Steam Direct to replace Steam Greenlight
Community Forums/Technical Discourse/Steam Direct to replace Steam Greenlight
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| Apparently Valve are going to be doing away with Steam Greenlight and replacing it with something called Steam Direct. http://steamcommunity.com/games/593110/announcements/detail/558846854614253751 https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2017/02/10/valve-to-abolish-steam-greenlight-open-up-with-steam-direct/ Steam Direct does away with the vote based approval process and $100 Greenlight fee and replaces it with a recoupable per-product fee (basically a security deposit) and direct publication with no approval process for products (they will have a per developer registration process). The amount of the per-product recoupable fee is still being decided upon but apparently it will be more than the Greenlight fee and may be up to $5000. Chances are it will be a sliding scale with smaller developers paying less than larger devs. Dunno about all this. Seems like Valve are removing the nearest thing they had to curation in the vote-based approval process and placing the onus on their ongoing changes to their discovery and recommendation systems. Generally if I try searching the Steam store the results I get back for a simple search are a smorgasbord of unrelated bollocks with no way to exclude stuff I have no interest in from the results (DLC, etc), so I'm thinking these changes will probably not improve things. |
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| This sounds good and bad... hopefully its good and doesnt turn into the app stores for mobiles... |
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| I think by this time next year, steam will on par with the mobile app stores. Mountains of garbage and a race to the bottom in game prices. |
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| “We will ask new developers to complete a set of digital paperwork, personal or company verification, and tax documents similar to the process of applying for a bank account. Once set up, developers will pay a recoupable application fee for each new title they wish to distribute, which is intended to decrease the noise in the submission pipeline.” I just went through this process with Steam (without the app fee) for TU2. They wanted to know a lot of info including proof of identity which I provided by emailing a photo of my NZ drivers licence. |
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| From what I can recall a lot of those dodgy Steam groups that will vote a game through Greenlight for a fee often charge $500+ for the service. That's apparently how a lot of the crap games get onto Steam. Seems like this new system is effectively the same thing but with a recoupable fee. I don't think these new changes will end well in terms of filtering out shovelware games. |
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| Z I also had to provide tax info, etc... the sort of details you have to be an adult to have. So perhaps Steam is trying to set a bit of an age gate so that the twelve year old doing a Unity asset flip will find it difficult to get on. |
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| ...im not quite sure what to think about this, considering fact that if anyone managed to make profit out of current 'fruit salad', steam is, is Valve. I really hope this will be some sort of filtering method where serious developers will be able to show their games, but again, im not really sure how all this will end..time will tell.. |
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| As some one who been through greenlight with my Pangemic game the system is broken, my game was nowhere near close to be voted in with 63% 'no' votes yet it got approved?!?!?!, so even the voting system meant nothing. And there are a lot of good indie games on greenlight but they're quickly buried under 'assets flips', 'Jonnys first Unity game' and 'Joke' submissions. |
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| Obviously the solution is to ban Unity3d games on Steam /s |
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| As some one who been through greenlight with my Pangemic game the system is broken, my game was nowhere near close to be voted in with 63% 'no' votes yet it got approved?!?!? 'No' votes don't count - only the 'Yes' votes do. The 'No' votes just tell the greenlight system not to show you that game again. |
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| I really dislike Steam and Steam alike sites because of the mechanisms they put in place to publish a game. To much hassle. When we released Defenstar Steam wasn't that big so I never bothered and will not bother for now. I might be forced to use it in the future when we have a new game or probably suffer loss in sales. I prefer how itch.io does it. |
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| 5000 dollars eh, looks like indies are going to get screwed over even more. I mean that's like almost 3 months or more of the average wage right? Most people won't even make that much money on a game. |
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| Well that's still not set in stone. I'm sure it will be much much lower. |
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| If Valve had any sense they'd just charge a few hundred bucks as a curation fee and use the money to pay properly trained people to spend a few hours checking that the game is fit for purpose and not objectively complete crap. You'd probably want a tiered system for that where stuff that gets rejected by the first curator is bumped to a higher level curator for additional checking, to minimize curator bias. There are plenty of working models in place for proper quality control and curation systems that Valve could base their curation system on. The way crowd-sourced transcription services handle quality control is one model worth checking out. |
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| Test one one.. sry.. just testing something |
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| as it stands both systems have serious issue's and nothing will fix it, I'm going for the Apple approach of a £99 a year fee. If steam is any good then it should be easy to make it back unlike the Apple appstore whereby our game gets buried in crap. |
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| as it stands both systems have serious issue's and nothing will fix it, I'm going for the Apple approach of a £99 a year fee. If steam is any good then it should be easy to make it back unlike the Apple appstore whereby our game gets buried in crap. Is this written in code? Do the obvious contradictions provide a clue to unravel the code? Do I get a prize if I solve it? |
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| lol the ultimate goal is to have a system that only allows commercial quality software through - rather than the dross, Johnny with stolen code and bought media. |
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| lol the ultimate goal is to have a system that only allows commercial quality software through - rather than the dross, Johnny with stolen code and bought media. +1 ..i hope it will actually work this way.. |
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| lol the ultimate goal is to have a system that only allows commercial quality software through - rather than the dross, Johnny with stolen code and bought media. I think you are hearing what you want to hear. |
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| Quality is mostly about effort and skill, not how much money was spent. Assuming the money is recouped, it still means an indie earns nothing until after the first $5k (or whatever it is). Hopefully, the barrier will be much lower. |
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| LOL "commercial quality"- that's a low bar :) - the moderation in steam is the product reviews- it pays to read them before a purchase. Still a lot of misinformation in the product previews and vids.. |
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| I think you are hearing what you want to hear. I didn't say it would happen...We shall have to wait and see. |
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| Seems the main concern Valve have with curation is that they have a near monopoly on the PC market and they don't want to get into a position where that becomes an issue. Their hands-off approach makes more sense in that context. Sometimes it's better for a company or industry to self-regulate rather than risking the government stepping in to do it for them. Valve won’t manually curate Steam because it dominates PC gaming http://venturebeat.com/2017/02/13/valve-wont-manually-curate-steam-because-it-dominates-pc-gaming/ https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/5ukzxw/valve_says_its_nearmonopoly_was_a_contributing/ |
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| $5000 will keep many small devs out. I'm also unsure, if this helps to increase the quality of games. |
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