What do you think of Steam Direct?

[Envieous]

@;668831

2016 saw the release of 4207 titles on Steam, nearly 40% of its entire catalog. My “small nation” comment was an obvious dramatic exaggeration but let’s assume that each game takes 1 hour to curate, and you have people doing it for 8 hours per day. Since people don’t work at peak efficiency let’s assume that in an 8 hour period 1 person can curate 5 games. In order to curate the 4207 released games in 2016 you would need to curate ~16 games per day, since 2016 had 261 work days. That amounts to 3-4 people doing it full-time every year of the day. This sounds like a low number, but there is one important thing that’s not taken into account - 4207 released games. Just how many games get *submitted *to Greenlight but don’t ever make it past that stage? I can’t find any concrete number but I would wager that it’s “the vast majority”. Also, perhaps equally important, the amount of submissions is growing at an exponential rate every year. It is not a sustainable model.

It doesn’t matter what I suggest, what matters is what will happen. And what I am describing is exactly what would happen. It’s not unprecedented - even today you have localizers who believe it in their right to “fix” “problematic” content and change the original meaning of a game; and Australia’s ratings board has long been infamous for banning any games that they find even remotely out of line. If Valve were to go the route of curation, the extent of the curation and the criteria could never be objectively established. Where do you draw the line?

You’re still predicating this on the idea that curation would be more than opening the greenlight page and looking at it for more than a minute or two. Most of those trash games that get released on the steam store, or greenlight are easily identifiable as garbage within SECONDS by anyone with the remotest capacity for critical thinking.

@;668831

This is true for the likes of EA and Activision, but there are many smaller publishers that surfaced in the past few years that specifically target “AA” or indie titles, like Team17 or Devolver Digital. Monolithic publishers of the early 2000’s are one end of the spectrum, 100% indie like Phil “Choke on it” Fish are the other, and I’d argue the latter is far worse in the long run than the former.

We’re lumping fez in with the trash now? Whether you like it or not, the game undeniably had creative thought, and serious effort put into it, that resulted in a game of passable quality.

Even if Fez were undeniably trash, someone self publishing a bad game is not a reason to go insert unnecessary parasitic middlemen into the process for anyone else because they didn’t happen to have X amount of money they could part with.

@;668831

If you’re making a game on such a small budget that a $5000 fee is insurmountable, the game doesn’t have to make millions of dollars, in which case the fact that other markets trail behind Steam is completely irrelevant. If make a game on a $1000 budget and sell it at $10, it has to sell 100 copies before it becomes profitable. Are you telling me that Steam is the only market where a game can sell > 100 copies at $10?

No I’m not telling you that. I’m telling you that, as someone who probably cares more about games than most people, I don’t care about all these other marketplaces, and most gamers are in the same boat as me. If a game is not on steam, short of some very special circumstances it may as well not exist as far as I’m concerned, because steam is where my game library is.