Looks like Steam Greenlight will eventually be phased out
According to Gabe Newell : http://gamasutra.com/view/news/186168/Gabe_Newells_vision_for_Steam_More_choice_more_democracy_less_Greenlight.php#.UROEimfxaUm
And in its place we may have (what sounds like to me) a very interesting system. (i.e. user curated Steam stores)
And in its place we may have (what sounds like to me) a very interesting system. (i.e. user curated Steam stores)
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This does mean there will be a lot of crap out there. Every fifteen year old kiddy with have their own store with all the same crap, but over time it will (possibly) start to solidify. If youtube is anything to go by there will be some popularist stores(channels) that will make no sense to anyone with more than two brain cells. But for pretentious indie arty-farts like (most of) us, would be amazing to let someone else do all the hard graft of finding unique and emotionally stimulating games we like.
Think the real unique value that valve are bringing to the table is ability for storefront curators to earn a slice of the pie, and therefore dedicate a great deal of time to doing a decent job. From a game makers point of view you will now have an entirely new crop of influencers to sell your story to. Will be great for those who are good at marketing anyway, probably not so much for those just want to hide in cave and dev games. The silver lining though is that store creators will have plenty of cut throat competition, and will actively seek out interesting games to add to their stores and differentiate themselves. Thinking along the same lines that people on the net found my towards the light game just so they had something for their youtube channels.
I do wonder though what will happen to steam sales. I imagine steam will still retain some semblance of a store presence, or at least a curated by Valve storefront. Plus they make a metric butt-ton of money form sales, so I'm guessing they aren't going anywhere. Honestly though my favorite thing about sales is that bundles make it so easy to discover new games. Imagine anything they come up with will include a way to maximize that...
That doesn't seem like it removes any of the awareness-building that indies have to do now anyway. At worst you have exactly the same issue you have now when you put up a game on your website and nobody knows about it - except you'd be paying some kind of percentage per sale to Valve for no marketing support whatsoever. Right now Steam is great because it's a user-firehose if you can get on it. I wouldn't pay a chunk of revenue just for being hosted elsewhere and no guaranteed user-base or visibility, that would just be daft.
At best you have a bunch of high-profile store fronts which piggyback on other content that the store owners produce. Basically TotalBiscuit and Yahtzee would run stores as places for them to earn kickback cash when they sell a game they've just done a video on and IGN/Kotaku/Verge would run stores tied into their sites when they review games. Again, I'm not sure I like that... Mostly because it incentivises reviewers to not link directly to your site. What's wrong with people having a Steam link to your game as it stands there right now if you're on Steam and a link to your site when you're not?
Besides, it's not like Amazon branded user-curated stores set the book world on fire.
Greenlight sadly didn't solve that problem, users might in fact be poorer judges of the quality of a game than Steam moderators, or at least the way Greenlight has been implemented causes it to have that result.
Allowing game reviewers to curate stores certainly has the potential to solve that problem.
Of course it depends on the implementation. And of course it could introduce other problems (particularly the monetization of game reviews).
I'd say that at best you might have system that favours actually interesting games being sold to users rather than a system that favours games that look interesting from the outside (i.e. games that at least one person loves rather than games that have the 3D graphics but lack the fun). I think that reviewers (like Total Biscuit) who have credibility on the line might make the marketplace more favourable for well-crafted (or arty or niche) games, and gamers who care about playing games they enjoy can take advantage of that.
For instance Broforce has had far more coverage on Youtube and with reviewers than many of the games above it on Greenlight. What Gabe Newell is proposing certainly favours Free Lives and our methodology more than the current system (not that I'm unhappy about the current system).
Obviously I have a vested interest in the success of fringe indie games so I'm inclined to see it as a good thing if they were to be benefited.
And also, immediately, it means that even tiny, or underfunded, or just plain unloveable games can place themselves within the Steam framework, have access to Steam friends etc, and be able to distribute themselves through Steam (without needing their own custom solution, with extra hurdles for the end user, with custom updates etc). Which is pretty flipping sweet.
Surely your at best scenario just shunts the effort of discovery onto the store curators themselves? I'm already struggling to get my game in front of kingmakers like Day[9], Penny-Arcade, PewDiePie, etc. If they're the ones that are ultimately responsible for people knowing your game exists in a market, then we're still stuck with the same problem that kingmakers create. It seems to be better to just have 1 king of kingmakers, look at iOS's single store compared to Android's multiple marketplaces that are fractured to hell and back. What's the difference between this view of Steam and selling something on Android? Biggest thing appears to be not signing multiple agreements with different storefronts, so at least you won't have to worry about Amazon trying to give your game away for free just because there's a sale on somewhere else...
I totally understand the need for a Greenlight-like system, I can never understand why people can't see how crazy overworked the people behind Steam actually are - they're essentially volunteers, given Valve's structure. Of course I want interesting indie games to sell better too, I dunno where that point came from (???) but this is the same problem that Amazon's partner stores were supposed to address for book sales and that hasn't had as much of an impact as people hoped either.
I guess I see all the people who say "Well, I can't get my game on Steam" as finishing that sentence with "because it's too much effort". It's either too hard to polish up their game until it's so amazing that it HAS to be on Steam, or it's too hard to build a following/community on your own site large enough to make Steam pay attention, or it's too hard to constantly promote your polished game so that Steam finally notices it, or it's too hard to recognise that maybe your game isn't the best thing ever and you might need to start all over again... It seems to be easier for people to just blame Steam instead.
What people don't seem to realise is that it's going to be EVEN HARDER to try to promote your game to more than 1 channel. So either your overall marketing suffers (unless you have endless money to throw at the problem and can do all the brand-building stuff that large companies use to deal with market fragmentation/competition) or you have less time and effort available to make your game good. That seems obvious to me. Which is why I don't see how a custom store system like this is supposed to be a magical solution to the "problem" of getting on Steam. We're all still going to have to put in more effort than the people who've already given up would ever dream of expending.
P.S. Yes, I know that I might be talking from a privileged position, but it took me over a year of chasing to even get proper contact with anyone at Steam.
P.P.S. You guys should really put a great big "Vote for us on Greenlight!" banner in your Broforce demo!
I do really like the idea that games will be sold from a place that is curated by people who have a vested interest in maintaining credibility. Gabe proposed that the point of sale be able to be accompanied by reviews and other user created material. This is very similar to how the fine-art world works, it makes critics more powerful and in turn makes artists cater to critics' more informed tastes which means we get more informed art.
At least I'm hoping that this makes game criticism more powerful (without ruining game criticism by incentivising positive reviews).
But where I really differ is that I like the Youtube Kingmaker system. I feel like that system favours excellence far more than game-is-on-Steam-will-benefit-from-user-fire-hose. I feel having one kingmaker is an awful situation for the health of the industry. (Though obviously having a whole lot of fractured difficult to use stores like in Android is not something I want either).
Of course making games that are fun to play and fun to watch has always been my goal. So I am arguing from a position of vested interest.
And I do have the feeling that Steam could stuff this up if it even goes this route. I haven't been impressed by their implementation of Greenlight. This could quite easily take the worst case scenario that @dislekcia envisioned.
Even then, you've said that it's not moving up in Greenlight as fast as some other games, given that it has more Youtube coverage than them. That's the same sort of disconnect between channels that I'm talking about: You have 1 channel that you really want people to go to, yet your fragmented discovery via Youtube isn't pointing everyone there efficiently. Yeah, I can understand that if people could buy the game (or vote via Greenlight) directly on those videos it might help alleviate that problem, I guess.
Having it on Greenlight made the story interesting/purposeful and gave an avenue for viewers to show support, but it wasn't "discovered" there by the most prominent press we've received.
That said... we really need to do some more marketing... and make the "Vote for us on Greenlight" thing in Broforce more obvious/usable (like you suggest).
While a lot of the early Greenlight results have been kind of random, due to a glutton of early voting, I suspect that more developers now are working the Greenlight system, and the competition will be stiffer and also produce better results, and we have to keep up with that (Which for us means getting more reviews that point to Greenlight). The stats show that some Greenlight entries are climbing rapidly through the ranks, presumably by developers who have found ways to direct a lot of traffic to their entry.
We also know that the top Greenlight entries have gotten about 4 times the number of views as us, so it's pretty clear what we have to do, and even if it's not exactly what we'd do if there were no Greenlight, getting our game exposure is good development practice for other reasons.
(When I say I don't think Greenlight has been implemented very well I'm saying that admitting games based on raw number of yes votes, which Greenlight seems to do, based on how all users respond to pitches set up by the game developers themselves, is bound to let in some mediocre games with the good ones, and exclude good but niche games or games by developers who don't know how to market)
I don't think the fragmented discovery/kingmaking via Youtube is going away. For us anyway that's always going to exist. So I guess if that could more easily result in a sale that would benefit us.
I don't think fragmentation is going away either, I just wanted to point out that it won't necessarily make things easier. In fact, I guess I'm ranting that a lot of the people who have "problems" with Steam as a platform are unable to see how Greenlight makes it easier because they didn't actually put in the effort required to get Steam working for them in the first place.
I'm hoping that Greenlight sticks around for a while longer because we've been planning a lot around how that system works (even if we haven't been doing much about it). But for us anyway the transition into a more user generated sales system seems like it would be relatively painless.
And learning new systems and finding exploits is fun.
And Greenlight will stick around after the stores appear anyway, just like the old Steam system is still there and working.
Interesting model to imagine apple creating the same "user curated" storefronts including a slice of sales for successful stores. Does basically become the android landscape. Not sure that is a winning solution. All I know is that somewhere along the line someone is going to crack the discovery nut and disrupt digital distribution in a very big way and probably make disgustingly large amounts of money in the process... Would be happier if that was valve rather than any of the other big tech companies.