Valve did the right thing.
You can’t filter all abusive (note not bad games) with $100 or $500 or even $1000. You’ll just filter some.
But with that fee, you risk to block some potentially awesome ideas/games.
Steam just needs better targeting system, and they’re aiming for that, right now!
If you know how to make/sell your game. Then $100 or $10000k won’t be a factor.
lol i was reading the comments, and, srsly, this game tho …
Maybe it started as a joke game, but then … well, just like goat simulator. People seem to enjoy it. Isn’t that all that matter?
yes, absolutely. I just think its funny is all. Funny in a good way, not funny like “oh wtf, why this?!”
The game title would be the last expected game title, ever. haha.
From a non-cynical stand point I agree, everyone should get there fair whack at it and there really shouldn’t be a barrier… It really should be down to nothing more than skill or talent, if your game is better to play / more fun then well done… You deserve it.
I just can’t see it happening in reality and I’ve not seen a convincing arguement to the contrary yet, I’d love to be proven wrong here and I can’t see how a targeting algorithm is really going to help in an ocean of potentially hundreds of thousands if not millions of games (give it time). It’s not all on Valve either, if the mobile market is anything to go by dev’s will start undercutting each other until free (or nearly free) becomes the minimum viable (expected) target supplimented by IAP / Pay to win / AD revenue. Not only does that do a disservice to developers but to gamers as well.
Games (especially PC games) cost money to make, especially for somewhat adventurous games and having legal protection to cover your behind is a good start… One of the good things to come out of this is generally the level of quality will probably rise with the amount of games / competition but there’s only so many top downs / endless runners people will play before they start expecting more. The baseline will increase and lets face it you’re not going to be creating the next Elder Scrolls level of game on a shoe string budget. Although we might get the odd cool whacky idea that’s fun, as rare as that is (if anyone can ever find it)…
Sure, I agree that a higher fiscal barrier to entry won’t remove all rubbish games and yes it can potentially block some awesome one’s but it’s better than en mass shovelware kicking everyone in the shins…
Again, lets see what happens in a year and again I hope I’m wrong, personally I’d like to see more startups become successful / more jobs / more positivity…
I’m retired and game programming is my hobby to keep my brain active, and I am a gamer so it’s a labour of love really. So it doesn’t cost me a dollar to program, just time.
I wonder if steam can add a simple filter where you can filter the games list by the level of investment in the production of the game, just something that filters the AAA from the experienced indie teams, the loner indies and the cloners or asset swappers somehow. I don’t know the exact way one might filter but maybe something along those lines can help customers choose what type of games they want to see/buy in steam. They could have a different level of fee for each category too if that helps. The filter could state how many games (1-5, 6 -10, 10 - 20, etc) the company/team have produced previously or revenue and whatever else you could think of, so we could filter out the less experienced productions.
Just my random thoughts.
Cheers,
Max
Number of previously produced games is meaningless, many great games were actually the first of that developer. And they could just lie on how much time was invested…
I guess everyone cheering for the new system hasn’t released a title yet on Steam. Greenlight was a great tool to test your product - to figure out if there is a market, if it’s even worth investing time and money. You could early prototype and show it to an audience that would tell you if it’s hot or not. In addition to that people would add your game to their wishlist, giving you an instant boost in sales on release day which is important to be successful on Steam. Without a good amount of people flocking to your game on release day your game won’t even be picked up for free by streamers.
Sorry but Greenlight was not working correctly at all. Too many sellers had fake accounts to push their own products regardless of quality or any actual demand
I think the Greenlight process had being made redundant by the style reviewers. So I think it is not so much about the system changing from one to another, but rather doing something that makes sense.
Game development from a money point of view has very much become a low barrier to entry business and a global one at that, so this $100 is dare I say a bit high.
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”.
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”…)
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.
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.
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.
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.
TL:DR glad that greenlight is gonek, can’t get any worse than that.
EDIT: so the forum censored one word… but you will get it anyway, i think.
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.
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.
Which is exactly why it’s helpful to run greenlight and have 15.000 people who added your game to their wishlist pre-release.
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.
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.
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.