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Spike11
Guest
Personally I'm not convinced. yet. Not saying GL was better, just that SD has it's own issues too.
Benefits for the dev's are yet to be seen.
Thoughts?
Benefits for the dev's are yet to be seen.
Thoughts?
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Less incentive to spam asset flips means proper games that took time to make won't drown in a flood of half-assed ones that didn't, so that's good for the devs... in theory, at least. Remains to be seen if it actually works.
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Kenjiro
Guest
Doesn't seem to be hugely different to me.
The biggest drawback, as I see it, is the lost marketing and exposure (more so than actually being 'Green Lit').
Developers would often use Greenlight as a platform to get instant exposure. Often coinciding the GL campaign with a Kickstarter launch.
Losing this 'instant exposure' has now made it a lot harder to make people aware of your Kickstarter campaign.
The biggest drawback, as I see it, is the lost marketing and exposure (more so than actually being 'Green Lit').
Developers would often use Greenlight as a platform to get instant exposure. Often coinciding the GL campaign with a Kickstarter launch.
Losing this 'instant exposure' has now made it a lot harder to make people aware of your Kickstarter campaign.
JackTurbo
Member
I think its still a bit too early to tell for sure but my thoughts are:
* Fee is per game now. Might help reduce Shovelware and asset flips? - this is perhaps a stretch. Not sure if it will or not but its certainly a bigger impact on those who are churning out lots of low quality titles rather than those who are releasing fewer more polished titles.
* No trading cards till quality of game is verified. This is a good thing in my opinion, its relatively well documented that some of the more scummy devs have been living off the trading card economy more than actual sales of their titles. Giving away hundreds of keys to artificially boost the number of trading cards in circulation.
* Algorithm is meant to bury poor titles. This I'm less confident in, I understand why valve wants to avoid any system that relies on human curation, however I just dont trust an automated system to be able to differentiate between a quality indie and an asset flip.
* Steam Curator revamp. This is where I think the new system is likely to either flourish or fall flat on its face. Valve has said that along with Direct they'll be revamping how curators work and will be incentivising them to play and rate undiscovered titles. If the community takes up this role with enthusiasm (and we know there are some very dedicated members of the Steam community) and they're supported by Valve with the tools to do so then I think this could be a real boon to small indies who struggle with exposure.
Personally I'd like to see the highest profile curators given free keys for these low profile/undiscovered titles, while the lower profile curators are instead regularly given heavy discount coupons for undiscovered titles. With the rate of these key's/coupons dropping being directly tied to the number of title's they're reviewing and the number of times their reviews are tagged as helpful.
* Fee is per game now. Might help reduce Shovelware and asset flips? - this is perhaps a stretch. Not sure if it will or not but its certainly a bigger impact on those who are churning out lots of low quality titles rather than those who are releasing fewer more polished titles.
* No trading cards till quality of game is verified. This is a good thing in my opinion, its relatively well documented that some of the more scummy devs have been living off the trading card economy more than actual sales of their titles. Giving away hundreds of keys to artificially boost the number of trading cards in circulation.
* Algorithm is meant to bury poor titles. This I'm less confident in, I understand why valve wants to avoid any system that relies on human curation, however I just dont trust an automated system to be able to differentiate between a quality indie and an asset flip.
* Steam Curator revamp. This is where I think the new system is likely to either flourish or fall flat on its face. Valve has said that along with Direct they'll be revamping how curators work and will be incentivising them to play and rate undiscovered titles. If the community takes up this role with enthusiasm (and we know there are some very dedicated members of the Steam community) and they're supported by Valve with the tools to do so then I think this could be a real boon to small indies who struggle with exposure.
Personally I'd like to see the highest profile curators given free keys for these low profile/undiscovered titles, while the lower profile curators are instead regularly given heavy discount coupons for undiscovered titles. With the rate of these key's/coupons dropping being directly tied to the number of title's they're reviewing and the number of times their reviews are tagged as helpful.
GMWolf
aka fel666
I think its a good thing. Have you browsed steam greenlghts recent additions? It was a mess flooded with crappy FPS games! You had to browse 2 or three pages before finding something good! THats why you had to be very lucky to get your title seen for it to be put in the self feeding loop of exposure.
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Kenjiro
Guest
Can't say I have.
But just looked then and (as suspected) nothing has been added since Greenlight closed down.
I'm either missing something here or I am greatly confused by what you have stated. :/
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GMWolf
aka fel666
The suggested things to look at are ok, because they have already been spotted and in the feedback loop.
But if you check the recent additioms!, It's full of 'spam' games.l, and some good games never get discovered amongst the sea of barely entertaining software.
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Kenjiro
Guest
Yeah, I must admit I hardly looked at Greenlight games for that very reason.
sylvain_l
Member
^^ with the giant flood of game at the greenlight closing (most of the game in the greenlight queue get greenlit), and I'm not sure if any game has yet made it through steamdirect, IMO that's too early to evaluate the potential of steamdirect.
just a thing, is steam concepts workshop gone too ? (I'm not talking of the workshop for mod for game, but I there was a thing to show your game when it's just a concept/prototype game before putting them on greenlight to greenlit them)
edit: as I'm on that thread again, can answer my question; yes it's gone as it was part of greenlight!
just a thing, is steam concepts workshop gone too ? (I'm not talking of the workshop for mod for game, but I there was a thing to show your game when it's just a concept/prototype game before putting them on greenlight to greenlit them)
edit: as I'm on that thread again, can answer my question; yes it's gone as it was part of greenlight!
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Tsa05
Member
Remember when Greenlight was new, and like, 6 games per month were accepting on there? It was a badge of supreme honor to be chosen. And now? Well, look at where it's gone.
I assume that in 4-5 years, the asset flippers will be back, and paying 100 bucks per game to submit to the DirectBot. Same world, more $$$ paid up-front to Valve.
In the short run it seems implausible, ofc. Who would pay $100 to troll with an asset flip? But that's exactly what people are doing today, technically. Just not $100 per title; it's a hundred spread out over many titles. The price per title will make it financially non-viable for now, but in time it is adding $100 to the price of every casual, indie, hobbyist, etc game. So all of your $0.99 games start turning into $1.89 games.
The cost will not affect big games, but it'll trickle down to slowly increase the base cost of all cheaper games on Steam at the same time that submission pressure will grow (as it did after greenlight got going). More and more games will make the cut, smaller and cheaper titles will slide in, and they'll all be priced to recoup the $100 per title fee. $2 for a trollish game on Steam would probably find at least 50 people in the world to bite--heck, you'd make more than that just from Youtubers who play bad games in order to pad their streams with funny content.
Main purpose of Direct: more cash for the Valves
I assume that in 4-5 years, the asset flippers will be back, and paying 100 bucks per game to submit to the DirectBot. Same world, more $$$ paid up-front to Valve.
In the short run it seems implausible, ofc. Who would pay $100 to troll with an asset flip? But that's exactly what people are doing today, technically. Just not $100 per title; it's a hundred spread out over many titles. The price per title will make it financially non-viable for now, but in time it is adding $100 to the price of every casual, indie, hobbyist, etc game. So all of your $0.99 games start turning into $1.89 games.
The cost will not affect big games, but it'll trickle down to slowly increase the base cost of all cheaper games on Steam at the same time that submission pressure will grow (as it did after greenlight got going). More and more games will make the cut, smaller and cheaper titles will slide in, and they'll all be priced to recoup the $100 per title fee. $2 for a trollish game on Steam would probably find at least 50 people in the world to bite--heck, you'd make more than that just from Youtubers who play bad games in order to pad their streams with funny content.
Main purpose of Direct: more cash for the Valves
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0.Bytes
Guest
I think the "greenlight" stuff, should have been redone. The idea of greenlight is great, but the real thing is that a lot of bad games were being greenlit.
That said, maybe this new way to publish on steam will keep the bad games away from steam.
The fact is that something needed to change, lets hope that steam direct is the solution that we need
That said, maybe this new way to publish on steam will keep the bad games away from steam.
The fact is that something needed to change, lets hope that steam direct is the solution that we need
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Austin Scola
Guest
I understand why they think a paywall will stop crappy content. I think that they should have just curated their own content from the start, not pawn off that job to consumers with GL.
Oakleaf
Member
Greenlight was a mess, as others have said. Now with the fee devs have to think twice before submitting their game: is it worth it? Will the game make enough to be profitable?
After all (as I understood it), it's more of a deposit than a fee: once a game has sold enough, the 100$ is returned. It acts as a buffer. Of course, nothing stops people from submitting "Asset flip #34535" if they're ready to pay up.
If you have a product you're confident will sell, then 100$ isn't that bad, it's an investment.
After all (as I understood it), it's more of a deposit than a fee: once a game has sold enough, the 100$ is returned. It acts as a buffer. Of course, nothing stops people from submitting "Asset flip #34535" if they're ready to pay up.
If you have a product you're confident will sell, then 100$ isn't that bad, it's an investment.
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Kat Serapha
Guest
I think it will be a fair while before we can see how truly win or fail this is. It's way too early to say. At least the fact that it charges by the individual game and the fact that you need to have it solidly attached to your real name will probably force people to be a bit less stupid, or at least take it more seriously.
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Spike11
Guest
I'm not convinced that any monetary fee will prevent asset flippers and garbage (if you can buy assets, chances are you can afford a fee), it'll just frustrate real devs that won't be able to afford it. NO, not all devs can afford an exorbitant fee, especially if it's their first title.
other than human intervention (valve staff) which wont happen because it'll cost valve on-going overheads (or people on steam) which they tried and just ended up with people whining rather than just ignoring bad games (i.e. greenlight) maybe... To decide what is an acceptable quality submission perhaps submission game categories would clean things up a bit? Including one for "game that have paid assets only". That way we can all ignore the asset flippers category.
IDK
other than human intervention (valve staff) which wont happen because it'll cost valve on-going overheads (or people on steam) which they tried and just ended up with people whining rather than just ignoring bad games (i.e. greenlight) maybe... To decide what is an acceptable quality submission perhaps submission game categories would clean things up a bit? Including one for "game that have paid assets only". That way we can all ignore the asset flippers category.
IDK
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I'm pretty sure there's no feasible way to keep up with what games flip assets, there's a lot of asset packs up there and some of them are in very obscure places. And even if Valve could track every paid asset in every marketplace ever, there's still sites like OpenGameArt and FreeSound where you can find decent-looking free assets that's gotten uploaded less than 24 hours ago. Either Valve would need to constantly download every asset ever to do automated checks on submitted games, or hire tons of people that would constantly browse every asset site ever and memorize every new thing that get added. It just wouldn't be feasible to 100% detect asset flips, and anything that would require the flippers to cooperate would just be like trusting the Evil Bit protocol for online security.
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Spike11
Guest
Very good point. We should also acknowledge that there are some very talented artists created some good assets for devs to buy. They too deserve what all game creators do as far as freedom, recognition and income.
what a mess, valve.
what a mess, valve.
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Kat Serapha
Guest
Yeah, using paid assets aren't a GUARANTEE of shoddy work, it's just a really common trend. Kind of like people using default assets in RPGmaker. They really do just need to hire people to look at games and be like "is this immediately and visibly a piece of crap?"
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weiner
Guest
I like new system, but something like greenlight concepts would be great. Because nowhere else you will get so big response.
WarpDogsVG
Member
If that was their true intention then I don't think $100 is nearly enough. That's about what it'd cost to get a game on a mobile store and that's essentially where spam asset flips were invented.
I signed up Steam Direct a couple days ago and I found the process really easy and simple to understand, but like Greenlight, it feels like a half-measure that won't stop people from flooding the marketplace with low quality work. As others have said, time will tell
I think there's a bit of a difference in audience, though... EVERYONE has a smartphone these days, including gullible parents that just want to download some quick distractions for their three-year-olds, but only people that are already into "real" videogames gets a Steam account.
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Spike11
Guest
"Our analysis suggests that quite a bit of the previous volume of submissions to Greenlight was motivated by trading card abuse, which we detailed in our blog post Changes to Trading Cards. With the changes detailed in that blog post, we expect there is a category of game-shaped objects that are unlikely to be worth someone paying even $100 to bring to Steam. So that will likely lower the rate of incoming new titles somewhat. But, Steam Direct also intentionally provides a more transparent and predictable path for new game developers, which is something we heard held back many developers, especially in non-Western countries." -Steam
If they had an issue with trading cards why not just address that?
A simple "You title must earn more than X amount before you can have trading cards" would have solved it.
If they had an issue with trading cards why not just address that?
A simple "You title must earn more than X amount before you can have trading cards" would have solved it.
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MishMash
Guest
They could easily have made the Steam Direct cost higher without isolating developers. I'd personally vouch for something $2500+, however if they did want to compromise, $1000 is very reasonable imo. In my eyes, any project that is serious enough to be on steam should be able to raise an additional $1000 through whatever means. When looking at game sales to recuperate that, it really isn't all that many.. If you are aiming to sell less than say 200 copies, then I think steam shouldn't really be the platform for you.
To put this in perspective, we released an alpha version of our game Vitality 2 years ago in order to raise funds for the project. This version was not advertised, aside from a trailer posted on our youtube channel and links put around the place. We sold ~180 copies on our own website in an environment where so many things counted against it even selling at all such as:
- Non-standard platform, had to register for our website
- Unfinished game (and clearly labelled as such)
- Lack of features
- Uncertainty of compatibility/bugs/updates
- Higher prices of $14.99 (This price was to encourage more funds to be raised)
I'm not proud of what we released, nor do I necessarily recommend others do it. We did it because we didn't have many financial options at the time, and wanted to raise some funds to make our game better. The point I am making here however is that at a price of $14.99 (higher to encourage more budget), this gave us close to $2400 after tax and fees. Therefore, I believe that if you released a finished game that was half decent on a platform with a more established base and marketplace such as itch.io or gamejolt, you could easily earn enough to cover a higher SteamDirect fee.
Regarding which was better, Greenlight got to the point where every game would eventually trickle on anyway, however some could take a year after they were actually finished to even get Greenlit. So in the sense that SteamDirect is a little more immediate, then that is better for developers, as there is no need to wait. However, it does also mean that people can spam games.
Like $100 is an absolute joke.. You could spam asset flips for days. If you make a really
game, it doesn't take much false marketing to generate 20 sales of a $5 game to cover your fee... Well, that is until the system gets so saturated that every new game just gets instantly buried, including the good ones. It's going to be hard for good games to see the light of day now, given that there are many many more games coming out.
So, that's the negative stuff, what do we as developers have to do about it? Well now more than ever, its our responsibility to market our games well. This should have been something that developers always do, however now it will be what makes or breaks your game. Whilst this doesn't exactly apply to me now (as I'm already greenlit), if I were a new developer, I would raise $1000 or so anyway and use that purely for marketing. Investing in youtube, facebook, twitter and google ads can generate a decent amount of initial traction that you can use to help snowball your game. ($1000 can potentially yield you between 10,000 and 50,000 views on YouTube, depending on what slot you pick). Assuming your game costs $10, you would therefore need between a 0.2% and 1% conversation rate to break even. Whilst this is quite a high sale-conversation rate, even yielding a smaller number of sales can be beneficial in moving your game forward when combined with free advertising sources such as twitter/facebook followings, youtube letsplays, game review websites etc;
The saving grace is the potential new filtering algorithm which could help players find games that are better suited to them, and equally, perhaps it will have some form of play-time based filtering so that it can evaluate how much players like a game proportionally to other games they are playing. As @JackTurbo said though, I imagine this will not work as well as intended, as whilst it sounds good in theory, it can often be too isolating, or over-fit to a certain style of game. Or perhaps Steam will become like amazon, where they have a very good ability to pick what sort of product you might be interested in, based on what others with similar purchasing habits got.
I don't have much faith in the curator system either, as I feel this system relies too much on human input and effort. In my experience, the average person is too lazy to spend hours browsing through curator lists and for the curators themselves, you don't want playing games to become tedious. My impression of the system has always been that it'll work for a bit, until the curators lose interest. Similarly, a curator recommendation does not necessarily equate to a sale.
To put this in perspective, we released an alpha version of our game Vitality 2 years ago in order to raise funds for the project. This version was not advertised, aside from a trailer posted on our youtube channel and links put around the place. We sold ~180 copies on our own website in an environment where so many things counted against it even selling at all such as:
- Non-standard platform, had to register for our website
- Unfinished game (and clearly labelled as such)
- Lack of features
- Uncertainty of compatibility/bugs/updates
- Higher prices of $14.99 (This price was to encourage more funds to be raised)
I'm not proud of what we released, nor do I necessarily recommend others do it. We did it because we didn't have many financial options at the time, and wanted to raise some funds to make our game better. The point I am making here however is that at a price of $14.99 (higher to encourage more budget), this gave us close to $2400 after tax and fees. Therefore, I believe that if you released a finished game that was half decent on a platform with a more established base and marketplace such as itch.io or gamejolt, you could easily earn enough to cover a higher SteamDirect fee.
Regarding which was better, Greenlight got to the point where every game would eventually trickle on anyway, however some could take a year after they were actually finished to even get Greenlit. So in the sense that SteamDirect is a little more immediate, then that is better for developers, as there is no need to wait. However, it does also mean that people can spam games.
Like $100 is an absolute joke.. You could spam asset flips for days. If you make a really
game, it doesn't take much false marketing to generate 20 sales of a $5 game to cover your fee... Well, that is until the system gets so saturated that every new game just gets instantly buried, including the good ones. It's going to be hard for good games to see the light of day now, given that there are many many more games coming out.So, that's the negative stuff, what do we as developers have to do about it? Well now more than ever, its our responsibility to market our games well. This should have been something that developers always do, however now it will be what makes or breaks your game. Whilst this doesn't exactly apply to me now (as I'm already greenlit), if I were a new developer, I would raise $1000 or so anyway and use that purely for marketing. Investing in youtube, facebook, twitter and google ads can generate a decent amount of initial traction that you can use to help snowball your game. ($1000 can potentially yield you between 10,000 and 50,000 views on YouTube, depending on what slot you pick). Assuming your game costs $10, you would therefore need between a 0.2% and 1% conversation rate to break even. Whilst this is quite a high sale-conversation rate, even yielding a smaller number of sales can be beneficial in moving your game forward when combined with free advertising sources such as twitter/facebook followings, youtube letsplays, game review websites etc;
The saving grace is the potential new filtering algorithm which could help players find games that are better suited to them, and equally, perhaps it will have some form of play-time based filtering so that it can evaluate how much players like a game proportionally to other games they are playing. As @JackTurbo said though, I imagine this will not work as well as intended, as whilst it sounds good in theory, it can often be too isolating, or over-fit to a certain style of game. Or perhaps Steam will become like amazon, where they have a very good ability to pick what sort of product you might be interested in, based on what others with similar purchasing habits got.
I don't have much faith in the curator system either, as I feel this system relies too much on human input and effort. In my experience, the average person is too lazy to spend hours browsing through curator lists and for the curators themselves, you don't want playing games to become tedious. My impression of the system has always been that it'll work for a bit, until the curators lose interest. Similarly, a curator recommendation does not necessarily equate to a sale.
Sammi3
Member
I'm split on this. On one hand, I feel that $100 might only discourage a few from asset flips. It will cut down on it but I doubt as much as people want. On the other hand, I come from a 3rd world country (Tanzania represent) that is consistently in those "world's poorest countries" list and something like $5000 would be extremely tough on me. Even taking me out of the equation considering that I'm one of the better off people in the country and can find employment in Europe or elsewhere in order to afford this, it will also hamper what is already a pretty non-existent indie scene in my country by making it a huge wall to overcome in order to compete with international game developers on the same platform. So in that regard, I am grateful that it is at $100.
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MishMash
Guest
The comment on countries is a definitely valid one, what they could do in this case is taper the initial cost based on location, so that it is more in-line with what an expected budget would be in these locations. People would not be able to abuse this (or really it wouldn't be worth their time) as you have to validate your identity anyway. Though the other way of looking at it, as stated in my previous post is that there are still plenty of opportunities to raise that money by selling it on a different platform first. At this point, location wouldn't matter so much as the earnings of your game would likely be based on USD $ anyway. (You don't necessarily need to adjust for gdp when you are earning an amount for a price in a remote currency anyway.)
sitebender
Member
Seems to be win for certain people. One person has 4 games out in this past month. Two people are digging through the Steam GameMaker 1 Workshop games and asking everyone if they want to be published.
I used to think that having a Greenlight would get hype for your game... but as big as publicity was for Greenlight its dwarfed in comparison to the game coming to Steam and appearing on Steam within the first 3 days. Even just existing on Steam gets far more traffic per day than Greenlight did.
Having big Youtubers cover the game and having a Greenlight link in the game... did nothing to help the Greenlight. Getting thousands of downloads of the demo, you'd think there would be more of a crossover where people would go vote. Every bit of my Greenlight's traffic came from Greenlight and Steam itself.
I used to think that having a Greenlight would get hype for your game... but as big as publicity was for Greenlight its dwarfed in comparison to the game coming to Steam and appearing on Steam within the first 3 days. Even just existing on Steam gets far more traffic per day than Greenlight did.
Having big Youtubers cover the game and having a Greenlight link in the game... did nothing to help the Greenlight. Getting thousands of downloads of the demo, you'd think there would be more of a crossover where people would go vote. Every bit of my Greenlight's traffic came from Greenlight and Steam itself.
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This reminds me of a cool side note that was brought up in some random GDC talk I watched recently, where the guy brought up how marketing is usually seen as something separate from the development process itself, while they saw it was a natural part of the development - so you should work on marketing material as you're working on the game, and make the game advertising-material-creation-friendly, like adding in a simple function to get screenshots for instance. And as you might've heard, record footage GIFs and screenshots and stuff on games in development and post on twitter every day or so. I've personally noticed glitches getting lots of positive attention (especially if they look funny because something is completely broken) so don't focus too hard on polished bragging-rights material but post anything you have that's interesting.
I think it was this talk, and in either case it's a really interesting talk on how to work efficiently as a commercial indie:
sitebender
Member
Sorry for the necropost, but I'm back to explain how much I miss Greenlight for the publicity and the general feedback of "game looks good" or "change this."
I have a third game on the Steam store (but not for sale) and it has literally one fourth the wishlits that the other two had which went through Greenlight. The first and third games are in the same vertical space shooter genre, so I'd expect the same level of interest. In terms of traffic, it has half the traffic as the first two games.
It still might not matter as the traffic will inevitably jump once the game is released. At least that's what I believe from experience. Maybe things have changed in the past 10+ months.
I have a third game on the Steam store (but not for sale) and it has literally one fourth the wishlits that the other two had which went through Greenlight. The first and third games are in the same vertical space shooter genre, so I'd expect the same level of interest. In terms of traffic, it has half the traffic as the first two games.
It still might not matter as the traffic will inevitably jump once the game is released. At least that's what I believe from experience. Maybe things have changed in the past 10+ months.