Steam Greenlight being removed
Sup peeps
Just saw this on Gamasutra, thought I would share:
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/291277/Valve_to_shut_down_Steam_Greenlight_replace_with_a_feebased_game_submission_system.php
Do you think this is a good thing? The cost being between $100 - $5000 seems a bit concerning?
Just saw this on Gamasutra, thought I would share:
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/291277/Valve_to_shut_down_Steam_Greenlight_replace_with_a_feebased_game_submission_system.php
Do you think this is a good thing? The cost being between $100 - $5000 seems a bit concerning?
Comments
Remember that they are saying this will be refunded through sales, so I assume once your sales hit 5k it would then return the funds. It can only benefit us all as there will be way more visibility for productions with a 'curated through fees' store.
I am excited to see what this does to the Steam store but I think any change is better than what is going on now.
Thinking a little more about this and I assume a higher fee is essentially the point of this exercise.
Valve don't need the money - they make billions of dollars a year, heck they have said they will refund the entrance fee by not taking their royalty up to that amount.
I assume the fee and this new process is designed to create a barrier to entry. From their blog post and taking a look around Steam, the asset flip culture and really low quality games that have been released this past year have caused the store to become terribly cluttered. 5,000 games a year just increases the signal to noise ratio and makes it harder to get noticed by potential customers.
Do we really want the app or play store fiasco where unless you cheat the system, buy players or get featured your game perishes due to the mass of titles?
Valve cannot curate new games like they used to sot he only alternative is to make it harder to get onto the sales platform.
@jackshiels The Valve contact thing has been around for ages, but if you don't find the right one, they're not interested. Just remember Broforce and all these games had to go through Greenlight because a Valve employee didn't see their value:
- Incredipede
- Kentucky Route Zero
- La Mulana
- FRACT OST
All games that were award winning and that were quite financially successful in the end. After you're on Steam and you have a Valve contact it's much easier - before that, breaking onto Steam is still a little tricky.
@bischonator I think if Valve really didn't care about money they would just spend money on more curators :). They want Steam to be as automated as possible to reduce overheads and increase their margins. Steam cares about the customers more than the devs, they literally say "our goal is to make customers happy".
They are also looking like they're taking moves to make the storefront less cluttered. I don't really think this move will do that though. Valve even says in their blog post that the only reason they're doing this is because they trust their algorithm that shows games to players. This means they don't really care about the gross amount of games on Steam - they just care about showing the right games to the right players.
An idealistic part of me hopes this will clean up the storefront of garbage games, but I think it probably won't. Even without those rock-bottom games, there are still way more good games being made than ever before. This won't be about quality - it'll be about money. All the experimental stuff will disappear from Steam unless it's got a free pass through that fee.
But I agree with Ben. This will drastically cut down on the non-commercial stuff. I think we'll see more clones, of higher quality but lower originality.
I assume it's 5k entry fee per title, not 5k for any number of titles? Well if you're always making at least 5k on each title then it's kinda free I guess... pay 5k, make 5k back, put another game up, pay 5k, make 5k back... (Why does the maths for this scenario feel like no money's being made?)
@bischonator It's obviously much, much easier for people with 1) Already successful game/s under their belt on the platform and 2) niche interest titles (VR) to get approved bypassing the system.
So now people are asking to go back to that system for some reason? Or "hire more curators" - let's say Steam hires a few dozen people. Curation like this is a subjective task and it's almost impossible that curation would be consistent. People will complain about some people having contacts at valve who seem to be getting all their games on Steam while my friend's super awesome indie zombie crafting game isn't and obviously they are biased against him and I'm suing. This is literally what happened before.
So then the next logical step is to have the community curate content which lead to Greenlight in the first place and the Curator/friend recommendation/user review systems that are in place now. Probably the ideal system is that anyone can sell whatever they want on Steam but the "automated" community curation very quickly pushes the cruft down.
One thing I don't understand is why people find the high volume of low quality games on Steam so concerning. I very rarely even encounter crappy games on Steam at all, I usually only see them when Jimquisition makes an episode about them. I'm not concerned about my games being devalued because of other low quality content because I have faith that my games are good enough to stand out.
$5000 might be steep but it is a good marker - if you don't think your game is going to make that much on Steam, and/or you can't find a publisher to front you that much, then maybe your game has issues in the first place. If you are making a very niche or free game that isn't designed to get profit there are other storefronts such as itch and GOG that will probably better serve your target market anyway. $5000 is less than three months' worth of burn rate for even the tiniest studio (if you are paying your team salaries at all in the first place). The criteria for a game being on steam and getting featured will be "I believe my game will succeed" followed by the community saying "this game is worth buying and recommending".
I do realise that I'm in a very privileged position and that my viewpoint of "a very good game will almost always succeed regardless of the system" might be out of touch and people blaming the system rather than the quality of their products does annoy me more than it should. That said a very tightly curated storefront does benefit me the most as a consumer and as a developer considering that I have contacts and almost never browse the storefront for random games.
I think Steam in all its incarnations (except the old curated version) has still been miles ahead of the "get featured or die" system that the apple storefront has or the wild open wasteland of Google play.
http://steamcommunity.com/games/593110/announcements/detail/1265922321514182595
It sound like the process is now: Pay $100 > Verify address/identity > Wait a month > Publish.
Although this means less hassle etc. not having to run a campaign, I'm not entirely sure how this is going to get less crap on the store. It seems like it is now easier?
One thing to note is that the $100 fee gets refunded when your game earns $1000. Maybe really low effort games don't get to $1000?
Developer puts loads of crappy games on Greenlight and gets them greenlit by basically promising free keys on Russian hub sites for this sort of thing, as well as through Steam bots.
Games are greenlit, then the network of bots go to work farming cards. The cards are then immediately converted to gems, which in turn are used to buy booster packs for games with more valuable cards, which are sold.
This bit I'm less clear about, but the Steam Wallet money earned from this is then used to buy things like CS:Go skins that can be sold for real currency on gambling sites that use skins as virtual currency.
The $100 won't do away with the flood of legitimate crap games on Steam or discoverability, but at least it'll help with this sort of thing. Plus I'm all for giving people a chance to put their heartfelt and sincerely crap games on Steam. :)