“Traffic Jam Simulator” is a 3D, realistic simulation of sitting in your car, stuck in very slow-moving traffic - like a racing game but without the racing. Mostly sitting, except for the “Crazy Mode” where you can blow up other cars; but that wasn’t even shown in the trailer. The trailer just shows a car model, and then a car sitting stuck in traffic, moving at a snail’s pace. Now, the devs said it reached # 95 in Greenlight in less than a day and it was officially Greenlit at some point, although it still hasn’t been released after almost two years. Steam Community :: Error
My question is: how did it do so well on Greenlight? How did it get Greenlit at all?
I don’t think you understand how many people love to just press stuff without any care of the consequences. Almost everyone on steam wants to see the world burn. The entire steam experience is just a game, or part of fun time.
Well, some people will vote something bad through just to be funny, especially if certain YouTubers have already attacked a specific game. But other times, people will simply watch a few seconds of the video and vote really quickly. In this case, the music and visual in the video are pretty good during that first dozen seconds. Some people may have voted before seeing the actual “gameplay” in that video.
One interesting thing is that there are over 300 comments. Usually hundreds of comments on Greenlight means the game was popular among Greenlight voters. Most games on Greelight get about 20-30 comments.
One thing that is interesting here is how many titles that developer put on Greenlight. The developer has 51 games in Greenlight. Not all of them were Greenlit, but that is a pretty busy person to place that many games in Greenlight. Some of the success with “Traffic Jam Simulator 2016” was simply the result of trying over and over with every possible idea. Here is a link to the games the developer has on Greenlight:
It looks like “Traffic Jam Simulator 2016” was Greenlit in 2015 but did not get completed or released yet. Wonder if this is one of those games that never gets released or if the dev will rename it “Traffic Jam Simulator 2017” and release it at some point.
I’ve noticed a lot of people on Steam like to badmouth and ruin things for other people’s games, but that usually makes it difficult for games to be Greenlit rather than the other way around.
Why do some people think watching birds for hours on end is the greatest thing ever? There could be many reasons for it being Greenlit I’d guess. Like mentioned above some people probably do just click Yes. Others click No on any game in a genre they don’t like. So people weirdness could definitely be a part of it.
The game is kind of unique. I suppose people who live in cities and can relate to sitting in traffic jams may be hoping they can do all of the crazy things they’ve thought about doing when stuck in real life. A possibility.
I also think a big reason could simply be that people are actively checking out the games waiting to be Greenlit and they see a lot of very bad games and then something like this actually looked very good in comparison. Definitely could be a possibility.
Some people would vote Yes because of the people whining & crying in the comments calling the game garbage. Like I could see myself doing that. lol Seriously, I have seen many times now when people are butchering a game it causes many others to support the developer particularly if the developer is responding in a “high road” way.
On another note I checked out his library and overall he’d made a lot of interesting looking games. So maybe people see some real effort there and want to support him.
On yet another note this all does kind of make me think about completing a game again and this time putting it up there. But thinking about it a bit more just tires me out. I was working on what I had envisioned as a very cool hack n slash kinda scrolling platform game several months ago. But even that ended up wasting too much time on graphics nonsense. One of these days I want to make something that is truly just like colored rectangles no animation at all. And maybe like sort of microscopic too like the entire game world fits on a single screen. 2x2 pixel player or something. But I dunno even this sounds like too much work at this point.
The reason for that last rambling paragraph is because I kind of like how some folks just grab some art assets from the store build a game with them quickly (I guess) and then get the game out there. At least they are getting stuff done. This is a very active developer.
There’s “Goat Simulator”, “Surgeon Simulator”, “Shower with your dad”, “NotGTAV” and many other nonsense games.
I think that people who let the games onto steam for the heck of it are a different and possibly much bigger group than those who badmouth everything they see.
I think they are part of a collective of arseholes, frankly, and usually they’re young since there’s nothing better for them to do be doing with their time.
Well to be fair I’m with the developer on this, not the people voting badly. The developer is using greenlight as it was originally intended - to see what the public wants before development begins.
This is because generally, a product that does badly on greenlight will do badly when it goes on sale, even if its greenlit. Traffic sim was greenlit but it’s clear it’s been trolled so the developer would be stupid to develop it, especially in light of the refund culture. It would be very unlikely people would sit in a traffic jam and not hammer refund
So here, the developer is clearly just using it for mining interest. Steam designed it so you can and it’s valid to do so, therefore any blame for this falls on Valve/Steam/Voting public.
I think the trailer was funny, with the anticipation they build up in the beginning.
And maybe some people just find it enjoyable to be stuck in a traffic jam.
No, there’s too much open-mindedness and willingness to accept anything. Sitting in a traffic jam is not enjoyable. And if anyone does enjoy that, they aren’t numerous enough to bother developing a game for. Just no.
Yeah I’d have to say this is a case of the public encouraging something they almost certainly will either not play, or refund immediately. I’m not saying a fun game couldn’t be made out of this premise, but nothing that anyone could reasonably want to play was shown in the trailer.
As far as the voting is concerned, I’m not sure if it’s out of malice - I think some people are probably just tickled by this anti-climactic idea and this prompts them to want to respond in a positive way. Maybe they didn’t even think about what the vote meant, and treated it as a ‘Like’.
Overall, the fault is definitely the voting system itself.
Papers, please is an actually good game with mystery, intelligence and a few endings to the story. Traffic sim in no way indicates any of that by the promotional video, and indeed, it does not exist.
Since the promotional video is all there is, and it’s not VR, I don’t think I need to spell it out.
Hippo, what I meant is that just because “sitting in a traffic jam isn’t fun”, it does not mean that “it isn’t possible to make a fun traffic jam game”. It does not mean that “This particular jam simulator looks fun”.
I think that jam simulator’s “trailer” is pretty bad, but the reason it worked for greenlight is because it is one of those trailers that create illusion of a game. Changing vew couple of times, adding background music and few captions is often enough to jumpstart user’s imagination and make them imagine portions of product that do not exist. For example, after looking at the trailer, people can imagine a long road, maybe some sort of city with cars, several “levels”, or something silly like surgeon simulator… while in reality the only thing the trailer shows is one scene shot from different angles, which probably wasn’t even a gameplay footage.
Well, the dev did later say that there’d be an option of blowing up other cars, in which case it would become an automotive version of Goat Simulator… but I don’t know how many of the Greenlight voters even knew about this feature.
