The Steam Greenlight Thread - SHUT DOWN

[Infinitron]

"BRO FORCE" http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=93927889

 

[Humppaleka]

Gas Guzzlers Combat Carnage

Fuck yeah. Already own it but what the heck.

 

[dbx]

"BRO FORCE" http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=93927889

Tried the demo, it's a good oldschool platformer.

 

[Infinitron]

We don't need no steenking English, comrades http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=93991350

 

[Konjad]

We don't need no steenking English, comrades http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=93991350

 

[kazgar]

This thread's going to be thinner on the ground after this announcement

Submissions of all kinds have been pouring in to Steam Greenlight. As of this post, there are over 700 submissions, but that doesn’t really tell the whole story of what’s being submitted.

Two things we’ve noticed so far. First, there are a ton of legitimate submissions that people want to see. Second, there is unfortunately a significant amount of noise and clutter being submitted, either as a joke or by fans not fully understanding the purpose of Greenlight.

So, with those things in mind, today we’ve made two updates to how Greenlight works.

The first update is a $100 fee for someone to post to Steam Greenlight. The proceeds will be donated to Child’s Play. We have no interest in making money from this, but we do need to cut down the noise in the system. (Note: Anyone who has already posted a submission to Greenlight will not have to retroactively pay for any existing submissions, but will need to do so for any future submissions.)

Makes sense though, if you're semi serious and end up on steam, you'll make that $100 back in a heartbeat (and can probably claim the donation?)

 

[Konjad]

Prosper is too late

 

[RK47]

Makes sense though, if you're semi serious and end up on steam, you'll make that $100 back in a heartbeat (and can probably claim the donation?)

Thank goodness.
Money is one thing that people aren't willing to part with if their original intent is just to troll.
I'll wait till the noise dies down before browsing through it though. I want a bargain, but not that badly.

 

[DwarvenFood]

Good of AoD to act quick.

 

[Infinitron]

Butthurt comments: http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2012/09/05/green-for-greenlight-valve-now-charging-100-fee/

I love this related tweet that appeared on my feed last night:
“mcc ‏@mcclure111
Basically I’m shocked by the sheer number of ways the indie ecosystem is presenting me in which I can spend ~$75 in order to be ignored.”

Couldn’t they just give the money back if the game didn’t end up getting on? That would keep both sides of the argument happy, I would think. Submission would have to include an agreement that troll entries forfeit that money, but that doesn’t seem too unrealistic either. Is there an obvious thing I’m overlooking here?

Just to throw my hat in: Yes, I can find $100 to cover this. It’s not a big expense, relatively speaking. However, it’s money I could put towards making my game better and it’s money I’d miss.

Submitting stuff to Greenlight (or direct to Valve beforehand) was free. There are other ways to solve the problem of troll posts via community effort, like peer review or sandboxing submissions until some civic-minded types have had a look at them. The fee could be much lower and still deter abuse.

I’m looking at $100 out of pocket and I’m not totally sure why. $100 is a copy of Sony Vegas Platinum to cut better trailers with. It’s a bunch of sound effects off SoundDogs. It’s enough to test out a new artist. It’s two days of living expenses to keep working on the game.

It’s money I can find, yes, but it’s money I could use.

OCCUPY STEAM! We are the 99 percent!

 

[Kane]

Considering how much money you have to pay to get a book published or any other media, $100 are child's play and entirely fair.

 

[felipepepe]

Agreed, if you don't trust your project enough to spend $100 on it, something is wrong.

 

[eric__s]

Agreed, if you don't trust your project enough to spend $100 on it, something is wrong.

That's a good point. There are two caveats though - first, that this isn't the only submission system that requires payment. Even other independent development channels (like the upcoming Indie Games Festival) cost money to enter and over time this could add up to a significant amount. The second is that this is a relatively small amount of money for someone from developed countries, but for someone from the third world this could be devastating. Overall I think this is a good idea but the amount could be lowered for these considerations, especially the second.

 

[felipepepe]

$100 devastating on thirdworldia? It's more money, but it's surely not devastating... and is a double edge sword, the guy may be paying once in dollars, but he will get all the sales in dolar too...

 

[eric__s]

Well like I said, this isn't the only marketing expense you'll need to pay.

I met an exchange student on scholarship from Nepal in my computer science program. He wants to make games, but if he wants to put a game on Greenlight (and other services as well!), it would take him significantly more effort to raise the capital needed than you or I because Nepal is not a very wealthy country. Because the money Steam is getting from Greenlight is going to charity and not their corporate coffers, it might be smart for them to create a system that scales the amount of money required to put up a game if you can verify your country or economic circumstances. I think this levels the playing field a little and lets that Nepalese guy have a better shot. The idea behind Greenlight isn't to limit who can put games up, it's the opposite. This $100 thing was more like a quality buffer.

 

[garren]

I think 20 bucks would be a lot better price, that at least should be manageable to pretty much everyone, and keep the trolls away. How many people are prepared to pay 20 bucks plus get a ban for posting a titty picture that stays up 10 minutes? However this system is a lot better than no payment at all imo, especially when the money goes to charity. When you get your game on Steam, I bet that 100 bucks isn't something to care about at that point.

Besides, like felipepepe said,

Agreed, if you don't trust your project enough to spend $100 on it, something is wrong.

 

[Multi-headed Cow]

I agree $100 shouldn't be an issue, but considering how ridiculous the requirements seem to be for getting accepted by Greenlight (No game has even reached pending, much less accepted) I could understand the reticence in coughing up $100.

If a popular scam like Zomboid hasn't been accepted yet, what are the odds your turn based virtual card game about castle management will? Valve should lower the barrier to entry via Greenlight I'd say.
Shit, Zomboid is only 28% there, and it's the highest rated game I've seen on Greenlight.

 

[kazgar]

We won't know how well greenlight works until something's actually accepted, and for a lot of the games there, they'll have to be finished first. I'm guessing valve isn't totally sure how greenlight will work just yet.

 

[Livonya]

I agree $100 shouldn't be an issue, but considering how ridiculous the requirements seem to be for getting accepted by Greenlight (No game has even reached pending, much less accepted) I could understand the reticence in coughing up $100.

If a popular scam like Zomboid hasn't been accepted yet, what are the odds your turn based virtual card game about castle management will? Valve should lower the barrier to entry via Greenlight I'd say.
Shit, Zomboid is only 28% there, and it's the highest rated game I've seen on Greenlight.

Zomboid is a pretty cool game. I easily got my moneys worth. Just thought I would pop in and defend Zomboid.

 

[Metro]

Let's face it, Valve could charge a lot more. It's not just the platform it's the publicity. Having your game on Steam gets it attention it wouldn't otherwise get. I've seen the laughable complaints about the $100... one guy bemoaned he was entering college and probably couldn't afford it. Baloney. I worked through college. If you're really serious about your game you can afford the $100 fee. If you're just looking to diddle around with some sloppy mess and hoping to cash in on Steam then, yeah, it's probably better that you aren't on Greenlight.

 

[Infinitron]

Valve has shut down the original submission process for indies. MASSIVE BUTTTTTTHURRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR

Wow. I feared this, but didn’t really want to believe it.

They did. I spoke to one dev currently on Greenlight this weekend, he confirmed that not only Steam is no longer accepting submissions through the previous method, but several devs that had submitted previously and were waiting approval (he included) were told to submit to greenlight instead.

The new text of http://www.steampowered.com/steamworks/FAQ.php worth quoting:
“At the moment Steam is currently not accepting new game submissions as we transition to our new Steam Greenlight process.”
“Going forward, we’re putting the choice into the hands of customers through Steam Greenlight.”
“To get access to the Steamworks SDK, you still need to go through Steam Greenlight.”
So, yep, they just shut the door to any indies who don’t already have a contact inside Valve to chat to about getting their next game up on the service by the sounds of it. This fee-required popularity contest just got a lot worse than it sounds, hopefully the community will say this really isn’t on and they’ll reopen the traditional approval process that used to exist for bugging people until you got a ruling on the viability of your game.

 

[Metro]

Well, that sort of sucks. I was hoping they'd keep the traditional avenue open, too, and still independently judge games. Just that Greenlight would serve as a catch basin to scoop up stuff that the community likes that Valve passed on. Not good news for some more obscure indies I'd really like to see on Steam. Ahkranoxis doing fairly poorly and I thought it would be pretty popular.

 

[Infinitron]

Meet RobF, aka "Rob Remakes". I'm loving this guy's comments on RPS.

https://twitter.com/retroremakes

Either moderation, because Valve can afford to pay staff and we should acknowledge this at all times or by providing enough tools to the community to filter out and filter through the crap to find the things they want. Which is how Greenlight was supposed to work. It’s supposed to be the community filters through the crap, it’s supposed to be developers funnelling people from elsewhere into Greenlight to vote up their page. Noise will be an inevitable end result of this.

To use another example of a service flooded with crap, XBLIG. There is a nominal fee that costs somewhere in the same region as the fee to be considered on Greenlight. The service is still filled with rubbish. That’s not the problem. The problem is people need a way to sort through that rubbish and that’s where curators play a part (see also Playlists and Channels on YouTube), that’s where strong and granular search tools would play a part, letting people filter is the answer, not charging an arbitrary amount and hoping the problem will go away because of it. That way you have the community, you have everyone working to make it a more desirable place. That’s how the ideal works.
Greenlight was meant to be a crowdsourced solution to the sorting. That’s what it was designed to be. A way the community could grease the wheels of the submissions machine and a way to hopefully be more inclusive in what they catch. And a way for Valve to offload the submissions queue.

I’m not averse to fees, I pay enough money out for dev things as it is. I’m averse to fees where the situation they’ve been instituted to resolve could have been easily forseen and prepared for by anyone who’s been on the internet for more than five minutes and large parts of the issues solved by launching with a stronger set of base tools to empower people enough to do the jobs Valve want them to do. The first week would always be chaos but you work at laying down the rules of the service, you ensure that you have systems in place to remove abusers from using the service (greenlight, not Steam as a whole…), you launch prepared for these things and you deal with them until the message hits home and the novelty has worn off. These are things that anyone launching a similar service would have to consider in 2012, we don’t let Valve have a pass on it.

But the fees are just a thing to quell the tide, a panic solution that isn’t a solution at all. And they could keep, no matter how many people shout “fuck them if they can’t afford it”, developers out in the cold and they’re the developers who would benefit most from Greenlight because for every 10 shit ones, there’s a person making magic for 25p and a panda cola. Saying fuck those guys if they haven’t got $100 is stupidity incarnate, more so when you consider that some who were those guys you’ve probably bought games from on Steam and turned them into not-those-guys.

Dom, “And if you can’t market your game well enough to raise $100 even on a dozen stores? Well, nobody would have voted for you on Greenlight anyway, and it would have been wasted money to begin with.”
And that’s sorta the problem. I’ve seen the numbers for the other stores Dom and it’s scary the gulf that can emerge between one game on Steam and one on those dozen stores. To the point of, genuinely, those other stores not being able to fund the $100. That’s what makes all this so worrying.

But, y’know, why is this fee here? Never mind the could you pay it, that’s a given that lots can’t, lots seem to think it’s dead easy to pluck $100 out of your arsecrack and some people just look a bit befuddled about the whole thing. Never mind the idea that it’s somehow a privilege to be able to put your game on a website somewhere and potentially have people click a button on that website.

What is the fee for? Why am I paying money because some people uploaded some shit to a website? How the fuck do we get to a place where that’s seen as fine? And since when can’t Valve afford to get some moderators in? Why are people being asked to pay because their system is broken. Fix the system first, show that it works, then we’ll talk fees.

Or, handjob down the docks. Four sailors, easy money.

It’s easy to come up with theoretical ways to raise the money, I’ve read everything from Kickstarters to yard sales to asking your friends to begging from other indies providing you acknowledge that there’s no free rides in life (ew) to saving up really, really hard. None of them fix anything.

They all just paper over any issues and carry on as if it’s perfectly reasonable to instate a system that removes work from a company, foists it onto the community and developers then when it doesn’t quite go to plan in the first few days, slap a fee on it, call it for charity and go “what? what?” a lot as if there aren’t other, better, solutions out there.

I’m not interested in ways of raising the money, personally, I have the fee today and I could pay it if I needed to. I’ll question why I need to pay it and “because you shouldn’t feel entitled to be on Steam for free” so far has been the answer more often than not and I really, really can’t wrap my head around that because well, you could argue that about walking on pavements, farting, anything and it’d still have no less a circular logic to it. “You have to pay because you’re not entitled to not have to pay” is insane.

FYI “Serious developer” folks. Having $100 just means you’ve got $100. It doesn’t mean you’re any more/less serious about your craft and making a game. It also is in no way a dividing line between being a hobbyist and being a professional. It just means you’ve got $100.

Really, we need to stop with the anti-poor rhetoric, it’s pretty gross.

An absolute real poor person. A real game developer like many that exist. That’s what kind. The kind that make videogames and if you buy indie games, you’ve likely bought a game by someone who couldn’t afford $100 at some point. Maybe they had to sell their home to carry on doing what they do. Maybe they’re 1000′s of pounds in debt to make the game, with money having come from family, friends and credit cards galore, maybe they work out of coffee shops on battered old laptops just good enough to run what they need. And they do this because they are very serious about making games and want people to have the best games.

But y’know, since when is “putting your money where your mouth is” any more a sign of being serious about something than building a game with the absolute most love and conviction possible? Since when is not having $100 left any sign that someone hasn’t been putting their money where their mouth is? Who’s to say they haven’t spent the whole time spending the money on making the game?

Please, stop making up random rules that people need to conform to and just, y’know, listen to people rather than saying “you can be this, you can’t be that, you need to be this for that”. Hear them when they say “I can’t afford this” and don’t say “well, you should or you’re this”. Understand, please. These people do exist and they do make brilliant things, important things and indie dev is tough enough without making up silly random rules and trying to exclude them solely because for whatever reason, someone has decided they can or cannot be serious or proper businesspeople just because they’re not sitting on or willing to risk $100 on a gamble.

 

[Infinitron]

Joined: Aug 29, 2012
Posts: 20

 

[Metro]

I agree with his argument that it's a poor/ill fitting solution to the larger problem but I'm still not going to buy into the fact of people not having $100. Sorry, that's bullshit. If you don't have $100 you probably don't know where your next meal is coming from and -- at that point -- do I really trust your financial stability to actual make a game? Go to Kickstarter, get your money, then come back to me when you actually have the ability to produce the thing in two years or so.

Since I don't have much to do right now as I'm watching the NFL opener I'm loading up my Greenlight 'queue' and sifting through all the submissions. Just want to clear the decks so I can easily browse my 'upvoted' games and never see downvoted ones again. Trust me... there are A LOT of shitty/lazy games on Greenlight now. A LOT.

 

[felipepepe]

I’ll question why I need to pay it and “because you shouldn’t feel entitled to be on Steam for free” so far has been the answer more often than not and I really, really can’t wrap my head around that because well, you could argue that about walking on pavements, farting, anything and it’d still have no less a circular logic to it. “You have to pay because you’re not entitled to not have to pay” is insane.

Except that Steam is a fucking capitalist company that aims for profit, not saving the poor developers of the world... they are offering a service and asking for a fee in return; you would think that people would be used to that logic by now...

If he think he is free to use other people's software and work freely, I guess I'm free to use his games too...

 

[Infinitron]

This Gamasutra commenter gets it right: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/177123/Valves_solution_for_Steam_Greenlights_noise_A_100_fee.php

A few things strike me here. First, Greenlight is not about helping USERS find your game. Greenlight is about helping VALVE know about games that aren't currently on their service for which there is (or will be) a sizeable market. Greenlight doesn't need discoverability tools, that's your job as the developer. You want people to find your Greenlight page? Then make sure people know about your game!

So many people seem to want someone else to make their game big for them. It's not Valve's job to get your game out there, that's YOUR job. If you can't figure out how to get people interested in your game, if you can't find ways to direct them to your Greenlight page without needing Valve to do it for you, why would Valve possibly believe that your game is likely to be a commercial success on their platform?

$100 is a complete non-barrier for anyone who is serious about making a commercially viable game. Are you making a game that has the kind of production values that a commercial PC game needs? Are you planning on having ANY marketing budget for that game post-release? Are you serious about making a game that can compete with what already exists on Steam's service, that could show up on the front page and look like something that potential players will get excited about? Then you have $100 to get your game on Greenlight. If you don't have enough confidence in your game or your ability to get people interested in it to spend $100 to help get it on Steam, then maybe your game was never going to have much of a shot of getting released on Steam to begin with.