There are better places to invest $10.000 and turn that into 20k much easier than indie game selling;
I would not give away all that moneis just to have the “opportunity” to sell on Steamworks.
Look, I’m being realistic; you might not like what I have to say, but Valve is a business and it’s their business to maintain a storefront that customers can use to find decent games. If customers can’t find decent games, their storefront, ergo their entire business has problems, and that also means problems for those who use their storefront for their business. They need to maintain consistent quality on their products and they are not out there to do ‘the little guy’ a favour, there are other platforms for that (see itch.io, humble, or desura) that you can publish your games to.
Steam needs a barrier to entry in order to maintain a reasonable quality level across the board. Once upon a time only big publishers were able to get their games up there, later down the line they had a team curating submissions. That team became overwhelmed and it’s no longer reasonable to even attempt to curate the storefront (literally thousands of submissions per day), so they adopted Greenlight. Greenlight didn’t work because the barrier to entry was simply too low and the market was absolutely flooded with rubbish, making it impossible to sift out games and meaning that decent indie titles often failed to get any visibility at all.
I’ll say it again for the third time - if your business and game is worth selling on Steam you can find $10,000 with relative ease, and I’ve already mentioned four different routes you can take to get that fee. If you cannot find it and other people do not have faith in your product, perhaps it’s time to admit that your game may well not meet the quality bar required for Steam.
Read it again.
Valve didn’t suggest that; it’s the studios trying to kick you out whose are telling Valve to put a $5K barrier, it’s your competitor’s suggestion, not Valve’s greediness.
They’ve already stated that there would be a recouperation mechanism for the fee.
$100-200 would mean that the storefront would be even worse than it currently is under Greenlight - it quite simply has to be higher. There’s no point making the problem even worse when you’re trying to solve the problem in the first place. $5000 is a tiny amount of money compared to the size of Steam’s audience, and you can easily find that money somewhere with minimal risk to yourself.
Well that might help for a some indie devs.
But it leaves a lot of us in the dust. Because money is tight. (I live in California, MONEY IS TIGHT, is an understatement.)
Well, if they choose that price.
Very true.
It would be a wasteland of bad cheaply made asset based games.
I would say we need Greenlight back with new rules and a better system.
There are ways to find that money. I don’t know how many times I have to reiterate that you don’t have to pay for it out of your annual salary 
I’m not sure where you think there’s this big pile of money just laying around (under the seat cushions maybe?) that’s at the disposal of the indie developer. But many indies are self-financing and on extremely tight budgets.
I think the idea of unreal engine based games being sold on marketplace sounds interesting. If it works, I’m pretty sure unity asset store will follow the model.
On a side note, regarding steam direct’s fee, unreal dev-grants come to my mind. Perhaps epic will be more “generous” towards devs who wants to release their game on steam but can’t pay the fee, epic can easily cover that under the “dev-grants” umbrella.
Maybe but if they would get 5,000 submissions/year or more at $5,000 each that would become a risk too high to make for Epic Games or any other business. Just too much money and too many of those games could easily fail at selling enough copies.
So it is just better for everyone in the business at any level if Valve avoids doing such a thing as forcing developers to pay an high ($1,000 to $5,000) fee+the 30% cut they would keep getting anyway.
I built my PC on parts from the goodwill.
And spent money on a good Video card.
That’s how tight. (I could still do it. This is true. But boy would I be a dead tired by the end of it. Mentally and pysical.)
But again this is all fruitless to discuss till we get an offical price from valve
I would love to have an alternative to Steam. But unfortunately, they are the 600lb gorilla in the room.
sigh
Small business loans. Angel investors. Crowdfunding. Publishing agreements. Dev grants / equivalents.
The money is there for anybody who cares to put the effort in to find it. If you can’t seem to raise the money through these routes, you may want to accept the possibility that your game is probably one of the ones that fails to hit the quality barrier and that Valve are deliberately trying to keep out of their marketplace.
Valve can’t make the fee low, or their store will be saturated with low-quality rubbish - this is the entire point of changing the system. Yes, it is possible that a game might not sell enough copies to make a return on the $5000 investment - but this is the risk that you accept when you pay the fee to have access to their storefront and customer base.
To ask a serious question - if you honestly don’t believe that your game is good enough to make $5000, why do you think your game should be on Steam in the first place?
In what fantasy world are you finding plenty of rich people giving money to fund games development, uh ?
You are talking about your own fantasy world. It doesn’t happen in the real world in most countries and even where it happens it still just for a few.
NONSENSE !
Is Apple asking developers to pay $5,000 to publish any app or games perhaps ?
Apple enforces quality control over what it is allowed to sell on the App Store. THAT is something Valve should do as well by hiring employees to do that job.
Is the App Store full of bad stuff ? Well… yes and NO ! … Compared to the mess that is the Google Play Store for Android the App Store regardless of some bad apps and games it still features high and very high quality products overall.
And Apple asks just a small annual fee. Not a very high annual or per-app fee.
If Valve asks a very high fee Steam kicks out all indie developers and most small software houses. It is as simple as that. Surely many large software houses hinting at the $5,000 fee would be pleased by such a thing…
If it was for people like you the Apple App Store and iTunes would have been a huge financial failure with only big studios and big software houses able to afford publishing anything there.
The ‘fantasy’ world where I’ve been there and done that. I’ve been part of a new start-up indie company with an initial budget of more or less nothing, I’ve taken money from angel investors, and I’ve talked to several publishers regarding publishing deals. Don’t tell me it’s a fantasy, because I know that it isn’t from experience. If you have a half decent product or business plan and you actually put yourself out there, you can get the deal you need. There are quite a number of international publishers who work specifically with small indie developers, funding their projects, marketing them, and getting them on storefronts. Games like Stardew Valley as an example were supported by these kinds of publishing deals. Even if you couldn’t find the right deal with investors or publishers, raising $5000 through crowdfunding isn’t exactly difficult.
You keep telling me it’s impossible, but quite frankly I don’t think you’ve ever even tried.
Both storefronts are saturated with rubbish, to the point where small indie developers can’t make a penny because they have zero visibility and the tiny number of top-sellers are permanently enthroned in the top-sellers lists. How does this benefit you, if there are so many low quality releases that nobody ever even sees your product? It’s the single most common complaint targeted at the App Store and it’s the exact problem that people allude to when they compare Greenlight to the App and Play stores. Turning into one of those useless storefronts is exactly what this move is supposed to avoid. If you don’t have a quality product, Steam doesn’t want you.
Realistically, the only the big studios bother to publish anything worthwhile on those stores, because nobody else can afford the marketing to compete with them. As a small indie developer with a high quality product and low budget, this is the exact opposite of what you want. The vast majority of games on Apple’s App Store don’t even make the annual fee back.
How about this, Valve takes $100-500 and actually uses that money to play test the game, and decides if it meets their quality bar (and gives feedback on what the game would need to be accepted).
The benefits would be no high financial barrier to entry that is an artificial barrier that might not actually keep trash out.
The first Binding of Isaac would have never made it onto Steam if there was a $10,000 barrier.
So you found someone that gave you the money you needed ? That is great FOR YOU. BUT it doesn’t apply to everyone else and in most countries it just doesn’t happen, ever.
And if the Apple App Store was in such a big trouble as you are trying to say there profits would have gone down already and there wouldn’t be more and more developers trying to turn a profit publishing their apps and games there. It is as simple as that.
If Valve adds a $1,000 to $5,000 per-game fee and others like Apple would follow the whole business would self-destroy with only big studios and software houses left.
And that would mean that low fee and free/almost free 3D engines like Unreal Engine, Unity and CryEngine and others would get affected along with their marketplace sales.
If small developers and small software houses can’t afford publishing on Steam and other online digital shops 3D engines games would be used by medium and large software houses only like it was some years ago.
I think Steam should not be a totally open marketplace where anything goes. That’s what the open internet is for.
If you, the developer, do not believe that you will sell $2,000 worth of your game, you should not submit it to Steam, IMO.
And, if every developer that submits to steam believes that they will sell at least $2,000 worth of the game, a $1,000 refundable listing fee is totally legitimate.
I agree: The correlation between “will pay $1,000 for the up-front listing fee” and “the quality of the game is actually good” is not perfect.
But, in my opinion, it has to be better than the correlation of “will pay $100 Greenlight fee and can make a trailer that gets voted up” with quality, which we’ve now found is close to zero.
This is not true. $1,000 is about a week’s worth of rent in San Francisco. If you really believe in your game, saving up the equivalent of a week’s worth of rent should not be a real problem, especially since you’re supposed to make it back in sales.
Even if you live in a cheaper part of the world (rent varies wildly,) $1,000 is about 1/20th of the cost of a small, cheap car. Lots of people buy cars. An investment in a game that will actually sell is in many ways a much better way to spend a bit of money than buying a vehicle that quickly depreciates. I do not think that a $1,000 fee would strangle all indies, or even strangle all basement developers.
If you make just $2,000 on Steam you have to pay a 30% fee to Steam/Valve as well. for Unreal Engine a 5% goes to Epic Games.
in most countries taxes are at least 30% and up to 50-60% in Europe.
So paying a $1,000 fee to just publish a game that might end up being a financial failure is a lot of money for small developers and small software houses.
That unless Valve would ensure that at a $9.99 price they would sell 10,000 copies of it so that the developer would end up getting some profit out of it when taxes are paid. But such a thing will never happen.
So the fee must be below $500. Anything above $500 would be a huge mistake.
Keep Greenlight as it is.
But create better Quality control. That is what we need. Revamped quality control.
Anarchy in the store will cause an Atari style implosion of crud. 1983 game crash if anyone wants to google this effect.
We need to revamp the quality control. That should do it.
Rent in San Fran is around 3500 to 5000 right now. (From someone who lives around there.)
And jobs suck around here aswell. Just saying.
Hopefully you make it back and some.
But I don’t like playing russian roulette.