Why not scrap paid and green light?
Steam make money through the sale of the game so why shouldn’t they revert to the traditional publishing platform - you submit a playable demo, they decide if they want it and give you the go ahead to complete publish it free of charge.
You negotiate the commissions that way it’s in there best interest to only supply the best games for maximum sales even at a lower commission rate.
Well the reason they don’t is fairly simple. If they have 500k games on there market that’s 500k products to sell and make commission from over a diverse membership of millions with varying purchasing power. If they get too selective and have 250 high quality games where they make 5-10% commission there membership base will decline drastically so they are making fewer overall sales on higher value games at lower commission rate.
One of the successful aspects of steam is that when I’m bored of the games on my account I as a thrifty person can go find a game for <$10 to enjoy during my annual leave. Once they reduce that ability why would I want to remain on steam?
500000*(10*.3) = 1500000
100000*(45*.05) = 225000
Even at the same rate of commission it’s 1350000 so less but given the reduced market I’m less likely to agree to 30% commission.
Correct, but the argument made throughout the thread is that even $250 is too much because “no budget third world indie devs can’t find that kind of money”. That kind of statement is blatantly false and only serves to derail the actual discussion. $250 is nothing, it wouldn’t help quell the flood of horrible **** at all, it would enable it even more with no other barriers. In order to properly deter people churning out useless, hacked together template-projects you need a high entry barrier to make it unprofitable for them to release something that’ll sell 10 copies.
So far we don’t know how exactly fees will be setup. It’s possible that what is meant by recuperable fees is a simple system where you pay part of the fee out of your pocket and the rest is deducted from sales. For example if fee is 2000$, you pay 1000$ upfront and don’t get any money out of Steam until another 1000$ is recovered from sales.
People keep mentioning trash games and asset flips like they know more about the whole situation than Valve. Do you have actual evidence that trash games are the reason for such a huge revenue drop? Maybe real reason is that so many games are abandoned as soon as devs get their first cash from Steam. Or so many games are sold using early access process for the half of their price. Or because 2016 was full of new AAA releases and most of their sales was done as pre-orders outside of Steam. Or maybe Valve was inflating their revenue numbers previous years. Or unicorn invasion into the data center of Steam resulted in loss of financial records. In my honest opinion it doesn’t matter much as it won’t change the fact that Greenlight is to be gone.
On a basis of what I’ve just said, I don’t think that specific entry fee or Steam Direct itself are going to solve all of the raised potential issues on why Steam go so many games published in 2016 but at the same time revenue dropped so much.
I don’t know how exactly Steam Direct will function but it would be great that everyone gets a fair opportunity to get their game published purely on a basis of how much money their are willing to spend. If I recall correctly, both Greenlight and games from publishers are getting some amount of “views” on the platform. If amount of games goes up faster than natural customers growth of platform you have a supply/demand problem. Where it doesn’t matter if you got your 1mil views to spend, just as 100 others games, as you can’t “spend” them because there are just not enough customers to browse all new games on the market. So why not just pay for the amount of views your game needs, just as big publishers already do? Instead of doing a custom contract with Steam, negotiating how much you are going to pay them from start, how much their cut will be and etc. Just have a system where you pay 500$ and your game is given 100000k views, if you pay 5000$ you get 10mil of views and so on. it’s your responsibility to make those views count and do a proper marketing inside of Steam to “use” all of those views that you’ve bought. If you can’t afford high fees you just get a lower exposure on Steam itself, but if your marketing outside of Steam is good you don’t even need those views as customers will arrive from external links.
[Obviously as amount of total possible views is limited you might be paying dynamically depending on how many games are published and how many devs are willing to pay higher price. maybe even make it as auction.]
STEAM is awash with poor quality products, should valve chuck out the trash and leave a core of solid products ?
Would this make STEAM direct more appealing (for a fee at the higher end) … as you would be joining a quality Market Place?
Or how about filtering things out to a lower tier STEAM … STEAM community and Steam Pro ?
just my own musings
Paul G
Edit
I might add with upgrade / downgrade path
And possibly a max / min price range for each service… this could possibly control quality better than any high / low submission fee… you would have to be confident your product could sell at XXX -YYY price range.
The point has nothing to do with whether those games had publishers or not, read my post again.
That is how I draw the line. That’s the ENTIRE point I am trying to make in regards to how curation should work. Are you even reading what I’m posting?
When people ask, “How is this **** on steam”, these are the kind of games they’re talking about. They don’t care about mediocre games, they don’t even care about poor quality games that may or may not have some sort of redeeming factor, they care about the trash that anyone with a brain could have looked at once and realized that this does not deserve to get onto the steam store.
You’re taking idiots on twitter way too seriously.
No, it’s not.
Ok?
The amount of effort to make even a bad portal clone is drastically higher than the amount of effort it takes to flip an asset pack.
Granted I don’t spend a heck of a lot of time looking at the store page, but when I do sometimes I’ll take a look at the steamspy listings of new titles for the sake of curiosity, and typically the sales are reasonably within where I would expect them to be proportional to the effort displayed and the price range. Sure there will always be niche games, or some that are amazing but just don’t catch on, but there are exceptions to every rule, and will happen whether steam returned to 2008 levels of store additions or not.
While a game being successful on other store platforms can be an indicator to quality, it could also just mean it’s a memey piece of garbage instead. However, some games do become successful on their own and get a steam release later on, but ultimately it doesn’t matter, because it’s just putting one artificial step between the game, and the vast majority of gamers, making it still a poor solution.
I honestly don’t want to. You argued about how good it is that publishers are having less of a grasp on games and posted a bunch of examples the majority of which used publishers.
You have no clue what “they” are thinking. “They” are not “you”. And as I’ve been saying all this time - what you think is not what I think, nor what everyone else thinks. Everyone will have a different idea of “the line” and we can sit here and debate whose line is better until we’re old but that won’t change the fact that at the end of the day, the line is subjective and subjectivity has no place in a system such as the one you’re suggesting. It’s unfeasible.
So is the press. And the outside world. Like it or not, those are our “public figures” and we owe it to the entire gaming industry, community and history to hold them to a certain standard.
You don’t know how to separate your own personal agenda from business interests. This is the last thing I will say regarding this point.
Irrelevant. See discussion about “the line” above.
But it does matter! That’s the core of what matters! Prove that your game has some merit before putting it up on the prime-time stage! You won’t be going to Broadway with your first play, you’ll be touring it to dozens, if not hundreds smaller theaters before someone gives you the spotlight on the big stage! That’s how the world works, you don’t get to skip this “natural selection”
Artificial steps is exactly what we need! Small games DO NOT NEED the vast majority of gamers. They need hundred people, top. To get the ball rolling. If the game is good, it will bubble up to the surface, and onto the prime stage (Steam).
People have gotten this misguided idea that Steam is for all games. It’s not. It’s for a minority of games.
Basically it was a single platform out there where hobbyists and amateurs could commercially publish their work, without getting anyone’s approval (I don’t count crowd as it was too easy to buy votes). Desura went bankrupt and dealing with GOG or Humble is pretty much out of question as for them this is how acceptable quality looks like: https://www.gog.com/games/indie?sort=title&page=2
So yeah, there is quite a bit of mis-conception. Like if you can’t publish your game on GOG why the hell it should be on Steam at all. I think starting teams or individuals should be super happy about Steam Direct as it’s only the money that you have to find, it’s not like you need to make an above average game in the first place, as GOG expects you to:
“This is my first game. Do I have a chance to get it onto GOG?
Definitely, and we encourage you to try, but please remember that our main focus is the quality, so if you want to submit your first game to us - be sure that it is comparable to, or even better, above indie market standards. Best way to make sure about that is to look at our previously released titles in the indie section.”
Hi,
Stingray looks okay.
CryEngine UI is no different Unity with flat icons.
Personally I like the new Maya UI and FL Studio. Perhaps Epic could make the icons editable and soon you can customize your own or pick up a fresh look in the market place.
btw
My taste is really good, I only play with the best.
Now if it was Unity UI, I would of say you’re right, but those two game engine’s UI can’t stand shoulder to shoulder with Unreal.
?? Who got a lot of money doesn’t even really need Steam. They can sell on whatever platform easily or sell directly. Big software houses started publishing on Steam because the majority of people buy there on PC … they could afford paying even a $100,000 or $1,000,000 fee to Steam or more (heck they were paying $1,000,000+ for the professional 3D Engine alone… and most still do to get premium support)
Freelancers and small software houses can’t afford paying an high fee and the world isn’t full of people willing to give the money to publish games with nothing in return. For Unreal Engine 4 … a 5% goes to Epic Games, Steam gets 30% … … some countries have low 20% to 30% taxes yes… but in the EU most countries have insane 50% to 65% taxes. That means that adding an high fee , anything above $500, could make it impossible for small and very small productions to even try selling their products on Steam. Adding a publisher to the mix with another 10% to 30% fee would mean that small software houses and freelancers could end up working hard for free, there would be no money left for them.
Which is extremelly easy. If 20 people buy a game and more than half ask for refund, Steam checks the game and if the reason for the refunds are substantiated, the game is removed. If the dev continues to submit crappy games, he’s banned/suspended and fined, which he must pay if he ever wants to return to the plataform.
If a gamer can’t see the difference between a good game and a crappy one in less than 1 hour, he is a …
That’s why small and very small productions can start with Humble and GOG, where you don’t need to pay high fees but you do need to demonstrate quality of your product. If you are talking about EU countries with 50-65% tax, I guess you mean Nordics or maybe Netherlands. In Netherlands average salary €25,000 to €30,000 a year, so please tell me, how someone could spend at least half a year full time to develop a game, but can’t spend few thousand to publish it? Because it’s too risky and you don’t know if it sells? Well, this doesn’t sounds like you are working professionally as your first risk was not publishing but developing it for half a year, which already costs you x5-10 of the fee.
Let’s say fee is 5 000$, in one country this is an average yearly income and so it is a lot of money. But at the same time, your cost of living is low too - making 10 000$ in income from Steam (which is just few thousand units) gets you enough money for another year + fee for the next game. Sounds like a great deal to me.
In another country, where 5 000$ is about 1.5-2 monthly incomes, your problem is not a fee but a cost of living as you have to make 5 to 10 times more of that a year. At this point, your risk assessment should have be done long before you are ready to publish your game.
Btw, we should not use taxation or income levels of individuals as it applies only to hobbyists or amateurs. If you are a professional, which Steam customers are expect you to be, you already have a registered company and plenty of EU countries have tax deduction or other insensitive for game developers or just small businesses. You still will pay your personal taxes from salary that you pay yourself, but this is no different to other small businesses.
Sure is! I always have liked GOG’s way of handling things.
Still don’t want steam to have a large fee… But if the game is good this is a viable option of getting money for steam’s fee (if large) and some marketing for the game.
it will be up to the quality of the game. As it should be in my opinion.
(Wonder if this bring more buisness to GOG as indie fans would be hanging out there more?)
??? If you work 24/7 on developing games as a freelancer you don’t get any money from any other job. And unless your parents are willing pay the money needed for your, if they can, you are out of budget. Most freelancers and very small software houses don’t have any income other than the games/apps they can make. So the ones without a rich family helping them are out of luck and no one knows how much a product can really make on the market, maybe the first one doesn’t sell well but the next one does … still if the fees are too high the chances of finding out if a business could commence with some real profit are thin.
I’m not sure if you understand what freelancer means. Freelancers make money from doing job for other people or companies. They sure can make their own games too but what makes them a freelancer is ability to sell their skills - they can make money. If they can’t - they are not freelancers.
Normally you don’t start business without any money at all, but I’ve managed to do it twice and one time it had to be done radically - moving back to my parents and working for half a year without weekends and any income. But it did payed off. My parents are rather poor and most of my life I’ve lived in Easter European country. So even if I would try to optimize my expenses by relocation I wouldn’t even be able to get out of the country.
But this is irrelevant, if you are serious about what you do, you can relocate your business somewhere cheaper. FTL devs started in China. Asked 10k on kickstarter and raised 200k, sold a lot of early access copies before getting on Steam. Plenty other stories like that. I don’t want to sounds like “git gud” type of person, but I hardly see what there is to complain about as you barely need anything else but some sort of PC/Laptop, some water and food and preferable a roof. People run way more complicated and demanding businesses and don’t have much alternatives of working as freelancer as most of us can. So yeah, with all being said, I just don’t see how a fee, let it be even 10 times higher, can be an obstacle so large that you will have to go out of business. That fee will be even recuperable according to Steam.
To me it’s a bit funny that we have this kind of conversation at all. Making game is as easy nowadays as it ever was, but game itself is just 1 out of 10 things that you have to do as a game developer. Thanks to the frameworks like Torque, Xna, Unity, Box2D, UDK, Unreal Engine 4, Lamberyard, CryEngine and dozen of others, the total amount of work that you have to do as a developer have greatly diminished already. Paying just a fee to get to the largest PC market becomes just a nuance and gives you 2 out 10. The other 8, such as managing company, paying taxes, hiring people, training people, firing people, dealing with limited resources, building and following long term plan, dealing with authorities, getting an actual office, promoting your work at conferences, participating in various social gamedev events, building your website, hiring more people, maybe spend each second sunday with your kid, working on design for next game, doing market studies, learning new tools, optimizing production pipeline, getting presents in social media, working with youtubers, working on advertisement, opening your own shop, dealing with customer support, dealing with bad reviews by ingesting epic amounts of alcohol, thinking that you should have taken that offer to work in IT for local bank… How you are going to handle all this if you can’t make a surplus of few thousand dollars?
