Why is the RPG Maker name so hated?

Well it wasn't all sunshine and rainbows back then too. Many great games struggled to get greenlit and many studios with a lot of potential went under because they couldn't get their games out there. The fact that there is a nice middle ground seems to be lost on valve tho XD.

 

Well, giving the propper feedback is not easy and takes time, i can't say that their team was big or small. A couple of friends of mine sent a game demo to nintendo once and after a couple of days or weeks they received a huge feedback about what they should do to improve their mechanics & sheep and why their game wouldn't be accepted by nintendo.

 

Well I wasn't really saying anything about feedback. But there where a few games that I really wanted to play that never made it cos of steam greenlight. Basically the game they made before the one I wanted to play didn't make em enough money to continue making games. Because it didn't meet the draconian standards valve had back then. But now it's even worse. Now it doesn't even matter if your games good. Good luck finding it in the sea of crap.


p.s I am overcome with the desire to give the cat in your avatar hugs .. is it yours .. what's their name XD?

 

@RHachicho: Right, and it seems to be getting worse. I've noticed that now there is a huge rise of unity bare-bones greenlight games (watch for the ones with the default Cryengine), and renipy games are starting to flood the market too. And there is one other where I'm starting to recognize the same assets as being used, but don't know the engine, maybe gamemaker?


The point is, right now every engine is flooding the market, and people are getting turned off by it. It's not just our fault, but we were the first, so we take the flak. Seems people are now taking the extreme routes to get their games noticed too to offset it, as I've seen a rise in RPGMaker games with half naked women in them just to appeal to that audience (though renipy is worse...don't ever read the message forums for those games if you don't want to lose your faith in humanity, as the first post is always is there an 18+ patch?)

 

Ha! well I guess I can't talk as My game will be NSFW. I'm not having my characters prance around in thongs and bikini's tho. I'm attempting to tell a serious story that happens to have sex in it. And people don't run around in thongs outside unless they want to catch colds ... But I can't really talk on that score. I don't really have the issue you seem to do with R rated stuff. I know the forum's rules on it so I don't post any of it up here. But I don't really think having sexy stuff in a game automatically makes it bad. I guess I would have to see those games for context ... I certainly think that having characters run around all but naked all the time is very silly and can't really be a sign of a serious attempt to tell a story.

 

@RHachicho Well, you can only give feedback if you gave a propper look at the project.

This cat is not mine but it's face is so funny that i had to use it as an avatar.
My cat is actually less fat and fluffy :v

Here she is

Spoiler

I've found her inside the trash can of my building, she's 8 months old now
 

 

She's very cute but I think we need to stop this here .. I think Shaz might put us both in front of the firing squad if we start trading cat pictures on the rpgmaker forums XD

 

The situation on Steam right now is kind the bedroom-programming zero-budget dev community's fault too, since in the past it was much harder to get onto Steam, some believing it was too hard and a lot of potentially great games couldn't get greenlit because the developers simply could not achieve the high level of publicity and exposure. A lot of people protested until the approval system was changed, but now we have the opposite problem. In Valve's defense, it is incredibly difficult to create a functional and practical system that relies on the whims of anonymous users. On the other hand, it is still kind of unfair to make us choose between the old way, where developers metaphorically tied their games to hang gliders and put them in catapults in hopes they would get over the insurmountable wall, and the current way, the sewage tsunami we all know and love.

 

Back then we still had other platforms to release games besides steam like desura and GOG but people just wanna play your game if it's on Steam, this still a fact.


This is fact is so true that if you release the same game in steam and in another platform you'll earn from 2 to 4 times on steam compared to other platforms.

 

I'm pretty sure an company like valve will find a way that is in the middle of both sides.


I'm already imaging something like a 2 Step System.


A fast and easy green light should be okay, but before the release it should have a final quality control  


So we could avoid getting flooded by trash

 

I'm not as optimistic as you are. This is just my opinion, and I am hoping against hope that I am wrong, but I think the only way Valve will ever do anything about this is if something happens that is SO bad that Steam is forever associated with unplayable, soul-annihilating, broken Hell garbage and absolutely nothing else. As bad as Greenlight seems to us now, it could be so much worse. Right now, the system is at least somewhat functional and is still capable of producing large amounts of legitimately good games. I don't think Valve is going to risk throwing away a decent system for something that might turn out super bad, and scare away many potential developers, losing huge amounts of profit in the process.

 

Yet again, it still doesn't address some legit issues. Some games have assets/music/images/etc. that they don't own. Some developers can be 100% filled with scam juice (see Digital Homicide). Some QA check would be appreciated and ensure that Valve doesn't allow illegal garbage in there.

 

the problem with that idea is that quality control takes a lot of work and thereby costs a lot - even professionals can't check for all possible sources of stolen resources and then check if that resource is really stolen or the one case where the creator was asked and paid for.


Greenlight gives the community the option to do those checks for free, that is the only way to get it halfway done.


Otherwise Valve would have to do quality control by searching requesting the game creator to list his sources, and that would make the process not only expensive (which would cut down on the money for the creator), but also slow down the approvement to the speed of the people working for valve.

 

Yeah I do get that Andar, I understand that valve can't do everything. And that genuine quality control has to be more thorough than just looking and going .. yeah .. looks like copyright theft. But there are times where you have to think do they really have to do 1000 checks to spot the obviously bad. Like something that's almost unplayable low quality or carrying characters from 10 different competing well known licensed properties. I think if I was valve and a game featuring donald and daffy duck having a deathmatch turned up on steam .. I would just take it down and send an email to the dev asking them to prove they have permission to use those assets. That way the burden is on the Dev not valve. If he can prove his game is legit .. it gets back on steam. Quality control is more difficult as it is somewhat subjective. 

 

RHachicho said " I disagree that steams laxity is good for sales." Based on what information? Do you have sales data of Greenlight games before and after they changed the process? Total profit figures?


Old system: 100 games Greenlit per year. New system: same 100 games get Greenlit, plus 1000 more. It would seem the new system is more profitable. There must also have been costs associated with the old system of quality checking; perhaps that's why they ditched the old system. Either way, both ways, or ways we have way of knowing, Steam does what is best for Steam.


Your other issue "how u gonna convince people your rpg maker is the good one", that's what your Steam store page is for. My game has been out for 6 months and under 1% have requested a refund for "Not fun". Don't up-sell, that's my advice: show plenty of real gameplay video, not fancy trailers. If there's a market for your game, they will come.

 

When so many more get greenlit, it encourages more beginner devs to give it a try. This does mean more submissions to greenlight. There is a fee, so it would mean more money. 


With more beginner devs giving it a try, you get the lowest quality projects coming from engines with the lowest barrier to entry. Unfortunately, that is RPGmaker. Lowest barrier to entry. So, tons of submissions, some get in, lots make us look bad. 


Change your game so it is different. Make it good. We need some more big name/highly rated/well done projects to make us look better!

 

@bgillisp Adult Games will always be a part of the market, That doesn't make them bad, It makes them not fort general public consumption, But there have been some really good ones out there that have remarkable stories that really go far beyond just "This is an adult game so there is nothing but sex" Katawa Shoujo is a great example of an adult game that is still very well done, and has an option to turn off the R18 content so it can still be enjoyed completely without the adult content. And considering such a game came from part of the darkest area of the internet where tasteful content is a complete rarity that's saying something. The whole thing with RenPy is its a visual novel engine... The first thing a lot of people think when the term Visual novel is used is H-Game, galge porno game ect... That's kinda a fault with the medium itself where the most noted titles ARE adult games. I think the problem lies with the maturity of the community on that stand point. So much as show a woman's nipple today and you get 30 to 40 idiots going YAY TITS! and celebrating. And that's outside of sexual content.


Bad games make bad games. Subject matter itself will not make a bad game. It may make a controversial game, a game that makes some people uncomfortable ect... but The subject matter doesn't make a game good or bad despite how tasteless some view certain content to be.

 

Well .. no surprisingly enough I haven't in fact bothered to look up the intake of every game on steam as well as steam's total intake over a 5 year period. And I don't really think that should be expected of me in the context of having an opinion on a forum topic either. If you disagree with my opinion feel free to do so. It's just that ..  my opinion. Though I would venture to ask if you have similar data to back up yours? It seems reasonable to assume that you do as you seem to expect it of me. Your game is a sample size of one. And a lack of refunds are not sales numbers either. Therefore hardly proof positive that me or you are right or wrong. Especially considering the volume of games out there.


I think I've made my point. Trying to string people up on the altar of "proof" in a casual forum discussion because you don't like their opinion is rather rude. Please try to be a bit less confrontational .. stress is bad.

 

Valve is a big company, i don't think it would be so expensive for them to keep a feedback + the old greenlight.
 

 

What has Valve been doing lately anyway (besides raking in money and falling behind the other platforms to the point that Origin has better customer support now, ORIGIN)?  There sales are even getting worse with Skyrim hitting nowhere near the low cost of older sales.


I agree that Greenlight needs to have some quality control.  By not having any, there are literally driving people away from the good ones (there is a reason I don't look for games through steam anymore, there are way, way to much crap to sift through).  Actually,  I find that alot of people are now saying things like "Looking for good games through Steam? LOL," and just recommend people look through other sites (which do not talk about indies much, like IGN).


@Andar - I don't buy the whole expensive counterpoint.  Valve is making the most via there game distribution platform, but they have yet to even try to fix there customer service (which they admitted sucked and they are working to fix... ....starting 3ish years ago).  Valve isn't really doing anything major at all and just ends up never complete ling anything they say they are going to do (like how they were suppose to close greenlight).  Heck, they only added refunds to try and damage control that Australian lawsuit (which they ended up losing anyway).


The only way for Valve to do something is to have some MAJOR backlash.  Like Skyrim paid mod level (and that took quite a while for them to even listen, let a alone get rid of). Remember this is the group that thought Portal 2 didn't make enough profit to be worth similar games in the future.