Steam Greenlight is Going Away

I did read the article, and I agree the article sounds like Steam is ramping up to generate revenue. I am guessing that Value will set the price to $100 per game and let everything onto the Steam store. I think Valve is trying to promote this idea as a possible way to reduce shovelware, but it will hurt Valve's revenues if they set the price high enough to actually reduce shovelware. I don't actually think Valve plans to use this as a way to restrict shovelware.

 

I have no idea what price point could potentially do both.

 

Question is, are they a minority? I think yes. And in fact I think some of these game flippers produce better quality games than a lot of people with 'more pure intentions', although I'm not personally in favour of the practice.

So in effect it would work anyway, because most of the 'noise' is probably made by people who don't want to spend any more than absolutely necessary to get something that passes as a game out there. When you're scraping together flipped assets, adding even a few hundred dollars on a per-game basis to get on the platform is certainly going to be a barrier. The large majority of internet peddlers, it seems to me, like the idea of making money with no up-front costs and a minimum of effort.

I know some have the idea that you'll end up blocking out some wondrous indie gem that would otherwise have gotten through and taken the gaming world by storm, but these imo are few and far between and not worth turning Steam into a dumping ground for.

 

Ideally this will be great if the price is reasonable like $500 maybe $600 per game. That should result in less great games appearing on Steam and just as many or perhaps far more junk games appearing on Steam. Which means discoverability will be somewhat of an issue (probably not much different than currently) but it will be easier to stand out as far as quality goes. Maybe. It all depends on if the junk games invest in great graphics for their screenshots.

But overall this seems like an effective way to reduce the competition.

 

I can. I dunno about the general public. I only buy a handful of games each year. Mostly ones I've discovered via word of mouth or a cool demo. In many ways Steam seems to be more about selling games then discovering games.

I'm saying that from the point of view of a Valve senior executive, there may not be a mess at all.

 

I guess it will be interesting to see what happens. i dont really see the fee effecting much (its not going to be a barrier to entry even for a shovelware dev -- even at $500

 

It does kind of make a person want to knock out a bunch of tiny games rapidly and list them on there.

I don't know what if any impact it will have on shovelware but I think it will at least slow the rate somewhat for games in general. That just makes sense. Where a person could spend $100 one time and submit to GL whenever now they might be ready and wanting to submit but need to wait a few weeks or months to save up first.

 

I would say this may be fairly unusual. Because when you go for AAA, it doesn't really matter where you get them - on steam or elsewhere.

Steam's main attractive point is sales, and they make sure to show you everything you might be interested in.

There's discovery queue, the store also suggest you things based on your gameplay time, pages you viewed, etc. Also, they appear to be slowly improving this functionality.

Basically, you don't really need to LOOK for stuff. The site will suggest it to you. If you want to look for something, you can just open store page and keep scrolling down.

 

Maybe, but considering how much of a problem people have paying a few hundred for fantastic software (game engines for example) or assets for their game, it might actually have an effect. Just think about it, if you make three crappy shovelware games that's $1500 you're already out of pocket. It might turn out that it's not hard to recoup for even a shovelware game but it's going to make a lot of people think twice. Opening your wallet always makes you reconsider things.

On the other hand, maybe the fact that this cost is placed at the point of launch makes it seem much more essential and worthwhile.

Sure, I could buy AAA anywhere but what I'm saying is that even though there's a lot of other stuff on the site I'm not especially inclined to sort through it and buy it. Same thing on Google play's free section, i can never be bothered to go through all of that so I just stick to the paid section and consider it a worthwhile investment for not wasting my time.

A lot of stuff may be suggested but that may not do a lot to sort the wheat from the chaff. And when it's done badly it comes across as spambotting junk.

Anyway, my point of view is that it would be good to see a lot of junk cleaned out from Steam but I'm not sure this is the right way to go about it or even if steam have the same idea of what they want as I do.

PS I think another point against the idea (from steam's point of view) is that greenlight gave the community a sense of agency which will now be taken away. It might reduce a lot the popularity of steam as a place to court drama and feel like you're helping to 'shape the industry'. It can't be a good thing to take that away from a publicity point of view.

 

@Billy4184 when you mention all of this junk on Steam what are you referring to? I was originally thinking of asset flips and very bugged & unfinished games.

But I get the impression you mean something else because you are talking like Steam is literally filled with junk games.

 

Hmm. I paid the Greenlight fee a few months back. I wonder if it is now wasted? I also planned on putting Party Animals on Greenlight sometime next week. So I'm a little curious as to what happens to games that are on there. I think it said they are looking for Spring for it to take effect. What happens to games that aren't Greenlit by then?

Ideally the fee wouldn't be a barrier to entry thing, but a payment to the person doing the reviewing. That way Valve could afford to have as many reviewers as they need, within reason I suppose, and still have some sort of quality control.

 

I think you don't get it.

You don't need to sort through anything. it is on the site main page. You open up the main page, there are games. Sometimes things catch you attention. Most of the times they don't. The main page is being displayed when you start the client, by the way.

I think in my all time on steam I had only two junk suggestions total. The garbage titles are pretty much invisible, unless you start looking for them.

Steam does not have much of the community, though. So I'd say the "sense of agency" is not very important.

 

Well, it seems to me there's quite a bit of rifraff on there that doesn't get culled by the greenlight process, especially when I see some infamous `lets plays' etc and examples on the internet of what steam should not have allowed through. There have been a few examples posted on these forums that make it seem like literally anything can get approved.

Maybe I shouldn't have been quite so blunt about it since I don't often buy games at all, let alone spend time on steam. I guess I'm probably factoring in a lot of my point of view of other stores like google play which isn't exactly fair.

But a particularly annoying point about Steam is that I think there are too many alpha games that never get finished, where devs with good intentions just end up leaving a unityproject on there and disappear. Maybe a fee would make them think twice about when is the right time to launch.

Fair enough. I'm not going to argue since it's been a while since I went looking for anything there. Like I said, I'm probably mixing too much of my general point of view with this particular case.

However from what I've seen there's definitely a community on there that I think likely grew largely out of the ability to decide the fate of games that are put through the greenlight process.

 

Certainly an interesting move, and certainly long overdue.

Thinking on the valve side, what they make in terms of revenue off of the hit releases more than covers the cost of the shovelware- So it makes sense to open the floodgates so that valve maximizes their chances of hosting a potential hit.

The obstacles to those potential hits is the "noise" they refer to. If people can't find the potential hit, valve loses out big, so there's their motive for moving to cut down on sheer numbers of releases.

When it comes to shovelware, the only time I can think of that a low quality game causes noise is when it pushes down a potential hit in the new releases section. After that, the market causes the cream to rise and everything else to sink- so I imagine Valve has no interest in curating out the low quality sales manually, when time will do that for them.

As has been mentioned, a paywall only blocks those without money- hobbyists, newbies, especially those from countries of poorer economies. It might block the proliferation of malicious actors (flippers, scam artists, ect.) but those already in place and already profiting will just continue to do the thing that is working for them. Valve seems to be moving the responsibility for policing the content to the community and customers with the ability to report DCMA violations. In effect saying that anybody that becomes too much trouble to host will get taken down.

I would guess that the recouping of the initial publishing fee would be in terms of a suspension of the steam cut on sales up to the amount of the fee- Regardless of if the game is quality or not, Valve makes at least something on each title they host. If the game performs, it seems to me that Valve would still make their money and then some if they didn't start collecting their cut until after the first $1k or whatever it is.

What I don't quite get is how this solves the problem of low quality games pushing potential hits out of the new releases list before they've had enough exposure to realize whatever potential they have.

 

What's stopping them from going through a publisher? Or crowdfunding?

My method of finding new games is definitely different now. At one point I would have gone through Steam looking at every new game in the genres I cared about but now I simply go to the Reddit communities for the genres and games looking for threads discussing titles with similar criteria or gameplay.

 

Also just occurred to me, if the recoup of the fee is in the suspension of the steam cut, it would take longer for cheaper games to recoup the initial publishing fee. Perhaps steam doesn't want games that release at the "under $10" point, and instead want to reserve that price point for sales & games that released at higher prices, but have since reduced. Effectively making a bargain bin.

 

Some guy named Alden Kroll who presumable works for Valve said in the comments that they are still looking into the recoup method, but it would likely be the fee being returned to the developer after the game hits some modest revenue target. So I guess it'll function something like a security deposit for a house.

 

There's definitely an issue here, and I agree that a paywall on its own likely isn't the best outcome especially for some people who can't afford it.

But I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of the problem has to do with hobbyists themselves with good intentions - especially when they never consciously attempt to polish their hobby project into a marketable product. It's like "I'll just put this up there and see how it does" and despite the fact that it often doesn't, it's still there years later.

I don't think a majority of people actively go and peddle asset flips and shovelware. I think the majority of devs have a creative desire to make something good, but totally mis-judge the work and effort required, and at some point just upload their projects on Google play or steam to see how they do, because they can with no cost.

There's a time and a place for alpha builds, prototypes and beginner projects, but it's not in the same space as everything else. There must be a proving ground for them somewhere though, where they can rise by popular demand into a better position.

 

Well, Valve probably does worry about that to some degree. If the price point is set high enough to cause small games to end on GameJolt or itch.io instead of on Steam, then one of those wonderful indie gems could potentially cause a lot of gamers to use another platform. For example, what if some surprise hit like Stardew Valley or Thomas was Alone (just as an example) had ended up getting released everywhere except for on Steam? If a surprise indie hit caused a lot of gamers to by a game from one of Steam's competitors, then Steam could begin to lose its grip on PC gaming. Valve needs to make sure all of those games are released on Steam.

 

Ultimately, would be game developers have had it very easy relative to other fields. There has been a start-up cost of nearly $0 for quite a while now. Someone wanting to start a business should count on some up front costs, and per-product costs to bring a product to market. Of course, the better developers do spend money, either on assets, hiring someone to create assets, or just in the form of their own time. But others simply rush something out because there is no real financial incentive not to. The problem with the new system, as people have mentioned, is that it just becomes pay to play if there is no review process at all. The risk/reward equation changes, certainly, but I don't think it is the solution Valve is looking for (waves hands, Jedi-style, in front of Gabe's face)

 

.... You're serious, aren't you?

(IMO) People and publishers won't give a damn about most indie projects until they become a hit. Basically, crowdfunding will fail, and the publisher will turn the developer away.

There must be a site with low entry barrier, but decent filtering/sorting/suggestion system. If steam doesn't want to do that, someone else will take steam's place.

 

That's true. I don't really think a paywall is the best idea. It's way too untargeted. Maybe the greenlight process just needs to be tightened up a lot.

You know how it is, democracy may be horribly inefficient but it's probably the least worst of the possible options - at least, nobody can really complain about the outcome even when it's clearly not optimal.

 

Someone had to bring them into the discussion eventually. Better to do so before the topic has started to die down.

 

It's a fun discussion. In the end it will probably be about the same as it was before. If people are making great games that get published through GJ, io and others instead of Steam that will help those sites to grow.

Also there would be an opportunity for smaller Indie publishers to spring up that could serve as the link between the developer and Steam. Or for some kind of alternate funding source such as investing in a solo dev's (or tiny team's) game simply agreeing to cover the fee and then taking x amount or x percent of a cut for doing so. So kinda be like a publisher but doing nothing but listing the games for others and paying them their share.

Which means there might be more more opportunities to make money in Indie games other than developing them. I've thought about this before... investing in a tiny "broke" team producing great games. It might just become a thing.

Maybe a Steam Kickstarter service will spring up dedicated to handling this problem through crowdfunding.

Be interesting to see what is going on end of this year.

 

I like the idea of Greenlight, but there are actually two problems with Greenlight. The problem most people talk about is how much crap is on Greenlight. The other problem is the opposite, though. There are a lot of games stuck in Greenlight for months at a time, even some decent looking games. As it is currently implemented, Greenlight delays a lot of games. That delay is costing developers and Valve.

I voted on a bunch of games to get a better understanding about Greenlight before I put my own game through Greenlight. One thing I noticed was that it was easy to vote on games that had been added within the past couple days, but difficult to vote on older games. Steam automatically showed the latest submissions, but users needed to manually generate their own voting queues in order to vote on anything else. The UI was not obvious enough about this. And even if users do generate their own voting queues, the queues are short fixed length queues, so users have to keep generating new voting queues manually. This bad UI design in the Steam Greenlight voting system causes a lot of users to only see the newest games. After a game has been in Greenlight for a few days, then nearly nobody will find the game. It is an extremely bad discovery problem caused by bad UI design, and it causes many games to get stalled in Greenlight for months.

In addition to that, Greenlight does have some kind of curation. Greenlight is not strictly based on a threshold of yes votes. Somebody at Valve still manually decides whether or not to Greenlight a game, even though the system is supposed to be automatic. I assume the manual curation step probably gets done first for games with the most votes, but it is still a manual step. In some cases, I suspect Valve has manually Greenlit some nice looking games that were stuck in Greenlight due to the discoverability problem, and Valve may have even gotten more active in manually curating the queue in recent years to offset the delay problem. But I still don't understand why that UI problem was there in the first place.

Note: I have not voted in Greenlight recently, so I don't know if the manual voting queue requirement is still there or if Valve fixed it. Maybe somebody can try voting on a bunch of older games in Greenlight and let us know.

 

Of course, Valve can control that somewhat with their new system if they stick to being very thorough in how a company can register for distributing on Steam. If one of the true hurdles is not the $100 or whatever, but instead is getting through the registration process, it would make it difficult for someone to register a bunch of different companies on Steam. Then Valve just prevents a company from releasing games "too frequently", however that gets defined.

 

Yeah, I go through the Steam discovery queue pretty much every day. Most times there's nothing I want, but almost never is it just shovelware. And occasionally I do find some very interesting stuff there (which gets put on the wishlist).

 

Not at all!!! steam users buy not beacuse "its the only one" but for a huge factors, try to sell you indie game after an e3!!! you wont, cause mostly all user are saving for the next blockbuster video game, its not removing crappy games!! just people with crappy wallets!!! i can be a steam green light abuse and have earned enough money to abuse this new system with my "crappy" games!!!

 

Allright I stand corrected, at least until I get around to having another look.

One place I have spent a lot of time poking around on is Google play, and it definitely is full of shovelware. I guess I heard some stories about steam and assumed it was the same thing.

 

From the wording of the article I do see where this impression comes from, but the language is all over the place and can be read any which way. Here...

... they're talking about an "application fee" and a "submission pipeline". Both applications and submissions are commonly subject to some kind of approval system (eg: Apple's submission systems). I also don't see why they'd care about reducing "noise" in their system if it's just about letting everyone though who can pay the relevant fee.

 

Thankfully Steam is nowhere near as bad as Google Play. Or the Windows Store on my phone, last time I used that. The main issue with Google Play is that, since there's just one low fee and some automated checks between submission and publishing, people can publish almost literally anything. Greenlight is far from perfect, but it still provides a barrier to entry far higher than that of Google Play.

 

It all comes down to the 5 grand fee still being opening the flood gates or not.

If it is ... with 5-10 new games a day. Then forget it. Steam blew it for us ... and it'd be awesome for them.

If it's not, then you'll wish you had that exclusive store.

You can't just think on being able to push your first game somewhere. Eventually you'll want to be able to have some guarantee of exposure.
Otherwise every game is a gamble for ever ... unless you make one really successful game that garantees exposure of other games until you retire.

Or just working on a game company with a marketing budget. But if you have a marketing budget, you may also pay for Steam's fee.

Not to mention having time and skill to make a game = do game related online freelance work for some time.

Or don't. Make the game and use other game stores to raise money for the fee. If you can't make 5 grand off all stores combined, greenlight wouldn't save your game either, so you're still stuck.

 

I don't think Valve is talking about reducing the noise in the submission pipeline relative to the existing Greenlight process. I think they are talking relative to what Steam Direct would be like if there was no fee at all. The way I read it, it sounds like Valve wants to let in a lot more games (by completely eliminating the Greenlight delay), but wants to use the submission fee to help filter out only the crappiest possible submissions.

 

It depends on what the fee is. If the fee is $5k, then the number of new games per day will drop. However, if the fee is $100, then the number of games per day will skyrocket. Greenlight has been throttling/delaying the game submission rate. A direct submission for $100 per game will lead to a ton of tiny, quick games to get submitted.

 

I agree with the interpretation, but I believe the fee is more about Valve making at least X on each and every game they host rather than as a filter.

 

If the price is too low then it will be flooded and putting your game on steam will be even worse then now there would be hundreds of games released a day. If it's too high then it could prevent some devs from publishing on there platform

 

They have all of the data, so I don't know why they don't just calculate the number themselves. Do some random samplings and see where the break even point is for quality and crappy games and pick something in between but towards the low side.

Probably should also create some categories to apply different fee rates to though (small/quick, low/med/high priced, etc.). A one fee fits all doesn't make sense given such a disparate set of variables that make up the range of games they allow.

 

Financial gates do not discriminate on quality. Announcing it without all the details is a bad idea. Steam Direct may have the potential to be good or bad. Only the potential for bad is visible at the moment.

 

Because doing the survey gets them an idea of where developers perceive the proper price point for Steam application to be. The developers who are supplying Steam with games are vital to the site's continued operation. Just as you need to know how your customers perceive your prices versus the value they get, Valve is in a position of also needing to learn more from the developers. It's market research.

Plus, asking questions may get you information that you had not thought of yourself. Valve admits that there have been successful games they probably would not have let through. The developer survey that asked about the application fee to Steam, and probably had a number of other questions as well, lets Valve gain some possibly valuable insight.

 

at first i thought this was a good idea but a lot of you have made some really good points. it would be really S***ty if only those that can afford it would be able to release their games on steam.

I think a good solution to all this is to have steam's staff review each submission and if they see that a developer has submitted crap then that developer wont be able to submit another game for an x amount of time... the crapper the game the longer time.

Some might say that this would cost steam a lot of time and money, but guess what... making games takes a fking long time and money... and steam takes a huge 30 percent of the sales. they need to earn that 30 percent and filter out the crap.

 

They've got a distribution system with access to your audience. Sharing that access is how they earn their cut. If you don't like it, do business elsewhere.

As for speculation as to how this is going to work and what it's going to mean for Valve/us/our customers, there's really not enough information there to give meaningful insight. It's far too vague and open to interpretation, not to mention that they could change their minds on anything at any point anyway.

Edit: typo.

 

I think the main problem here is that it's not entirely clear what the problem is, let alone how this will fix it.

Sounds like 'opening the floodgates' to me.

Not entirely sure how the paywall helps to achieve that.

Is this a reason for why the paywall is being created, or simply an acknowledgement of a new or ongoing problem?

The tone of the post sounds like the problem lies with Greenlight somehow preventing publishers from targeting their intended audience. Maybe this is because people do things like randomly downvote games in genres they simply don't like very much, or maybe it's an excuse for Steam to simply open up the floodgates by alluding to the existence of a frustrated audience that just doesn't happen to include any given person.

Overall, I don't think there's a clear message at all, which in itself is a bit disconcerting. The fact that it seems like it could go either way (toward more or less content going onto the store) simply based on the submission price is even more confusing.

I have a feeling that however it turns out, no one is really going to end up knowing for sure why.

 

Wouldn't the problem be that they don't have a proper review system like Apple?

 

They don't seem to think so. Which makes me believe that there isn't going to be a significant amount of curation alongside the paywall.

 

Well it does sound like that is the case. And maybe Greenlight is broken. Considering people can always vote on anything and for any reason. They can vote "No" just to be an ass. They can vote no to honestly answer the question that is asked (buy this game if it is on Steam) even though the real question is why are they even looking at the page at all if it is not the kind of game they like which I imagine happens at least sometimes.

So I don't doubt there are some problems with Greenlight as far as making it harder for games to get on than it should be in some cases.

At the same time considering all of the games on there it doesn't appear to be that big of a problem.

Maybe the part they left out was "we really want to try this experiment and see what kind of difference it makes to our bottom line. We've ran some projections and it looks good to us. And we'd rather take an even less active role in trying to screen out content such as Greenlight does to a degree. We've had this goal for awhile now. First you know we reviewed each submission. Whew! That was a lot of work. So we ditched that and came up with Greenlight. That definitely provided a faster flow of games onto the site which improved our bottom line significantly. But still we think the next logical step is to just remove Greenlight entirely and let devs pay per game to get listed. This way we immediately get money and we get money even if the devs don't. Plus we don't need to waste our time actually looking at these submissions. We have better things to be doing!"

Something along those lines maybe.

I am sure it will work out in the end. Makes little difference to me. It is their business. And I have heard people complain about a lack of games wishing more games were on there. So I think gamers may well like to see a lot more games coming on. Mainly because they aren't considering they will just have to dig through that many more to find ones they like. But maybe with continued of the discovery queues and people relying on those more and more that will end up perfect solution.

Actually I would like to see more games on there for me to buy. So I can kind of understand the gamers who think that way. And who knows maybe people have bugged Steam about it saying I can only find 21 games that are the kind I want to play.

 

Well I'd say at least part of it is that greenlight is disfunctional. I wouldn't be surprised if Steam spend a lot dealing with complaints from the environment it creates. Maybe they just don't really know what to do except remove human involvement from the process.

 

Well now this could well be it. People are ultimately what causes problems or at least what magnifies a tiny problem into a massive problem.

 

It's not just adding a paywall, they are just changing the type of gate. (though there was already a $100 fee). The idea behind greenlight sorta sounded good, but in practice it's a lot of noise and resources, and ultimately, it doesn't actually work as curation or as an indicator or future performance. Its a lot of pointless drama.

The new plan seems to make more sense. If you want to publish, you can. No having to play the game of getting votes or all the dramas surrounding it. Instead, like the app store/windows store/play, if your game is ready to ship, you can start selling right away. The effort/pandering/arguing/whatever that you would have spent trying to get people to agree to let you sell your game, you can now just put into marketing. All the overhead of the voting system and hosting random games that never get greenlit and all that stuff doesn't really help developer or player, is an expense that can go away.

The fee ensures that they don't become a dumping ground for hosting crap games that never sell, and is recoupable. It just sounds like they are going the route of the other stores, the main difference being the fee, but that makes sense. The app store and such doesn't need to charge that due to much smaller resources involved.

Greenlight has never really worked I think the way they thought it would. Just making it an open platform to publish games works everywhere else, should work nicely for both steam and developers.

Exactly. Greenlight isn't a benefit to users or developers, and a lot of silly overhead.

 

Well it was a bit of a colosseum, so it's going to be a shame not to have that any more

 

We won't know for sure who is going to benefit from this until more details are released about the fees model. Sure it will stop A games from being published on steam, but at what cost.