What if I want to use some Steam services in my game? Steam inventory? Steam trading cards? Steam matchmaking? Leaderboards? If my game is a game that depends on these what should I do? Implement all of these on my own then after I somehow get 100$ from the sales of a game with badly implemented services, just rewrite everything to start using Steam? Oh geez, you're right, poor devs shouldn't have access to those Steam features. They should've raised that fee to 1000$!
No, it's not uncommon for indie games to patch in Steamworks functions, especially EA games. They can be added in post release if the game engine supports it, in which case, that is the conscious decision of the developer to choose what engine they use.
If on Steam, Steam features can be added in later. Achievements are available to anyone if you know how to program them into your engine, and honestly I think every game on Steam should use Steam Cloud because cloud saves are insanely easy to do on Steam (it's not even needing any additional programming in the game itself, you just tell Steam Cloud to save the files to the cloud related to save files). This said, some Steam features have been restricted already with this change. IE, Trading Cards are no longer available on launch unless you're an approved publisher on Steam (IE, Bethesda, Capcom, Square Enix, xSeed, basically the 'big boy' publishers). Trading Cards now you can't add to a game before release, you're only allowed to submit for Trading Cards post-release and only if your game gets above a certain sales and positive review threshold. However, when cards are added to players who played the game previously they'll get the cards their hours in the game attribute to if they're approved (IE, if I had four hour on a game and the game had three trading card drops with one hour per drop after two hours, I'd get two cards in my inventory automatically when approved as a player).
Isn't he from UK though ?
Also I'll say it again, if you think 100 dollars is too much to release a commercial product, I dont see how you can make it a job.
His game seems to have beyond 50k owners and even if these were 10 cent sales, that would vastly cover said fee already.
Totally agree with you. Whenever I see someone claiming it's too low, it's just baffling. And yes, it could've been lower. I mean, 500 or 1000 dollars are already amounts that is too high for small indie devs, because it represents a lot in term of savings as a short term investment. As for the 100 dollars, while I wished it was lower, I have troubles to see how can a dev, wishing to release a commercial product, can be turned away by that.
I think there's many different positions for many different people, my main point is I do think $100 is for the best if you keep a global eye in mind and different positions for different people, and with Valve being clear they're not trying to make less games release on Steam, just filter out 'fake' games. I think the fee is doable, and it being refundable for a reasonable fee is good too. The fee and how it works makes me relieved as a smaller niche dev who has positively received game but not a big audience yet.
Looking forward to the new format of application and entry vs greenlight. Greenlight imo has done some amazing things in bringing games that simply wouldn't be around, to PC services. At the same time it was quickly gamed by its nature and Valve's unwillingness to sacrifice the open nature that is so complementary to the PC ecosystem of creators, games and experimentation in the first place.
I'm fairly sure the same "crap" "garbage" games that people complain about will simply increase - but that isn't what I care about since as made demonstrably clear on GAF, those proclaiming "crap" and "garbage" are often highlighting games others cherish. If Steam Direct can actually drag down "fake" games / card harvesting games etc - then it is a job well done as far as I'm concerned, as that is the principle problem beyond the Steam Store algorithm having idiotic metrics at the moment to define your own interests
This is kind of my thoughts too. I think many who want the fee higher are taking issue in a different thing that the actual issue is, IE I would bet some people who want the fee higher would claim certain games others love that are smaller, niche things are garbage that doesn't need to be on Steam. Valve's goal is to eradicate what they call 'Fake Games', games done with minimal effort or are shitty cash grabs, by devs who aren't serious about game development or are essentially scam artists or at worst are malicious developers who try to abuse the system. They have a few other systems outside of just Direct to combat this too, including the developer review process and the changes to Steam Trading Cards, but this is what Valve's trying to combat. They want to make it a market anyone with a serious effort at a game can release it, no matter how small or niche. But also are adding tools and systems to try and improve visibility of games that are worth checking out with increased Curator features and the upcoming Steam Explorer program. They also say they're following this closely to add and change things over time and build off this foundation over time, so it'll be interesting to see how this goes down.
The goal was to broaden the market to different tastes, not seclude it to the cream of the crop. Just to try to tackle the issue with 'fake games' and scam artist/malicious devs, not to eradicate every bad game or every small developer game.
