And you trust everything you read on the 'net about how people claim to make money, right ?
Because it is so easy to get money and become rich, right ?
If you work on creating a game 24/7 for months if not years you can’t do any other job so you won’t have any income until your project is completed and you can sell the product.
Sorry but that is quite a nonsense.
Creating games isn’t easy at all. It is only way cheaper than in the past thanks to the fact that professional 3D Engines are cheap now while only a few years ago a license fee in the $500,000+ range was required and only an estabilished business or people with plenty of money could do it anyway.
The whole purpose of having created the so called indie market in the first place would vanish if the fees became too high so that most freelancers and very small software houses at their first product or with only a few products that didn’t sell that much all of a sudden couldn’t pay the fee to keep trying having a chance to be successful.
There where plenty of other engines which where free or had very small licensing fees before UE4/Unity/CryEngine5 and you could do games with them just fine. Heck even nowadays there are plenty of successful games made with all kind of engines. Just 7 years ago you had to code your own rendering pipeline to have deferred rendering as it wasn’t a norm for most of the engines, I don’t have to do anything like that in UE4. You had to create all those tools which you have an easy access today, for free, yes it makes it easy. Making great games is not but making playable game that looks decent was never easier than nowadays.
I think you have a misconception of what Indie market is. Self-publishing studio of 100 people is an Indie company. Self publishing one man band can be an Indie company too. The key here is “self publishing” instead of “this is my first game”. Indie market was not created by someone on purpose to remove fees, it was simply a natural process where ability to sell games conveniently online outgrow necessity to sell games in physical shops. This is all to it. Getting your game Greenlit on Steam doesn’t make you an Indie, what makes you Indie is making game professionally for years without a publisher. Obviously if you can’t sell enough products to pay fees, taxes, salary and etc. you are not an Indie, you are just trying.
You are the one with confused ideas here if you go around telling that a production studios with 100 employees wouldn’t be an estabilished business in any field but an “indie” thing just because it would be self-publishing.
The free 3D engines you are referring to were worse than subpar compared to the professional 3D engines. And the games produced with those as well as custom 3D engines were of low and very low quality compared to AAA games made with the professional 3D engines which licenses were very expensive.
Nowadays a single freelancer and very small software houses have the chance to even achieve AAA games quality thanks to the availability of professional 3D engines like UE4 that were just too expensive a few years ago.
No, he’s correct. A studio operating without publisher backing is independent; that is literally what the term means - independent of publisher. Indie developers vary in size, but a studio with as many as a hundred developers is not necessarily unusual. Many indie studios have headcounts of around 50, some have less, some have more. Bohemia Interactive as an example has over 250 employees, CCP has around 600.
If you are not making a living through developing and selling games, you are an amateur, hobbyist or aspirant.
This conversation is going full circles due to people not reading previous posts, not understanding or are just trolling.
I think it’s ok. I just hope the price isn’t too high. I feel like $500 would be fair if they’re looking to keep out the riffraff. However for $500, it would also be nice to get some benefits besides just publishing.
I concur with this. I think everything that can be said on the subject has been said.
500 at the min…with 1k at the top end…
teak
Interview with the steam team via Valve News Network.
If the fee was too high, couldn’t you get your friends and family to pitch in? Or, maybe even do a kickstarter for the entry fee? Or patereon? Not sure what you would consider too high? But anything under 2k would be good, with 1k as my favorite!
teak
I haven’t read all of the thread or most of it, but I bet my post will be an unpopular opinion.
honestly, The games market is so saturated with absolute garbage, and not just from indies studios either. most games that are put on steam via greenlight, and honestly, allot of games that are added by steam, shouldn’t be on steam, let alone any marketplace, period. You know how much garbage is now on steam because of greenlight? Too effing much. There was enough garbage when it was curated by steam alone.
Yes, some people don’t can undestand this, the more simple game with small bugs and bad graphics can be a successful in sales.
Here you go… this is where the players really are, not Steam; and soon you’ll be able to sell your games truly directly to them:
5% cut. I say hasta la vista Steam!
Didnt read all of it,but is the final fee number set yet?
For me even a grand is too much.Thanks to stupid games people are more aware today and ignore even the good games.Looking at steamspy,some manage to make 1-2k in a timeline of 2-3 months.With steams aditional 30% bite and each contry tax(not counting epics 5%) its not profitable in the begining.What i loud like is something like 400-500 max and only 10% steam profit taken.Shoud be enought to stop 20% of the lame(i mean)lame games with ready assets assets and nothing more.
Yes, the way she said it was misleading; it’s indeed the same 30%; lame.
30% is way too much… Even for Steam.
Hmm, well, maybe they are just not “good enough” games, or too niche, or target wrong audience or don’t have enough exposure. All this have to be solved by devs in any case.
I haven’t played Formata for example but visual content in it is bare-bones - like it uses UE4 mannequin for character models. Which I don’t mind at all but some people got really angry about it. Imho if decent gameplay is already there, proper art is something that dev could commission later. Let’s look at some stats:
As you can see, it’s already sold decent amount of copies since launch and have mostly positive reviews.
In my opinion if the fee is 500$ or a little under valve should** definitely** be able to easily pay a guy to test a game in 1 day to see if it is good enough in one day. It doesn’t need to be a in depth review, it doesn’t take a long time.
Very excited to hear, that it could be possible to get game in gog or twitch too. Was bit worried if it gets too expensive to get game in steam direct. Twitch and Gog could be even better choices for games that might not be quite top10 material, without sales dropping to zero instantly. Very exciting times.
Valve want two things:
#1: Earn money without doing anything.
#2: Earn more money pretending they make us all a favor, including the players working for them for free while still paying them to play the games. Double charging, players and developers while watching it all from the outside.