I opened this thread knowing that would be in rage. I was not disappointed.
With all honesty, I agree with him to the fullest. (though he could put it in nicer way).
Not even Steve Jobs thought anything like that. If he ever did then the App Store wouldn’t exist and Apple wouldn’t have been so successful and most developers wouldn’t be publishing on the App Store first. He actually opened up the whole market to everyone. Yes Apple has strict apps/games submission reviews (although nowadays less than in the past due to a massive amount of new apps/games daily sent to them) but it didn’t close the store to just a selected elite of developers.
Microsoft with the Windows Store did that by pre-selecting who had the right to publish anything there … and in fact Windows Phone and Surface and Windows10 have all been a huge failure.
The best solution for this predicament:
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.
You can agree with him all you want, it just means that you’re both wrong.
Ah… terrible news from a developer perspective and they even made it a recoupable fee making it almost a zero risk investment to anyone. Now the game prices will slowly begin to fall even more because teams in cheap labor countries and lil Timmy’s living with their parents can spam apps and on top of that afford to sell their products 5-10x cheaper due zero to low expenses even if the quality is good and people would pay more. Gamer’s will get used to the low prices and begin avoid titles that cost more than few dollars.
I reckon they should have lowered it to around $50
He isn’t really totally wrong.
The reason Steam is full of literal garbage is that the fee is too small. What he says regarding this is true. People that don’t deserve the luxury of publishing stuff in the biggest gaming marketplace, just shouldn’t be able to.
Now, if there was a “clean up crew” or quality control from Valve, this would all be nice. Because there are some people who got great ideas yet have no money to afford 500+$.
Basically what DamirH says that people with crappy games shouldn’t just pay 100$ and get away with it. If they want to, they can use the smaller sites with similiar purposes.
Sorry, that’s not how it works. From a consumer stand-point, Steam advertises itself as the biggest and best, go-to marketplace for PC games. Yet they allow every piece of garbage onto their store day after day. Garbage which will now have an even easier access to their “premium” PC store.
From a developer standpoint, Steam charges up to 30% royalties per sale, yet they give a masterfully crafted game the same time in the spotlight as the aforementioned garbage? How can they justify the prices they charge in royalties while allowing everyone onto the stage. This means that if you were to make a great game, spend thousands upon thousands of dollars on promoting and marketing it, you’re being punished for your effort and success because Steam will charge you a ton more money than some idiot who took a template from a marketplace, packaged it into a “game” in less than a week, shelled out the $100 for the Steam release and had 100 sales. Looking at the percentages, he has a bigger profit margin than you, for a fraction of the effort.
People forget that the infamous industry crash of the late 80’s is directly linked to the platforms at the time being flooded with cheaply made low-effort garbage. That’s why Nintendo decided that they will check every product themselves, thus making the Nintendo Seal of Quality.
Look at the Android and iOS markets today. Only the biggest players with the marketing muscle to push through the flood of garbage are able to even consider making a profit on it. I can’t remember where I heard this, and it might be off, but the Android market sees more than a 1000 games released every day. If that number is even close to true, that means Android is not an ecosystem for releasing games, it’s an ocean of feces where every gem that someone worked hard on and put effort into will sink, never even coming close to succeeding.
With this change, Steam is headed into the same direction. Even with Greenlight, over 40% of Steam’s library was released in the past year or so. This new system will be even easier to release on than Greenlight. How exactly do you expect this to work, and what do you think Steam will look like in a few years if this continues?
I am glad that the future of PC gaming is a joke to you. Makes me all fuzzy inside, gives me hope for the future.
Niceness only goes so far. There are times when mincing words doesn’t get you anywhere.
Exactly, which is why the iOS and Android App stores are cesspools today. If anything, Steve Jobs was short-sighted, and it shows today. You have better chances of waking up one morning and seeing that honey is flowing out of your pipes than succeeding on the App Store as a brand-new developer with a brand-new game.
But everyone seems to have glossed over something I said - I never mentioned that publishing should be an elite-only thing. I am saying that we should facilitate MORE stores. If I am a farmer who is making nice vegetables, the biggest retail store chain won’t give me the time of day at first, but I’ll go the local stores, sell it there, get some word of mouth going, make some initial profit, then pitch it to the big stores after I made some name for myself. Only then will they even consider giving me shelf time.
Steam is analogous to that. Everyone thinks they deserve the shelf space on the biggest and the baddest store, but this is no liberal college campus safe-space, this is the real world. Some games are just better, and without a track record no one will, nor should give you the time of day. But if we had a dozen alternatives to Steam, smaller digital platforms, then a new developer could release there, make some initial turnaround, some small profit, get the game rolling. It’s not like your game has a self-destruct timer on it, you can release it on the smaller market today, and put it on Steam in 6 months once the game is battle-tested and it’s proven that there’s an audience for it.
This is a win-win situation for everyone. Steam gets competitors, the quality on Steam goes up, overall discoverability of games increases and the monopoly on digital distribution goes down.
How anyone can seriously argue against this is beyond me.
should have been higher, i’m sure that a lot of people here are actually delusional enough to just pay 100 bucks and put their unreal garbage on the store anyway.
maybe putting it on 250 dollars would keep some of the trash people make off the store; 100 dollars is nothing.
Nope. The reason Steam is full of literal garbage is because there’s no human quality control. No entry fee will ever have any real connection to the quality of a game, and that’s all there is to it.
Naw, just u fam <3
This goes to show just how far up tra-la-la land you’re actually living. How about you come down with the rest of us, to the real world. A world in which human quality control is not going to happen with the number of daily submissions. Even if the number of submissions isn’t a problem, any time humans are involved you are introducing subjective judgement into the mix, which leads straight down to thought-policing. Jack or Jyll might be having a bad day and they might reject a game because it’s hurting their feelings (For a less-hypothetical example of this in action, see Australia’s rating board).
So given all that, knowing that human quality control simply is not an option, tell me how you would solve the problem of Steam being full of literal garbage?
Create a good storefront algorithm which filters out games that people wouldn’t be interested in, which is what Valve wants to do
You shouldn’t just cut the part where I also mention that part, when you quote me, to be honest.
As I said before. If there is no quality control, there should be a high fee cost. If there is a low fee cost, there should be quality control.
Since we have no quality control right now, the fee can be 500$. The person who believes he made a great game have a higher chance to get paid back that large amount, while that smartass that took a unity asset pack and made it a “game” will think twice before doing so.
So… “Let’s still allow all the garbage in, but hope that our search algorithm will filter it out”, i.e. sweeping the problem under the carpet?
Let’s assume for a second here that making such an algorithm is possible (it’s probably not, at least it’s improbable), how do you distinguish between an asset-flip and Ambitious Anthony’s Awesome Adventure, on which he passionately worked years on? How many games will turn out to be false positives or false negatives?
You guys can laugh at me all you want right now, but time will vindicate me. In less than five years, Steam will become an equally undesirable platform as Android or iOS, mark my words.
Which is what I am saying, but it doesn’t seem to be getting through. (Otpozdrav)
I agree With !
I came from a ‘poor’ country with average salary of 600$ you will be surprised of what they do with 600$ salary.
you will be surprised as how many of ‘poor’ people are willing to take a loan from the bank to buy a BMW car or for a honeymoon trip to show off or misuse the money and live on Sardine cans for years but you are going to convince me that a serious or good game developer can’t get a fee of just 500 or 200 from anywhere! I call ******** on that. If you told me above 1000 maybe 2000 maybe but 500? or 200?
If you believe in your game and you put the time and dedication to make it happen then you will be willing to work at burger king to get the 500 buks.
But if you doubt your game to that extent and complete it as an ‘experimental school project’ hopeing to throw out there and see what comes, then it is not worth being on steam in the first place and would just be part of the rest of the garbage occupying space and causing direct harm to countless dedicated developers who have sacrificed far more than their pocket money and time to put their game out there.
And the last thing we need in these forums is ‘not to hurt people’s feelings’ say it as it is stop with political correctness when it comes to this stuff.
Let’s be reasonable here.
Higher fees will only partially solve the problem. Why? Well, quoting Memphis:
If “10 years old kids” are walking around with $800 cellphones and $2000 laptops, do you really believe they care wasting $100 or $500 in publishing something just for fun, for showing off or for any other idiotic reason?
I’d much rather keep shitposting, but hey if you need me to dumpster your terrible arguments again, I’m game.
In the 24 hours that Steam Greenlight defines as June 2nd for me, exactly 25 games have been submitted to greenlight. Given that we’re giving them a simple ****/notshit test, that’s about 5 minutes each (and that’s being generous in the amount of time it usually takes to detect these things). Recognizing these so called fake games is not a difficult ordeal, and most people can do it by simply looking at a screenshot.
Except the vast majority of what people have a problem with is not games in genres that they may not like. They have a problem with games that are objectively terrible. We all know the kind, blatant asset flips, blood effects off google images with jpg artifacts, games that are shipped missing their executable, etc. Things a monkey with a checklist could detect. I listed a bunch out in the previous thread, I’m not digging them out again to make the same point.
That’s what the vast majority of people are upset about. No one is morally outraged about x game being on steam because it’s a genre they don’t like.
Ignoring for the moment that Valve have already stated that they intend to improve their QC in certain areas, particularly when it comes to games shipping without executables, and assuming we are in fact living in a world where QC is just somehow totally impossible for humans to do. Then guess what, there’s nothing that can be done. Human quality control is the start, and the end of the list of things you can do to determine beyond a reasonable doubt whether a game is garbage or not. A developer being able to fork over x amount of money has absolutely no connection to the quality of their product.
DamirH is correct it appears you don’t understand how the gaming market is being attacked right now on sites like Steam. People create few nice looking screenshots out of assets from Unity or Unreal Asset Stores which they copy past over 50 times to create 50 " unique games " spoowing all of them to Steam hoping that one of them will sell atleast few times as at then its worth it.
Just like Kickstarter is losing the potential donators because of some many thiefs promising mountains just so they will get the money and run away with as little spend on the actually project as they can. We as a developers who have very limited resources have to protect sites that allow us be connected to millions of players that can potentially buy our product.
Unfortunately, it is true that people from countries where 500 $ is above the monthly minimal wage (like me in Poland) will have a problem to enter to such a market. But considering how many low budget sites are on the market that allow us achieve same resoults as we would have on steam just in much smaller amount, it is not much for people like me to just safe the required money. True it would take some time but if you really want to create and sell a game project it is normal to actually spend certain amount of resources to actually start.
I prefer to save money for 4 months and release it on a quality location like steam than spending zero and release it to the site with hundreds of theft project HOPING that someone will believe me that I don’t want to robe them of their hard earn money, but rather share my work.
Everybody should be allowed to be a game developer as everyone has amazing ideas talent and creativity BUT like to everything in your life if you want to put your heart into your work then you should trust it enough to risk at least 500 $ to put it on the market.