Fb+Unity vs Steam?

http://thenextweb.com/facebook/2016/08/18/facebook-unity-team-launch-steam-competitor/

Don't... just don't do that.

 

If it turns out to keep some of the crappy games out of steam, I'd welcome it.

 

On the other hand if they have proper curation and won't allow just any title on their platform I'd welcome that too.

 

I wouldn't, because I think facebook is cancer and I wouldn't touch that store with a 10 foot pole. Pulling crap away from other distribution plattforms is the best outcome I could imagine. Worst outcome would be xx years down the road UT turns evil and forces devs to release games exclusively on the new FB store, as a backdoor way to introduce royalties through the cut the store takes from sales. I'm not saying it's likely or currently planned, I'm just saying that's the worst to come from this that I'd be able to imagine.

 

I very much doubt that is going to happen.

 

I'd welcome it as well... More platforms = more opportunities.. That's just point blank how it is. Just so long as games are only allowed based on if they are a 13 hour game vs a 1 year game, to separate the two. Which you can just look at a game and tell.... That way it's more organized. Got the quickly made casual games, and the premier games that took over a year to make, etc.

 

That would instantly kill all the Facebook games xD

Well, as long as Facebook is paying Unity and this doesn't turn into another Oculus disaster... by the way, doesn't Facebook kind of have a store already through Oculus? Wouldn't it make more sense so use the same store and just give it a dedicated VR area?

I guess that this is okay as long as this collaboration doesn't take any time or resources from anything else at Unity.

More Articles below.

English:
Facebook Creating Desktop Gaming Platform With Unity

Swedish:
Facebook och Unity skapar fristående spelplattform

 

Check out the comments of the community, e.g.:
https://games.slashdot.org/story/16...ty-to-create-a-gaming-platform-to-rival-steam

Facebook for them means collecting your data. I don't think it is that good for Unity to be associated with that. So it can lead to people not trusting Unity Ads and Analytics and Games in general, people could assume if they install a Unity game, their private data will end up at Facebook.

Also all stores except Steam and GOG are hated with a passion, and not just a little passion, more like pure hatred. (Same for me, had to install Origin for Mass Effect 3, against my will, hated it. Removed as soon as I finished the game, with anti malware tools, to be sure nothing of that sh#t remains. I would love to play ME3 multi-player from time to time, but I will not because I don't want Origin on my machine)


Edit:
e.g. check out this comment. Things/opinions/publicity like that are/is exponentially worse if there is a connection to Facebook:

 

Can confirm. So far I'm boycotting all games that would require Origin, even those that I already own keys for and that I'd want to play. I caved in on uplay and I really hate it. It's a S*** plattform, not even half as reliable as steam (which is far from perfect too). And I have friends who boycott uPlay because they've had such a bad experience with it in the past (losing savegames, accounts being hacked etc.).
Also I hate the fact that most people don't care enough to stand up for what they want. Almost no one said "F*cking finally!" when Origin and uPlay arrived, yet millions bought their games. For my first uPlay game (Far Cry 3), I sadly wasn't aware I'd need uPlay to play it when I ordered the game from Amazon, or else I likely wouldn't have bought it either.

I wouldn't call that "spyware", more like "metrics". It's not like they'll be collecting bank account data or stuff like that. It's no surprise they collect data either. "If it's free, you are the product".

 

I login to FB 4 to 5 times in a given year. Surprised it is still going so strong. Figured people would have burnt out on it by now.

I suppose all of the people using FB on a regular basis may welcome a new game platform tied to it. If they are on FB regularly they obviously don't care about privacy and companies recording all of their activity.

 

I think this is a smart move by Unity, since it is going to make it easier for Unity games to be available to Facebook users. I don't honestly suspect Facebook's game store will suddenly rival Steam, though.

 

I thought Facebook popularity is decreasing recently?

 

meh

 

When playing all those games listed above on console that require uplay and origin -- how does that work?
I have never been prompted to sign into a service when playing on console, although I guess it could track stuff without my knowledge in the background.

From reading it seems facebook sdk is a complete disaster to work with.
So Im for this if it improves deployability to 650 million users (or is that number representative of fb casual gamers?).

As long as Unity doesnt sell out to fb - Im alright with it.
Fingers crossed

^^ !

 

I haven't made the jump to the current console generation. On xbox 360 I remember Dead Space 2 wanting me to sign into some EA thing. Not sure if that was only for multiplayer or not.



On consoles, as long as the games remain playable purely offline and from disk, even after official support ceases, I don't really care what and how they track, as long as they don't wireshark my LAN and don't have cams and microphones nonstop recording and transmitting (afaik there were smart-TVs (planned?) that did that, and the xBone kinect in its original planned form maybe?).

 

Its about time someone put some competitive pressure on steam. They have been enjoying a monopoly for a long time.

Of course its worth noting that many of these collaboration announcements go nowhere. Unity is constantly announcing new deals with new partners. And very few of them actually make a difference in the long run.

 

They like it. Makes them feel famous.

 

Those devils... democratizing indie gaming and providing a single platform for everyone.

If only there were a way to circumvent greenlight...

 

I just wish that there was a competitor for steam that branded itself on quality and culled 90-95% of the stuff that tries to get on board with it. I don't necessarily want steam to restrict greenlight - there should be a place for 'entry level' games and people who enjoy sifting through the junkyard - but I can hardly imagine that anything associated with facebook, and presumed access to "a seventh of the world's population" would have any need for above-average quality standards

 

Depending on whom you ask, both of these statements are true:

A) Steam allows too much crappy content on their website. Greenlight is broken and stupid and also dumb.
B) Steam refuses to let any games on their website. Greenlight sucks and it's broken and exclusive and unfair.

Honestly #indiegamedevs #gamers #hastags... this is your legacy. Endless archives full of passionate self-contradiction.

 

That's exactly why we need different types of stores. Steam has established itself as a likeable if somewhat lacking in standards type of store, and would be a perfect candidate for the bottom rung. This unity-fb alliance though, which otherwise might have had to market itself on some kind of virtue that steam lacked, is coming into the fray on sheer weight of numbers from its social media base, so it may manage to not only upstage steam, but do so on the basis of all the things that steam already does quite well (low barrier of entry/democratisation), and fail to fill the voids that are there (i.e. quality standards). It's like having a movie with a cast full of cannon fodder and no heroes in sight.

When you combine this with the tired state of the game industry, the result is just more pressure and still no release - the best we can hope for is that there'll be some sort of apocalyptic market correction even sooner than we thought - although the games market seems to have a morbidly horrifying propensity for absorbing hits in quality without suffering apparent injury.

 

Ultimately no alliance or new market will solve the issue of 'There are more people wanting to make unique games then their are wanting to make games'. All this really could represent, even if it's a market changer, is a redistribution of existing customers.

 

Isn't that GOG?

 

I'm not aware of GoG having a particularly stringent quality standard besides being DRM-free, but then again I don't really know much about it either.

 

They curate games on a game to game basis I believe. So you can't just upload any old shovelware
In theory anyway, I've never tried submitting to say myself

 

What would be good is a place that marketed itself on that basis, i.e. they directly say something like "we know 95% of indie games are either crap or not ready, here's a site where to get on you have to be really damn good, and if you buy from here you know it's going to be a really well-done game" - a place that really skimmed off only the best.

I'm not sure about the nuances of surviving in the current market for something like that but I'm guessing there's some sort of basis for it, considering how swamped greenlight is.

Then again, as you say if Gog judge games case by case that's a good sign that the standards are well above steam. They don't seem to have any distinct angle though, besides being DRM free.

 

When I read their submission guidelines it seemed to be very oriented around being high quality and drm free. May want to check them out yourself but at least the image I got is that they really care about what goes on their store

 

Good old Games, aka gog, is trying to do that as far as I can tell.

 

It would seem so. Would be good to hear more from people who have launched there, unless there's some kind of nda.

 

There is no reason to cull 90% of the store. There is no finite shelf space limitation (like a physical store), so there is no sane reason to chop off a huge number of potential sales through authoritarian curation.

What Steam does need to do is continue improving the rating and review systems. When nearly anything is allowed on a store, the rating and review systems become extremely important. In addition to that, Steam needs to improve the search and recommendation systems to improve discoverability.

Steam Greenlight is broken, but as others have mentioned it is broken in both directions. Greenlight does let a lot of pure garbage through while simultaneously blocking or massively delaying games that are better than much of the garbage that quickly got through.

One of the key problems with Greenlight at this time is how the user's voting queue is structured. Each user has to manually generate their own voting queue in order to see older Greenlight submissions, and it is not immediately obvious to users how to do that or even that they need to do that. The newest Greenlight submissions are shown automatically, but older submissions are not. The "generate voting queue" function should automatically run if the user does not currently have any items in their voting queue. I voted on a bunch of Greenlight games, and this bug in the Greenlight UI made it harder to vote on games. I am guessing this bug alone accounts for much of the current trouble with the Greenlight process.