Steam Greenlight is Going Away

Sterling is pretty entertaining with his Greenlight shennenigans. Much better than a few smaller channels pushing that bad early access games were a fundamental problem or that trading cards were to make millions of dollars.

But that video was much ado about nothing, or is that just me?

Blablabla, Anita Kardashian, blablabla, omg the software only needs to run, blablabla, blablabla, Valve needs to do stuff by hand (but they never will*), blablabla.

Pffft.


*) You dont become market leader in a digital medium if your philosophy is "lets do everything by hand!". In fact, it's the exact opposite.

 

Spoiler

The text below does not apply if you're disabled, can't work due to health reasons and live off some sort of pension.

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Aside from the entry fee, if you weren't paying the bills all that time, then I'd automatically expect you to screw up all the business decisions related to your game. Every single one of them.

Basically... people can drop out of school, university, make lots and lots of bad decisions, but all of this doesn't matter if they can pay the bills, because as long as they can take care of themselves, they will get by. If they can't, then it is the time when all alarms go off and it is the time to rethink life decisions. It is sorta a fundamental important thing, a sort of "baptism by fire" at the start of adult life.

If you worked for 8..12 hours on one game for 4 years and it isn't ready, it is probably the time to take up a part time job and try to save money to hire more people. Otherwise the whole story sounds a lot like a setup for some sort of horrible life tragedy with shattered dreams and all that stuff.

There was a thread recently about people who spent loads of time - years perfecting one game, their first game - and it didn't even turn out to be good in the end. Don't do that.

That's my opinion, anyway.

 

Care to give me the skinny? I can't stand watching the man for long enough to get the point.

 

sure, thanks for caring Lol
.... anyway, i had (kinda crazy) intended to be self sacrificial ... but whatevs lets not get into all that...

i started this newest project, that i finally intend to see through .. uhhh.. september 2016?? i think??
august??

ive done alot of stupid practice projects that i quit before really starting,
like racing game, FPS game, platformer game, flappy bird clone, etc

 

Better then some I've seen. Ultimately it won't do you much good stick on your hard drive. When do you plan to release?

 

my goal is to have "something worth showing" in April .. thats my hopes...
well actually like end of March ... hoopefully.. although iam behind on my schedule i made up in December.

dunno about real completion .. but after April, it should be much quicker devving, since itll be primarily level creation and new 3d models, no more coding, or very little, hopefully

 

Hopefully after he aligns those textures properly. It's setting off the crazy part of my mind.

 

Jim talked alot without saying much of anything

 

He tends to do that when something is really new and there's no concrete details on it. Right now all we know is that the system is changing and that there are enough details up in the air about it that we don't know how much it's changing.

 

So here is a dev who has a mostly finished game.
He has decided to put it up on Greenlight now before seeing whats coming.
He was planning on doing this much later in the year.

Cogmind is a roguelike where you play a robot, scavenge parts off your kills.
I havent played it yet I've been waiting for the final version, and for it to get to Steam.
Its been for sale on his own site for over a year and has made over 50k so I expect it should do ok.
He already has 5 pages of comments, probably just from people who know about the game already. He just posted it there a couple hours ago.

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/f ... =863069096

Go vote yes

See, this post was sort of relevant.

 

Basically he talked about much of the same stuff that this thread covered, including the fact that the price point will determine if Steam Direct opens the flood gates or not. He also pushed the idea of manual curation

 

Got ya. He's probably devestated that he might be losing so much easy content. ;P

 

The (presumably greenlit) games being shown on his video though. Not even what I would consider shovelware. More like just broken and bleeding FpsPrefabAndTerrainProjects. Surprised it even got off the perpetrator's hard drive without falling apart.

If a paywall screens out that rubbish, I'm all for it.

 

Unless it's at the very high end of the range Valve talked about, I don't think it will.

 

Well, actually I don't think it needs to be all that high. The important thing is, it's on a game-by-game basis.

In all likelihood, paying the Steam one-off fee was either something they did at the very beginning to make things 'official', or at least before they realised how poor their games actually were. But then it's too late, they've already paid so they might as well upload all the junk they've got.

But even paying $100 a game, that's not something people are going to do on a regular basis once they know what's going to happen. And even if they somehow make it back, it's still nowhere near the same as taking home the full profit for no risk, which is what it was before.

 

The per game thing is good. I kinda wish the App Store and Google Play did it as well.

But if it's lower than 500$, I don't think it's going to stop anything at all.

For example :

This: http://store.steampowered.com/app/357770 (see the reviews) had 63k sales according to steam spy ( http://steamspy.com/app/357770/ ). It costs 0.5$, plus whatever he gets from trading cards.

Do you think the developer will think twice before uploading his next game if the fee is that low?

 

Wow 63k sales for such junk.

Yeah unless Steam curate by hand or implement some kind of crappiness detecting algorithm, that kind of stuff will always get through. It's just a question of how much.

One thing I think would be a good idea would be for Steam to set a minimum price tag like $5, and get rid of this early access crapfest. That's just turned into a complete joke.

 

I just want to point out that Steamspy does not list the sales. It only estimates the owners of a game.
This includes people who got the game for free, within a bundle etc.

And with that price, I doubt he made a lot.

 

If it has a "free day" or something like that, steam spy does note it in the listing. It doesn't for this one. But yeah, whatever codes might be given away are also counted as owners.

But even from free users the dev gets a few cents from trading cards. Also the game wasn't normally 0.5$, it sold for 1$ previously.

So taking a worst case scenario where the average is like 0.1$, 6k is still enough money to make the zero effort they put in worth it and the (recoupable) 500$ to pay to publish their next game, trivial.

 

True.

It won't weed out every shovel-ware producer. But I believe for the majority of them, $500 per game would really hurt.

 

I hope you're right.

Well, I guess we'll find out eventually

 

I think it will land somewhere between the two numbers they mentioned, based on Store data. If they look at all the low quality titles, they will be able to see what those kind of titles sell, and I guess the best approach would be to make sure that making and selling shovelware will be unprofitable.

And I actually think that Valve wants to get rid of the shovelware. If they didn't, they would have no incentive to do this. Valve has been looking to get rid of Greenlight for about five years, because the system isn't working.

Picture it like this: Steam is a storefront, and it needs to have good, sellable products to function. Right now, products arrive on Steam in two ways. One is publishers, who already have an established presence on Steam. The other is Greenlight, allowing people to vote for projects.

Thing is, Greenlight isn't working. A lot of low quality games is passing through what was supposed to be a filter. This happens due to a lot of reasons, but not all of them are because the actual community wants to buy it.

Due to the whole process, this means that a lot of low quality games are entering Steam, giving the storefront an overall problem with visibility. This is a huge problem, since more and more good quality products which is the bread and butter of Steam, goes unnoticed and fail to meet their expected sales, which is bad for a multitude of reasons.

So, the idea with Steam Direct is that there will be no more community approval. Instead, if you want to publish a game, you have to be willing to pass the barrier and pay the fee - which shouldn't be a problem with a solid product, since you can recoup it. This will weed out a lot of shovelware, since it won't be profitable for them to go on Steam anymore to earn some fast bucks on a few bad games.

Ideally, this system will not put off smaller games on Steam, since the system will actually benefit the developers, giving them more visibility on a less cluttered store front. Valve is actually catering to the developers doing this. The fee is symbolic and pretty much a moot point if you have a decent product - it's the ones without a decent product that has to worry.

TL;DR: Valve is doing this to cater to the developers that matter. The one that will make a good game, follow it up with another good game etc. It's not the other way around. In the long run it makes their product even better, and it helps developers grow and profit.

 

If your game is any good, you'll have no problems finding the funds to get it on Steam. Half of game development is actually promoting and pitching your game to people, and if you can do that convincingly, finding a few dollars for the recoupable Steam fee is the least of your problems. You get the money back.

The way it is now, your game would drown in the excessive amount of crap and it would never be seen. Setting the entry bar higher will weed out a lot of games, actually giving people like you a fair chance to be seen.

 

It won't matter what price they put it at I mean the higher they put the actual better it is for shovelware devs in a weird way.

So if you got your game and each game can go on sale every two months for trading cards and then put into a bigger bundle and sold also in sales even at fifty cents and a thousand sales per time it's just a matter of x number of games. So the fee won't matter since it's more about the sustained income, but if there are so many games It becomes worthless since there are too many people doing the same thing

 

While this is certainly silly, I don't think people like this guy is the main part of the issue.

 

But that's exactly it. These people are already doing it, as it is now. Setting a fee require a bigger investment/incentive for the shovelware devs and will reduce their overall potential earnings. We can only assume that the fee will eliminate a large amount of these games, since their margin will be a lot lover. For them to recoup the fee, they actually have to sell pretty well - and the purpose should be to give less incentive to release games that take up virtual shelf space and make a few dollars.

Be aware that we'll still see shovelware, but there will definitely be less of it, because profit margin will be lower.

 

Even if your game was catering to the fad of the day, you would be one among thousands mediocre "fad of the day" games that got through greenlight based on the fad currently en vogue with the small subset of steam users still putting up with steam voting (or paid to do so ).
Even if your game was above the sea of mediocreness that came out of steam greenlight, unless you got some attention somehow, you would still drown in it because you would be competing with thousands of zombie survival fad games on steam now.

In the end, being on steam was/is a good thing, if you don't count on steam selling the game for you. If you have some kind of marketing, an already thriving community from earlier games, Kickstarter campaigns or Devblogs/youtube, you had a name, or your game got featured by youtubers or journalists, and people actually searched for your specific game on steam to buy it, you don't care about the shovelware.

Well. Same story for all other stores really. Don't expect itch.io to sell your game. YOU need to run your marketing campaign. YOU need to reach out and target your future customers. If you spend time on this, do it well and reach your target demographic, it doesn't matter much if your game is on Steam, itch.io or wherever else.
Sure, most PC gamers by now have Steam installed, and spend quite some of their gaming time in the Steam ecosystem. This makes your game easely accessible for them if its on Steam.
But if they really WANT to play your game, 90% will also get it from itch.io... not many are lazy enough to really care about that.

Stuff like Origin or the Ubisoft crapware are different storys. But there the problem is that its crapware by single publisher they try to force down our throats, and badly done crapware with crap support at that (or at least it was when I last tried Origin... the one reason I vowed to never touch Origin again).


In my case, I am sometimes looking around on Steam searching for games that might interest me for some hours, and are cheap enough for an impulse buy. I got some very good games for a good price this way. Currently playing guacameele I got for 3$ now, and I am both ashamed now that this game slipped under my radar for years, and that I only paid this much for a game worth way more than the original 15$ if you ask me. If I knew how good it was before buying it, I would have gotten it for the full price without a second thought.

On the other hand, I have the Symphony of the night spiritual successor from the Castlevania designer on my radar. I missed out on the Kickstarter, will buy the game regardless of how much it costs (unless 120$ or so), or where I have to get it from (unless its Origin or Ubicrap, but I doubt it).
Same for some other Kickstarted games that look awesome. I'll get from itch.io, GOG, Steam, where ever the devs release it on first.


I would guess that is true for many others too... if we care and know about the game, we will find out where to get it from, and while Steam might be the option number one to keep the amount of stores to a minimum and all your games in one neat location (or GOG for the DRM-free-forever folks), we are certainly open for alternative stores or outlets.
If we just want to browse a big library of games looking for a good deal without having anything particular in mind, Steam is currently target number one. In the future it might be that Steam is just one of many targets to look through.

But in the end, the second customers might give you a drip feed of income, but to be successfull, you need to attract buyers that are actually looking for your game on purpose. As said, this will NEVER be achieved without marketing outside of the storefront.

 

Is he, though? I'm willing to bet early access isn't going anywhere even though greenlight is. He can give the vdeos some suitably disgusting name, like "Early Abscess" or something.

 

One thing he mentioned that he saw on a Steam post from another user, was the idea that there are two lanes. In one lane you pay the (potentially) $5000 fee and go straight onto Steam, while the other lane cost little to nothing, but must go through checks by Valve to ensure that the game is of quality. The argument is that this allows those who have the money to put their product into the market, while those developers who can not afford it, but have a quality game, are still able to get onto Steam.

The biggest problem he mentioned with this approach, is that there is no guarantee Valve would ensure that the game actually does anything other than start so you could still get a ton of crap games through without making Valve a penny.

 

You can look at steamspy some of the games dont make any money anyway, shovelware games made steam more money then some real attempts.

 

Yeah this whole thing is a bit confusing in a sense because people seem to have this notion that if you make a great game a high quality game... spend years if that is what it takes... then you will do very well. Definitely do better than people knocking out games in 60 days or less. And it just isn't true. It can happen yes but it is not a golden rule as people seem to believe.

I think people are missing the key point... if you make a game that people want and they know it exists. Then your game will do well. That's it. Entirely.

And what people may want is a super cheap tiny game even if it is not a potential candidate for game of the year.

What other people may want is achievements & trading cards and the "quality" of the vehicle (game) delivering them is less important than the achievements & cards themselves.

Other people may want some very niche kind of game and again just being able to buy and play such a game is more important than effort and time spent on making a "high quality" game.

And sometimes it is all the same person wanting these different things at different times.

In general people don't care how much effort you put into making a game. Only that it delivers what they are looking for. And all of this focus on "crap" and "quality" seems to be missing that important point. Not to mention what is "crap" for some elitists is fine for many others.

 

Absolutely! However, a toxic community where developers pay companies not only to post positive reviews, but from what Jim says, post negative reviews on other games waiting for Greenlight can clamp any marketing efforts simply because Steam is so popular. It will be good to see that go...not to say it won't still be done.

 

QFT


But you miss one very important group it seems... some people just buy crap games for the laugh, or to troll other people. I would guess besides the trading cards and achievements, that is the main source of sales for some of the notorious shovelware producers on steam.

Well, I don't know about others, but for me sources outside steam > steam reviews. Same goes with any other part of steam, like greenlight really. As much as I learned to despise traditional game journalism from the 90's, when some publishers and devs just couldn't do wrong and their reviews spiralled up into the regions of 98% while others got 75% reviews for the same effort, I still trust a game journalist review more than a random user on steam. Same goes for WELLKNOWN youtubers or any other source that has earned my trust really.

I know I cannot fully trust steam, nor its users, as the system has proven to be easely tricked by devs.

Thus, personally, I don't think the reviews inside of Steam are not nearly as important as some people think for games that have a STRONG marketing presence and good reviews by wellknown and trusted sources outside of steam.


Of course, having bad reviews on Steam is never helpful, and achieving this presence outside of steam takes quite some effort, especially for small unknown devs.


I guess putting a stronger emphasis on professional reviews (kind of like metacritic does it, where you see user and pro reviews in an easy comparable format) could help make up for this, as would a stronger moderation of user content by valve.
But again, that would mean Valve needs to get more involved in what is going on on their storefront.... yeah, most probably not gonna happen sadly.

 

Less quantity would be very nice, but it all depends on how profitable "shovelware" is. If it's still sustainable, they'll still make it, but the difference will be that valve gets a cut up front this time. I don't have the data to say, "A $5K initial investment will obliterate their profit margin."

I'd be interested in hearing your take on reasons games make it through greenlight even if the community doesn't want it.

I think the main place where shovelware causes disruption is the new releases list- if we had a better way of showcasing the new releases, perhaps the disruption of a large quantity of low quality product could be mitigated.

 

One way to stop developers who make their money primarily off of trading cards from shoveling in the shovelware would be for Steam to not apply any income from trading card sales toward the recouping of the application fee. If only direct sales on Steam went toward that recouping, it would mean that application fee could end up as an unrecoverable development cost, which might make some of those trading card based shovelware developers think twice.

Or at least we can hope.

 

I wasn't trying to list every reason a person may want a particular game just giving a few examples to illustrate the diversity.

Your examples still fall under "people want the game". That is the point... people buy games for all kinds of reasons.

I've heard a couple real life people (and read many accounts online) where they literally "just want to buy some cheap little game to play" and that is what they did. They had $2 to $3 in mind found a game at that price and bought it.

Of course there would be reasons why they chose the game they actually bought but those reasons can range from "this seems different", "this is funny!", "this looks fun", "this looks very hard!" to dozens of more.

 

That is an example of a game that I don't personally have any interest in playing, but I don't see what it hurts by having it on the store. Steam has a review system and a refund system. In the case of that game, the sheer number of negative reviews should deter most people from buying it.

Let's assume the SteamSpy numbers are accurate and think about this specific game from Valve's point of view. If the game sold 62,692 copies for $0.49 each, then the game brought in $30,719.08. Assuming Valve takes 30% of that, it would mean Valve made $9,215.72 from that game. Hosting that game on Steam cost Valve very little, so that is nearly all profit for Valve.

Why should Valve do anything to prevent games that like from making them money? Assuming Valve made $9k off that game, there is no reason to think Valve is going to want to prevent games like that. If anything, Valve will want to find thousands more crappy games to make even more money from.

If Valve did set a $5k submission fee, that game might not have ended up on Steam. Maybe Steam's competitors (like itch.io) would have made that money instead of Valve. As a business, why would Valve choose to give profits to their competitors instead of themselves?

 

That depends. We are making a game for hard core role players. Anytime you find a discussion on gaming forums about role playing you also find a lot of super duper hatred. I have said this before on the forums, but I"ve seen role players accused of being sexual deviants, gay, care bears, and have been told to go away, or threatened with in-game death, etc.. Truth is most role playing has nothing to do with sex and some role players love PvP and even beg for perma-death.

But these attacks are nasty. Back when I worked as a developer on a similar game I received PM's that were really scary. I am not sure why we are a threat to the typical gamer, but we are.

So...if we tried to release on Steam, what would happen? A strong marketing presence would help of course, especially if targeted. But it would probably be difficult to ever pass Greenlight standards because the hatred would simply draw more and more negative reviews, not because of the game, but because of the genre.

The new Steam would cost us money but it would be easier to actually get our game on Steam. Whether it would sell would be determined by the quality of our game, the size of our audience, and our marketing. But at least we would have a visual presence on Steam. My guess is our sales will come through other means but it doesn't hurt to have the exposure.

I am sure there are other genre games with the same issues. Some probably never make it through the process. Some might be shovel ware but some might be nice games.

Like it or not, being on Steam is important, even with low sales.

 

So, Steam is building a wall and making us pay for it?

I have nothing real to contribute here. In fact, I haven't read a large portion of the thread...

 

We won't know Valve's true motives until we find out the price point. I honestly think Valve is switching from Steam Greenlight to Steam Direct to eliminate the delay and open the flood gates. Valve can easily see how much money they make from a flood of games, and Valve likely sees Greenlight as something that slowed down the pipeline too much.

I honestly don't believe Valve sees shovelware or low quality games as a problem. I realize that a lot of developers would like to see Valve release fewer games onto Steam, so their games get more attention. But that is not really something that Valve cares about. Valve clearly views Steam as a "Long Tail" style business, and a large part of every long tail is truckloads of low quality crap.

If Valve can make money off low quality games in addition to making money from high quality games, then Valve is going to keep the low quality games. The only way Valve would ever choose to reduce the number of low quality games is if low quality games somehow reduced the sales of AAA games.

 

Not many are talking about the "paperwork" process. That may be what they really want to add. I imagine that it will help Steam curate out some of the stuff that could cause legal issues. I don't know what sort of paperwork they have now for people applying for Greenlight but the more information they collect, the less likely some unscrupulous person will want their information in Valve's hands. Also might eliminate some of the very young from sending in games without parent's information.

 

Right now, there is no paperwork needed to submit to Greenlight, but there is some stuff to fill out once your game is Greenlit. I am guessing Steam Direct is going to have similar paperwork.

 

That's exactly the opposite of what Valve has been talking about. They want to have even less involvement in the process than they do today. They're going for a toll-booth model, not a curation model. If it doesn't crash and your credit card clears, you're in.

 

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=620081787

lool this game took forever to be greenlit ... and its like still not up on steam, i think its intended to be free .. as its free on their site
http://www.peacemakergame.com/

LOL some of the dumb comments on that greenlight!!

maybe the new system would make such a game easier and faster to be put on steam??
(ALTHOUGH ... maaaybe not, since the game is free?? )

ppffttt yeah, well iam still just coding it, art comes later .. i just wanted an idea of the look of it.. lol .. it has better handpainted texture now anyway (took some time to learn handpainting)... .. but iam sure you know that...

 

There are only 28 comments, most supportive. Not sure what is dumb about them. There are a few obviously intolerant political comments, but otherwise, not so bad. Are you assuming people were paid to post them? Maybe, or maybe it appealed to this small niche of gamers.

 

I understand that, BoredMormon asked what Sterling talked about, and that was something Sterling talked about as an idea. Nobody said anything about Valve talking about it.

 

I thought he was referring to the people saying crap game because of the subject material. It definitely is a great example of how letting gamers vote and control which games or at least how fast games become available for sale has problems.

Here we see people wanting the game very bad and then there are others intentionally trying to block the game because it offends them basically in a political way. Craziness.

They could simply ignore it on GL and if the game passes through just not buy the game but no.... they feel the need to "make a statement". I greatly dislike this kind of behavior in case it wasn't obvious. Big part of what is wrong with the world in general today. And one reason I think taking the voting control back from gamers would be a great thing. Too many just try to "make a statement" or otherwise force their views across as the ruling.

EDIT: Actually thinking about it I don't see why there is a NO on the GL thing anyway. That is stupid and a major part of the issue. All Steam and a dev should care about is there enough people interested in this game. Yes and Maybe covers that.

 

Yeah, absolutely.

Yes, again! I agree with you a lot, you know. lol

Actually, it is crazy that Steam didn't think of that! Why should people who don't want a game be able to influence whether it is published or not? I understand if there are mechanical issues with the game, but otherwise, why do they have so much power?

 

yeah thats dumb, why is there a No ?

... hmm there was some game that (i think satirically) was trying to .... as ive heard Jim Sterling say LOL "promote the killing of homosexuals" ... buuut in my mind, to censor that is also bad, especially since, i saw it as being artistic in a different sense... like the game Hatred looks like crap, but its MEANT to look like crap, its meant to convey the message of "this kind of thing being depicted, is crap"

and there was the "slave tetris" ... i thought that was GREAT!!! really artistic depiction, and lameass idiots got the dev to pull it from the game ... wtf??

people are dumb as hell! ><

.. i mean, you depict "a crap thing" .. to make it apparent that a thing is crap,
like some people legit think killing homosexuals is a good thing, but you show it happening, and some of them might THEN see "wow this is crap!"

sometimes you have to see to believe

but nooo people go and say "this is crap ban it!!" ... thats just stuuuupppiiidd

.. people see it and say "this shouldnt exist!!" - EXACTLY!!! thats the purpose of the depiction!
its showing us that what it is depicting shouldnt exist!! thats what its all about!!
..and instead, they erase the depiction, and in doing so, they are effectively agreeing that in reality, it SHOULD exist!!

like i saw some schools banned the book "To kill a mockingbird" ... cause the book has the "N word" in it..
FACEPALM!!!! that book is like a historically anti-racist book!!!! LMFAO!!! IDIOTS!!!
in my school we read it, and the curriculum was all anti-racist .... wtf!!!

... but .. i mean , its steam, a business, they have the right to their decision, and decisions that are best for business, of course...

 

Politics aside, its hard to tell whether this game is going to be a good game or not. Maybe those supporting did so for reasons other than whether they would actually want to play it?

Maybe it's worth having it succeed purely because of the political message, but saying that downvoters are acting purely because they are 'offended' and that it shows how the greenlight system is flawed I think isn't an accurate assessment. Maybe they just didn't see enough interesting gameplay.