+1 this sir.
Quality control will solve most of the other problems.
The fee should be pretty high, like $1000 at minimum. Note that the post says it’s a “recoupable application fee” which usually or by old publishing words means you get it all back when you succeed. Maybe when you hit a certain milestone in sales they pay it all back or cut it from their 30% share after set revenue point and until it’s all paid.
If you can’t assume your game makes at least all of the fee back you need to keep improving it till it shines or use other platforms until you succeed and have enough to pay the Steam fee. If you are not ready to take the risk by funding it yourself or taking a loan or etc. you are more likely a hobbyist than an indie developer and could start elsewhere. The whole “I’m an indie dev” phrase is so wildly used that everyone who has started Unreal/Unity/Gamemaker once calls them selves that while rolling on a zero budget.
I love how those with access to money are telling the ones scraping by that thousand $$ fees are no big deal.
It’s not a big deal if you get the fee fully back with a good product. If you can’t trust your product enough to be prepared to invest some money ahead you probably are not yet ready to release it in Steam.
Is this a real discussion? Whoever suggests values like $5000 or even $1000 have absolutely no consideration for the little guy or how bad the situation is in some countries.
A better quality control is all that is needed. Period.
I’ll wait and see how the system works before casting judgement.
It’s not a question of being ready for release. The game market is fickle and releasing a game is a **** shoot with no guarantees of success even for the big guys. So the idea of the indie going into debt in the hopes that he might make enough to cover the Steam fee is not exactly palatable.
Valve has said several times they do not want to quality control because it’s subjective and there is audience almost all kinds of stuff. They even had an own small chapter about it in the post and Gaben said the same in the recent AMA.
Quick example that comes to my mind: “Who’s your daddy” game looks like it was cobbled together in few days and looks terrible, yet it became a small hit. What would have the curator done? rejected it for child death, suicide theme, terrible graphics, buggy gameplay, etc? what about the game “Shower with your dad” or any of the other similar titles that were “small hits”, yet they look like a joke or game jam games.
That just means the “indie” did not hype or market the game at all or observed the demand and interest if they just released and hoped for the best. Steam is not supposed to be an showcase room for an amateur hour products or first game hobbyists. If you are experienced developer or one of the big guys you are not releasing games and praying for gods. There is always an estimation for the profits long before releasing and it can be based on various things like riding with the franchise/publisher name or pre-release hype at minimum.
If you go in debt you are most likely still a hobbyist trying to put all the eggs in one basket. Steam is not the only platform.
People can argue for better quality control all they like, and it’s the solution I’d like to see, but it isn’t in Valve’s modus operandi and they aren’t going to manually curate their storefront any more.
Yes we did, and it took some effort. We had to draw up a proper business plan, and we had to approach investment groups and make our pitch as a business, but we got that funding. If you can convince such a group that you’ll make a return, they’ll make the investment. This will work for more or less anybody. Publishers and investors will generally work with anyone so long as they are reasonably capable of doing business with a company in that country, and it’s rare that they aren’t able to do so (for example trade sanctions). If you’re in a European country like you suggest you are, you should have no trouble at all. The only barrier to getting investment is you putting in the hard graft to make a business and product worth investing in.
The App store makes billions from it’s biggest sellers, who have all been entrenched for years now - the little guys seldom make any money at all. Do yourself a favour and actually look at some statistics for how games fare on the App store before making statements that are easily proven to be false. It is well documented that 99% of apps on that store don’t make any money - which is absurd for any marketplace.
For example, first hit in google (2014):
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2322853/over-99-percent-of-apps-will-not-make-any-money
This is pure speculation on your part. I doubt Apple care much what Valve do, they have their own internal analysts to work out what they want to do with their storefronts.
I don’t think you’ve thought this one through. If a game doesn’t sell enough to make it’s $5000 fee back, it didn’t make enough money to pay the royalty on UE4 (or Cryengine etc) - ergo Epic really don’t care, they’ve lost literally nothing. The barrier to entry on Steam isn’t going to stop people making games anyway, and Unity’s storefront success predates the existence of Greenlight entirely.
Business is business - from a business standpoint, in the absence of curation, the fee has to be high in order to prevent saturation from low quality rubbish. Valve isn’t a charity and they don’t own ‘the little guy’ anything (nor do they stand to gain anything from him).
And it’s because of examples like that, that it’s virtually impossible to predict which games are going to be successful or even profitable. All I know is that using a fee barrier can actually destroy the real indie industry.
Take for example someone from Bangladesh. It can easily take years for someone to raise $5000 with a full time job. He/she would have to chose: develop the game or spent his entire time trying to raise the necessary money.
But, let’s wait and see for Steam’s final decision.
Your argument is flawed. You are assuming the ability to fork over thousands of $$$ somehow guarantees a quality game. And no one is saying Valve is a charity (especially when they are taking a 30% cut on sales).
Wasn’t Id Software a “little guy” back in the day? Do you remember the Oliver Twins? They were also “little guys”. Block the little guys, and you may end up lossing millions.
Game success isn’t luck, and it’s far from impossible to predict how successful a game will be so long as you actually do your research prior to bringing your game to market. At the same time, success isn’t based on chance (with some rare exceptions), it’s usually the direct product of effort put into marketing a product that itself has sufficient effort put into it’s development.
The indie scene will be fine. Most of the major indie games had six digit budgets anyway.
Edit:
Firstly, it’s not the 80s any more, things have changed in the last forty years.
Also, if you care to do your research, you’ll find iD’s first games were all brought to market with the assistance of publishers (in fact, every single game they’ve ever released has been). Dizzy was published by Codemasters, as were most of the early Oliver Twin’s games.
People suggesting very high fees are just in desperation mode, trying to cut down their competition 
Developers with money want to cut out the little joe hobby, making easier to sell more for less marketing costs since there won’t be so many apps in the store to fight against, for consumer attention.
Steam has never been a “holy graal” of games, this pseudo elitism towards Steam posed as a high standard storefront are just commercial interests speaking; since the early days there’s crappy shovelware selling over there.
If you don’t want to deal with flooded marketplaces, go sell on platforms hobbyists have no free access to; suggesting to keep them out of Steam will simply make Valve decrease anual revenue instead of helping Steam to grow, they will never do that, wait and see.
Valve’s interest is simple: QA costs time and money, they want to remove quality assurance from their expenses list.
They usually make their consumers work for them while they keep the money, this is why Greenlight exists today; but developers cannot accept the fact Steam is becoming Google Play store for PC and have always complained about it.
They tried the same with paid Mods, but backlashed and they gave up for now, but they will always try to make someone else do their work for them while receiving money for it too.
What is actually going to happen is nothing will change:
- There will be trash games published, because some people actually buy those bad games.
- Only the big releases will get store front page on the bigger banners.
- The flood will keep on flowing, small games forgotten quickly.
- The bigger games will keep selling millions as usual, nothing changes.
I just feel a little sorry for those who gonna pay for this fee, no matter how small/large it end up to be 
There are also several hundred Greenlight games that failed badly even after people voted them in and seemed to have a good reception. It’s not really impossible to have some sort of prediction of a games popularity. A one level demo posted at itch.io, reddit, etc. with analytics can sample peoples reactions and how they receive a game as example. Many games have started as a flash or a game jam games and evolved in to full games based on the reception. Once again Steam is not the only place in the world.
Yep it can, however it does not mean the entry fee should be low because of them or even that they would have the fee discounted. That would make the competition unstable and hinder it because after the fee they gain access to the same global market as everyone else and with same revenue flow. In some countries there are even laws or regulations for market access from developing countries. Note that the cost of development in these countries can also be multiple times lower. They can have a 10 man team working on a game with the cost of a one senior developer in a US or EU based indie studio.
I can refute that easily – See Duke Nukem 4. Years in production by big name(s); Massive budget; Name recognition; Total fail in the market place. Compare this with Goat Simulator which was done as a joke.
I can refute that easily – See Duke Nukem 4. Years in production by big name(s); Massive budget; Name recognition; Total fail in the market place. Compare this with Goat Simulator which was done as a joke.
[/QUOTE]
Cherry picking two examples isn’t refuting a point. You’ve also cherry picked badly.
I’m going to assume you mean Duke Nukem Forever. That was a critical failure for a number of reasons, in part because it had been in development hell for so long and had completely failed to keep up with the times. Nevertheless, it’s a terrible example because the game made a profit regardless of it not being very good. Gearbox didn’t pick up that game on the off-chance it might make some money - they did their research and worked out what it would take to break even before even buying the rights.
Goat Simulator was not luck either. The game was a game jam game, whose trailer was made as an April Fool’s joke that went incredibly viral. Coffee Stain wisely used the enormous viral success of that trailer to turn it into an actual product. Once again, it’s not luck, they made the game in response to demand for the game.
The shovelware storm is hitting Valve’s bottom-line really hard, they are losing money because consumers are losing confidence in their platform and buying fewer games (and a number of successful mid-tier developers no longer even use their storefront). It’s more or less an exact mirror of the games market crash 82-85 - when consumer confidence is low, consumers stop buying. In the early 80s this almost completely wiped out the console games industry, and it was caused by an over-saturation of low budget, poor quality releases. Atari allowed almost complete freedom for third parties on their platform - it cost Atari everything and they never recovered. Nintendo on the other hand were highly selective, and went on to massive success. This isn’t a coincidence, it’s an important consideration in market economics.
I can refute that easily – See Duke Nukem 4. Years in production by big name(s); Massive budget; Name recognition; Total fail in the market place. Compare this with Goat Simulator which was done as a joke.
[/QUOTE]
There were great games that did not sell aswell.
System Shock 1 (Lost money in the end. Considered one of the greatest games of all time.)
Tera Nova: Strike force centauri (Pretty much created Squad based gameplay. Great game too. Lost A lot of money to the point were they laid of Warren Spector!)
Grim Fandango
Jet Set Radio
Shenmue
Beyond Good and evil… And many others.
Proof that one cannot just expect something to sell. (Sometimes…)
Goat Simulator was not luck either. The game was a game jam game, whose trailer was made as an April Fool’s joke that went incredibly viral. Coffee Stain wisely used the enormous viral success of that trailer to turn it into an actual product. Once again, it’s not luck, they made the game in response to demand for the game.
[/QUOTE]
Sounds like the epitome of luck to me.
That a smart company used to their advantage.
The shovelware storm is hitting Valve’s bottom-line really hard, they are losing money because consumers are losing confidence in their platform and buying fewer games (and a number of successful mid-tier developers no longer even use their storefront). It’s more or less an exact mirror of the games market crash 82-85 - when consumer confidence is low, consumers stop buying. In the early 80s this almost completely wiped out the console games industry, and it was caused by an over-saturation of low budget, poor quality releases. Atari allowed almost complete freedom for third parties on their platform - it cost Atari everything and they never recovered. Nintendo on the other hand were highly selective, and went on to massive success. This isn’t a coincidence, it’s an important consideration in market economics.
[/QUOTE]
Nintendo fixed that with quality control.
Not overpricing. And this mainly affected the US only.
England seemed fine with their low budget Speccy games. They had a golden age. (Most made on no budgets at all!)
Id’s games became popular through BBS’s.
Shareware model sent them to heights they never would have reached just with publishers.
And the people that made up Id had made Countless games with no publishers or not even released way before ID.
I thought we were talking about indie studios (or individuals) with really small budgets or none at all.