Steam Greenlight

It's basically genius. Valve's pretty much said you can abuse the internet to get your game okayed on greenlight, then abuse that bunch of people to buy your game afterwards.


In short, Valve is making people make them money for them, with even less effort.*


* That's the jaded version. In reality I'll be hopping and skipping over there with confetti in my wake.

 

Remember when Steam first came out and everyone flipped out because they thought it was unecessary bloat that would never serve any purpose or have any success?

And, I agree with hippocoder: Valve is essentially iTunes.

 

Even in Brazil kids spend 200$ on shoes hehehe

 

Seems you make the big money if your game is on Steam.

 

Oh, Steam is definitely a no-brainer. If you release a professional game without it being on Steam then you've failed. It's almost freaking guaranteed exponential, for the love of god. One does not F*** with exponential growth.

Or you're EA/Ubisoft/etc. and just release it through your own methods. But that's usually due to legal reasons after you've dropped $100mil on the game.

 

You know how they say dont judge a book by its cover, well with 600+ games I am using the little icon to see what game I might be interested in

 

Awesome Stuff

One small step for gamers

and one giant leap for GameDevelopment

 

I am already seeing people take the angry bots character and throw it into a unity terrain and call it a game on greenlight. Ugh.

 

Btw. some oldskool game:
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=91564412&searchtext=

Online version:
http://hatsproductions.com/organtrail.html

 

Well they can but there is no point it wont get green lit, so its a waste of time.

 

In my country is trivial for ppl to pay $800+ on shoes, $200 is nobrainer.
You get TVs for $100, we pay at least $1000... /rant

 

The problem with that is the kids are F***ing the system.
I spent my free time today on greenlights page, I voted every single game, mainly to know what is going in there, whtat I will play against...
99% of what I saw there is garbage and some are trolls having what they call fun making jokes about September 11.
Now there are more 150+ projects since I had the voting rush, the trolls are there again and some real projects with bad comments are re-posted.

I really don't think this thing is going to work that way, unless they permaban the many many trolls fooling the system.

Oh boy... Really Valve?!

 

I just had some twat downvote my game because I had a facebook icon on the screenshot of my main menu.

"Tumb down just for "Like us on facebook" on a screenshot.
The game seems good, but the facebook logo makes me angry"

All I can say is LOLWUTFROFL

 

I would consider that trolling and report the guy.

 

Not a bad idea actually.

 

What? $800? I haven't even seen a $200 pair of *shoes*. Boots are different, I've seen $300 hiking boots, but I would never consider buying them.

We get bad TVs for $100. The TV my family has was $1200, and is a Vizio smart TV.

 

Personally from just having a quick glance at Greenlight its sadly fatally flawed, due to the voting system.

1. Allowing people to vote down a game makes no sense, it is just open to abuse either by individuals or by a mob. Case in point would be youTube and many sites/forums where they ended up removing vote down because it was too easy to abuse. You'd think a game company with experience of MP griefing would have considered this.

If down votes are considered at all in terms of getting a greenlight then its just silly as its irrelevant. You're not looking at how many wont buy the game, you're meant to be looking at the numbers who would. So why bother including it at all?


2. Voting at all is pretty meaningless, I could vote every single game on their, but have zero intention of buying. It should have been a case of 'put your money where you mouth is' and be a pre-order system instead, that would have weeded out the majority of the trolls and troll comments.

Overall its not gong to be about how good you game might be, but how good at marketing and how many people you can muster to vote/block vote for you. Again its just open to all sorts of levels of abuse.

Its also bad they appear to have launched it with in excess of 500+ titles. I had 722 titles to rate when I first look, think i still have 720 Just no way many of the games are going to get a good look in with that many to shift through. Not to mention there is really no way to easily find titles you might be interested in and want to rate.

Obviously i'm glad Steam are looking at how to can release more 'indie' games, and i'm sure they will think of 'greenlight' as a success regardless, but from the outside looking in, it just seems so flawed from the start.

 

I'm pretty sure the down vote button doesn't mean anything except getting it off the users to-rate list.

Valve have only just released Greenlight, I'm sure they'll stick with it and sort out the issues and make it meaningful and useful for all, players, developers, and Valve themselves.

P.S. Vote for my game Major Mayhem!
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=92569681

 

In which case perhaps a 'not interested' button would be better?
Its just in my experience being online that if you give people a method to 'down vote' they will, just for the sake of it and usually for trolling. Even from a quick glance through some of the comments on the games already on there its clear to see. e.g.

Clearly this makes no sense, but it is one of the more polite down vote comments. The guy likes the potential, but not where it is now so they down vote. Even if as you say its just to get it off their 'voting' list, now they've down voted it i'm not sure there is anyway for them to get back to it - I can only see ways of checking your up votes or favourites.

I just don't see the point in it, especially as GreenLight is tracking the number of people who look at your page, between that and up votes the author has all the information they need.

Overall though I still think voting is pretty meaningless in the grand scheme, its just to open to abuse and provides no real commitment.

I'll also agree with some previous posters that there should have been a nominal fee for uploading projects to remove the rubbish and fakes, as the biggest problem is that its just going to get flooded with entries. That in itself is going to mean it less effective, if people simply don't have the time to rate stuff. It just makes the whole thing lack focus, which I feel is whats really needed.

 

+1
-1

 

Downvotes don't make any difference. They just get added to the 'Items I have rated' filter.
Upvotes on the other hand do make a difference.

You can only vote on a game if you have purchased at least one game on Steam on that account.

Right now the sorting of the system is flawed. The same games are always on the front page, giving these games unfair exposure, while others are forced to live in the middle of the pack, and by that time most people have gotten bored of rating games. This is my biggest issue with Greenlight, and means that the best games won't get voted through, but the games that hover around the front page all the time.

Check out my post on the Steam Forums "How I would have designed Greenlight"
http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2918422

That's how the system should work IMHO.

 

I can confirm that. And I guess everyone else as well. Just look at Youtube...

 

Steam definitely puts up some stinkers by themselves. You might enjoy total biscuits review of Revelations 2012
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LzTo6XUiIA4

 

Couldn't remember it by name, but instantly remembered it in the first second of the video, absolute classic Total Biscuit review. Didn't stop me from watching the first few minutes again as the 'character' animation/dancing is just hilarious

Wasn't there some thinking that it was included on steam due to bias of using the Source engine?

 

I guess I started with that...

But I talked about a small fee... $100 is quite hefty.
On the other side, I think this will stop all troll/joke/junk submissions immediately.
Yesterday, I saw a company that submitted dozens of their cheap facebook games. Almost all with the same gameplay just a slight theme change. Really that can't be the solution...

So I welcome that fee. And I think it's a great move from Steam to donate that money for charity.

 

I like how companies are taking advantage of this and spamming it with their crap.

Real gems become hard to find, it's a real shame.

 

This to me seems more like:
"We are too lazy to check each submission, it will simply cost too much.
So instead, donate $100 to a charity, which we have pre-selected."
Who can't get $100? If they were developing this game for months and it was good I'm sure someone would donate that money for maybe something good in return(IE: 20 free copies) or something? If it's free, who knows?

 

I think for those spam companies that was like the "spaghetti on the wall method". Let's see what sticks. No risk involved.
But paying $100 for each game, I think those people will think twice if they want to waste their money. I mean, they don't really think one of their spam games will make it into Steam, do they?

 

The first update is a $100 fee for someone to post to Steam Greenlight.

Aka - $100 and you can submit as much as you want.

 

Oh I see. Well, that's not a big hurdle then :/

 

Mhm, it's only going to hurt smaller people. Trolls may not do it, but we'll still be spammed with S***ty games from crappy companies.

 

Good first step, this cut down on much of the trash we have seen in there. Valve will have to continue tweaking the system in the future, but that isn't a big deal, just how it goes with a new process.

I'm not too worried about great games being shut out with this $100 fee, if you can't come up with that I doubt you can bring a Steam quality game to market.

 

Well at least they are doing something, though i'm frankly shocked that they never even thought of this stuff before launching the service, its all pretty common-sense stuff.

As for the $100 fee, i'm not sure about the call to make it a charitable donation. Not that I'm against charitable donations, but I saw the fee as something to help give further support to greenlight itself, to fund extra bodies to help moderate the service and improve it or even to be offset against marketing costs, i.e to give value to your submission.

Unfortunately now its been stated I see no way they can go back on it, so they'll going to be stuck with a $100 donation fee, so in the future if they see the need to ask for an actual fee from developers its going to end up being on top of that! The more I think about the more I see a massive amount of poorly considered planning involved with the whole thing and that's very disappointing.

The real problem though is they are charging a fee to get onto Greenlight, that might lead you to getting included in steam store. It just feels wrong, its not as if Greenlight itself gives you any real exposure itself, you still have to have a marketing machine going in the background to draw attention to your project. Now the fee is being given to charity you can't even get say a proportion back if your project fails to make it ( a proportion in order to cover costs).

I don't know, its no so much losing the money (as its to a good cause) its that there is a lack of a service being given for it. I mean sure Valve have set up the backend for this and no doubt will have some useful front page promotions, just like say Kickstarter does on their homepage, but beyond that I don't see any other service being given and Valve stand to gain massively from the social/community aspect plus selling more games anyway.

Depending upon the number of games that are successfully added to the store this 'fee' with zero benefits may come to haunt them. By which I mean if only a handful of games a month get picked out of several hundred entries this $100 that was meant to avoid fakes and trolls, may simply be seen as a barrier for legitimate entries.

The reason being that to have a hope of being successful and getting noticed by Valve you have to have some good marketing clout or a massive fanbase that you can mobilise or pay-off to get votes. After all it was set up because Valve didn't have the man-power or the nuance to choose the right games, so they are going to rely on the voting to a large degree, which as I said is going to need a massive marketing push to get anywhere. If you don't have that marketing muscle, why waste $100?

Its good to see they have addressed the vote down issue, though I still think 'voting' is open to massive amounts of abuse.

 

Hate to quote myself, but Valve quickly added a 100$ fee to this thing , and if you troll and post something really offensive you can (likely) get banned and lose your 100$ ...

If your game isn't worth 100$ to you then its not worth the time of the community. For that 5%of people who have games that are actually good and still can't come up with 100$, life isn't fair, and say it takes you 6 months to make 100$ , thats 6 months you've spent polishing and working on the game to make it that much better .

 

Wish Apple charged $100 per game.

 

... it's time to go to Kickstarter and sell some pre-purchases.

 

Tanks Heroes
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=93794003

 

Yeah that was the video in which he made the claim and was pretty convincing if you look at it compared to something like that blob game.

Steam was uploading popular IOS games. For example tiny troopers, on IOS its sold for $1, on steam they charge $8 (because they know people will pay more for a steam game just because its on steam). So whoever was handling what games went on steam kind of sucked, hopefully this is a better way of doing it.

Total biscuit completely destroys tiny troopers.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vzM9EvKDCdk

 

For those who have games on Greenlight that are not in a mainstream genre, please can you join on this discussion I've started on the Steam forums.
Please keep the thread active, Valve needs to see this, and respond to it.

http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=3059162

 

Greenlight is completely flawed. It's a popular contest for the votes of teenagers. Adults don't sit there and vote, who has time for that? It's completely and utterly stupid. Games should be reviewed by Valve staff to ensure a level of quality. It's a clever way of Valve outsourcing this job to the populous.

The next big issue is games that don't even have a beta are on Greenlight. This is beyond stupid. If the game does not have a playable beta (Greenlight needs to add an easy way to distribute the beta) then it should not be allowed on Greenlight, period. It should not be used for hyping a game that's going to release in 3 dang years, get Greenlit and waste a spot, then come to find it'll never release.

 

Agreed, while I do think Greenlight is great in helping Valve filter through all the cr@p that gets submitted, they should still do some Greenlighting of their own and have their own internal Greenlight team that looks at some potentially great games that just don't have the exposure.

Also agree on this crap with games that are 2-3 years away from release being Greenlit, that is frustrating.

 

In my eyes, Greenlight is Valve's way of saying "we don't care about the True Indies, only about those large studios that happen to be independent, for you 'Garage Devs'.... well go fight over this two meaty bones, whoever wins gets to eat."

Greenlight is absurd, especially given Steam's recent statements against Windows 8 precisely around "the indie gamer". The way I see it, it's easier to get Microsoft to back me up as an garage indie in their app store, than to get Steam to even look at me.

Don't take me wrong: I love Steam as a customer. But I am very ware they are not in it to help Garage Indies, they are in it for the money.

 

Such studio productions as MaK, Blockscape, La Mulana, Kenshi, Gnomoria, Kinetic Void, No Time to Explain, Contrast, Octodad: Dadliest Catch, DLC Quest, Dream, and Sang-Froid.

And seriously? "True Indies?" Don't bring useless "No True Scotsman" arguments into this.

 

Took the time during the post to clarify I mean "Garage Indies". Why I call these "True Indies"? Well, for all purposes Valve themselves are "Indies", but it's hard to use the word to mean anything when the studio or company in question has a lot of money behind them. IMO: you have a payroll, you not a "true indie", but given that some (like you proved) would get that to be too... hmm... "useless", I guess I will make sure to ALWAYS call them "Garage Indies". I think that's clear enough.

Edit to add: Don't have enough time to google and accuratly find all the titles you listed, but the two I did find are on Greenlight. Good for them to be able to snatch the meaty bones while every other game in the queue keeps begging for theirs!

One more edit: Given the definition of the word "independent" and "indies" being just an abreviation, i think the term is completely useless to begin with. There was a less semanthic time where "indies" would ONLY bee used to define the "Garage Dev".

 

Steam has a reputation for (generally) curating a library of games above a certain quality of standard (and AAA titles regardless of quality). Apple, Microsoft, Google Play - none of them even attempt this, they let anything that works without blatant false advertisement onto the platform.

Valve doesn't have the resources to thoroughly look into every indie game that comes out; it's not that they don't care, it's just a downright impossible job. Greenlight is their solution to that (let the greater community help curate the massive amounts of indie games coming out every year). Steam has plenty of games from very small independent development groups (and individuals) without the greenlight - they just tend to be products that have already gained a large level of support external to the platform. They clearly care about true indies, but they also care about the continued standard of quality in a way that no other digital distribution channel does at the moment. Sure, sub-par products slip through the cracks (War Z as a recent example) - but generally you can go to the recently added list on Steam and see a selection of high quality games from both small and large development teams.

The iOS approach doesn't help indie developers any more than the Steam approach does. You don't want to get on Steam because it's the only way the vast majority of computer users can install software (App Store) - you want to get on Steam because you know that simply being on the platform is going to be an enormous boon to your visibility and sales. This is not something the App Store can come even remotely close to claiming - it's a sea of countless $0.99 titles all fighting for the visibility that simply being on Steam provides.

It's apples and oranges. You don't need Steam to reach PC gamers - the only reason it's at all relevant is because it's carefully curated and relatively exclusive. The second they open the flood gates and let every developer publish to the platform is the second the platform loses the biggest thing going for it. If your title can't make it's way though the Greenlight process, it doesn't have the community support that should be required to enter the platform.

 

My primary issue is concepts don't belong on Greenlight. If you need to hype your concept, idea, etc.. then do it on a personal site for the game. They need to instate a rule that a Demo or Beta is required and distributed by steam in order for it to be on Greenlight. I hate going through and seeing 20 games in a row that I'm expected to vote on hasn't even begun basic gameplay development and is at least a year or 2 from release.

Screenshots, videos, and concepts shouldn't be the basis of getting a game Greenlit. Gameplay should be.

I plan to release and sell my game directly from my website as standalone. I'll then go on Greenlight and if I get Greenlit will add Steamworks for achievements, leaderboards, etc.. until then I'll make money with standalone sales. I think that should be the goal of all Indie developers. I mean after all Steam takes a 30% cut so at least make something while you wait 6 months to a year to be Greenlit and by time you do you should have a well polished indie game.

 

So heres what can happen someone like a pewdiepie (who has millions of fanboys) can like a game and tell his viewers to go like the game, now he has enough of a fan base that enough people can do it and it gets greenlight - but that doesnt mean all those people are actually going to want to even buy the game. I would guess you would have to do a better job of somehow getting a community together to be able to get people to greenlight it and if you cant do that - you wont be able to get enough sales anyway.

Jessecox is doing a weekly greenlight series to do a spotlight on whatever he thinks is a good game (each video got over 100k views so thats got to help).

 

And they should not attempt it. If you want to truly help, you create a separate store, category, hole in their site... whatever... and there you do just a basic Q&A to make sure what is being listed is a functional game and let people buy it if they want to buy it.

Actually (unless they removed this once Greenlight launched) they do have a queue for anyone to submit their game. They would reject most stuff, though. Greenlight is a way to allow rabid fans to eat each other if they are denied by Steam's regular process. Basically "if you know we will not approve you, you can always duke it out in an American Idol contest."

Above I was not talking about the iPhone App Store, I was referring to the Mac App Store (and you can make quite a bit of money there, WAY more than you can by self-publishing.) Given that the Mac App Store comes pre-installed with every mac (and now the same goes for Window's alternative) they you get a LOT of visibility.

As for the exposure you get on Steam not being able to be match by Apple's App store... tell that story to the guys that made World of Goo. They stated their iPad launch was larger than the peaks in any other platform they launched at, despite the way lower price point (and that was talking about the iPad Only release, the iPhone release came later.) This is topic for another thread, but the impact visibility in the iOS market is NOT to be dismissed.

Let be honest: without a big marketing budget you NEED a digital storefront with enough user base. Thanks to Microsoft, though, now there is the Windows Market in Win8, so today you can say it’s optional to get into any other digital retailer. But that’s part of my grudge…. Steam is precisely against the existence of Window’s app store, and they have been rather vocal about it, while also attempting to imply it’s bad for indies!

That is not true. Right now it’s just about who gets the most votes. Most consumers that vote might never actually pay, and those that would pay won’t necessarily bother voting.

Steam does not need to fully open the flood gates either. In fact, they don’t even allow the floodgates to be opened for all games. They charge a $100 just to get into Greenlight (unless you want just to gauge interest on a project, in that case votes won’t really count and will only be visible to you.)

If steam wanted to really help, they would open up a section of the store (with a submission fee) to all devs. Games in this section all will have mandatory demo windows, and all will be verified only to make sure they meet basic definitions of games and also to make sure are not malware. Making players try Greenlight games before they decide to pay makes sure there is never a controversy over refunds like there was with WarZ.

BTW: I intentionally did not mention Google Play store above because it’s the entire opposite side of badness. By allowing just anything in, they make a true pile of bile for consumers to browse through. That market is actually a pain to get any money out of.