Greenlight Replacement

[Kes]

For those who don't know, Steam confirmed yesterday (10th) that Greenlight is going. Instead there will be 'Steam Direct' which is targeted for Spring 2017.

What will happen is that after completing a lot of paperwork (including personal or business verification, tax documents etc.) developers will have to pay an application fee for each new title. The reason given is that this "is intended to decrease the noise in the submission pipeline". A reasonable translation of that phrase would be "try and weed out some of the junk".

The level of fee has not yet been decided. Steam have approached various people for their views and have received suggestions ranging from $100 to $5000 per game. Obviously this will hit developers from poorer countries particularly hard where even $200 represents a lot of money.

Steam say that this fee is a "recoupable" fee. This is ambiguous at best. To recoup is not the same as to be reimbursed. Does it mean that devs will recoup it from sales? Well, that depends on the level of sales, doesn't it. Does it mean that Steam will adjust their percentage take until it evens out? There has been no hint.

It is unlikely that the level of fee will be made public in the immediate future. They acknowledge that "There are pros and cons at either end of the spectrum". Until they do confirm it, any figure you hear is going to be pure speculation. No one knows at this stage, including, it would seem, Steam themselves.

 

[Andar]

As said, there are both cons and pros on either end of the decision, and greenlight has been abused (who remembers the company advertising here on the board that they basically purchase greenlight votes for beta-keys and offering RM-Games to participate?)

No matter how they will decide on this, there will always be people who get the short straw on it, and always people who find a way to abuse whatever system they come up with.
That said, I believe any discussion prior to their publication of the new process will be premature. Steam probably hopes for such a discussion to get a wide range of opinions before deciding (that is probably the main reason for that news), but since they will only be monitoring their own forums a discussion here wouldn't even give them that feedback.

 

[Kes]

@Andar Yes, you're right about any discussion here. My purpose in posting was more to give information than anything else. I know that there are people here who had hoped to get on to Greenlight

 

[bgillisp]

I saw something on this yesterday too, and wondered what was known from those who had published games on steam so far. Guess it means we will all have to wait and see.

 

[Kes]

I've read pages and pages of discussion in the Developers' Group on Steam, and no one knows anything more than what Steam posted to that group, which I have summarized in the OP.

 

[cabfe]

Instead of judging the quality of the submitted games (which is a long and subjective process) they chose to judge the quality of the developers' wallets.
Faster, easier, and it brings even more money in.

As a business company, Steam is doing a smart move.

 

[Failivrin]

Wow, that's a little scary. Thanks for the update though.

 

[Haydeos]

My gut tells me this will lead to more kickstarter campaigns.

As well as more bad games from rich people.

 

[Miss Nile]

I think cabfe's and Haydeos' comments summed it up. I don't understand how raising the fee would assure higher quality of the games. If anything, it might prevent the actually good indie games from showing up on the platform, from people who actually put time and effort into their games without having a lot of money and resources. :/ I don't think Valve is thinking much of the quality of the games as much as it's thinking of how to use the situation to just make more money. -_-

 

[The Stranger]

Yeah. From the sound of things there will be zero input from either Valve or the community. From other sources I've read, Valve will do a quick test to ensure the game actually runs (and has content beyond a title screen) then put it on the store. Basically, you pay them and you get your game on Steam. This is moving toward the end goal Valve envisioned all along - people being able to upload their creations to Steam; movies, music, and games.

I was irritated by the whole thing when I first heard about it. However, if it pans out how I think it will (and so long as it has either a reasonable\realistic, or flexible, admission fee) then it could be good for the indie scene (not just for games) in the long run. Though, I have a strong feeling that this move will push poorer devs toward publishers. Just gotta hope not all publishers take away the devs rights to their own work.

In all honesty, I never saw much wrong with Greenlight; one of the major downsides to it was devs buying votes.

 

[Pierman Walter]

So this is another fascinating permutation of Greenlight's current model, "You give us money and we do nothing." I don't know enough about it to judge, but it seems the end result will be more or less the same, if there isn't some sort of screening process. Even if there is, it already seems way too similar to the American college application system, which I am too familiar with.

 

[Haydeos]

Onnn the other hand, removing the system where you merely vote for games reduces the situations where players SAY they'd play a game, but when it comes out, they don't actually want to BUY it.

If the need for fundraising is increased, then developers will be required to make sure their game is actually good enough to even sell the IDEA to people, and customers will be incentivised to put their money where their mouth is, so to speak. Plus having people giving you money beforehand, instead of votes, is a much better way of gauging how well your game would sell on steam.

But this would have been MY advice to RPGM users before this change anyways! Make your game first! Then, explain to people; This is what it will be, this is what the art style will look like, I just need X$ to pay an artist (and now an extra X$ to get it on steam) If it's a good concept, then you'll get support. If you don't, then it wouldn't do well on Steam anyways, so just post your game here on the forums.

I accept that I may be missing some keys things. Sites such as kickstarter not being available in all areas, and other counterpoints like that. You're welcome to disagree.

 

[bgillisp]

But this would have been MY advice to RPGM users before this change anyways! Make your game first! Then, explain to people; This is what it will be, this is what the art style will look like, I just need X$ to pay an artist (and now an extra X$ to get it on steam) If it's a good concept, then you'll get support. If you don't, then it wouldn't do well on Steam anyways, so just post your game here on the forums.

This! I've been saying this as suggestions for a long time to many people who want to hire artists or such when the game is still nothing more than an idea in their head. MAKE the actual game first. Then, once you have it done (or enough done that you are 99.999% likely to finish it), then get the money for the artist and such.

 

[Parallax Panda]

This is... interesting. When I first read it I thought "Oh, crap! I was to late, now my RM game will never get on Steam!".
But after processing this information for a while, maybe it's not so bad - it could even be a good thing.

Reason is, I was already worried that I was late to the tea party considering something like 30% of Steams library was submitted during 2016.
That is crazy. And while I've obviously not looked at them all, I know that there are quite a lot of RPGmaker games among those as well. Aaaand the majority of them are probably pretty bad, unfortunately.
Besides the obvious downside of getting lost in the flood, there is also a big chance that people have seen a lot of bad RM games using the same/similar assets or system as you do. Because to some extent RM games look the same, and many of us use at least a few store bought assets - be it tilesets or music packs. I don't think I've to elaborate on why it would be bad that potential customers more or less unconsciously associate your game with that crappy game they saw last week. Now THIS is what have been my fear all along. Knowing I should've pushed to get my game on Steam in 2014 and not 2017, but hey, we can't rewind the time.

Enter Steam Direct! Yeah, it could be a deathblow to commercial RM and low budget indie games, but it could also mean that good RM games get less competition in the future. Let's just hope that will be the case.
Everything will depend on how difficult it will be to pass the screening process (if there is one) and how much money you'll have to put down to get accepted. I'm hoping that it won't be more than 300-500$/per game and that you somehow can make that money back, cause if it's more than that I'm not sure how I'm going to proceed myself when *cough* if *cough* my game get's finished.

 

[Tuomo L]

Recoupable means it's most likely tax reductable as filing it under expenses.


I am sure it's going to be something reasonable like bellow 200$ per a title. I mean, they're not completely trying to weed out everyone who's not AAA developer.

 

[Saboera]

I'll go ahead and say what I've been saying everywhere, it's just replacing a half baked Greenlight with another half baked system. Valve sometimes seem to have that issue where they have an idea that in a perfect world would be great but end up full of holes when it's actually applied to reality. Remember the paid mods outrage? Was a nice idea on paper but the application was beyond terrible and as soon as it came out, people started abusing it. Greenlight is another example, nice on paper and they could have fixed it, but they left it to fester and again, it ended up being abused like no tomorrow. I would have preferred if they overhauled Greenlight instead which on paper was supposed to be more of a merit based curation system.

Not a fan of this at all for a multitude of reasons. Those who applaud the system and think it will weed out the ''garbage'' are probably in for a rude wake up call depending on what they end up doing.

If the fee is too low, let's say between $100-$200 then the inverse is actually gonna happen. The flood gates will be totally open and there is no curation at all that is planned so far in what they announced.

If the fee is too high, then it just basically mess up indie devs so hard. Start-up costs goes up and it pushes independent developers away from self-publishing towards publishers, investors, other platforms or crowdfunding. Basically the barrier of entry goes way up because it's an up-front amount of money that gets added to the software, hardware, business registration, upkeep, marketing and development costs.

No matter what, this will kill a form of business model which I thought was interesting and was only starting to really emerge. That model is low cost short form episodic games. No one will want to pay a hefty fee every time they release the next chapter of their $2 game, it's disastrous on many levels. Also how the hell is this even going to work with free games, do they get a free pass? I've seen some developers cleverly releasing a free prelude to their game in order to generate interest for the actual game. There is so many ''but what about X?'' questions right now.

Then there is the potential dev abuse coming out of this from scammers, opportunistic investors and ''publishers''. At some point, Valve will have to realize that there's people out there who will do anything for a quick buck and that their systems are gonna be abused by fraudsters.

I guess we have to wait and see what's gonna happen but I can't quite understand why they came out with this announcement without providing much details. We can only give proper feedback when we know the full picture.

 

[Alexander Amnell]

I can understand people not wanting to jump to conclusions, but at the same time common sense sort of dictates that this new format is going to be a paywall, they cutely put as low as 100 dollars (the current greenlight fee) as a consideration but in all seriousness what are they even doing at that point but replacing the abused and easily rigged voting system with the exact same system - even that poorly contrived form of QC, which they're plugging as the entire reason they're doing this in the first place? I doubt they'll decide on anything as high as 5000 but at the same time I'd bet my own money that the buy in price will be closer to 1000 than 100 at the very least, and honestly I'm expecting it to be 2500+ personally. Otherwise they're actually reducing quality control further under the guise of increasing it, and after how long they've managed to outright ignore criticisms on their quality control thus far such an action would be pretty irrational from a business standpoint.

Valve is lazy as heck when it comes to quality control but they're to business-savy at the same time to reduce it further under auspices of increasing it. I think @cabfe has the right of it, unless they are withholding information to the point that the information provided so far will be found in time to be an outright lie a high cash paywall is the only way that this kind of a change makes sense. It's a shame because if they had reformed the greenlight process earlier on it could have been so much better than this, but they chose instead to ignore it until it became so toxic they felt it in their bottom lines and now it looks like they're going to scrap it and go back to the company/publisher exclusive way of doing things that steam, at it's very best, was a rebellion against instead.

 

[Tuomo L]

I doubt they'll decide on anything as high as 5000 but at the same time I'd bet my own money that the buy in price will be closer to 1000 than 100 at the very least, and honestly I'm expecting it to be 2500+ personally.

Anything above 1000 is unreasonably high. 2500+ is ludicrously high and will literally snuff out many actually talented, small time indie developers. Even 1000 is honestly very high and I doubt many developers when releasing their first game have the funds to just cough that money up.


Plus that doesn't stop the shovelware companies, they got the money to piss away that they get from doing shovelware in the first place. In the end, you would merely drive people to other places and kill Steam's direct by overpricing it.

 

[Alexander Amnell]

@Tuomo L Hey, I'm not advocating for it by any means, that just looks like the direction they're most likely planning to take with 'steam direct' given the limited information they've released about it so far. Be good news if I'm dead wrong here, I just can't see how else they'd envision removing the voting aspect of greenlight in favor of a more direct access approach to improve quality control if not by a large paywall.

 

[Tuomo L]

What annoys me is that this is all done under pretense that it's some sort of quality control, when if anything this may actually see us get only more shovelware and not good games due to good devs not able to pay but the shovelware people having the money. Charging developers more money while not giving any benefits to go with the new price tag is very anti developer. It literally makes quality matter even less than before where people could vote for it, now anyone who justs has a bit of extra $$$ can just pay the fee, regardless of the lack of quality on their product.

Besides, if Valve truly was so serious about quality control, they'd hire 20 people to play each game for 2 hours a day at 8 hours by daily basis. That'd mean each person could play 4 games a day, meaning 80 games could be played on daily basis at the minimum, more if the games are buggy and/or unplayable.


This would eliminate all the unplayable games and help with quality control and Valve is more than capable of pulling that off.