989

I like the new system, and i do have games on steam.
No, it was not.

1: there were many “trolls” who just voted “no” on everything.
2: there was vote-fraud due to people who bought votes, or gave away steam-keys for votes.
3: Greenlight-Votes do not represent sales at all.
4: you only had (roughly) one day of visibility on greenlight, because there are so many entries. (you needed to get votes from elsewhere, or already have a large community, but that still is “from elsewhere”.

1+2 if your game suffers to that it won’t make money. It’s already an indicator that it’s hitting a niche market.
3: it does, if your title sits there forever the money later will flow at the same speed. my game hit top 10 in 3 days with 20.000 votes. On launch day there were 5000 sales in the first hour due to the fact that i had already established a community that was crying to get the game (without any reviews) which led to an immediate hype the following days.
4: see 3.

@Yaeko;721989

There is a market for everything, just the size of the market is different. (There are/were games on steam where you had to slap hookers to get their money, or where you roll around a street as a giant ********, trying to “spread your dna”…)

What’s your point ? I said i used it as an indicator if a concept/product will sell or not and it does exactly that. Who cares about other developers, that your examples don’t sell well is kinda obvious.

@Yaeko;721989

No one cares for games that are released on steam, because there are between 10 and 20 new games every day, according to steamspy’s newest statistics.

Which is exactly why it’s helpful to run greenlight and have 15.000 people who added your game to their wishlist pre-release.

@Yaeko;721989

Greenlight never was a helpful tool, it was just a huge “popularity contest” to get into the top 10.And since the “bad” games could not get there without fraud, they just bought their votes, so the whole system was made useless.

You are completely missing the point of greenlight. It was a tool that you can use for your own product to see how the market reacts. When you manipulate the data to get your title through you cheating yourself because the market already said ‘nay’ to your product before release. I never saw it as a contest as i could care less how other people are doing.

@Yaeko;721989

I got my game up there without buying votes or similar things, but it still was annoying. I was sitting there, every day, knowing that the game will get through regardless of what happens, but still had to wait for an uncertain amount of time to actually get greenlit. Aaand… all the scammers that try to get keys from you, or advertise their own “games” in your comments.

I would have scrapped any project that doesn’t hit top 50 in a week. Again, greenlight gave you a good indication what will happen after release. I made my millions on steam and i’ll be missing greenlight as i now have to finish development completely before knowing if a project is worth my time and then compete for visibility with unpopular games - as we all no longer know if our game won’t be popular.

@Yaeko;721989

Steam Direct is better, especially since Trading Cards got “nerfed”, and that there will be a way to send keys directly do the reviewers on steam. (no more fake-mails and stuff)
And if the reviewing of games works as intended, all the bad games should just drop to a place where no one ever will find them, unless he desperately searches for them.

I don’t see how this is better, all they did was removing greenlight. I didn’t bother about trading cards as that doesn’t even make up 0.01% of the revenue you can make with a decent project. As for reviews, good luck getting exposure - before you had the initial sales from people who added your game to the wishlist, they were friendly excited gamers, through greenlight you could establish a fanbase before release. Without that fanbase buying and reviewing your game your game is vulnerable to early negative reviews - what i mean is that you’ll catch 5 negative reviews at start and your game sits at 0% - killing off future sales.

For the indie market it just got much more competitive and harder to generate revenue on steam, i consider myself lucky as i made enough money to just buy exposure on /Twitch etc. but for indies who are late to the party they are gonna suffer. They will have to invest more time before they find out the financials of their product and release their game into a more competitive market.