Don’t mind Epic selling games without steam. (Drm free would be nice Epic.)
But don’t expect much sales from this market place. Steam and others have pretty much taken the market.
And the people buying from steam don’t want to change, as darthviper107 said.
Interesting idea nonetheless.
I made a new topic of this idea so people can share his opinions, i think Sweeney was indie at his time developing unreal and he will help the indie community his creating by even sharing the source code and making unreal free* with all the features on!!! also its a great business oportunity, not to mention something that even unity cant offer to his devs… Remember, it was games created by valve that attracted players to use steam in the first place, so unreal can do the same(paragon,unreal tournament,etc) , i dont mind to wait 3 years for the market place to hit 10 million players, youtubers are making that amounts of “fans” all by posting videos with 0 marketing cost!!! Hope is watching this forum and take it to the unreal war room monday morning!!!
I’m sure when Steam started it was the same way and with less developers than Epic. Epic have a huge user base, from hobbyist to AAA. We could totally do this and in about a year it could become the go to for early access and new games with Unreal Engine.
It may not be enough, but combine with other avenues like Amazon DD and GOG we can stop feeding the beast. It scary to see that much power over the industry to one corporation.
Unity would probably follow soon. The industry is always changing and regardless of the change, a good game will drive sales no matter where it is sold.
Maybe they have something else in mind that will improve that system, because removing community voice and increasing pay wall does not look like reasonable improvement
Steam is hardly about quality of product as much as it a pay for distribution service. Their allure is how may people are playing games via steam, that’s what they are selling (potential game sales).
The fee needs to be $10,000+. People in here might not like that much, but if it’s any lower, it won’t be a deterrent to the kind of throwaway **** that inundates the storefront at present. At 10k, only games that expect to make a serious return will stump up the fee.
Let’s make it $1,000,000 while we’re at it. For me and many others who don’t live in the US it is pretty much the same, because there is just no way to get that kind of money apart from selling everything we own. Even $5000 is more than I make in a year. Now I wonder why did I think that spending 1.5 years trying to make a decent game was a viable strategy, should have just pushed out a pile of shovelware games. Shovelware devs have profited already, now Valve punishing those who actually wanted to make a good game.
I think it’s about time Greenlight to go…
The new submission system though, I bet they’ll charge from $100 to $300 and only refund you that fee IF you publish the final product and if the game sales surpass the (fee * 0.7) mark.
A LOT of hobbyists will absolutely hate this submission model.
I guess that for Valve, Steam Direct will give another advantage: a way of promoting Source 2. When they will release the SDK, probably the fee for releasing a Source 2 game will be lower than if you build your game with Unreal.
If you’re serious about your project, you will find a way. Small business loans, angel investment, crowd funding, there are a multitude of ways to raise the fee. If the fee is too low, Valve will only be making the problem worse, not better.
There is no “you will find a way” thing.
Either there is a so called indie (freelance developers) market or there isn’t.
If they ask anything above $500 to publish a single game Valve would cause Steam to die quickly and only medium and large software houses would be left on Steam.
If Valve doesn’t want to spend money hiring employees to do what Apple does on the App Store to review and approve everything they can’t ask $600 … $1,000 or $5,000 just to submit a game or multiple games.
If Valve asks a $1,000+ fee to publish a game on Steam they must ensure that the game sells no less than 10,000 copies which would mean the developer manages to make money out of it and the $1,000+ fee becomes just a bit more to pay on the 30% fee that Steam gets anyway.
I really hope Valve will set a fee no higher than $200 or $250 per game which would be more than good as long as the fee doesn’t increase anymore once set. They keep getting 30% on sales it is not that setting a $5,000 fee would mean that Valve would give 100% to the publisher.
$10,000 is well within reach for indie developers - if you can’t find a way to raise that amount of money, simply put, the project is probably not worth being on Steam. You may not like that, but it is realistic, and it is not really that large an amount of money to raise (a $20 game need only sell 500 copies to recoup that fee, start making revenue and start paying the Steam royalty). If you honestly believe that $10k is too much, Steam is not the platform you should be targeting.
If the fee is only $200-250, the onslaught of absolute **** will continue, and quite possibly be worse than before as the previous barrier of Greenlight won’t even be there to stem the tide.
Well, I guess I am not serious enough, because if my game flops and I am left with $10000 debt, that’s it, my life will never be the same again, I am pretty much done.
That’s how it works for most people, if they’re based in the US, Europe or otherwise.
Not that it matters; none of those options require you to personally assume the debt.
Don’t know which reality you live in … maybe you are already very rich and you don’t mind but trust me the reality is not that shiny for most people either in Europe, US or even Japan, China, South Korea. Even in the countries where there are more rich people most indie developers have to start from nothing with very few money and in many countries in Europe taxes are very high which is another bad thing. Only rich people and already established businesses can afford high fees. Surely not a small developer, a freelancer that has a few money to risk and not enough to pay an high fee too.
Asking an high fee to small developers with nothing in return would be the worst Valve could do. If they would set an high fee in the $500+ range they should ensure a minimum number of copies sold (no less than 10,000 so that for a game sold at $9.99 the developer ends up with some money once taxes are paid …which can be as high as 60% in Europe!) and that they would promote the product at any cost to sell those copies. Otherwise why would anyone want to pay them such an high fee for? They are already getting 30% on sales anyway too.
If you have a game that is worth at least $10,000, you can find the money to get it on Steam. If you don’t think you can find $10,000, your game does not belong on Steam - it’s really that simple. I’ve already said there are many routes to obtaining that fee, such as small business loans, angel investors, crowdfunds, and of course traditional publishing deals. If you find you cannot get one of these you may want to re-evaluate your business plans, as they are probably not realistic.
It’s nothing to do with being rich or poor, there are ways to market if you have a quality product that will sell.
If the barrier to entry for Steam is low enough that everyone can afford to buy in with minimal or no commitment on their part, it’s useless for you anyway, because it will be same barrage of terrible content every day, and your product will be completely buried on the day it arrives, never selling a single copy anyway. This is what is already happening on Steam with a $99 buy-in and Greenlight in the way - there are literally over 100 games being pushed on there daily at present, and nearly all of them aren’t worth the time they take to download.
You know how ridiculous you sound? I can’t believe what you’re saying.
Since when does it require an indie team to shell out any amount of cash to publish a game? Steam is too lazy to do what Epic is doing now with content review. The Greenlight was a nice idea, but is now out of control.
This is partly due to the industry getting easier for developers to make games. Game engines are easier to master these days and content can be bought almost anywhere. It used to be where it would cost you and arm and a leg to hire a designer or programmer. Just because it is easier does not mean is not exhausting having to learn all new things. A single developer or small team has to grind and learn all facets of game design. Let’s just make it a little harder for that poor kid in China that’s been watching Youtube videos for two years and now wants to publish his game. Oops sorry it’s gonna run you $500 to $1000.
Just because Steam is imposing these fees does not mean the whole world needs to march to the beat of their drum.
The quality of a game is completely detached from how much money a developer can shell out to valve.
This will do literally nothing to curb the onslaught of garbage that is getting on steam, unless they make the fee absurdly high, in which case it’ll just cause more harm than good for obvious reasons that I clearly don’t need to repeat since most of this thread, ambershee being the obvious exception, get.
If this was really about quality control, they would just hire someone to take an hour of their time each day and just look at the greenlight queue. It’s not hard to quickly identify trash that has had no effort at all effort put in, in most cases you can do it just by looking at the thumbnail alone.
$5000 would kill my project immediately from being considered for a Steam launch. Way too risky for the indy developer working on a shoestring and quite frankly greedy on Valve’s part. $100 to $200 is tolerable. IIRC, Steam also gets a cut from sales. So they’re double-dipping here at the expense of the developer.
