Steam Greenlight is Going Away

Well, since you brought it up, the real cancer trying its best to undermine and destroy this industry isn't corporations like steam, it's games journalists like those at polygon and just about everywhere else. Clearly.

They are a Trojan horse, and that is their intention. Anti games. Anti gamers. Perpetually furious that they haven't been able to tame or destroy this medium that they unjustifiably consider to be beneath them, when they are nobodies that write articles than any person belonging to the middle class could throw together. I'm amazed that any of these people still have jobs.

They are more rabid about having video games and video gamers on their leash than steam is.

Steam will charge you 30% for a service that you can choose not to use.
Games journalists will trash your game to try to destroy your sales if it doesn't have the "right message" according to their subjective moral value system that most gamers don't even share, the very people they are supposed to be informing.
And as a dev, you don't get to choose whether that happens.

They don't speak for developers, and they most certainly don't speak for gamers. Basically, the exact opposite. Those groups are completely antagonistic towards each other.

 

You pay once for Unity if you use pro. And optionally pay to use their store. No biggy. I never seen anyone complain about the 30% Asset Store fee, and I've been around here for some time now.

They already are. They promote the chicken game, and that other game where you rotate a structure to move around, and such. All the games I see them promote are good games. They will never promote sloppy games for free, and shouldn't either.



So ... we cool? Unity can start planning the new store!

 

Have you seen GameJolt btw? Imo they both offer a very similar set of features but I few key differences
-out of the box, GameJolt's game pages look far cleaner
-GameJolt has had dev logs and (I think) the client longer than itch so it's had more time to be refined
-GameJolt's paid marketplace is a fair bit newer though, so somethings are still a bit weird (such as giving access to two packages from one purchase)
-GameJolt allows OST to be displayed on 5 page
-GameJolt has a rather good api which lets you implement online leader boards, achievements and data storage with pretty minimal effort
-itch is far more versatile and customizable in terms of packages and game page
-itch's butler tool for pushing builds via command line is beautiful

All in all they're both good, but I prefer gamejolt.com; having said that, I think all the reasons you like itch would probably apply to GameJolt too

 

I dont think anyone would pay 70% that seems retarded

 

I have from time to time but it's usually tied into other conversations so it tends to get buried.

Guarantee that my mobile games will make $1,000,000 and I'll pay 70%.

 

I think Steam's 30% cut is well worth it considering the huge increase in sales that Steam allows. If you look at the data from SteamSpy and do the math, the 30% cut still generally leaves a nice profit unless the game's sales are too anemic to have allowed a nice profit even with a smaller cut anyway. Steam has some other problems - trolls, for example - but I think the cut is reasonable.

 

THIS. That type of gaming reviewer is just a more educated version of a Greenlight troll. If devs banded together against Polygon and similar outlets, I bet things would change.

 

@CarterG81 I recommend you also take a good look at GameJolt. They have pushed forward a lot to make their platform a viable alternative (at least as much as itch.io IMO anyway).

Read this: https://gamejolt.com/marketplace

They are still tiny compared to Steam (everything is) but are growing significantly every year in terms of gamers using their platform.

 

If devs found enough time in between Unity forums and other procrastinations

 

Sorry @QFSW I just now saw your post mentioning GameJolt. I like it a lot too. It's sad it's always the underdogs who seem to do things the best. I hope in time they become on equal footing with Steam (or even pass it) in terms of market share. Of course odds are low.

 

I've got the Comey hearing on tv
I'm eating taco chips and salsa
I'm on the Unity forum

 

This is the worst post I've read on this website so far today. This is borderline gamergate nonsense.

 

No problem, just goes to show that you yourself liked it too

 

Holy S***. Seeing game journalists as the evil badguy threateing the industry is not just hilarious & worthy of mockery, but that is a new level of insanity.

"Some writer with a tiny insignificant amount of influence is our true enemy, not the multi-billion dollar companies involved who exploit unethical business practices."

Who is next? The evil consumer & their villanous negative reviews? Damn those monsters & their refusal to buy our products! Rawr!!!

 

Dont turn this political and get the thread locked.

 

Too late, run!!

On a more serious note, ultimately the ones who run the whole thing are not big corporations, but truly is a matter of collective behavior. All corporations such as Steam do is try to shape itself to meet that collective demand, trying to encompass as much of what gets people's interest as possible. They try to go with the flow, but they aren't the flow.

There's no monster ... or rather, we're all the monster.

 

This is a very naive view of the world to think multi-billion dollar corporates arent an enormous problem in our world. You should check out that polygon article. It has a lot of evidence & a strong argument that Valve are very manipulative & strikingly evil. Although Valve bosses referring to a transgender woman as "It" surprised me. I figured they would at least be less of dicks to one another. In no universe does any human being of any kind want to be referred to as "it" by their peers. Such disgusting behavior always shocks me. The rest, like exploitation of free labor, I already knew about long ago.

 

You mocked the earlier statement about game journalists being evil yet how many of them are owned by multi-billion dollar corporations? That's not to say they have some secret agenda but at the same time it's just hilarious pointing towards a website owned by a multi-billion dollar corp and using them as evidence against multi-billion dollar corps.

Polygon is one of eight brands owned by Vox Media. Vox Media was valued at the billion dollar mark back in 2015.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vox_Media

 

I'm obviously not going to read all of that. But I read enough t get a general idea.

I appreciate that, it's very kind of you. But personally I'm more interested in the "irrational-rational" spectrum. The "naive-conspiracy theory" spectrum is strange to me.

To me Steam wanting to hurt the market or their customers is contradictory. Rather there's an economic eco-system in which a majority of people participate and agree with.

... So Steam cares about money. Same can be said about all the pay to win game developers ... and the free+iap ... or worse, pay+iap games.

Are they evil? Or are they just people looking for ways to monetize their work?

Ultimately it's all still tightly tied to what people demand, customers voting with their wallets, AND developers voting with their game releases, all who choose Steam because of the convenience to publish a game within a market Steam built over a long time.

 

It is not a conspiracy that people with all the power use that power to grow their power.

It is not a conspiracy that corporations do what they can to maximize profits because they want to generate wealth.

Far from it. So much so, it is far more a conspiracy that those things are not true, and that there is some crazy rarity which contradicts all the evidence to suggest that they aren't the problem.

How can you even declare you side with rational thought, when you don't even grasp how corporations don't have some evil grin in the morning thinking "How can I hurt the market today? Bwahaha!" & instead just have a desire to increase profit irrelevant of the harm it causes?

For example, big oil doesn't destroy our planet & cause climate change because they think "Bwahaha! Dieeee Earth!" They just think "Oooh! Profits! Yum!" and don't care that they destroy the Earth in the process. There is a difference. Evil is usually obvious, but evil people don't think to themselves that they're evil. In fact most likely rationalize their evil in some way. "It's normal!"

This is humanity 101. Basic reality which no one really argues against.

Everything you've displayed suggests you're ignorant of some of the simplest things about how modern society functions. But by all means, please continue believing some crazy conspiracy theory where the majority of human beings - people who are entirely powerless & uninfliential, are just as much a monster as the multi-billion dollar corporations who exploit them. It's everyone's fault right? Not the people with all the power, wealth, & influence.

OR...OR... you aren't ignorant. You're fully aware of all of this. You are just so used to evil being the norm, that you don't recognize it when it's blatant & in your face, with greed plaguing & destroying your society. (That's how people rationalize defense of big oil or the American war machine. It's not evil, it's normal!) Tell that to the children whose flesh are burned off by illegal clusterbombs produced in US factors. Tell that to the Earth's climate as it burns. Tell that to the hard working asset developers whose Free Labor is exploited by Valve taking as much as 95% of every sale. Is theft suddenly okay because it's not murder? Is insulting your waitress by calling her ugly in earshot suddenly okay because it's not theft? I oppose bad behavior.

It's not a conspiracy just because you're used to corporations exploiting people for money.

 

Oil companies are a different thing because they damage the planet in ways that may not be recoverable. Valve doesn't contaminate the water or destroy the ozone as far as I know.

We could also discuss that oil company's evilness is a shared responsibility, among them and all the people who consume oil based products on a daily basis and en masse, often excessively. The evil lays among all of us, as I've said, we're all the monster.

But we're talking about game industry here. I mean if you want to talk about oil, lets move this conversation to UE4's forums, they'll talk about anything there, seriously they're crazy ... but Unity forum is a serious place.

For sure Steam can be considered evil in the sense they don't care much about minority groups' interests as long as the majority is giving them money.

Sure, that sucks. Because maybe we want something else. They're evil to us, but not to most people.

If their actions started to harm LARGER groups of customers, causing them to lose customers, they'd keep on adapting, always trying to satisfy as many people as possible. That's their game.

So, in short, the reasonable approach in order to find a solution that works for us too, is not to label them axiomatically evil ... but understand how they work, so we can find a way to adapt to it as well, finding good compromise between our interest, and theirs.

 

The most comical part of these posts is this idea that developers can "band together against journalism".

I mean... how are you even suppose to do that, anyway? It's a Trump-like statement, lol...

"Polygon is Fake Reviews."
"We'll beat Polygon. Bigly."
"Make GameDev Great Again."

You guys are beyond silly. If you can show any kind of connection, maybe I'd consider your weird conspiracy theory that Polygon exists exclusively to destroy the Gaming Industry.

Connecting them to a major corporation definitely casts doubts, but to extend that to some kind of gamergate inspired conspiracy & declaration that all game journalists are the anti-Christs of the industry is simply ludicrous.

@NA-RA-KU @Aiursrage2k & @HonoraryBob have "GamerGater" written all over them. This is truly embarrassing for them. I cannot believe the hilarity of such wild conspiracy theories as "people who dedicate their lives to writing about video games are secretly out to destroy them".

I honestly cannot stop laughing at these three. The best comedians in the world couldn't make this stuff up. Such transparent levels of fear that game journalists will dislike their game. Either that, or just remnants of gamergate grudges against Polygon/Journalism.

 

You'd have nothing to fear from free speech if you actually got attention from a journalist. You'd also be excited if your game was even negatively talked about among journalists because there is no such thing as bad press.

This fear that game journalists will doom your game is irrational.

All evidence points to the opposite: Even if your game is a literal scam, and every game journalist of every game site blasted you as a scam, you'd still see an increase in revenue because of them.

It has one of the lowest metacritic scores of all video games, of all time.
​

Why not drop this emotional / sexist (gamergate) / anti-freedom gamergate crap & actually look at the EVIDENCE?

Don't fear Journalists who would actually help you with a negative review. And for the love of God - it's a GOOD THING that they can review your game & say anything they want without your permission.

 

Me too? But I have nothing against game journalists. :-/

 

Back in the GreenLight topic, it looks like they have simply decided to GreenLight virtually everyone that was in the process. I got my email this morning.

 

Hi this is coming close to a personal attack, or probably is. Don't do that.

 

You're now resorting to personal attacks although no one here has done that to you. You've even conjured up a charge of "sexism" although no one here has mentioned anything related to that issue. You're way out of line.

You're also creating a strawman by claiming we're blaming "all" journalists, which wasn't the point. But since this subthread is off-topic, I'm just going to say: read what devs such as Daniel Vavra have written about the manner in which certain journalists (not all of them) have explicitly threatened to ruin any dev who doesn't promote their personal agenda. That's what we were referring to. Your example of negative coverage doesn't seem to address this specific problem (what was the reason for the negative coverage in your example?), and you're also sidestepping the fact that positive or neutral coverage in that case would have gotten the dev far more sales, even if negative coverage gained him some sales. But the issue is whether the coverage is fair or not.

In any event, this topic is supposed to be about the change in Steam's vetting policy, so let's get back to that issue.

 

Yes, they strongly implied they were going to Greenlight virtually all submissions.

 

That's great.

 

Obviously devs would like to pay less than 30%, but the fact that you have thousands of games going through the greenlight system and all that hassle to get onto Steam rather than just using platforms like itch/gamejolt is telling. I was just watching some GDC videos on youtube, and almost every presenter was getting like 75% of their sales from Steam. I mean obviously any outspoken devs should be haggling to get the 30% fee lowered, but I think at this point Steam still has the facts on their side. The eyeballs they bring to a game justifies the 30%.

 

So what is this thread about now? The last three pages since I last read it have been...kind of a hot mess.

Plenty I could respond to, but not sure what direction it's going.

 

It's more or less devolved into whether steam is good or evil

 

Let's throw holy water on Steam and see if it sizzles. If so, we know it's evil!!!!

Or does that only work in Dungeons and Dragons?

 

I think we all know its evil.

The debate is more about does that matter to anyone. And do we stand to gain more from aligning with evil then we do from fighting it.

 

You mean the same

Just get the cleric to use Detect Evil. It's not like they have anything better to do.

 

I found this on the internet...

 

How about we get it back on track and leave the trolls alone.
Steam Direct is now live, developers can pay a $100 fee to submit games
http://www.pcgamer.com/steam-direct-is-now-live-developers-can-pay-a-100-fee-to-submit-games/

 

As a chemical engineer, I have to point out that direct steam injection is fairly limited in terms of its applications. I would highly recommend against using it, except in very specific cases. For most use cases indirect steam via a jacket or coil is better.

 

Agreed, so who will be rushing to submit their game? I'll be waiting a couple of months for things to die down a bit before I do so. Although damn, if I'd known so many games in Greenlight were going to be Greenlit at the end, I would have sneaked my game in there....

 

I'm not exactly rushing to get anything on Steam, but I'll probably jump on sooner rather than later since my game will be making use of Steam's lobby system when it gets to that stage and I'd like to be able to test that a significant amount of time before release.

 

Deleted a bunch of nonsense. No more of that, eh?

--Eric

 

Will do.

 

You beat me to it.
I was two seconds away from hitting reply, then saw yours.

I've never even seen a diagram like that before, so weird.

 

I've always been mindboggled that nuclear energy basically works through steam. It seems so incredibly inefficient to not capture the energy in some more direct manor.

More on topic, I hope the people here planning to submit games post their names so we can check them out when they do.

 

Pretty much all large scale heat to electricity conversion happens via steam. This is fairly universal, regardless of what the heat source is. The generation end of a coal, gas, solar, geothermal and nuclear power plants are pretty much all identical. And as yet we haven't discovered a more efficient way to turn heat into electricity.

 

Now that greenlight is replaced by steam direct, there's no chance to know if your game is good or not earlier, whether it's worth to continue working the game or just dump it to recycle bin(or archive it somewhere)...

 

Here I'm going to have to channel some @CarterG81 because I feel like screaming out loud that Steam is not the only show in town!

What you're talking about is "market testing" and there are loads and loads and loads of ways to do that, and Greenlight wasn't even a particularly good one.

• Try something like Itch.io or one of the many other small distribution services that are happy to distribute early looking games.
  
• Make a WebGL version of your game and post it to game portals.
• Put up your own website.
  
• Get on social media and share the heck out of your stuff.
• Go to events and show off your stuff. I don't know about elsewhere, but there's no shortage of indie-compatible and even indie oriented events here.
• Do a crowdfunding campaign and see if people are willing to pay for what you're offering. (Though I wouldn't recommend that approach until you've got plenty o' notches on your belt and a name for yourself.)

Even with a bunch of those options Steam is still a useful tool. Put down your hundred bucks, put an MVP up for free, and see how people respond.

 

I believe @Meltdown did his soft launch on the Windows 10 store, so maybe he can let us know if even just that was sufficient to get what he needed?

 

I was actually talking about how changes from steam greenlight to steam direct in steam scope. Of course I know some other option about market testing, posting your projects on forums like here and tigsource is one of a few example...

Well, I've seen some other distribution service like itch.io and gamejolt, but unfortunately it seems that the communities are not as vocal as those on steam. That said, I haven't publish any game on any of them(include steam) so my opinion might be not accurate...