I posted this in Unity with a few name changes.
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Here’s what we know: (3 years ago they announced Greenlight was just a temporary experiment.)**
1.2004 and 2014 = 3827 games were released on Steam
2. In 2015 Steam stopped curating Greenlight submissions.
3. 2015 = 2064
4. 2016 = 4207
5. 2017 Steam announced the death of Greenlight
The real issues here are:
- Lack of human interaction or no curators.
2.The system can be easily manipulate to pass Greenlight (a Facebook account and some friends)
Things to considerate:
1.Fee is non recoverable. ($100-$1000)
2.No guarantee that shovelware will disappear, in fact now you can just buy your way in regardless of the quality.
3.30% revenue cut.
Suggested Solutions:
- Demand that Steam brings back curators to stop the flow of garbage.
- Create an in-house marketplace for games for Unreal. Unity and Epic have huge influence over the industry and can easily create this in a matter of months.
- Provide incentives to developers by bring down the 30% revenue cut that is now through out.
I think this is a really great idea for the following reasons. - Just picture a really game created with Unreal and exclusive only here. If the game is that good people will find out where to buy and the rest is history. Last time I checked everyone and their mom knew about Google.
- It puts pressure on Steam to be more competitive and adopt fair pricing options for small companies or indies.
- Steam is not the only waterhole, but by cutting its supply further it slow down what looks like a monopoly in the making.