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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.
If you are a serious indie game developer, this may be good news. Hopefully this will reduce the amount of scams/shovelware/asset flips by 80%. However, there was a good side to Greenlight: cross-promoting a Kickstarter campaign with it was useful.
If Steam does not put in place anything similar (for games that already paid the fee but are still developing), it can take a big hit for marketing of indie games.
We are just in the middle of deciding whether to do our campaign before or after Steam Direct closes the gates... :-)
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.
They don't want to do it because they don't need to do it because they're so huge. It's the same problem as with facebook: the inertia both FB and Steam got from being the first to deliver a service has launched them so far ahead in the market that they're pretty much indestructible at this point. I mean sure, there are competitors out there but steam is so far ahead above the others that they don't have to worry about losing their spot.
Think about the fact that steam is the only thing that pushes ads onto my desktop from time to time. Then think about the fact that sometimes I've bought games from these ads if the discount is good enough. Valve knows the types of games I've purchased, what I've played, for how long, what kind of hardware I'm running, etc. They have pretty in depth stats about my gaming habits from the past 10 years. This information by itself is something that none of their competitors can ever have access to, and it's worth a lot to them. Targeted advertising is not just done on websites.
They have taken advantage of this by building the sales/discount system so that even though pretty much everyone agrees that Steam's customer service and quality control are bullshit, most of us still end up using the service because of the value it offers. It's a sort of abusive relationship: we all know that the only way to teach Valve a lesson would be to stop using steam altogether and head to their competition. But people have to start steam to play their library of games, at which time it usually reminds you that this or that game happens to be 70 % off now, and sooner or later relapsing occurs.
People don't really switch from Facebook to other similar competing social platforms because FB has their images, posts, and connections. Competition is difficult with both Steam and facebook because to efficiently compete with either of these you need access to at least some of the information currently only possessed by these companies, and they sure as hell are not going to hand it to you.
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous" -Alfred North Whitehead