The fee should be higher, and if we did not pay royalties, the engine should cost thousands of dollars to use.
Well, with that same logic one could say that the current trend in making big engines such as Unreal and Unity free to use and more available have helped push us to the direction we are now.
On that same note, if Unreal cost thousands of dollars to use, you can pretty much guarantee next to no indie games would be created on it at all and would be AAA only. You currently have no investment risk to use it - yeah you have to pay royalties, but otherwise its free during development, which is huge for what you are getting and then potentially being able to turn around and make money off of. In that same sense, if Steam cost’s a couple grand to get your game up there, you can pretty much kiss indie games goodbye on the platform entirely. And at that point, quality surely is not reflected on monetary value. You’d probably also see a huge influx of kickstarters trying to raise that sort of money too, and as most of us know, kickstarter fund raising does not have a direct correlation with quality either.
From Valves point of view (and much like Epic’s business model) making things more widely available with a lower entry bar makes them more money in the long run I’d suspect as well?
There is no point in arguing anymore, the fee has already been decided and we can’t do anything about it no matter if we want it to be higher or lower.
I’m here for the “I’m too poor, except for my $5,000 computer, to pay anymore then free for anything i do.”
I wish the fee would have been higher… With that said though… If Valve can improve their algorithms and curators to ensure that **** games made in a week are in the trash pile where they belong than that’s great! I hear they are getting rid of trading cards for **** games too…
teak
ps: wow, c r a p is considered a bad word… <grins>
IMO 500-1000$ fee would be ok.
I submitted unfinished game to greenlight because of only 100$ fee… gameplay wasnt bad but graphics was literally horrible.
Higher fee = higher game quality.
Im too from poor country 600$/month but if i put 5 years into game, 1000$ is nothing compare to time put into game development.
Currently its better than it was, but still not enough strong barrier to put ***** off.
Valve really should consider very strong quality control that is most effective filter against “slap assets together and go”
$100 / game? Owch…
Not sure how to get to that, seeing my current budget allows for a cup of ramen / soup every other day. If I go every 4 days, then I could probably release one game every 7 months? Actually, that’s probably not that bad tbh. Gonna suck for those 7 months though :S
Sell a few early copies of your game directly to friends, family, or long time supporters.
Yeah I agree, the potential for a race to the bottom is frightening. However, the way people play PC games is fundamentally different from how they play mobile games. Most PC games provide exponentially more entertainment value and content. Desktop and console games are also much harder to produce. Both of these factors will likely buoy game prices indefinitely, or at least until a quality indie game on PC/console can be produced in the same time and with the same budget as a “quality” mobile game. When our tools and engines get that good (or you can ask the AI in your super computer to make your game for you) then it’s time to worry.
But I’m not concerned about F2P on PC/console. We have already experienced the F2P craze on both platforms and regular buy-to-play games seem to be mostly unaffected, if not on the rise (e.g. look at the decision of games like LawBreakers and Overwatch to avoid F2P). Probably a more dangerous threat are Steam sales. The current sale system, training everyone to wait for the inevitable sales, seems to have done more to erode the perceived value of games on desktop than anything else.
What if you just set the price on steam 30% higher than other platforms so you end up with the same $ per sale?
What kind of games are you guys doing to be able to finish them in under 7 months - every 7 months - and publish it as worthy for steam?!! I thought small 2d games for mobile alone would take half that time. unless they are utter ****.
Edit: Don’t mean the post in a harsh way, just curious :). I always believed it would require at least some good enough of polish over any game published on Steam in order to be worth publishing and not end up in the crowd. To be honest under 7 months with one guy (assuming you are the only one working) who has trouble paying 100$ makes the odds odder.
People are different.
Dostoyevsky was able to write The Gambler in less than a month and so was Doyle with his A Study In Scarlet. Others take years to write a single novel.
Therefore, for some people, the correlation between time and quality is closer to zero.
100$ to release your game on Steam. The floodgates are wide open… we gonna see a lot of gems vanishing under a pile of junk… I’ll be missing Greenlight, it was a great tool to figure out if there is a market for your concept/game. If it wouldn’t get greenlit in a week you could basically assume that your product was ****, not being worth the time and effort. Man, we gonna see lots of disappointed indie developers this year.
Legitimately surprised I had to go to page 2 to find out if someone brought this up.
I’m Canadian, buying a game from Steam already costs like $80 here because we legitimately have monopoly money. If the fee were to be $1000 USD, that would put the price to publish on Steam up to around $1400 for a Canadian indie developer. Foreign exchange rates are no joke.
lol get ready for ~4.000 games hitting Steam next week.
Good luck finding buyers for your own game in that sea of releases.
This is great news!
Not at all!
No worries. Everything will be just fine. Trust me.