Valve: Steam Greenlight to Go Away

http://venturebeat.com/2014/01/15/s...llers-and-other-tidbits-from-valves-dev-days/

:cry:

What do you guys make of this? Do you think Valve will improve the easiness to publish indie games or just kill the system like it kind of happened with the xbox indie market? Maybe they will press up on exclusive agreements now that the Steam Box is around the corner?

 

What's the point of speculating what the new system will be?

 

i got no problem with it since i'm a non commercial game dev

 

Not sure, this caught me by surprise. With a few Greenlight games being super popular during the last Steam sales I really did not see this coming. I just would like to know your thoughts on this, after all this is a gossip forum isn't it?

So you think there will be a new indie system don't you?

 

Very shortly after GL was opened Valve said they knew it wasn't what they wanted. I'm surprised it lasted this long.

It's really *too* open, anyone can put up their garbage game on steam and thats mainly what it consisted of. There were some really great GL games but the majority were crap and that having to push resources into hosting them, reviewing them and letting them clutter the GL feed is a waste. Steam seemed to be transforming into this cheap platform for getting crappy games that don't last long.

I suppose GL submissions will be locked, current games aborted or published, then a new system released. If it resolves the current problems, then I'm all for it.

 

I always wanted a cleaner system so im all for this, 90% of the games on there is pure trash and the good ones were almost impossible to find. If they have a review system before it even gets on there it would rock. Its too easy now, u can make whatever u want and put it up there, not exactly helpful for serious developers.

 

Seems really good for people who might make a decent game...but for whatever reason they can't win the popularity contest to get greenlit.

But, unless there is a submissions process and some stopgaps to ensure that things going up on Steam are quality games....I'm going to be worried about having to sift through loads of garbage games about farts and boogers (i.e. xbox live indie market) to find the good ones.

I guess well have to see what their new system will be.

 

I just want a proper curated store.

 

So like a Green Light for Green Light? That would be a bit cumbersome I think. The biggest problem with GL was the fact it was a popularity contest which didn't actually put developers through just because of their popularity, Valve still had the end decision and it made it hard for developers to know whether or not they were going to make the cut. It makes developers want to get on green light very early in their development so they have a chance of actually being accepted by the time their game is ready, which can distract from development.

What I think Valve should do is to take applications from developers directly, make it easy to apply to but with a relatively high bar set for quality and hire more staff to work through said applications to accept games onto steam (or reject them if they don't meet the criteria). This would put more strain on Vale themselves but would make it far more straight forward for developers and would stop the need to jump through hoops pushing a marketing campaign so early on in development. The games would need to be well into development in order to portray the game to Valve properly which I think is much better for the developer than feeling they need to show it off to the public when it's just a prototype, as happened with a lot of games trying to get through Green Light.

 

+ 1.

If GL just "goes away" and instead we get a PC version of the Appstore/Google Play, well, then it's going to be "interesting". I can understand Valve to make things more open in order to guarantee some flexibility. That's great. What's not great though is the fact that you'll have to fight with visibility of your game(s).
If everyone CAN publish, a lot of them will. You might spend more time trying to get some attention for your game than rather developing it, since hundreds of other games make it harder for yours to be seen. That being said: nothing is wrong with self-promotion and such, quite the contrary, but as hippo already stated: where's the problem with proper curation?

 

If there was an 'app store' in steam I would be very disappointed. There would be more garbage available that no one wants to play and it would make the platform look even more like amateur hour.

 

Well if that article is correct it doesn't seem like that is what we are going to get. The article mentions removing all the measures preventing "tiny" developers from publishing on Steam.

 

Preventing or making it difficult for "tiny" devs to publish a game barely has anything to do with removing quality games even though it may eliminate a lot of crappy ones.

 

This is probably what will happen. Steam will just become an open publishing platform. To compensate, they'll have to have strong ranking algorithms, which I think is doable. There is a TON of trash on the internet, yet Google manages to sift through most of it. Hopefully Steam will be able to do the same thing.

 

Valve won't block out indies completely, at least 50% of games on Steam are indie. They're not stupid. I imagine they're thinking the same thing as us: they want to keep Steam's quality high while still catering to small indie developers.

 

Thank goodness, the democracized voting system is going away.

We will have a world where all game genres will be treated equal and all developers will be treated the same., and allow users to buy with their wallets, not vote on the look of screenshots and whether the game is a survival zombie horror in an apocolytpical world.

I am all for some sort of curation/ranking/quality bar process though.
And titles should only be submitted if they are in a playable state.

 

+1

I'd hardly call Steam amateur hour to begin with. Though I also don't want to see an app store or play on Steam.

It would be suicide for Valve to cut indies from Steam so I don't know why people are fretting over that happening. Valve just can't win here though. People moaned when greenlight came in "raahhh they're killing indies not enough games will get through, its a popularity contest" Valve opens the floodgates "Too many games and getting greenlit and the majority of them are trash arggghhh".

I want the store to be kept curated but with a better submission process. I don't know what that would be though.

A return to the old system but Valve should hire some people to look over the game. So when if your game gets rejected you they tell you why and a dev can look and see where their game is in the queue to be looked at.

 

And who exactly would perform the reviews for your "review system"? If it's by Valve employees, it's like going back to the old way where they made decisions without transparency. Remember, it's hard to define objective rules for how good a game is. Yes, they can put in some hard rules, such as the need for a video and 4 screenshots. But otherwise it has to decided by people. Those people are either Valve employees, or the masses.

And what do you think the new system will be?

 

What if Valve decide to just do away with indie games all together? It's not good news for us.

 

They won't. It's too profitable for them.

 

Curious about all the negative talk with regards to valve and indies. If anything the article makes it sound like they will be more open to indies. This very well could be good for most indies, and somewhat negative for the high quality indies.

 

If I was Valve and wanted to open up the store to any developer, this is how I would do it...

1.) Open the store and allow any developer submit any game they want. The only rule for submission being the game must be in a playable state, and have screenshots, at least one gameplay video, and a description of the game.
There should be a reasonably pricey developer account registraion fee, to cut out the riff-raff and non serious crap.

2.) All submitted game's must have a playable demo

3.) If the playable demo has been downloaded, the user who downloaded the demo, is allowed to 'vote' up or down on the game experience.

4.) All games that have very few downloads (i.e they look like crap and nobody wants to play it) get removed from the store.

5.) All games that have a high percentage of downvotes (> 90%) (from users who have played the demo or full version), get removed from the store.

 

That requires a whole lot more work on Valves end. Given the reason for doing greenlight in the first place they'd be extremely unlikely to implement such a system.

Downvotes are open to abuse as well.

Also suffers from the same discoverability problems. A game doesn't need to be crap to be buried in the system.

 

As they told us a while ago, Greelight was somewhat of an expriment intended as a system to help them discover indie games for puchlishing more easily, and they didn't feel that it was doing what they wanted very well. I think they might have even said that they wanted to try other things, which kind of implied that Greenlight wouldn't stick around after they did - why have two experimental projects that cannibalize each other?

I'm not upset that Greelight will go away, because Greenlight itself isn't what matters. What matters is what Greenlight represents, and that is Valve's intention to discover and publish indie games. As long as that intention remains I don't really care what format it takes. And the fact that they tried Greenlight and were honest about where it did and didn't work suggests that their intention is reasonably strong.

Edit: Also, the actual wording was interesting and worth note:

I personally hope that doesn't imply a shift towards a more "App Store" style experience.

 

Sure, but plenty of non-Greenlight games are also super popular, and there's no real way to know if the fact that they came from Greenlight in particular factored into their success. Furthermore, the quality titles in Greenlight could quite possibly have made it onto Steam in their own right anyhow, since they're the kind of thing Valve want to be selling.

 

No it doesnt, they make some modifications to their system to accommodate this, there is no need for human management. The system can curate itself.

The downvotes are a lot more accurate than they were on Greenlight. Now the player has to have played the game, and they can give a much more accurate vote based on that, not on some pretty screenshots or because the user didn't like the look of the game at a first glance while choking on their coffee.

The same discoverability problems?? There is a huge difference between a game sitting in a Greenlight queue 5 clicks away, and a gamer actively looking for something they can play in the store. No it does not suffer the same discoverability problems.

Greenlight suffered discoverability because people couldn't be bothered to scroll through hundreds of games to vote on that they couldn't play. Give users the chance to actually download something, this all changes, now they will take a little more time to read about the game and watch a video before downloading it.

 

1.) I agree with this

2.) While demos are generally a good thing, I think it's going to be difficult to require everyone to make one. IDK, what does ouya do? They allow people to download and try the games for free. But do they require everyone to make one? Perhaps more people will be encouraged to make a demo if it helps them get a better ranking.

3.) Some sort of rating system is pretty much a necessity, but I don't think binding it to the demo makes sense. A simple one vote per steam account would probably suffice.

4 / 5.) These are mostly redundant with the rating system. Banning might be good for inappropriate content, but banning just for being bad seems overly harsh.

 

Not if you want good curation. The App Store, Google Play, and Greelight itself are examples of this.

 

So Valve is going to write a system that auto checks to see if the demo you've uploaded is in a playable state and that the gameplay screens and video are from the same thing you're uploading?

No the downvotes is open to abuse. So first they can rate based on having downloaded the demo then only if they've played it do their votes count? Why have the first system to begin with if only the votes counted are the ones from people having clicked play. The don't even need to actually play the demo just let it boot up quit and then vote. It only takes one person with enough of a following to kill a games chances.

No the problems are still there. People still need to hear about the game before they go looking for it. Very few are going to want to trawl through a system looking at stuff where they need to sit and wait on a download before they can vote on it. It'll be passed on or forgotten about. Not everyone has unlimited bandwidth either. Some ISP's still cap bandwidth and that would be even less of a reason to want to randomly download demo's to upvote them.

Noticed you edited the post after to say there should be a pricey fee to cut out riff raff and non-serious crap. The current greenlight fee already does that. It cuts out the jokey submissions but what are you defining as riff-raff?

 

What don't you like about the App Store and Google Play? Let's leave Greenlight out because the games haven't actually been released yet.

 

But it does, because at the end of the day you've got the same number of people looking at a greater number of things, and therefore able to look at a smaller fraction of them. The UI has an effect on discoverability, for sure, but assuming a perfect UI with 100% efficiency the bottleneck is going to be how many games a person can look at.

The discoverability problem is this:
- A given user can pay attention to X games.
- Your system has Y games available.
- The user is unable to pay attention to (Y - X) games, regardless of how those games are presented or curated.

Clearly we don't want to limit Y*, because that's throwing the baby out with the bathwater. So the question is then "if the user can only pay attention to X games, how do we show them the X games which are most likely relevant to them?" Or, rephrasing that, "how do we pick which (Y - X) games we simply won't show to this person?" And there are different considerations in the (complex) answer to that depending on who the user is - are they a gamer who wants to buy a new game, or are they a Valve staff member trying to pick something new to publish, or are they a user trying to pick a gift for someone else, or..?

I think the prime fallacy here in most people's thinking is that if the games are made available everyone will be able to check out all of them. But that's simply not true, because that's based an an implicit assumption that there's unlimited time for browsing, which there is not. Time is the number one factor here - at (say) 30 seconds per game, how many games can someone look at in a session? And how do you make the most of them?

* Though only stuff that meets the relevant quality standards for your service should be included in Y in the first place. We could also have a dilution factor, D, which is (X / Y), which we want to keep as high as possible. So bulking Y out with crap games that nobody wants is clearly bad, because that increases D without adding value to your overall system...

 

Apple/Google play curation is woefully substandard and only benefits the platform owner. They don't in fact care about quality, only that the minimum standard is set for their 30%.

Because the platform holder in these cases benefits much more from quantity rather than quality. There's little incentive to go with exclusive polished titles when you have almost zero discoverability.

The problem with this model (and it is a big problem) is that everyone rushes to the bottom and you get iAP abuse, you get freemium games designed from the ground up to have timesinks which directly affect the quality of the game experience. In a nutshell, nobody will invest in special and exciting games for this platform. The majority that did, found out the hard way that it wasn't worth it.*

So if you're doing shovelware, by all means please be happy with the mobile business model. It's not going to wash for Steam or console in the long term though. Those need to be strictly gated and curated if we are to invest significant money into a title.



* You'll always read about some smug bastard saying his special emo title did really good, but with 1000s of developers a week releasing, you'll realise how shockingly rare this really is - so ignore it.

 

Because aside from digital ports of board games there's not a single thing on there I care to play for more than a few minutes, even in the featured/popular lists. On the other hand, there's plenty of stuff on all of the strictly curated platforms that I'd happily play for days without having to resort to self-curated lists because the libraries are of manageable sizes in the first place - I can get my own list by telling it what I want, and I can be confident of the quality of the items it shows me.

If I want to game on my iPad I spend longer looking for games than playing them, and I rarely find anything that holds my interest for long*. I'd much rather jump on Steam and pay ten or twenty times the price but actually play something, and probably play it for quite a while and then come back later and play it some more.

Also, "self curated" platform really means "marketing curated" platform to a huge degree.

* And that already beats the crud out of Google Play, where I rarely pay for anything because there's no quality control whatsoever...

 

I was about to release to Greenlight sometime soon! MAN! I hope they have a better system (I dont make crap games )

 

This could be good news if you read any of gabes old comments about the "steam stores", where every joe can have there own store. And there is no more curation... hard to say if that will happen though.

For example I love games like zombie shooter, or crimsonland etc. Well now if we got a store for just those games, we would see more of those games. Now rather than only having say 10 categories -- where every indie game is under indie -- you actually have speciality stores.

 

It could be you just don't like mobile games as much as desktop games. That's understandable, as I don't play them much either. But that doesn't mean the App Store has bad ranking.

As for "self curated" meaning "marketing curated", where do you see the connection? I'm assuming "self curated" means decided by the masses vs decided by a select few individuals. The masses can certainly be influenced by marketing, but this isn't anything new. People have been doing this for ages ... it's sorta just part of life.

 

From what I remember reading, they bacially want it hwere anyone can publish a game to there own little "storefront'.

 

Yeah but its kind of like youtube where anyone can put up there videos but only a few people are going to make any real money off it. But even a few extra hundred bucks a month might be worth it as a side gig.

 

Good point, in this case some curation will be needed. But Valve can simply state, if this is not a playable demo your game will be removed from the store. Now what dumbaas developer is going to take this risk and upload something that isn't playable?

I highly doubt anybody is going to do this. If so, it will be < 1% of Steam's userbase, making it irrelevant.

They won't need to first 'hear about the game' before they look for it. They will be browsing the store , looking in categories of games they feel like playing. I don't go onto Steam and type in a game's name in the searchbox. I look at the store front, news update, or browse by genre to discover new games.

Yes, when I mean riff-raff, I mean developers that submit unplayable crap to the store as some sort of joke.

 

Orrrr... you could get a legion of fanboys to downvote it into oblivion. And what if someone just doesn't like the genre?

At the end of the day, it doesn't matter who WON'T play it; what does matter is who WILL play it.

 

If someone doesn't like the genre, they move on.

The difference with this system, is now, games are being rated based on the ACTUAL GAMEPLAY EXPERIENCE, not the genre and the amount of zombies in the screenshots.
This means every vote actually means something, and has substance. It's a more accurate vote.

This also solves the issue of minority genres. If a game is a in minority genre, only a small amount of people will play it for sure, but the voting will still be an accurate reflection of the game's quality, as only people interested in the genre will take the time to download and install the game.

In Greenlight if the game was in a minority genre, it was most likely downvoted, for being in that genre, which is downright unfair.

 

But in Greenlight, downvotes don't do anything.

 

Curated with curation fee: If accepted, you're charged 1k out of the gate. People thinking of wasting everyone's time would think twice, plus it pays for the curation. This way, you only get people fully invested in a title, that believe in it, on the store with a high quality funded curation and support staff behind you. Quality > Quantity is my preference.

 

About time.

 

But a downvote is one less upvote. And for Valve to say they don't consider at all the upvote/downvote percentage stats, I'd call them liars.

+1 + VAT

 

You would run into pay to win scenario, even the people who make shovel ware would pay that amount it would have to be higher

 

But if it's too high, you hurt talented developers with a small budget.

 

One less upvote than what? Not having looked at it in the first place?

I thought that thumbs downing a game was kind of like saying "no thanks" - as in "I don't feel like playing it" as opposed to "that looks like crap". And I wouldn't call them liars if they claimed not to use consider downvotes since it seems like pretty irrelevant data anyway. If I'm trying to make sales I pay attention to the people who express interest far more so than those who are explicitly disinterested.

 

1k is fine. Pay to win doesn't mean win. It means you get the chance of winning, and shovelware won't win. It only wins now because there's so much of it.

Say in this fictional proposal and scenario, that shovelware makes it through? compared to the great titles available, it'll drop off like a stone. They'll be out 1k and crying. It'll sort itself out.

But it'll never happen. Ideas like this never make it, for good or bad.

 

Greenlight was never meant to help Indies, Valve always retained the right to decide which games got on Steam. It was used as a block to give Valve time to assess the situation. There were always indie games that would've gotten onto Steam. Valve only started admitting numbers of indie games in reaction to all the other platforms opening up and trying to get a piece of the action. It was clear that Valve had to make a decision or get sidelined from that market. They won't kill the goose that laid the golden egg so the main storefront will stay the same. Developers will get into a sort of walled garden indie section, they'll probbaly keep the $100 fee because that now seems standard. They will introduce some kind of storefront that relies on reviews and the community curating them. The real problem for developers now becomes how to get from that area into the main storefront. Companies that are now classed as indie developers that are actually small firms that pay salaries and rent will have additional problems getting games out. A lot of indie developers do games as a hobby for the love of it and to make a few bob, and they price the games accordingly. As they don't rely on the money to feed them a lot don't do research into the market, do retro games 'like they used to play' hope that selling it for $1.99 will provide a bit of beer money, are quite happy if it does, then go back to daydreaming in their full-time job over what new masterpiece to release. All that has a knock on effect. The Valve situation is one of those effects. A company that is successful and has made a lot of money for others and not only the likes of EA and big publishers is now forced to come up with a system that isn't a poison pill, and it will probably be the best situation for indie developers in the current market but it will cause problems for small companies and people who make all their living from games and getting into Steam will no longer be the hoped for panacea it was thought to be.