Steam Greenlight: 1000 games and counting, more Greenlit every few weeks

I understand what Terry is saying there even though I don't agree with all of it.

PR is a necessity as an indie Dev. Orbitron: Revolution got incredible PR and news on Blues News, Rock Paper Shotgun, and Joystiq when it hit PC back in March. We actually received 3500 or so hits to our own site which broke the previous record of a few hundred.

Sales were ok from that initial window, but we got a lot of people asking if the game was on Steam. Here we are all this time later, on Greenlight and doing reasonably well.

If the timing was better an the PR could have been combo'd with the Greenlight I think Steam would have been a slam dunk. We feel like going back to the web and begging press outlets to cover us on Greenlight is pretty pointless. The window has long closed so there isn't anymore PR to do. Greenlight is in and of itself the only avenue really left. It is in the hands of that community now.
 
I just played through Don't Look Back and Alphaland, thanks for mentioning them. I don't think I could see something like that on Steam...but maybe that's just me.

One other thing VVVVVV that no one seemed to mention, it had outstanding music which might make a difference.
 
HoosTrax said:
You guys really should check out the first trailer for this game:

268x268.resizedimage


Game itself looks like a bit of starship designing combined with Frozen Synapse-ish action.
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Please vote for this, it looks great.
 
Feep said:
I really like Terry's games, but it seems like there's a lot of entitlement going on. A completely unprecedented chance for exposure of previously unknown indie games and devs, and we demand it for free, dammit! And heaven forbid we actually have to try running a business and deal with PR and marketing.

No one is magically exempt from this. Steam is a business. If you decide to sell your game for money, you're running a business. Act like a business owner. Yeesh.
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The amount of exposure you get for the greenlight page alone really isn't that impressive, and with the actual chances for any game to ever get onto steam still a complete mystery it really doesn't seem worth it at the moment.

There's also a pretty big difference between doing PR in order to get people to buy your product and doing PR just to raise interest interest so people may eventually be able to buy it. Most businesses don't actually have to go through this.
 
beril said:
The amount of exposure you get for the greenlight page alone really isn't that impressive, and with the actual chances for any game to ever get onto steam still a complete mystery it really doesn't seem worth it at the moment.

There's also a pretty big difference between doing PR in order to get people to buy your product and doing PR just to raise interest interest so people may eventually be able to buy it. Most businesses don't actually have to go through this.
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I didn't mean that Greenlight itself was the exposure, but even the chance of reaching Steam is well worth it. I only got Sequence onto Steam because of sheer luck...it was extremely difficult/next to impossible for no-name indies to reach Steam prior. In terms of expected return, even if there's only a 2% chance of reaching Steam from Greenlight, then the "one hundred dollar cost" turns into a five thousand dollar expected cost, which any Steam game should easily crush.

No, it's the same. PR is PR. Being on the Steam frontpage as a new release is auto-PR to the tenth power, so if you want that visibility, I don't see the problem with proving to Valve that you deserve that spot by getting a good number of people excited for your game.

It's just a mountain out of a molehill. A hundred dollars is a pittance. It is TWELVE HOURS of minimum wage work, when making a good game should take literally thousands. I'm having a little trouble drumming up sympathy.
 
Great post Feep !

beril said:
There's also a pretty big difference between doing PR in order to get people to buy your product and doing PR just to raise interest interest so people may eventually be able to buy it. Most businesses don't actually have to go through this.
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Welcome to the Kickstarter age
 
Feep said:
I didn't mean that Greenlight itself was the exposure, but even the chance of reaching Steam is well worth it. I only got Sequence onto Steam because of sheer luck...it was extremely difficult/next to impossible for no-name indies to reach Steam prior. In terms of expected return, even if there's only a 2% chance of reaching Steam from Greenlight, then the "one hundred dollar cost" turns into a five thousand dollar expected cost, which any Steam game should easily crush.

No, it's the same. PR is PR. Being on the Steam frontpage as a new release is auto-PR to the tenth power, so if you want that visibility, I don't see the problem with proving to Valve that you deserve that spot by getting a good number of people excited for your game.

It's just a mountain out of a molehill. A hundred dollars is a pittance. It is TWELVE HOURS of minimum wage work, when making a good game should take literally thousands. I'm having a little trouble drumming up sympathy.
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The thing is we don't really know if it's any easier to get onto steam now, except instead of luck you need a massive following, and probably some luck as well.

And the difference for making a bunch of PR for greenlight is that unless you manage to reach whatever goal Valve has set up it's just a massive waste of effort. If your game is already out elsewhere you might be able to get some increased sales as well but most people will probably wait for the steam release as long as there is any chance of that happening.

Maybe it's still too early to draw any conclusions about the percentages and the rate Valve will accept games. But it's been almost two weeks and it really feels like something should start happening soon. There at least a few dozen games on there that seems like complete no brainer that they should be accepted, and another hundred that's easily on par with a lot of games on steam, and maybe another hundred that's a bit more niche or smaller scale but still looks like they could be interesting games that deserve to be on any online store. But unless they start accepting a whole bunch of games every day it'll be a long long time until some of the more interesting games are accepted, if ever.
 
If you have a finished game, putting it on Greenlight should help making it visible to people who had never heard of it. Not sure it will result in a massive increase in sales, but it should help.

That Greenlight Bundle you're in certainly has a good idea for promoting greenlight AND selling copies of the games that are done. Especially since it promises Steam keys if they become approved.

But yeah, Valve has not really made the "how this shit actually works" stuff public. If they even know at all. And since it's Valve, it'll take forever for anything to happen.
 
To be honest, I'm still not really satisfied by Greenlight at all. On one hand, I'd actually welcome to raise the entrance barrier a little higher, since there are still many great games created by very talented (or even pretty established) studios that are falling through the cracks due to the sheer amount of crap that's also on the system, but on the other hand I don't like the idea of excluding up-start indies altogether.

It's hard.

Though, I generally don't think that Steam should be the plattform to release your first one-man game on. At least not on the day of its first release -- if you are a one-man team or very unexperienced you've got to prove yourself first before entering Steam.

Edit: I also dislike the high numbers of votes needed to hit 100%. Yes, Valve says that a game doesn't actually needs to hit 100%, but that isn't good enough for me. The voting process needs to make fun for the user too if Valve wants many users to participate for more than just a week or two and I think it's very demotivating to see that most games that aren't more-or-less polished-looking 3D games have problems to reach even 5%...
 
HP_Wuvcraft said:
So you're saying you are voting for Romney?
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No, I don't hate women. = D

beril said:
The thing is we don't really know if it's any easier to get onto steam now, except instead of luck you need a massive following, and probably some luck as well.
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Like you said, it's a little early to tell one way or another. If the overall number of games accepted remains the same, I would rather those few games be the ones with hype and followers instead of just super lucky.

As far as the "massive waste of effort", I don't know...plenty of gamers are seeing games on Greenlight that they've never seen before, even if they're already for sale somewhere else on the internet. I mean, in this respect, it's just like Kickstarter...hit the goal, or nothin'. Even though Valve is apparently saying 100% isn't required?

It's funny that if I were submitting Sequence now, into Greenlight, like everyone else, it's very probable I would never make it onto Steam. I was a lottery winner, effectively. Still, I think this is the better way to go.
 
What I'm actually a bit worried about is that they've said no timeline on when some of the games are going to get approved, and there's the fear that some games that would usually have made it on to Steam by now with the regular procedure are "stuck" in Greenlight as they're tweaking the amount of votes needed and try to figure out the whole process.

There are some well made games already released on other platforms that absolutely should not have to linger in either the regular approval process or Greenlight too long and should just get on the service already. Some of the dtp Adventures, some of the games in the Greenlight bundle etc.


Feep said:
It's funny that if I were submitting Sequence now, into Greenlight, like everyone else, it's very probable I would never make it onto Steam. I was a lottery winner, effectively. Still, I think this is the better way to go.
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I don't think that's right. If it were, that would mean that Greenlight had failed. Sequence is a quality game that deserves to be on Steam.

edit: that's if you had pitched the completed game as it is and not a WIP build/concept, obviously.
 
I probably have no chance with my game getting on steam, but it's given me the opportunity to tell 8,000 people about it. I'm going to eventually release it on our site, but it's still a cool way to advertise...
 
DTKT said:
I honestly think that all of that "backlash" is born out of devs not being quite sure on how Greenlight is actually going to work. I mean, should Valve only allow games that reach that 100% goal? What if it's just 10, 5 or 1 percent? What if you spend the 100$ and only get 5% of the votes? Does that mean that you'll never get on Steam. I mean, even high profiles mods like Black Mesa, Slender Man haven't reached the 100%. If they can't, I doubt that any other "indie" title can.
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I don't like the term "entitlement" so I won't agree with anyone using it to describe developers.

But I do think that people online are collectively chicken littles when it comes to things being announced. You see it everywhere online. Every time a site has a new design, people are unwilling to wait even a day to let the kinks get worked out. Every time a new feature launches anywhere, people bombard the system with questions and won't wait even a day for answers. Even people in beta tests complain that the beta is unstable, although they volunteered to participate and were told in advance. It happens here on GAF. Any time we do something new as moderation, the reaction is very decisive, immediate, and generally pessimistic upfront even if it pays dividends in the long term.

To some extent, service providers need to be cognizant of this and work overtime to counteract it. Absolutely. But I think the people who are unhappy would be much happier if they just held their comment for a few weeks or a month and wait and see how everything shakes out. This immediate need to render a decisive verdict on stuff is not good psychologically. Delayed gratification is valuable.

So far, exactly 0 games have been Greenlit. We don't know the ETA on when they will be. We don't know what the final vote threshold will be. We don't know how many established publishers are exempt from Greenlight. We don't know how many indie games Valve plans to accept. We don't know how they plan to work with publishers of games in under-represented genres. We don't know what the future holds for the $100 fee--just that it was a reaction to an immediate flood of games that they couldn't handle. We don't know what the "concept / in development" section of Greenlight is going to look like. We don't know how or if Greenlight is going to mesh with Big Picture Mode. We don't know if the delay on acting on Greenlight stuff is a result of launching Big Picture Mode and (coming soon) applications on Steam. We don't know what Valve plans to do to team size for Steam to handle these new announcements.

And if all these questions are answered in the next week or two or month or two, all of this fretting is going to seem direly premature, but I don't think the Chicken Littles are going to learn their lesson for next time.

Now, this is not to say that Greenlight is a smash success. It's quite possible all the worst fears will come true. But we're not ready to draw a conclusion yet, or we shouldn't be.
 
Feep said:
It's funny that if I were submitting Sequence now, into Greenlight, like everyone else, it's very probable I would never make it onto Steam. I was a lottery winner, effectively. Still, I think this is the better way to go.
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It would have a good % ... it is a polished game with an unique gameplay mixing 2 popular genres.

How long did it take from submiting it to steam till being acepted and released ?
 
No one posted yet? Some games have already passed the process-

Black Mesa greenlit!
McPixel greenlit!

edit: apparently not for mcpixel, showed up as greenlit for me for a few minutes, maybe they're still playing with things
double edit: now it's greenlit again!
 
Yay, hope the Kenshi dev gets his ass to work though.
God damn that game is long time coming. Glad about the rest, although I wasn't really worried about some of those 'not getting on steam' in the more traditional way.
 
Awesome that Black Mesa got greenlit before it's planned release date September 14th but I doubt they can implement the Steamworks integration and sort the paperwork with Valve before that time even if it's just a free game and both parties combined should own the copyright of all the published material.

It would be awesome if Valve were to give the regular process an extra push and have it on Steam at release but if it's a month from now I wouldn't be surprised.
 
Stallion Free said:
10%
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Thanks! I'm kind of surprised they are letting games through in the 15% range, but at least it should stop people from worrying so much.

I'm glad Black Mesa and Routine went through. I -thought- I read that McPixel was super buggy but I might have it confused with another game.
 
Happy to see Towns and Kenshi on there. Got Towns through the Indie Royale AlphaFunding bundle a while back, along with Wyv and Keep and 3079. As for Kenshi, I haven't played it, but the entire concept is one of the most intriguing I've seen since M&B.
 
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