There has been a debate over whether more people watch the video or just look at the screenshots in Greenlight; but how exactly do you determine video views? In my experience, it seems that Youtube’s video statistics are only for views on Youtube itself rather than when the video is embedded in another website, but I may be wrong.
Way back years ago when I used to make Youtube videos I’m pretty sure it showed sites that embedded the video, and data from them. Could be wrong, but that’s what I remember.
Apparently, autoplay videos aren’t counted, and Greenlight videos are set to autoplay. Here’s one discussion in which people say that autoplayed videos aren’t counted: https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/youtube/MYnJlwIPEts
I wouldn’t trust YouTube stats for GreenLight videos. I had a hundred plus yes votes, and less then 13 recorded views on YouTube.
No idea then.
It turns out Greenlight is going to be shut down soon anyway, and replaced with a system that basically favors established companies, or so it seems. Valve is shutting down Steam’s Greenlight community voting system - The Verge
There are very real systemic problems in Greenlight which Valve is trying to address, and they need to be addressed. People are, for example, frequently complaining about something like this:
“Lots of people voted for my game, but then it was rejected. This other game is worse than mine and had less votes but it still got accepted. Steam is corrupt.”
Steam ultimately decides what games go on its service. They always have. They always will. If the right people at Valve love your idea and you get no votes, you might still get to be on Steam. And if the right people at Valve hate your idea, you can have all the votes on the planet and you still don’t get to be on Steam.
Meanwhile, a lot of people treated Greenlight like an automated system, which it wasn’t. I’ve spent the last few years in the information marketing community, where a commonly recommended path is to get on some random service and spam the hell out of it with low-quality products. (TradeBit comes to mind.) Even if you only make one sale a month, and only get one dollar a sale, multiply that by five thousand products and you have got a decent income. And that process works when you either (a) do not pay any fee at all to submit, or (b) pay only one initial fee to submit all you like.
Greenlight lets you pay only one fee and submit all you like. So, you know. Connect the dots.
The new system where you pay a fee up front might be better. I’m wary of the idea that they may increase it, because $100 up-front to publish a game is not unreasonable (someone has to look at it, after all, and presumably that person gets paid), but if you start demanding $5,000 to publish a game on Steam that is going to be a problem for most people.
I do see a path there, though: release on a site like Kongregate or itch.io, develop a community, then KickStart or GoFundMe to raise the Steam submission fee. You don’t need an especially large community to raise $5k, especially if your game is going to cost around $10 anyway, and if you can’t sell it hard enough to get 500 people contributing… you’re probably not going to do very well on Steam anyway.
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I agree that Greenlight has many problems, including the large amount of low-quality submissions; but I don’t think that’s the most important issue. A bigger problem that I see are the large number of professional trolls on Greenlight (with names like “Skumbag” [sic]) who seem to do nothing but post negative and often unfair comments on practically every game they review, usually a variation of a few stock allegations such as “asset flip” even in cases where these accusations are patently false. These guys are seemingly deliberately trying to prevent devs from making a living wage, and the replacement for Greenlight sounds like it will make this worse. As I understand it, only established companies with a tax record (and hence significant previous profits) will be able to apply, and there may be a fee of up to $5,000 (more than what most games would make on Steam) This will gut the indie community on Steam and certainly make it impossible to use Steam to break into the market for the first time. Steam had previously been the last feasible method most indie devs have for breaking into the market. Basically the new rules would favor established companies that don’t really need a platform like Steam, or certainly not nearly as much as someone just starting out.
Perhaps you should use itch.io or Kongregate instead. Most of the best F2P games I’ve gotten on Steam started on Kongregate and moved to Steam after they were already successful. If you aren’t doing F2P, itch.io looks like a pretty good place to host your game and see if you can even get people to buy it at all.
And if you can’t sell $5k worth of product without Steam, maybe you shouldn’t be on Steam.
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Nobody knows yet what the fee will be for Steam Direct. It will probably be between US$100 and US$5000 per game, which is a very wide range. At $100, it will open the flood gates for indie games. At $5000, it will largely kill off indie games on Steam. My guess is that Steam will choose $100/game, but that is only a guess.
I agree that any decent game should be able to make $5000 on Steam, but many indie developers won’t risk it if the fee ends up being $5000 per game.
Currently, the Greenlight fee is $100 for all the games you can submit. Stripping it back to $100 per game would have two immediate effects:
- You wouldn’t submit any game you didn’t think could make $100.
- If you were wrong about your last submission, you’d think a little harder about the next one.
I think that would have the desired results with minimal chilling effect on indie studios as a whole, but I also see raising that price to something higher as producing a stronger effect. If I were Valve, I would probably start it at $500 and see what happened.
Historically, publishing a game has cost a whole hell of a lot more than $5,000 for most of the industry’s existence, and as I said there are other places to release besides Steam. If one platform’s new policy makes you give up altogether, I’d suggest you aren’t cut out for game development anyway.
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I did not try publishing to Steam yet but it seems like publishing Unity based Game on Xbox One is easier as UWP APP.
The big difference between Steam Greenlight and Steam Direct is the removal of the uncertainty of Greenlight. With Greenlight, you paid $100 one time and could submit as many games as you wanted through Greenlight, but every game you submitted had a lot of uncertainty about if and when it would be Greenlit. It could be Greenlit in days, weeks, months, or possibly never. With Steam Direct, you have a pay a set fee and the game can onto the store. Regardless of what the fee is, it will be nice to have a predictable system in place.
It will be very interesting to see what the price is for Steam Direct and how the market responds overall. Even at $500/game, it is likely a lot of indie devs will choose itch.io or Gamejolt instead of Steam. I don’t think Valve wants to lose the indie game market to those competitors.
I don’t actually think Valve’s price point could cause indie devs to completely give up. With too high of a price point (for example, $5000/game) indie devs simply will release games on other platforms instead of Steam.
From what I’ve read, Kongregate and Itch.io are essentially impossible places to sell anything since people there are used to free games. So is there any other place where you can actually sell something? If not, then it’s pointless to say that anyone who can’t make $5k outside of Steam shouldn’t be on Steam, since Steam seems to be pretty much the only viable place where you can make any money whatsoever.
That’s because historically, the game market used to be entirely the domain of large companies. Steam at least gives indies a chance, but you seem to think that should change.
Just keep in mind the limitations of UWP, though. For example here are the hardware limitations applied to UWP apps on Xbox One:
The maximum memory available to an app running in the foreground is 1 GB.
Share of 2-4 CPU cores depending on the number of apps and games running on the system.
Share of 45% of the GPU depending on the number of apps and games running on the system.
UWP on Xbox One supports DirectX 11 Feature Level 10. DirectX 12 is not supported at this time.
An Xbox One is not an overpowered device to begin with, so the limitations are very limiting. For any larger games, an Xbox One devkit is required, and there is a process in place to filter who can get those devkits. It is vastly easier to get on Steam than to get an Xbox One devkit.
The price point isn’t the main problem: the main problem is the apparent requirement that all submissions be made by companies with tax records and hence enough previous profits to have to pay taxes, which prevents start-ups from even getting in. And without any viable alternatives for getting started in the market, it would become pretty much impossible for beginning developers to ever break into the market if that’s going to be Steam’s new policy.
I agree limitations are there at the moment and may be it can change in near future since Microsoft is becoming more and more open.
It seems like that independent developers are being kind of forced to sell their ideas to Publishers only to get some chance.
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Ooh, then you’d better not try them. I’m sure wherever you heard that, the people saying it totally knew what they were talking about.
Last year, a pair of college students decided to combine one person’s art talent with the other person’s programming talent and produce an idle dating sim. They threw it up on Kongregate, people loved it, and then they took it to Steam.
Somewhere along the road they opened a Patreon account which gathered over $6,000 in contributions the first month.
Now, I am sure this only works if your game is popular. You know what else only works if your game is popular? Developing games for a living.
Hey, remember when everybody was running around shouting about the “Indiepocalypse” where Steam was letting so many terrible games onto the market that nobody was going to make any money with indie games ever again and the market would collapse and only AAA titles had any chance of success?
The three primary reasons people identified for this were Greenlight, Greenlight, and Greenlight. There was no quality control! Nobody was vetting submissions! Idiots were sticking games up on Greenlight and then giving away prizes to people who voted for their game! The voters were stupid anyway! It was just chaos!
You could tell something was wrong, because so many good games (read: “my game that I wrote”) didn’t make it onto Steam with Greenlight, but they published garbage like There’s Poop in my Soup! Or, you know, some other game I didn’t like.
So hey! Valve is listening and Greenlight is changing so Steam will be a better place. You know what that means, right?
Of course you do! The sky is falling! Everything is bad and getting worse! They are going to shut down the market and stop us from publishing and indies will not get to make games anymore and then they will make us eat bugs. When you submit a game and they don’t like it, they will just email you a big picture of Gabe Newell’s butt.
You already can’t actually sell your game on Steam unless you have those same records. I did a little added research just now, and I see no indication anywhere that the necessary records themselves are changing. In fact, Valve representatives are basically quoting the existing FAQ on exactly what the “digital paperwork” is going to be.
If it is a problem for you that you need to be a legal entity which pays taxes, I don’t know, go back to Mexico? I can’t imagine many situations where this is difficult. If you jumped the border, maybe, but that’s really all I can think of.
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