Steam Direct is great for devs and awful for consumers.
The fee is recoupable, which means that if your game sells Valve will give you your money back.
I don’t think the fee will be higher than 1k, they just want to scare those guys submitting joke games.
Unfortunately, as I said on the Steam Community comments, this is not going to stop shovelware publishers because Steam is broken.
Even if your game is total **** you can give 1 million keys away and make money through trading cards.
They should have forced Greenlight candidates to release a playable demo to judge the game but there’s no way back, they just want it to be fully automated.
Steam is not the only online store, you can sell instantly on many other marketplaces, if you’re not willing to make an effort to promote your game it’s not going to sell even if it’s on Steam because it won’t have enough discoverability.
Even if you live in a 3rd world country you can make it happen, just start selling to first world consumers, learn about sales and marketing and promote your game, start building a community NOW.
It took me a while to read through the entire thread (late to the party!) but I wholeheartedly agree with @ambershee and believe he got a lot of undeserved flack for his posts.
On topic - Let’s first establish the postulate that Steam cannot be manually curated. You’d have to employ a small nation. In addition, and perhaps much more important - you don’t want humans curating your Steam games. A lot of people seem to forget this, but manual curation opens the doors for censorship and subjectiveness. I don’t want some San Fransisco trust-fund kid declining my game because they deemed it “problematic” and “triggering”. You open that pandora’s box and in half a decade the only thing on Steam will be artsy walking simulators.
Secondly, I’m from Bosnia. $5000 would be just under my annual salary. I would still support a higher fee than that, because, despite what some people would want you to believe, it is very possible to get to publishers, angel investors and all the other likes of funding no matter how backwater or poor your country is. I concede that the required effort varies but if you are serious about your game it is a token barrier at worst. And at the end of the day I don’t want to see games whose developers are not serious about development.
A lot of people make this out as some evil ploy to keep competitors at bay, but that is wishful thinking - developers who have a proper business sense and recognize the need for a higher entry barrier are already in a different league than people who think $100 is an acceptable fee and that raising funds / registering an LLC is hurting indies. It’s like me making a soapbox car and competing with Audi.
At the end of the day, the entry barrier for making games nowadays is too low and it will hurt everyone, developer, publisher and consumer in the long run.
If you still think that a $5000+ fee is too much, consider this - do you really have to release your game on Steam? Go with alternative routes, make a few small games, get some funds and build yourself up to Steam.
Yes because you pay the fee and that’s it you can publish. You don’t need votes, you don’t need to wait, you pay and publish, the competition will be far less than it is with Greenlight and when you get enough sales your fee will be refunded.
It already is a gamble being and indie dev in the first place and to make money your game needs to succeed no matter what. This being said, I already wrote a way to almost guarantee success.
Steam numbers are irrelevant, when you put your game there you still need to promote it, you still need to market it and create a community and create awareness around it.
It would be great to publish on Steam and make a million sales on the first month but it doesn’t work like that.
The mobile stores are probably bigger than Steam, why not publish there? Because they have huge discoverability problems. But you know what? Steam does have them too.
This is a business and Steam is not the Holy Grail, you still need to perform fundamental business practices or your game will became another forgotten title of that 37%.
Edit:
Exactly what he said.
I want to add that publishing on Steam is not a gamble when you have market validation.
If one is serious about publishing their game they may find $5000, even with difficulty when they don’t have any other choice.
But, if one is serious about publishing their game they just may have this $5000, even if their game is stupid.
Higher entry fee will not filter anything. It’s just extra payment for some people and extra trouble for other people and extra profit for Valve.
Just my opinion.
Completely untrue. In the 24 hour period over whatever timezone steam considers February 18th, there were 33 games posted. Hardly a significant number.
Very few people want curation remotely close to the depth you’re suggesting here. They want someone to spend a minute or two tops looking at the steam greenlight page to filter out blatant trash, low effort games, blatant asset flips, and baby’s first rpgmaker games. Like this, this, this, or this. Also games that launch without an executable l o l.
We’re in this situation in no small part because publishers were so immensely garbage that they drove a lot of people all the way into the hands of independent studios, and we’re better off for it. Over the last decade and some we’ve gotten countless games that never would have gotten made under the traditional studio/publisher model.
Remember Amnesia? The game that sparked the resurgence of mainstream horror games after they had been completely absent for ages?
Remember The Ship, Torchlight, Factorio, Stardew Valley, Defense Grid. All games that filled a void that publishers failed to fill for years?
There’s countless others, and if there’s one thing this entire situation, and the similar changes we’ve seen in the music world, should have taught us, it’s that publishers are more often than not, nothing more than a parasitic cancer that actively prevents developers from developing unique creative games.
And all this could be easily mitigated by having the most basic of quality control from some dude hired specifically to spend an hour or two looking through greenlight titles to filter out the blatant trash!
Steam has become the only distributor anyone cares about, with GoG trailing pretty significantly behind. No other marketplace is worth caring about. You may as well suggest that people go hang out on the roadside trying to sell their game.
2016 saw the release of 4207 titles on Steam, nearly 40% of its entire catalog. My “small nation” comment was an obvious dramatic exaggeration but let’s assume that each game takes 1 hour to curate, and you have people doing it for 8 hours per day. Since people don’t work at peak efficiency let’s assume that in an 8 hour period 1 person can curate 5 games. In order to curate the 4207 released games in 2016 you would need to curate ~16 games per day, since 2016 had 261 work days. That amounts to 3-4 people doing it full-time every year of the day. This sounds like a low number, but there is one important thing that’s not taken into account - 4207 released games. Just how many games get *submitted *to Greenlight but don’t ever make it past that stage? I can’t find any concrete number but I would wager that it’s “the vast majority”. Also, perhaps equally important, the amount of submissions is growing at an exponential rate every year. It is not a sustainable model.
It doesn’t matter what I suggest, what matters is what will happen. And what I am describing is exactly what would happen. It’s not unprecedented - even today you have localizers who believe it in their right to “fix” “problematic” content and change the original meaning of a game; and Australia’s ratings board has long been infamous for banning any games that they find even remotely out of line. If Valve were to go the route of curation, the extent of the curation and the criteria could never be objectively established. Where do you draw the line?
This is true for the likes of EA and Activision, but there are many smaller publishers that surfaced in the past few years that specifically target “AA” or indie titles, like Team17 or Devolver Digital. Monolithic publishers of the early 2000’s are one end of the spectrum, 100% indie like Phil “Choke on it” Fish are the other, and I’d argue the latter is far worse in the long run than the former.
If you’re making a game on such a small budget that a $5000 fee is insurmountable, the game doesn’t have to make millions of dollars, in which case the fact that other markets trail behind Steam is completely irrelevant. If make a game on a $1000 budget and sell it at $10, it has to sell 100 copies before it becomes profitable. Are you telling me that Steam is the only market where a game can sell > 100 copies at $10?
If it starts selling more, you can release it on Steam.
There are fans of those bad Unity games too.
Consumers see the videos, screenshots of the game. They read description, comments. If they think the game is good enough, they’ll buy.
As mentioned above there must be some level of quality control to really filter those truly bad games.
On the other hand most games deserve a chance. Who knows who likes what? Steam got more than 180 million consumer base.
I have followed this with much interest and I struggle to see why everyone is so passionate about it.
Will it stop **** gets getting on the store? No. Should it? No.
You as the consumer get to pick which you purchase, green light was bad for that because it restricted our choice - if a game sells 1 copy to a gamer that is happy great that gamer is happy and it didn’t affect the thousands that didn’t purchase it.
From a developer standpoint yes it’s money upfront but after spending a year+ on a game would u rather a rejection for your years work or a $250bill? Hell I’d pay $250 to publish over asking a community to decide if my game is good enough based on a 2min vid and some pictures.
Who has the right to label games as ****? Peggle isn’t exactly a great feat in game development but my kids enjoy it, my wife and I have it on our phones for when we’re bored - you don’t like it? Don’t have it
You’re still predicating this on the idea that curation would be more than opening the greenlight page and looking at it for more than a minute or two. Most of those trash games that get released on the steam store, or greenlight are easily identifiable as garbage within SECONDS by anyone with the remotest capacity for critical thinking.
We’re lumping fez in with the trash now? Whether you like it or not, the game undeniably had creative thought, and serious effort put into it, that resulted in a game of passable quality.
Even if Fez were undeniably trash, someone self publishing a bad game is not a reason to go insert unnecessary parasitic middlemen into the process for anyone else because they didn’t happen to have X amount of money they could part with.
No I’m not telling you that. I’m telling you that, as someone who probably cares more about games than most people, I don’t care about all these other marketplaces, and most gamers are in the same boat as me. If a game is not on steam, short of some very special circumstances it may as well not exist as far as I’m concerned, because steam is where my game library is.
You are still talking about this as if it’s some sort of objective standard, when it isn’t. If you ask 100 people about the standard for curation you’d get 150 opinions.
I am not talking about the game, I am talking about the developer - entitles brat who insults his customer base while sucking up to your usual corrupt news outlets, all of this with zero accountability, because he’s “independent”. Without someone to answer to, people like him will continue to **** on gamers and gamer culture until there’s nothing left of it. Draconian measures like EA or Activision are on the other extreme, but I’d argue they’re far less damaging than the indie alternative because they include a degree of professionalism.
Sorry, but as a developer you don’t get to choose what markets you “care” about, regardless of your love for games. If your game would sell 100 copies on RandomNewMarketX, that’s 100 people who bought your game on that market as opposed to Steam. Which means there are thousands of people using the service daily. You sell there, get funds for the Steam fee, release on Steam. As an indie who is just starting out with nothing but wind in his pockets, this is a win-win situation.
You get to sell your game on a less crowded market without big names stealing your spotlight
You promote a competitor to Steam (Very important as competition is always a good thing)
You make money without paying any fees
Once your game has been in the open for a while, building a community and some word-of-mouth, and you start making money, you can release it on Steam with a much higher chance of success than just dumping it fresh out of your BuildFinal folder.
Steam is less crowded by garbage who don’t pass this crucial gauntlet.
Let Steam put a $250,000 fee per game. That would solve the quantity and quality problem once and for all. If you can’t get that amount, you are not serious about game development. After all, I can bet that many of you are developing games while working a full time job or studying, and therefore you are nothing more than amateurs, hobbyists and consequently high profile stores like Steam are not for the likes of you.
I am amazed that people can read all the posts and arguments for higher fees, go through dozens of properly articulated posts presenting arguments and evidence, and go ahead and spew this sort of verbal diarrhea in response that ignores all of that and presents a stupidly over-exaggerated case to present the general ideas in a negative sense. I suppose it’s futile to hold developers to a higher standard that your average internet user.
In summary: You are not helping. At all. But 2/10, you made me respond.
Amnesia wasn’t Frictional’s first game - they were an established studio with three titles behind them at the time of releasing Amnesia: The Dark Descent. Their previous three titles (the Penumbra series - stylistically similar and in the same genre) were published by Paradox. To say that the game couldn’t have been made under a studio/publisher model is quite erroneous given that it’s three predecessors were. Frictional however had the ability to self publish for their fourth title; so they did exactly that.
Torchlight was an investor backed team of veterans, and ultimately was published by Perfect World. Stardew Valley was published by Chucklefish.
The Ship is exceptional in that it is a mod that later saw a standalone release as a game. Factorio was crowdfunded through indiegogo and through it’s revenue from essentially being ‘early access’ for a few years.
Numerous publishers exist for these kinds of games. More importantly, all of these examples had the capacity to spend $5000+ on the proposed Steam entry fee.
The point was that we have those games due to publishers being so generally terrible over most of that decade that they caused a serious shift in the interest of gamers away from mainstream titles into the world of more independent studios and digital distribution, which allowed titles like those to actually be created, and more importantly successful.
So one guy is a douchebag and…? What is your point supposed to be here?
I didn’t say as a developer.
Or we could just not waste everyone’s time and just put it on Steam? Again, the goal here is for good games to be on steam. A developer being able to part with x amount of money does not have any relation to the quality of a game, and neither does a game being marginally successful on a marketplace that no significant amount of people care about is also not an indication of the quality of a game.
I was been sarcastic but with 2 real points in mind to the community in general:
Maybe I misread something or some comment escaped me, but did someone presented some evidence that value X can actually solve the problem? The only thing I got was that value X was considered to high by some or too low by others. If you going to present a fee value or support one, say why and back it up with some evidence, even a general poll would be enough. If we are spewing numbers based on nothing, what is wrong with $250,000 or even 1 million?
I’m sicking and tired of reading comments of the type: “if you don’t or can’t do X or Y, you are not serious about game development” and “if you can’t get X your project is not worthed it”. What is a “serious game developer”? When are you considered to be “serious about game developer”? When you drop out school or job and dedicate every single moment to game development? When you get into debt? When you create a company? Spent a couple of years trying to get investors, in order to pay for Steam and some advertising? What? Please tell me.
Sorry, if you considered my previous comment childish or “verbal diarrhea”, but don’t forget, this thread is only asking what we think, but if you want this thread to be serious, let’s be serious.
This thread presented a lot a good ideas, where money wasn’t even mentioned. But, let’s see what Valve will actually do.
As ambershee demonstrated, all of those games except for The Ship had publishers… so your point kind of falls flat on its face.
Going for low hanging fruit doesn’t help your case. Those cases are obvious, sure in that they’re non-content. But again, tell me - here do you draw the line? As I said before - 100 people, 150 different lines. It’s not a question of whether or not there’ll be a game that’s unjustly rejected, it’s a question of whether it’ll happen on day one or two.
My point is that I’ll rather take the extreme publisher end of the spectrum rather than the extreme developer end of the spectrum because the former at least has an image of professionalism as opposed to being overgrown children on twitter that embarrass the industry and have nothing but contempt for the gamer community at large.
Your opinion as a gamer is extremely irrelevant here. I personally hate Steam with every ounce of my being, as a gamer, but I will still publish my game there because it’s the largest available market and I can’t deny that fact as a developer and business person.
But putting it directly on Steam IS wasting everyone’s time. It’s wasting the time of the gamers who have to shift through baby’s first portal-clones, it’s wasting Valve’s time to eventually curate all that drivel and at the end of the day it’s wasting the developer’s time by giving them the illusion that they’ll face anything other than complete obscurity and failure. By going through the steps I outlined above, with smaller hobbyists that don’t have financial backing going through smaller storefronts the problem would solve itself. And it doesn’t mean that “being able to part with X amount has relation to the quality of the game”, as you falsely assert in your post, it means that the game *earning *X amount of money means there is a market interest to it and chances are MUCH higher that the game actually has some quality to it and it deserves to be put on Steam, where it’s completely reasonable for people to expect a certain level of quality from the products.
The argument for “if you don’t or can’t do X or Y, you are not serious about game development” has been dissected in every matter possible. It might be just anecdotal evidence but I’ll reiterate my own situation - $5000 is just under my annual salary, and I live in a non-English speaking third world country (Bosnia). Even if Valve’s price is $5000 per game I would be happy about it because it is entirely possible for me, in Bosnia, to find angel investors and small indie publishers to release my game. As such, anyone claiming “It can’t be done, you can do it because you’re rich or in a rich country, it doesn’t work that way in the real world!” is talking complete, idiotic nonsense that serves no purpose but to derail the thread. It’s simply, factually false. If your product is good, finding $5000 is trivial. Most investors, regardless of where they are in the world, do business with 6+ digit figures, $5k is ridiculously low amount for them.
But even in the hypothetical scenario where it really is impossible to get that kind of “funding” - my above outline suggesting to go through smaller storefronts until you build up a large enough audience and financial backing to be able to get on Steam still stands. If your game made enough money on smaller storefronts to enable you to pay the $5k Steam fee (still making the hypothetical assumption that it’s 5k) it’s a perfect indicator that there is interest in your game and that the game is of certain quality. This in turn means that the people who use Steam can reasonably expect that games that made it onto Steam have a certain standard of quality and are much more likely to have heard of you already (through word of mouth from the smaller storefronts) and are much more likely to actually purchase your game, so we get out of the pit of an earlier quoted statistic that 34% (if I recall correctly) games on Steam have never been launched.
You didn’t get the point I was trying to make. How do you know that a value like $5000 would be enough to prevent trash in getting in? How do you know that this value will help Steam and not hurt it? Unless you know of some store that has a entry fee of X with no trash in it, we can talk about numbers. Until your value and everyone’s else are meaningless, and therefore, are as valid as mine.
Is anyone in this thread publishing crappy games on Steam? I bet not, therefore, all the values presented here are not a very good indicator, isn’t it?
If we want to have an estimation of the fee, we must know how much the devs of these crappy games are willing to pay to have their games in the store. Who knows, maybe $250 is more than enough.
Of course $5000 is trivial to find, just like $25,000, if your game is good. It just takes a little more time and effort.
