Should I release my game as an open source project now that I am having reasons to believe Steam doe

Well that's the thing: This may be my very first game but certainly not my very first product. I've released softwares, apps, even ebooks and with all of them there's one golden rule: the moment I upload them - traffic starts. To give you an idea abut the kind of traffic I'm used to: Once I released an ebook through amazon - 2,000 downloads and reached number one in Australia in one day. Not quite the experience I am having now on steam lol...

I had high hopes for steam as the figures sound very promising at first:

Thousands of games vs tens of millions of users. Obviously you'd think that people will find your game even if its the biggest trash just by browsing the fps category or anything. Well, I guess not.

 

Any links?

 

No. Sorry. Don't care if people believe me or think it's a total lie. Just don't want to feed the trolls. NOT saying you are a troll, but just sayin....

 

It's already started too albeit a bit more polite than I was expecting.

http://steamcommunity.com/app/452650/discussions/0/359543542246024923/

If you're going to make statements only to refuse to back them up what are you expecting?

 

Hey thanks for pointing me to that...I'd reply now...if i can...

 

Your developer account should allow you to respond.

 

It did and i just did...

But I'm preparing myself mentally for any type of unexpected things to happen lol...

 

If you're going to make statements only to refuse to back them up what are you expecting?[/QUOTE]

Yes, did you miss my point about not feeding the trolls or not?

 

Statements like that only make you out to be the troll. Don't make statements about accomplishments if you can't back them up with proof. Those who can safely get away with it have already proven themselves in this community.

 

^ I really feel no need to proof anything to a person who offended thousands of Steam developers last time. In my previous post you've mentioned how ALL the games on Steam greenlight must suck if my had reached 5th place. So you genuinely believe 1400+ games on steam greenlight suck?

Yeah, good luck living in your fairytale land where only the slaughtering grounds is good and everything else sucks lol...

 

Only 1400? You're optimistic.

 

why the hell would I need to prove anything? It's an anonymous internet forum, I'v already taken my money from amazon, google, already enjoyed the 5 stars ratings and already regretted the 1 star ratings on other products.

Literally give a zero ***** if you believe me and MAYBE, just maybe you should consider that someone who went through greenlight and the hellish steam approval process isn't a mad up lier who can't even build a notepad .txt file.

Has that ever occur to you? Exactly how many developers even build a game, let alone passing through the steam's approval process.

 

Your game is Early Access so you don't get immediate access to a million impressions. You will have to use your visibility rounds or leave EA to get any kind of exposure, until then your game can only stand on its own and that's hard even for games that look and work way better than yours.

 

genuine question:

how the hell people like "blue corpse" and the guy who emailed me asking for an interview on some gaming channell even find the game? Is it like...steam tell their friends? this thread is popular or reddit? 0_0

 

Steam tweets about new games and I'm sure there's bots and people monitoring new releases.

 

ah their tweets, thanks for reminding me that...

One more thing: 230+ people had the game followed...they email people about new releases who follow you from greenlight. I get from time to time such about games I'v voted for on greenlight.

Yet, that's not impressive: 230 people....most of which will totally neglect it, meaning 10 or so people...but still explains the youtube guy and the one who had started the thread...

 

Those people that follow the game get a notification when you make a news post. Make sure you make a news post when you make patches or want to announce new plans for the game (that is if you are serious about improving the game), in that way people can see that you are an active developer.

 

Yes. This is one of the only tweets out there now but it is pointing a YouTube personality in the direction of the game.

https://twitter.com/anthonygrego/statuses/754182645513199616

 

Oh my God haha, prepare yourself @justbrosingthanks you may get a lot of negative attention soon (better hope Jim Sterling is busy).

WE.WARNED.YOU.

 

^ Sterling is the reason The Slaughtering Grounds developers are now living in Beverly Hills mansion and have all the time in the world to develop better game. I am actually hoping to reach to the British far-right fatty who will call this "shait".

Again, seriously: I'd rather consider other options:

PM 100 youtube "personalities" to review;
Post on reddit /gaming which has ~50,000 users online at any time.

Anything else will qualify as spam and just waste of time, can't think of better ways to market atm.

I am also going to post some useful announcement soon, just can't think of anything actually useful + I am going to make another build with fixes next weekend. I really can't now and still my mood hasn't improved a lot to make me want to continue development .

The reasons I am more positive are:

1. it's already approved
2. best news: Already can see traffic on the store page but no sales 0_0...I mean like - how the hell are people posting screenshots (just saw them...) without sales? Guess it needs time...
3. Tweets like the ones the user above posted.

I need more things to make me want to stick it to it though...for now it's still at crossroads .

 

the hell...the guy who posted this:

"Politics, video games, and sexual psychology textbook collector. ."

lol, man that promises to be fun....

 

I'm done. You are awful.

Talent can be acquired with practice but you don't have the will to learn and improve yourself and your game nor the character to deal with criticism, nothing good will come from this.

I'm going to bed now.

 

whoa, first review. Basically: "It's S***, but it's worht the money and I enjoyed it" - well...summarized

"This game falls pretty squarely into the "So Bad it's Good" category of games. The animations are insane and often non-existent, your shadow is a floating pair of arms with pants, you fight T-Rexes and robots in the same level, often at the same time, enemies are literally transparent, the sound effects cut out at random, and yet, I really enjoyed playing through it. It's absolutely bonkers, and if you're someone who enjoys watching bad sci-fi movies with friends, get a friend or two and play through this together, it's quite an experience. I definitely got eight bucks worth of enjoyment out of it. It definitely needs one or two graphics updates, the glitchy shadows, non-existent border between land and water, and blinding reflections are less endearing then the other things I've mentioned."

 

Sounds very similar to my statements in past discussions concerning "B" movies.

 

^ in any case the guy had marked it as "positive"/recommended and not: "Man, it's glitchy I want my money back".

Pretty accurate review to be honest: Yes, the shadows on the player suck big time, but not other shadows...just saying. I haven't explained the dinosaurs + robots match - something I am going to fix with the GUI system in next updates.

Yet, most importantly: I enjoy playing through it...the shotgun, the graphic highlights at time, running from enemies etc, I've seen way worse games. Also: don't think the shooting feels bad...

Just trying to judge my game without any bias, as a side observer.

 

Still don't get the Steam reports,

Though the NDA prevents me from sharing actual numbers but let's say: so far nothing impressive. Just weird as the traffic still remains at none yet other sections, such as the "wishlist" have exploded....don't get it. Maybe it needs time....

 

You need to keep in mind that at one point the game costed less than 0.30$ I think. Also it is prominently featured by Jim Sterling and has kind of a "story" surrounding its release. It's regarded as one of the worst games ever and many of the positive reviews are probably trolling. I could see people buying it for a few cents just to see how bad it really is.

I don't really go looking for games on steam anymore. I'd expect others to also do this less and less. There's just no reason to do it. If anything is truly great you'll hear about it another way (especially for FPS games). Imho there are almost no "hidden gems" on steam.

I'm pretty sure Rimworld had over 30k sales (probably way more) before it even hit steam. The seperate listings in the releases likely are different DLC bundles. It looks like they offer the game like they did before, in different "editions" that include different "kickstarter backer bonuses" and the base game each. So you need to buy the right package from the start, because the "DLC" isn't available individually. As far as I can tell this is not content DLC, but things like "name an NPC" etc..

 

It had over nine thousand sales on Kickstarter alone bringing in over $260,000.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/tynansylvester/rimworld/

 

Not my screenshot, a guy who seems to have played it posted this one, sure not the best one but happy about it:

 

Oh well this explains their reviews....i was just thinking "what the hell"....600+ reviews in one day 0_0

 

It was available as an alpha to most of those who funded the Kickstarter. Quite an enjoyable game too even back then.

 

I want to play it too some day. How's the learning curve compared to Dwarf Fortres and Factorio?

 

I'm not positive anything will ever truly approach the learning curve of Dwarf Fortress. I haven't taken the time to play beyond the first few alphas though so I have little idea how it has changed and I didn't care much for Factorio so I wouldn't know about that either.

 

Dude, I gotta know - are the positive reviews your friends or something?

Seriously. Are those reviews real?

 

You know what....everything is one big conspiracy. Keep in mind:

1. I have developed my game with $2,000,000 budget. Man I am loaded...
2. ALL and I mean ALL the reviews on Steam are written by myself personally using Kongoan IPs - they're so fake, it's not even funny.

3. The moon landing is edited with Sony Vegas video 4 by a bunch of reptilians.

So, now you know - thanks me later.

By the way - the reviews are not "very positive" - they're mix between sarcasm and "I hope this dev. actually work on it".

But you're too much of a troll to even realize it.

 

I knew it.

 

Somehow I've missed a few replies in this thread.

In that case you absolutely never ever should have released it to early access, because you are now part of the problem why early access and Unity indie devs are starting to become red flags for some. Either commit 100%, or be honest about the game being what it is, and don't create false hope of "we'll be getting there in time", when you already are looking for a way to get rid of the project anyway.

 

You must have missed the debates that started back when Unity 5 first emerged with the "Made with Personal" logo. We've apparently had a red flag for a number of years now despite people like Jim Sterling attempting to tell people it's not the fault of the game engine.

That said you're spot on about Early Access being dragged in the mud by developers who are not at all serious. These days if you're not close to being finished with a game or have a great reputation you probably won't be successful with an Early Access title.

 

By the way, I hope the NDA allows me to share that:

Since launch in several hours 8 people have emailed me asking to make videos or free keys...

I don't get what the hell is Twitch? 0_0 Am I making a big fool of myself by not knowing lol...

And: what the hell is unity? Why am I even here ...

 

This is getting more surreal by the minute... ^^

 

^ Well I can't know all the video sites that exist right? I just googled it. I think knowing youtube and vevo is enough and...metacafe - back in the days it was a solid choice.

I am just going to consider 2 final ways to promote and leave it for several hours at least:

1. wikipedia page? or will that be spam?
2. contact to youtubers...maybe even sterling - don't care about the bad reviews really...

 

Twitch is one of the most popular ones these days for live streaming.

 

I don't see 1400 offended posters here, so I guess they are not upset.

When you encounter a word you never saw before the idea is to google it.

Either way, going back to original question.

Would be nice to have different wording next time.

You are not allowed to redistribute content you bought on asset store most of the time. That means you can't upload it to github. The exception is when your content is explicitly under permissive license like BSD, Mit, Public Domain, CC0, etc.

You are not allowed to use GPLed code in unity projects (because that violates GPL). So that's one license not to use.

Generally when you want to "get rid of" a project the idea would be to upload playble version for free onto either your website or something like gamejolt, and if you want to share the code, upload the code (and assets you developed yourself and want to share) onto either bitbucket or github, preferably under permissive license (MIT license, BSD license, CC0 license, Apache license, ZLib license).

 

^ gotcha.

Some good points, some wrong. GPL v3 means you can sell or reuse for as long as you comply:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2280742/gplv3-can-i-use-these-programs-in-commercial

"You are allowed to sell copies of the modified program commercially, but only under the terms of the GNU GPL. Thus, for instance, you must make the source code available to the users of the program as described in the GPL, and they must be allowed to redistribute and modify it as described in the GPL. These requirements are the condition for including the GPL-covered code you received in a program of your own."

Thus your point was wrong: "
You are not allowed to use GPLed code in unity projects (because that violates GPL). So that's one license not to use."

Maybe what you were trying to say is that it violates Unity's license? 0_0 And not GP.L. For which you should clarify, that's a totally different thing. I'm skeptical though that unity work will conflict with gpl...

 

Regardless of whether it will conflict or not though people will almost always avoid GPL'd resources making just about anything you release under this license nearly worthless for fellow Unity developers. Permissive licenses are preferred.

 

Well, you learn something new every day...

Why? It's the best license out there...it's like the analogy to CC "commercial use allowed - share alike" but you have to give credit and you cannot prevent others from sharing your work(even commercially...) as it's all part of the gpl chain now.

 

they explain it here btw:

https://creativecommons.org/2015/10/08/cc-by-sa-4-0-now-one-way-compatible-with-gplv3/

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

 

No. It's very much the worst license out there now. If you absolutely must have credit attributed to yourself then you can use one of the Creative Commons licenses but even then many people won't bother using anything more complex than CC0 in most cases as the additional effort is rarely worth the actual savings of using an open resource.

 

Honestly, I commend you for doing something.

But I ain't paying money to try this game out.

 

By using GPL code in your unity game you fail to comply with GPL 3 paragraph 5.c

GPL is viral and every product that uses GPLed code must be licensed under GPL as well. Meaning the moment you use GPLed C# scripts in your unity game, you create derived product, and entire program code of game including its engine component must be licensed and made available under GPLv3. Since you obviously do not have access to unity source and do not have the right ot release said source under different license, such game will violate GPLv3.

This happens because unity does not "interpret" C# files, but instead compiles them into *.dll form, and loading dll (dynamic linking) creates a derivative which must be licensed under GPL as well.

It is the worst possible license for a commercial product.

No, GPL infects your entire project and to comply with the license you must release ALL source code under gpl, no matter how you use GPLed code, and even if only one file was originally placed under gpl. Meaning nobody will use this in their unity games.