What do you think of Steam Direct?

[anonymous_user_2abc45731 (anonymous_user_2abc4573)]

@ambershee;664802

Luck is Flappy Bird. Capitalising on an unexpected viral video is just good business sense. Coffee Stain were doing just fine prior to Goat Simulator as it stands anyway.

So did they know before hand that the video would become popular? Sounds like luck to me. With some good marketing skills. (Like jumping on an unexpected viral video… Pretty lucky for them that video became viral…)
But this I guess is open to interpretation.

Most games in the 80s had very low budgets and often one or two developers only - but we’re still talking about 30 years ago. It isn’t the 80’s any more and the industry has changed significantly. Nintendo enforced their quality by disallowing third parties access to their platform without licensing their proprietary lockout chips; a literal price barrier to entry on their system.

It’s the current year! So everything must be different?
It was their version of quality control. Everyone still had a chance given the market at the time.
There is crud on the playstaion Xbox and wiiu. all have lockout methods. We are talking about what the company decided was good for their system.
And also… Their were a lot of non approved games that got past the lockout chip.

Their first and only shareware game was Doom, which was something like their 15th game - by they were already well established and the game was hotly anticipated, the success of the game was n. The shareware version was just a demo, you still needed to order the rest of the game from their publisher if you wanted to play it and iD made no money directly from their demo as it was free.

What? keem, wolf3d, quake, and many other earlier releases such as catacombs3d, tank3d and the dangerous dave (I think dangerous dave…) games were shareware. (Not including thousands of other shareware games by other companies.)
Just go and download some of the shareware releases and see for your self. (I happen to own all of these of disks and floppies I bought years ago… I’m pretty sure they are real.)

False. They were largely published by magazines, which was the most common way to publish games in the early 80s, others were commissioned by more traditional publishers.

Forgot about magazines. So you are right on this one.
But most of these magzines did not charge them a cent. They simply looked to see if it was good published it! Or bought the rights entirely. Like sub nodule by Romero, he sold it for $250 to the magazine.

Indie studios by definition are a legal entity, and as such will likely have a budget since they are professionals (it might not be a huge budget, but it’s there). If you’re making something in your bedroom in your spare time, you’re going to be an amateur or a hobbyist. The word ‘indie’ is has been misappropriated by an awful lot of nobodies making games, which has almost certainly led to the devaluation of the term.

That’s fair. Legal and all that good stuff.
But I guess all us hobbyists and Amateurs are a bunch of nobodies. That’s always nice to know.

Reviews are demonstrably useless, and consumers have been increasingly losing faith in them.

I don’t know… Before I buy a game I definitely go and read the reviews. Wouldn’t you?
And if you can’t recognise a joke review… Egad that is pretty bad.

This is the thing - it isn’t easy to find great games on Steam any more without considerable effort or knowledge on the part of the customer. It’s important to understand that those of us in this forum are not Valve’s average customer; their average customer is considerably less informed and relies a lot more on the store front itself.

A reason we read reviews right? Or is the ‘average’ costumer not smart enough to read them?

In the ten year period between 2004 and 2014, 3827 games were released on Steam - that’s about one game a day, or 7 in a week, easy enough for the consumer to follow. In 2015, Valve stopped curating Greenlight submissions and 2964 games made it on Steam in that year - that’s nearly 60 games a week, which is much more difficult to follow. In 2016, 4207 games made it on to Steam, at this point, this is becoming a real problem. The store has reached a point where nobody wants to sift through literally hundreds of games a month to find the one or two that are worth buying. If that kind of growth trend continued, you could have been looking at over 6000 new releases this year.

A good reason to implement better quality control.
And a better marketing team at valve promoting the best one’s.