Steam Greenlight

Hi All

I was wondering if anyone here has had a game put on the Steam Website , I am thinking of doing the same with a project I have in mind.

what I'm after really is someone to clarify the process, is it worth doing etc etc, or are the other avenue's besides steam to get a one man band game out to Joe Public.

 

It's doable, worthwhile and not nearly as hard as it used to be.

 

Thanks frosted for replying, good to know, it did seem a fairly easy process from what I have read so far, nice to get 1st hand experience.

 

It also really depends on the project, there's a huge range in games and a huge range in presentation - you have any screenshots or anything?

 

Nothing yet, it's still in the design/concept phase, in a few weeks should have something to show, there are already similar games up there of what I've got in mind, which did possibly make me think should I shouldn't I, but thought what the hell.

There are some many games already on steam that are practically identical , my concept is purely an Asteroid mining game where to make money to upgrade your ship, i'm taking bits from other games and mashing them together.

Gui's , Power Management and Cockpits similar to Elite Dangerous (My own design, not copies).
Mining Lasers similar to Eve Online (may have drones yet to pick up the mined rock shards).

At the moment I'm looking at Sound FX, Designing the cockpit with Blender, and it's hard to dedicate time at moment due to family commitments, but it the game gives me something to hone my C# skills utilising Playmaker (excellent tool).

I'm quite confident I can pull all this together (in time).

 

Cool.

I should mention that although it's way easier than it was, it's still challenging. Ideally the presentation is good, the graphics should be at least reasonable, etc. I probably spent around 8 or 9 months on my project before I posted it. The video itself took something like 2-3 weeks (split between cleaning up visuals and learning to deal with video). I cleared greenlight in 16 days (i think i would have gotten greenlit in 11, but the batch timing didn't line up well).

 

what was your project?. how long have you been using Unity, I myself have been dabbling for about 2yrs on/off.

I agree, with a lot of the Assets coming out now, it's making game development a lot easier, I am very impressed with PlayMaker, can do things very quickly with that, and no coding(which is sometimes nice )

 

I started using unity about a year and a half ago. I've been a programmer for decades. Here's the greenlight page: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=415505676

 

Impressive, are you charging for that game, if so had any buyers,I myself have been a programmer for sometime, not in a professional capacity, but more of a hobbiest and sometimes wrote a few internal apps for the companies I worked for.

 

I plan to charge around $18. But it will really depend on a lot of factors.

I was hoping to release early access around the end of this month, but after looking at some of the analytics feed from play testing - I am certainly going to need to give it a lot more love before it's ready for even Early Access.

 

Great, sounds like it's coming along, one thing would it be ok to pick your brains from time to time as I'm still learning at the mo and what you have done it very impressive.

Always good to get networking with similar minded people.

 

It took an immense amount of work. I really strongly wouldn't suggest something like this as a first commercial project to anyone. Get something easy finished and released first. Don't try to do greenlight as a first target. Yes it's possible, no it's not worth it even if you hit the goal. There's too much to learn. Start on something small. Get it to the point where someone actually wants to play it. The stuff I had to go through in order to get my project where it is, it's been insane.

 

Thanks for the advice, I have a LLOONNGGG way to go yet, tbh my inspiration was this game http://neptuneflux.com/

This is a one man band and has done quite well so far, I thought christ if he can do it why can't I, you can only but try.

Again thanks for the advice , keep in touch, happy to share ideas etc and get networking.

 

Kickstarter is a tricky beast. Very little about kickstarter success is based on the product being offered. It is mostly defined by the scope of the campaigns social network. To find out why he was successful getting it kickstarted, i would look at his bio. Look at his twitter account and compare his follower count to yours. Be realistic. I've read that in most cases 50% of your backers will generally be people you know in real life, I've read reports where it was much higher.

Many people will also arrange their kickstarter such that they generally have enough people lined up and willing to back (explicitly) before launch that the campaign itself is guaranteed.

 

Yea kickstarter does seem very tricky, not something I'm going to consider, Steam seems more appropiate, so that will be my avenue of release I think.

 

I don't think Kickstarter is something to be sniffed at. I agree that it looks hard to get the funding that you require, but the money that it can provide could enhance a project and make something far more achievable than without it.

My only concern with Kickstarter is the amount of work that it would take to successfully complete a campaign, as much as I would love the money the amount of time lost on my project would be bad and the energy wasted would somewhat detrimental.

Also @frosted, your game looks really impressive. It looks like the sort of game I'd buy. How much time did you spend spreading the word about your game and talking to people asking questions? Did you just submit the proposal to Greenlight and leave it be?

 

I asked a lot of questions to anyone I could find. This included local game dev meetups, irc channels, emails to random developers. As much as I appreciated most of the info I collected, very little of the advice I got was directly meaningful. The problem is, everyones game is different, everyones starting conditions and resources are different. How you approach something like Steam or Kickstarter will really vary from person to person and project to project. To further complicate matters, Greenlight has been changing, dramatically and rapidly. A lot of the published info is really out of date (even the stuff like a year old).

I had no social media presence, no buzz, no coverage, no twitter or facebook. So I really had very little. The only outside exposure I had was a friend's post on a smaller sub-reddit.

But seriously, don't make the same mistakes I did. Start with something very small, don't just make it functional - make it something someone wants to play. At least get a release under your belt before you take on something more significant. Like really.

 

Just a few pieces of advice: Make first, design later. Design is a waste of time if nothing is made - but something made isn't a waste of time without design. Anything like what the cockpit looks like or what Sounds FX to use is secondary to having a playable game. You'll probably scrap half your design document anyways because certain features just seem dumb or are too technically difficult.

When I say design, I mean anything not related to making the game. If you think about a feature and also think about how to implement it, that thought becomes less about design and more about making the game. Note that writing a program in your head is a lot more efficient than writing a program with your fingers so thinking about code design is 100% okay.

Also, Playmaker is a prototype tool for artists, designers, and noobs. You'll never get the freedom or performance you need to make a game like ED out of Playmaker. If you're planning to code it all, you should dive into C#.

Also, think of Unity as a tool. C# is such a great, flexible language so don't let Unity hide that from you.

Also, game dev meetups and whatever don't produce results most of the time, and often end up destroying productivity. If you want a competent team, you have to find people and one-one-one them to make sure they're the real thing.

Anyways, le ramble's finished. Best of luck with your game!

Btw, there is never a phase where you have "Nothing yet". Even in design/concept phase, you should have a prototype to test your designs.

 

Thanks for the advice, I do agree Playmaker is not the best tool for games, but certainly helps, I've already got some basic elements done which are:

• Player movement control using InControl (using PS3 controller on PC and WASD)
• Basic asteroid field generator using Perlin noise and random scaling to give different shaped asteroids from one prefab (there will be more prefabs to come)

I am planning to use C# for the game code,as a lot of the things I need to code just cannot be done any other way, do you have any advice on creating good GUI's as my intention is to have a GUI very similar to Elite Dangerous as their GUI's are very nice.

 

I'm pretty braindead concerning GUI but you should always consider player intent (what the player wants to do when he performs and action) when designing something. A GUI as complicated as ED's would probably be feasable with Unity's new UI.

 

Hi, I've just had a game Greenlit after about 340 days on Greenlight! You really need to get as many votes as you can in the first week or so. After that it gets difficult.

26% yes votes. Which is not too bad.

So now it looks like I've got a lot of work to do to perfect the game, see if I need to implement any Steam SDK features, do all the artwork etc. Steam players are about 100x more critical than mobile players.

I'm not sure if it will do well. Considering that there are about 100 million Steam users compared with billions of mobile users. But then again my game would be 1 of just under 4000 games which is much better odds at being seen than 1 in a million.

Also, I have to decide the price. Should I take a gamble and go for a high price like $5 or $10 and risk no downloads? If only you could run through life twice.

To be honest as long as I earn my $100 developer fee back I'll be happy.

 

"high price like $5 or $10"?

I guess the way things are these days $10 may actually seem high.... but $5?! If it was on mobile that may seem high but on PC I think most gamers have a little more common sense... maybe. I definitely wouldn't think of $5 as being high unless the game is complete junk. In which case it wouldn't matter if it was free I'd still not want it.

 

Price is relative. $5 would be overpriced for certain games and underpriced for other games. Remember that price is a branding signal. Selling at too high of a price will hurt sales, but selling at too low of a price will also hurt sales.

A low price relative to the expected price signals a poor quality game. If somebody expects your game should sell for $10 and you sell it for $1, then some people will actually not buy the game because the price is a lot lower than they expected and price often indicates quality. The trick is to figure out what potential customers think the price should be and then set it to that price.

What I would do is make a list of 10 specific people who you think would be interested in buying your game. Ask each of those people to guess what the price will be. If you see a pricing trend in their answers, use that as the price.

 

Your right. Apps mobile market is just over-saturated. Are there 100 apps uploaded per day to Google Play? Probable yes or more.. Good luck trying to sell anything on such platform right now.

 

Along with what the above poster said, another issue with pricing your game too low is customer service, especially with early access when your game isn´t well optimized. It is almost better to price your game high, and then float it down as you take care of tech issues.

Also, have your marketing in place before you go to Steam. The system favors games that get a lot of early votes.

 

Yea ED's Gui's are nice, It's more just the way they work and look, but a bit more simplified

 

Well it did take 340 days to get Greenlit. Make of that what you will.

Maybe that is a good way of setting the price. If x=days to get Greenlit. Then the price should be:

p = $300 / x​

I would need some more data to get a better formula. With this formula the guy who got greenlit in 11 days should price their game at $27.

In answer to the OP's question:
There are other avenues for PC games. You could create some shareware which can be paid to unlock it (I'm use Fastspring and used Paypal in the past). Minecraft and World of Goo sold originally just off their website.

The advantages of app stores and Steam etc. is you have a lot of eyes already there. People also know it won't have viruses in it.

For Mac Games you can put them in the Mac app store which I recommend.

My Question
Does anyone have any tips about the best things to do to make a game fit for the Steam market. It is a different ballgame to the app market. What sort of features should you add to a PC game that you wouldn't add to say an iPad app. Customization? Multiplayer? HD videos? What sort of added value.

What is the minimum and maximum file size of a good PC game on Steam. (ie. if it was under 10Mb it might suggest it doesn't have enough features in it!)

 

Days to get Greenlit cannot really be used to set price. For example, maybe somebody had a really niche type of game. In that case, it would take a while to get Greenlit, but users that were members of the niche would be willing to pay a higher price for the game that satisfied their niche. By contrast, a zombie shooter game might get rapidly Greenlit, but would not be able to command a higher price because there are is a surplus of that type of game to choose from.

 

Give me hope for my game which has been on there 180 days!

 

I had my game The Barbarian on green light for about 2-3 months. The day I got it into a bundle designed to green light games, it got green lit.

Another game, Dragon Rider VR was there for about 3-4 months and then got green lit randomly. Neither made it above 50% before they were green lit.

I have yet to release though. The Barbarian should come out in late summer, while Dragon Rider VR needs more work, but we're hoping for November, right before all the VR stuff comes out.

 

Care to elaborate?

ps, hows your barb game going on ios/etc?

 

It was the https://groupees.com "Be mine" bundle I think. It made about $600 from that, with many thousands of copies, but they only got an early version, and have to wait for the steam version to get the full game. It did help it get green lit, however.

On iOS it was making about 1-5 sales a day, usually about $90 a week, although the past 4 days have each had zero sales. It's very soft-launched, with only advertising on Touch Arcade -- their forums picked it up and that produced a lot of discussion.

I'm in the process of updating the game w/ more modern, higher quality characters and models that I can control (and to help finance it, I'm selling them in the asset store too) (http://www.InfinityPBR.com), and plan on doing a push for press once that is ready. That's the same time I'll have it on steam, hopefully end of the summer.

The big thing is the main character -- I want it to be male or female, players choice, with better closeups so I can make a real cinematic trailer. I noticed all the popular games have killer trailers ,and since my current models don't really look that good close up, I can't make the trailer I'd like to make.

 

At the moment you need about 1500 'yes' votes. But that number is getting less all the time as they green light more and more games.

I'm well chuffed that I my game got Greenlit. It's like earning your stripes as an Official Indie Developer. \/ Particularly as I was a bit downhearted at first when it looked like it might take 3 years to get Greenlit! Also I was quite nervous that Steam might look at my game and go... thanks but no thanks.

By the way, for anyone who already has there game on Steam. Did it do well? Or was it an anticlimax? Some people might even say that Steam will die off when Windows 10 lets you download sandboxed desktop software from it's app store.

 

Good to hear. I've been trying for years to get my sex games on there but they won't allow them, because sex and the human body are yucky. Since they do allow and encourage brutal violence (Hatred, etc.), I'm planning for my next game to be the most brutally, graphically, horrifically, depravedly violent game ever created. Then at least I can get a game on there. Will be nice to finally work on something that society wholeheartedly approves of!

 

Heard of a game where you basically are a mass killer fighting your own revolution against ordinary people.

 

There's no such thing as a fixed number, I didn't even get 1000 votes and I was greenlit in 20 days. The whole Greenlight process seems to be pretty arbitrary, I imagine that Steam employees check it once in a while and greenlit everything that seems serious enough.

I have a game on Steam and is doing pretty bad in sales but that's only because apparently the game wasn't atractive to the press so it has little visibility because the reviews are positive so far. We'll see, I was hoping that this game could make enough for me to dedicate myself full time to gamedev but apparently that will have to wait.

Its also Early Access so that doesn't help either.

And Steam won't die (soon at least), less for something as irrelevant for gaming as Windows 10.

 

Did nomad fleet break 1000 sales?

 

Nope.

 

There are games like HuniePop and other dating sims/visual novels with steamy content (lol pun intended). Nothing explicit tho. But for HuniePop, I believe they provide a downloadable patch on their website, which gives you the full action. So they kinda circumvent Steam's policy for too explicit games.
And yes I know this is debatable what "too explicit" means, if you have games on Steam, where you can cut off peoples heads.
I have a bit the feeling we going backwards with all the prudery lately. The 80's and 90's were more open and less prude IMO.

Back to the topic. I think Greenlight is still better than Google Play, or the AppStore, when it comes to keeping the most trash outside. But PC gamer are definitely more picky and expect a lot for a few bucks.

 

It seems like your reviews are really positive. The game itself looks really well executed, although the playtime on most of the reviews is fairly short (relatively speaking, giving 5 hours of playtime is nothing to scoff at).

What's standing in the way of making it more successful?

This review must have made you smile:
"The battle music got me giddy the first time i heard it. Lots of drums. I almost tought that i was commander Adama ordering my vipers to scramble."

 

The problem IMO is not criticism, a lot of good selling games have pretty mixed reviews. The real problem is discoverability, if the media is not interested in covering your game or they have other priorities, your game will be buried.
Now, the game has only a week in Early Access so there's a possibility that I'm overreacting, also I can still use my "visibility rounds" when I have a more substantial patch to announce. I'll try to get a day job while I work in improving the game though... hope for the best, prepare for the worst.

 

Good job on your game, looks quite impressive, especially since you've done all on your lonesome.

 

Yes, you're overreacting. It's only on Early Access and you're worried about not being able to live off the profits? Early Access should be about getting feedback and making your game really good. Then when you release it, it is perfect and then you can live off the profits! Don't give up now! Just try and get as much feedback as you can and spend a few more months making it something special.

It says on Steam that once your game is release you're guaranteed a million views. So that's not too shabby.

I am looking for specific information about integrating the Steam SDK with Unity and implementing things like achievements and all that malarky. Do you know where I can find all that information?

Do you think that things like Steam achievements and trading cards and badges and all those things are important for Steam or would it be a waste of time implementing them? Personally I've never been bothered about achievements in games but that's just me. Particularly as now Steam has implemented refunds (like I predicted) then now you need to keep your gamers in the game for at least 2 hours.

I think the refunds thing is the first step that will see them getting rid of Greenlight and allowing a more open platform.

 

Its a million views of your capsule (small logo) not of your page (probably a 3% of clicks). And I haven't give up, I stated very clearly that I'll keep working in the game, I just don't expect it to make any significant amount of money.

Anyway, you need to start checking Steamworks.NET, is pretty easy to use, you just put a prefab and boom! your game starts using the Steam overlay, you can even take screenshots without code. I haven't investigated further but there's a sample project included in Steamworks.NET that uses achievements and many other features.

I don't care about achievements or cards but I know that there's a lot of people that do so ideally try to include them in your development plan if you can.

 

Hell yes it's important. Steam has a whole economy and market for selling cards. Like seriously my friends buy cheap games sometimes just for the cards. Cards create badges and it levels up your steam account. When yo level up, you get game discounts and cooler backgrounds for your profile. It's this whole physiological game. Also having steam integration into the game (like the shift + tab) is a helpful tool. If you want to quickly look up a guide or message a friend, it will save you a lot of time. I will most likely think a game is better if it had steam integration.

 

I guess I'll have to get down and dirty with this Steam SDK then.

They provide a dylib file for mac but I think I need to turn it into a bundle somehow... (why is nothing ever easy Who'm I kidding I love a challenge )

 

Well maybe you should try to put one of your sex games on steam greenlight, everyone will make a big fuss about it. Maybe steam will pull it, then youll get some press and Lord gaben will step in and youll be sipping mai tais on a beach somewhere.

 

Pretty sure if I put one on there it would get quietly removed without notice or outrage. A lot of gamers like violent games while at the same time thinking sex games are gross and tacky and "porn" that shouldn't be on a games site (but extreme violence is fine). This opinion is based on 15 years of making adult games and keeping an eye on the societal trends in that arena, both from the (American) public at large and the gamer population.

If your art and creativity has anything to do with sexuality, you're in for an uphill battle. I wish I'd been more interested in shooting people in the face than in the most basic and vital part of human interaction. Maybe then I'd be sitting pretty on a mound of virtual broken and bloodied bodies, counting my money, instead of shaking my head at the ridiculousness of sexual shame and repression, and how that translates into my artistic creations not being allowed the same platform as everyone else.

 

When you phrase it like that, I totally get your frustration.

 

Now I wanna see these games Ony...