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Valve Is Shutting Down Steam's Greenlight Community Voting System (theverge.com)
Valve's crowdsourced Greenlight submission program, which let the gaming community select which games get chosen for distribution via Steam, is shutting down after nearly five years. It will be replaced with a new system called Steam Direct that will charge developers a fee for each title they plan to distribute. The Verge reports: Steam Greenlight was launched in 2012 as a way for indie developers to get their games on Steam, even if they weren't working with a big publisher that had a relationship with Valve. Steam users would vote on Greenlight games, and Valve would accept titles with enough support to suggest that they'd sell well. Kroll says that "over 100" Greenlight titles have made $1 million or more. But Greenlight has also had significant problems. Developers could game the system by offering rewards for votes, and worthy projects could get lost amidst a slew of bad proposals. Since Valve ultimately made the call on including games, the process could also seem arbitrary and opaque. The big question is whether what's replacing it is better. To get a game on Steam Direct, developers will need to "complete a set of digital paperwork, personal or company verification, and tax documents similar to the process of applying for a bank account." Then, they'll pay an application fee for each game, "which is intended to decrease the noise in the submission pipeline" -- a polite way of saying that it will make people think twice before spending money submitting a low-quality game. Steam Direct is supposed to launch in spring of 2017, but the application fee hasn't been decided yet. Developer feedback has apparently suggested anything from $100 -- the current Greenlight submission fee -- and $5,000.
Valve isn't real big on accountability, at least not when it applies to Valve. They want a system they can set-and-forget and that doesn't require human resources to supervise. On the other hand, they need to address the toxic garbage fire that the Greenlight has become. We aren't even talking about merely shitty games anymore, we are talking about lowlife scumbags a step below email SPAMers turning the storefront into a tragedy of the commons. Given those business priorities they don't have much choice but to increase the barrier to entry. They should have done it years ago.
We're a mid-sized indie shop who has put two titles through Greenlight.
This is fantastic news. Anyone who believes otherwise either has never had to go through the bullshit of Greenlight before, or is one of the shit-ware peddlers this is meant to filter out.
If you believe in what you are doing, a $5k deposit is nothing. Do a kickstarter for it when you can demo a good playable product.
Greenlight was terrible for indies. You were left in limbo for months not knowing if you would be able to pay employees soon, with a totally opaque approval process. The game you worked years on was lost in a sea of "Shower With Dad Simulators" made by children over the weekend.
Given that outside of the major publishers, Steam is treated as the de-facto marketplace for PC games, at first I wasn't happy with this move. But after giving it some thought, I think this is going to be for the better.
Right now Steam is suffering from two major problems that, as a casual buyer, make the store unpleasant to use.
To paraphrase from Ye' Olde Wikipedia: "Having too many approximately equally good options is mentally draining because each option must be weighed against alternatives to select the best one". Which really, is kind of a horrific concept because it implies that choice (and competition) is bad. But outside of AAA titles with large marketing budgets and immense brand recognition, most of the games in the Steam store are unknowns, so customers are coming in and facing too many choices without nearly enough information to choose between them. Which isn't a problem if you already know exactly what you want (Call of Duty) and are just coming to the store to buy it. But it is a problem if you only know what kind of thing you want (a first-person shooter) and want to see what's available.
Essentially requiring a deposit on sales is going to lock out a lot of low budget developers, which taken at face-value is anti-egalitarian. But from a consumer perspective it's going to improve the store by cutting down on the noise. Games from developers who were likely never going to become successful in the first place now won't be cluttering up the storefront. It may keep the next ARK from being discovered, but it will also prevent the next The District from clogging up the store's search results. Developers lose, but arguably it's a win for consumers.
Which really goes back to a central argument about Steam and app stores in general: what should they be, a free-for-all or a curated store? The former allows everyone to participate, while the latter allows for a more structured experience. And judging from the consumer discontent, it seems that people would rather have the latter. Which at least for the PC is fine; the PC is an open platform, so it doesn't limit choice. It just makes it harder for a no-name developer to get noticed.
On a side note, I hope this also helps to curtail Early Access shenanigans. There are too many games that are being sold badly incomplete, and of those Early Access games, too many of them will never get finished. There's a dirty secret that I think everyone in the industry has had to re-learn the hard way: publishers suck, but having a middle-man funding game development means that at least games are more-or-less done before they are sold to consumers.
If you don't have enough confidence in your product to make a 5 thousand USD investment then maybe it's a sign that it's not good enough to be published. If you make a good game that people will want to buy, it'll pay for itself. If you make the opposite, it won't.
Steam isn't some kind of free flash game site where everything goes, if you publish your game there it'll be sold alongside full-fledged AAA games and timeless classics of all eras of gaming. The entry fee for indies should've been high to begin with as that would at least assure SOME level of consistency in game quality.
Anybody attempting to filter the flood of games on greenlight right now, greenlit or not, would lose their sanity before anything significant was achieved.
What bullshit. Steam is not the only place to publish a successful Indy pc game.
If you've got a title that is remotely marketable, any bank would approve a loan in that amount for such a purpose.
That average includes the 0-effort asset flips - which is to say, outright scams.
This isn't the phone market. If your game isn't garbage people will pay $5 for the typical indy-fare with nothing inspired in the graphics or mechanics (assuming decent play-time, seems to be about $3 for short games). Games with some original or interesting element and solid art direction (not necessary good graphics, just an interesting look) will sell for ~$10 (assuming a steam sale discounting it from $15-20).
And if you actually have a cool idea and it's not your first game, you can probably get a kickstarter going.
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