nintendoman58
Member
Can't wait for the Jimquisition on this.
Steam Greenlight to shut down in spring, replaced by Steam Direct
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Valve wants to leave the quality control to the customers, the whole point of Steam is "Here, you're not an idiot, you know what is good for you."
The problem is that you have games like WarZ that make the cut lol.
Tertullian
Member
It's a little hard to tell exactly what this means (a "recoupable" fee? when is it recouped?), but it sounds a lot like Valve has decided that the best way to curate content is by... having publishers pay them more money. How convenient.
Stitch
Gold Member
Didn't he stop doing videos for crappy Greenlight stuff months ago? Instead he's focusing on the good ones.
Even with whatever barrier they put up, there's still going to be some garbage Unity games for Jim to play on Steam. Heck they're even getting onto PSN as of late. He'll just need to change the titles of his series.
Basileus777
Member
A $5000 fee would be crazy high and would get a ton of pushback, Valve isn't going to make the fee that large.
Steam is the PC indie market. If you're not on Steam, it's incredibly hard to get people to buy your game.
paperspace
Member
So can GAMEPUMP be a thing now?
Spyder_Monkey
Banned
Is this a good thing? Because the last thing Steam needs is to open the flood gates for more crap on their store.
Juke Joint Jezebel
Member
He still does "Jimpressions" of the awful shit though, he just stopped commenting over the game's greenlight trailers instead so the coverage is still there.
Hopefully they find a sweet spot with the fee, enough that it'll stop the shovelware people trying to make a quick buck, but still allowing those people who are dedicated and care to afford it.
What that price is? Good question. Hopefully it isn't just a flat fee across the board, some people in countries with less economic strength might struggle if it's a flat conversion, despite the fact I'm sure they have just as much creativity.
Personally? I figured it meant they may get it back from Valve if they sell enough copies.
What that price is? Good question. Hopefully it isn't just a flat fee across the board, some people in countries with less economic strength might struggle if it's a flat conversion, despite the fact I'm sure they have just as much creativity.
Personally? I figured it meant they may get it back from Valve if they sell enough copies.
A $1000 investment is pretty damn low for a commercial product, no?
They could make payment contingent on sales. Have a cheap $100 registration fee, but no payout until a title hits $1-2k or whatever. After which, you start getting paid (including your cut of that initial money).
Yeah, maybe the fee goes toward Valve's cut.
The investment comes in the year+ of the my time spent working on the product. It doesn't just magically pop out of the sky. And I'm not making it to make huge dollars, I'm making it for a community that currently has no game in this particular genre and has been stuck playing the same game since 2001. I doubt it would even hit $1000 in sales.
I would much rather deal with the crap games (that almost never actually show up on the Steam store page) instead of seeing what happens with a site like GOG, where games get rejected because they're "too casual" or "too hardcore" or "they're not a great fit with their customer base" -- even if these examples are from some of the best games ever made in their respective genres and have gone on to sell tens or even hundreds of thousands of copies on Steam (yes, these are all real examples). Valve themselves that a game like Stardew Valley would have been rejected by their old model because "who the hell wants to plant and harvest a bunch of 16-bit crops"?
In short: That sort of manual curation to that extent doesn't stop crap from showing up (go take a look at the PSN release list if you need an example of that) and it can stop interesting games with an actual market from being released.
What are you defining as failure? What kind of budget do you expect most of these releases to even have?
You are aware that Steam is something like 70% of the PC market and a large percentage of the other sales end up feeding directly back into Steam due to key reselling? You may as well be telling these developers to not exist.
Stumpokapow
listen to the mad man
I'm looking at my front page recommendations capsule, and what I get is:
Mostly Positive, Very Positive, Very Positive, Overwhelmingly Positive, Very Positive, Very Positive, Very Positive, Very Positive, Very Positive, Very Positive, Very Positive, Mostly Positive.
(Even breakdown of "you played games like this", and "friends recommended")
I scroll down and I see the following games featured in sales:
Very Positive, Very Positive, Mostly Positive, Mostly Positive, Mixed (Toukiden), Mixed (The Technomancer)
I scroll down and I see Trending Among Friends:
Very Positive, Very Positive, Mixed (Mobius FF), Mixed (Marcus Level)
I scroll down to recently updated:
Very Positive, Very Positive, Very Positive, Very Positive, Positive, Very Positive, Very Positive, Very Positive
I scroll down to Top Sellers:
Mostly Positive, Very Positive, Very Positive, Very Positive, Mostly Positive, Very Positive, Very Positive, Mostly Positive, Overwhelmingly Positive, Very Positive
I switch to Popular New Releases:
Mostly Positive, Positive, Positive, Positive, Mostly Positive, Mostly Positive, Very Positive, Very Positive, Mixed (Mobius FF), Overwhelmingly Positive
I know that if you browse every game on Steam you'll see buckets of rancid garbage, but is it really the case that there's no curated quality control? For me the entire front page is actual real commercial games. The "Mixed" games all seem like games that would make it under extreme quality control, regardless. The Mostly Positive games include Civ 6 and Batman Telltale, so it's not like we're talking about random Unity asset flip trash. You have to go out of your way to browse the dark abyss to find the kind of stuff people complain about. The worst stuff I could find on the page was stuff my friends play, and that's because I have bad taste in friends, not because bad games are being deliberately exposed.
The one exception is the discovery queue. If you only do it once a day, you'll largely get the kinds of suggestions I mention above. If you obsessively clear out the entire queue so that all is left is the current new releases, then yes you're going to see the crap. I don't think any degree of curation can stop someone who wants to spend 2 hours a day on Steam looking for crap from finding crap.
How do you imagine that real curation looks different than this?
How much do you plan on selling the game for? Setting aside free games Valve's minimum pricing is $0.49 and I think their minimum non-sale pricing is $0.99. At $0.99, it would take you $3000 in sales to recoup a $1000 fee (in addition, you would make $2000 in revenue). That would put you well below the 1st percentile of all sales on Steam.
KainXVIII
Member
Expecting to be the first post =)
michaelius
Banned
Considering some of those games have few thousands dollars budget in the best case already (and most of that in unpaid work after you finish your daily job) then 4 digits is insane and would force most of first timers to find publisher.
VichoCardenas
Banned
Can't wait to see all the shitty indie devs rushing to Greenlight right in an attempt to get accepted before it's too late (if they don't want to go tru all the new stuff of course).
Something overly dramatic that misses the point by focusing on the worst games, and ignoring the larger choice it brings.
I'll bet "recoupable application fee" is probably something along the lines of minimum units sold thresholds/projections that need to be hit, and then they're given their fee back. No withholding of sales revenue, just the fee money itself.
Probably on a case-by-case basis too.
Probably on a case-by-case basis too.
I say make it 5k. If you are invested enough in the idea, and the cost is re-coup able then make it high enough so those jack-offs who are cluttering up Steam with garbage stay away.
Good! Happy to see this finally happening, but it is going to be a long road to get rid of the issues that come from this route.
The whole signal to noise ratio thing will always be an issue with this. The fee being adjusted can help a little, but filtering and reporting tools need strong enough to deal with it all. I'm interested in seeing how it goes as I'm ultimately very much in favour of greater access to such games and no curation - while obviously interested in avoid spam / malicious content / broken content.
The whole signal to noise ratio thing will always be an issue with this. The fee being adjusted can help a little, but filtering and reporting tools need strong enough to deal with it all. I'm interested in seeing how it goes as I'm ultimately very much in favour of greater access to such games and no curation - while obviously interested in avoid spam / malicious content / broken content.
It's going to be hard to hit a good price that works for the full range. I'm not convinced that most standard Steam users are actually getting cluttered-up game suggestions consisting of the bottom of the barrel, so I say keep it low.
If you don't believe that your game can generate a meager 5k in profits then you need to stay off of steam and release it independently.
I think $500 would be a fair starting fee. It should be enough to dissuade the jokesters but not enough to stop committed one person projects. The idea of withholding payments until x units are sold or y revenue is made might work too. Didn't Nintendo use that model for their WiiWare platform?
Hero_of_the_Day
Member
Good. They have let far too much shit slip onto Steam. Time to cut the fat.
Darkstorne
Member
Not for smaller titles, like the vast majority of Indie games. A $1000 buy in price is a huge chunk of whatever that game will end up making.
The biggest problem is that an insane amount of shovelware comes from devs who view quantity over quality as their business model, and many of them do very well out of it. Raising the cost into the thousands probably won't affect them - it'll affect the people genuinely pouring years of work into a single game, not for the money, but for the love of it.
Chainsawkitten
Member
And generate 0 profits.
I really don't think Nintendo is a good model to follow for digital games.
Why?
are you an indie game developer?
cause even recoupable $5000 is a huge risk for an starting indie
MrFortyFive
Member
I'm just going to take a stab in the dark and say the fee will be somewhere around $250.
Greatest Ever
Member
It's good they dropped Greenlight in name too. I feel like it, for whatever success it may have had, became synonymous with a swath of crap games more than anything.
Garrett Hawke
Member
Because you said so?
$1,000 could be plenty of money to a lot of indie devs.
XANDER CAGE
Member
When people said vote with your wallet I didn't think they actually meant my own wallet!
Von Krukru
Banned
Don't know what to think of this. If the fee isn't more than 200/300$ I can still take the risk, but higher? I'll keep my game for myself!
I'm pretty sure there will be exceptions here. If you contact Valve and they like your game, they will probably cover your expenses, I think that is what they are doing with many VR games.
But I understand there has to be some kind of enter barrier, I suppose that good games won't have a problem in getting the funding to cover the fee by releasing the games in itch.io or similar services, having in mind it will cost between 100 and 500$, no more than 1000$ in the worst case.
But I understand there has to be some kind of enter barrier, I suppose that good games won't have a problem in getting the funding to cover the fee by releasing the games in itch.io or similar services, having in mind it will cost between 100 and 500$, no more than 1000$ in the worst case.
RyanPierre
Member
Huh?
We can't take the price into account yet, since it's not finalized, but let's be clear: they are lowering the barrier to entry by removing Greenlight. If you have the money, you get your game on Steam. You no longer need a bunch of Greenlight votes (which were typically gotten by shady "free codes for votes" promises or by praying for coverage somewhere, like Jim Sterling featuring your game on his Greenlight Good Stuff series).
I'm really glad they're lowering the barrier to entry. Greenlight's voting system conceptually made sense, but in practice, it was awful and easily abused. People willing to do shady things could get their game on Steam while others with promising-looking titles just languished in purgatory.
As far as pricing, $5,000 would be ludicrous for one-man devs with low budgets, but I don't think most indie devs would mind paying a couple hundred extra dollars (especially being recoupable) to ensure that they could sell their game on Steam.
I don't think this new initiative is going to do anything to stop asset flips, but if it helps more indie devs with sincere games get on Steam, I'm all for it.
LukasTaves
Member
That sounds terrible actually, and something that should get called out (and I think it would anyone else not valve trying to pass it up)
This is by the way the exact same reason tim is becoming paranoid about Ms lately.
This is by the way the exact same reason tim is becoming paranoid about Ms lately.
SpacePirate Ridley
Member
If that fee is more than 100 it woud be too high for small sudios like mine were every cent counts, who said anything more than 1000 was a big studio or a fucking idiot.
Its good that they are trying to stop shovelware and greenlight wa crap, but they can do the a better work with a small fee and study the paperwork and game the studio is trying to put on steam. Not going the old way were they were stupid not accepting anything if they didnt think it was going to sell even it had quality, just stopping anything that is completly broken, buggy or a clear asset flip.
Also they should clean the normal store of any super buggy unolayable asset flips.
Its good that they are trying to stop shovelware and greenlight wa crap, but they can do the a better work with a small fee and study the paperwork and game the studio is trying to put on steam. Not going the old way were they were stupid not accepting anything if they didnt think it was going to sell even it had quality, just stopping anything that is completly broken, buggy or a clear asset flip.
Also they should clean the normal store of any super buggy unolayable asset flips.
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