[quote]If the niche population is really that low on Steam (almost no one is interested), why should Valve be interested in having your game on their store?[/quote]
Why not read the actual announcement from Valve and find out?
They said themselves there are games they would've rejected because they figured they wouldn't sell - and then they wound up selling enormously. There is always a chance for a breakout hit in any genre so long as the product is good quality.
Edit: Just because the present population of IF-genre interested people is presently low that doesn't mean that's the maximum amount of people who could be interested in it.
Edit 2: And also, they should be interested in selling it because there are customers who are interested in buying it.
[QUOTE=gk99;51809413]How about just hiring people to actually play the game first? I know that's not Valve's style, but it's a [I]far[/I] better solution than shitting on low-income indie devs in order to stop garbage games making it in.[/QUOTE]
I agree on the fact that valve needs to just split off Steam as a separate company, where it isn't a plat structure and where they actually hire people to do this kind of shit. I mean, one minute per game alone would filter out alot of the total and objectively shit games(like asset flips etc).
On the topic of the fee though, I do not see this as an issue. It might not solve things but if your game is any good, then you will be able to get the money required through things like crowdfunding or other websites. If your game can't even do that then I think your game probably isn't all that good.
[QUOTE=gk99;51809413]How about just hiring people to actually play the game first? I know that's not Valve's style, but it's a [I]far[/I] better solution than shitting on low-income indie devs in order to stop garbage games making it in.[/QUOTE]
How many people would you need for that though?
Anyone got some stats on how many games go up on Steam a week or something?
[QUOTE=Valiantttt;51809435]On the topic of the fee though, I do not see this as an issue. It might not solve things but if your game is any good, then you will be able to get the money required through things like crowdfunding or other websites. If your game can't even do that then I think your game probably isn't all that good.[/QUOTE]
This will only encourage predatory publishers to take unreasonable amounts of funds from developers' royalties who don't have the money to get on to the service.
Crowdfunding is not a reliable way to raise money and just because there are exceptions does not make them the rule. How good your game is doesn't matter if you're bad at presenting it. Additionally, that's even more time where you're having to sit on your hands and 'watch the pot' while your potential savings drown.
Edit: Also I feel it's pretty ironic that what you're suggesting is pretty much 'Make Kickstarter the new Greenlight' when you're at the same time suggesting that Valve should actually get off their butt and just solve the real problem.
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[quote]This is an hard one to tackle and the fee still seems to be best of both worlds.[/quote]
It is in fact the worst.
You do nothing to stop people who are harming the platform. You shove all the people who are passionate but don't have money out.
[quote]If you are worried about savings and you depend on game dev, you don't make a game for a niche of niche and if you are making a passion project you can always test the waters in due time and understand the risk of putting your game on Steam.[/quote]
I did the math and the averages. I looked at my competition - how fast their stuff sold. I read in to the subject. I had a pretty good idea of how fast my game will sell. I paid my greenlight dues, I started making my game. I followed my budget. Here I am now a few months out from pushing this thing and suddenly my whole damn profit estimates are thrown into the air. All because Valve thinks this'll solve a problem that they ought know it won't.
I'm worried because those sales were supposed to be capable of plugging about $100-200/mo off my savings drop. Now I might run negative before I even see a cent where I was expecting to be at least somewhat positive. The new fee itself makes the waters choppy enough for me to even reconsider launching the product.
[quote] so if you put your game out there and do tests with actual players you will have an idea how risky that endeavor is.[/quote]
Please tell us where and how these tests are done in small markets with low traction. I'm genuinely interested in how you're going to apply logic that works well with large genres with smaller, niche, genres.
Tell me where I'm meant to pull people who play a niche genre of games out of my hat? Am I meant to just pull random people who all will just say they don't like that genre of game? That tells me nothing.
I've looked for communities where people who like IF gather. I've yet to find one that's active but I can tell from steamspy that there are interested people on Steam who're buying IF.
What I need to know is how well my game will sell within my niche; not what people who don't care about this genre think about it. A demo of my game is out, right now, on Itch.io and Gamejolt and I have received exactly one piece of feedback in several months.
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[quote] allows games like Undertale to thrive.[/quote]
Let me correct that for you: May kill them in the cradle.
[quote]I understand you want to receive feedback from your demographics specifically but first you need to know who they are.[/quote]
I know who they are. They don't gather anywhere specifically. I was paid a salary for marketing and developing community relations for 8 years and [b]I am having trouble finding a community of them gathering[/b].
Allow me to share, for instance, what I have found - I have located them in other games' communities. It isn't polite and will likely get me banned on those communities if I go in there yacking about my game and ask them if they'd buy it. But I have located [i]those[/i] communities. The trouble is finding ones that aren't attached directly to a game - nobody's got a popular IF website which has the audience I'm seeking active on it. At least not one I've found. No subreddit. No tumblr blog. No steam community.
I really think that you think this is all supposed to be easy. It isn't.
Edit: [quote]the fee aims to remove low-effort games as seen in the recent submissions to greenlight [/quote]
Also you keep parrotting this. How? HOW does it remove low-effort games? Do low-effort games have no money? Are their creators necessarily less affluent? Do games that have high effort necessarily have more money?
You're creating an incredible false reality in your head where if you put effort in, by gosh, you'll have money.
Reality is not so kind.
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The crowd for A Dark Room is not who I am targeting though I have tried to find tunnels to those who I want (unsuccessfully). Edit: Also, if you look through his blog he did most of his marketing after the game was launched.
What I want is the crowd who went after the Fighting Fantasy games, both digital and book form.
Edit:
[quote]I surely don't think if someone puts the effort and they will receive money [/quote]
Then why do you think this system is of any use at all? How does this new system target low-effort games if you don't believe low-effort means no-money?
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[quote]I think there's a lot of overlap between people who enjoy interactive stories and fighting fantasy.[/quote]
There is - but what I'm aiming for is more complicated because I'm trying to find a particular subset of people within that crowd. I'm looking for people who enjoyed those books just as much as they enjoyed Myst - and the intersection between those two is much narrower.
Also, edited my above post if you missed it. Would still enjoy a reply on that. I still think you're mistakenly advocating for a system that does nothing of what you want and everything that you don't.
[quote]which is it might not be that great of a idea to expect revenue from such a game[/quote]
My data says otherwise. Games like The Banner Saga and the Fighting Fantasy digital games are demonstrating to me that the market is very much there if I can tap into it. The problem is tapping in to it and recognizing it's a smaller market - which it is and which I accounted for.
[QUOTE=Firgof Umbra;51809599]The crowd for A Dark Room is not who I am targeting though I have tried to find tunnels to those who I want (unsuccessfully). Edit: Also, if you look through his blog he did most of his marketing after the game was launched.
What I want is the crowd who went after the Fighting Fantasy games, both digital and book form.
Edit:
Then why do you think this system is of any use at all? How does this new system target low-effort games if you don't believe low-effort means no-money?[/QUOTE]
Because most of the time low effort means that the makers of these shit games KNOW that their games aren't going to sell(and abuse the cards and such) won't invest a decent chunk of money for EVERY shitty game they put up.
[quote]Because most of the time low effort means that the makers of these shit games KNOW that their games aren't going to sell(and abuse the cards and such) won't invest a decent chunk of money for EVERY shitty game they put up.[/quote]
I don't find this correlation accurate. I think there's lots of people who throw tons of money at stuff that [i]they[/i] think is good but which is bad for the market. They're willing to bet money on it. This is demonstrated with Steam Greenlight itself.
Again, pointing out the whole divide between 'how much money a person has doesn't relate to how much effort they've spent'.
Edit:
And if we're talking about specific abusers who are putting games up just to profit off cards: This [i]definitely[/i] won't stop them. If anything, it'll make them more money because the market will be less saturated because less people will be able to afford to participate.
This looks interesting. I hope it will help keep garbage like [URL="http://store.steampowered.com/app/449940/"]this[/URL] off of the market.
It won't.
How so?
I want the allure of being a game dev. I think my game's worth it. I have lots of money I can spend. So I do. I put the game out and spend my money.
What you're really hoping is that all bad indie developers are poor. They are not all poor.
All this will do is alienate good but poor developers.
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It will [b]not stop those games[/b]. It will stop [b]poor people[/b].
It is a poor filter. It doesn't filter out bad content. It will never filter out bad content.
All it will filter is the number of submissions coming in and from what diversity of a crowd those submissions will come from.
You know what the greatest argument against this is if you want quality control on games submitted to Steam? [b]Its predecessor, which did the exact same thing.[/b]
It being a per-game fee doesn't magically fix all the problems Greenlight had. If anything, it's going to magnify them because now you don't have to go through the community - you just pay your dues and you're on Steam.
Edit: Really, if I'm reading between the lines in your post, I'm pretty sure what you're saying is "I want people who aren't professional developers to stop submitting games to Steam".
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[QUOTE=bunguer;51809788]You say that but there is proof it does help, it won't solve completely but it does help, why do you think Valve already demands $100 for an account?
"[b]What is the purpose of the Submission Fee?[/b]
In order to keep spam and joke submissions out of the system, there’s a one-time submission fee that will enable your Steam account to submit games to Steam Greenlight."
They have the data, they know it works against spam and joke submissions, which is why they are discussing increasing it even more. The data they have suggests it works and it might even work better if they become more demanding.[/QUOTE]
Is having less junk worth it if it means we also have less good games? I personally think not. I almost never see junk on steam store unless I go looking for it. I see awesome gold with barely any reviews all the time though.
[quote]They have the data, they know it works against spam and joke submissions, which is why they are discussing increasing it even more. The data they have suggests it works and it might even work better if they become more demanding.[/quote]
They also have the data showing [b] that it doesn't work [/b].
Otherwise, what are you complaining about? The old system was fine right? There wasn't any reason for you to be mad at it? Great. Now you get that system - except without any buffer time at all between when someone wants to publish and when someone gets published.
Oh except that now it's even harder for people who don't work at actual studios to get onboard. But that's also what you want, right? For indie developers to stop submitting their stuff to Steam? If that's not what you want, then you don't support this system.
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[quote]In any case, what you propose[/quote]
Where have I proposed anything? All I've 'proposed' is that this system will be just as flawed/useless at gatekeeping bad content as the old system was because they both rely on the same premise: That people won't spend money to get bad games on to the service. If you'd like evidence showing how that's a flawed premise, I again direct you to go look at Greenlight and see if you can't find some bad games. I guess I also propose that it's even more irrationally burdensome than its predecessor - which it is.
My 'proposal' if you want it is to stop this stupid silliness, make it something like $50-100 to list on Steam, and go that route. Anything more than that is bananas. Anything less than that is bananas.
All it does is filter joke games and poor devs. So if that's all it's good for, it should do its very best to not shut out actual genuine games.
If you're for better quality control, it's [b]not going to come from a filter whose entire purpose is filtering out poor people[/b].
Let's say I have 5k that I can freely spend and want to sell my shitty cookie-clicker clone on Steam.
Wow great quality control Valve you really improved the system and totally didn't fuck over real developers or anything.
[QUOTE=Valiantttt;51809435]If your game can't even do that then I think your game probably isn't all that good.[/QUOTE]
Your game that might make you a million dollars can't make you the price of the entry fee before it gets accepted onto the storefront. The fee isn't applied in a system where you just don't make profit until you've paid it off, it's up-front and you pay it prior to the game even reaching Steam.
[QUOTE=AaronM202;51809437]How many people would you need for that though?
Anyone got some stats on how many games go up on Steam a week or something?[/QUOTE]
A more accurate question would be "how many games are submitted to Greenlight per week" but even in the lower X,000s I'm sure the process wouldn't take more than a few weeks at most to get your game through if all we're checking for is "is it a shitty unpolished asset-flip" and "does it function as advertised."
Knowing how poorly QA is paid in the industry, I bet you could cover your costs, get some good QA in, and make an OK profit by charging $300 per game.
[QUOTE=RichyZ;51809495]Are people also forgetting about the indie devs who live in shitholes where the value of a dollar is much, much higher
I doubt some guy in brazil can pony up 500 like a guy in canada can[/QUOTE]
Pretty much this. I paid the greenlight fee while I happened to have $100 on the side to avoid a situation when I have a game ready but have to delay it until I had the money. If it was like $1000 I'd be set back for months.
Also the devs of VA11 Hall-A came from Venezuela, had there been a huge greenlight fee back then they'd be simply fucked.
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