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Not like people will follow these rules. Coz there are almost no consequences of posting a crappy game. You get money regardless (in a short term).
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Well not really not many people will buy a crap game.
I spent two years selling faith. Trust me, this is not what early access is doing, you can barely give the stuff away. 
But back on topic, the video is worthless. What is required for steam to become a platform for quality days is to go back t the old days when getting on steam was almost impossible, and definitely out of reach for the average noob with an engine.
Trouble is this won’t happen. Like the ap store and the play store before, steam has realised that volume, not quality, generates money.
The real way to fight that would be to use consumer power. If every steam user demanded a refund every time they got a sub par game, then steam would cave. This might just force them to implement quality controls. But until then, look forward to being flooded with a ton of worthless content, like every other digital distribution system.
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The problem is that most people think that game won’t be crap in several months because it’s still in “early access”
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They should just lower the number of votes required to get a rating, half the early access games dont even have a rating. Encourage the consumer to rate down bad games, or upvote negative comments in bad games. Theres only currently 390 early access games, i cant imagine if you looked and saw a good rating with a high number of owners it will be crap game.
If you go to steam spy and sort by user score, and then look at things that have sold over 100k “owners” they arent going to be stinkers
http://steamspy.com/genre/Early Access
Nah, what they should do is charge $1000 a year to keep a game on it and have it open to everyone, but have a system that keeps a list of premium, or editor’s picks, or whatever that serves as the regular list. Then have mechanisms to give each game a chance to get noticed. Like have a random game suggestion, or games that haven’t been rated section, or something to allow it to graduate to editor’s pick. Maybe give achievements for rating new games. Just some way to make sure that the game at least gets a fair shake for their $1000.
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At first I thought that wasn’t a very good idea, but you’re right, if a game fails to make $1000/year the developers will take it down, which could be good.
The problem is getting each game a chance to be noticed. That will never be easy.
At first I’ve thought that wasn’t a very good idea… and I am still thinking that. Following games would probably get taken down from Steam if it would be implemented:
- Skyrim
- Fallout 3
- Oblivion
- Morrowind
- GTA: San Andreas
- GTA Vice City
- Duke Nukem 3D: Megaton Edition
- Duke Nukum
- Duke Nukem 2
…and more. Because those are relatively old games, but classics nevertheless, it would be hard for those to earn enough cash.
They could generate some cash during Steam sales. Sure enough those games would be featured on Steam page during sale.
Maybe $1,000 mark is too high. $500 - $700 might be more realistic.
Besides, developer himself can pay to keep the game on store regardless of sales they’ve made.
But in my opinion, I don’t feel that this limit would help. Only quality control will help Steam.
Seems like a video made just to cover common sense. He is a very outspoken character. While watching I kept wondering so… where are your games? If this incredibly knowledgeable person has made games (and surely as brilliant as he is combined with him ripping on so many “bad” games he must have made some the right way setting an example of how to do it) I would be very interested in checking them out. If anyone knows what they are let me know. Thanks.
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Oh yeah on the real issue I agree completely the barrier to entry has become way too low. I realize Unity’s mission is to flood the world with Unity games (the whole democratization thing) but that is no reason for the marketplaces to not present a barrier to entry. If Steam charged $1k per game there would be less games there. If they had reviewers and every game had to achieve a certain minimum score there would be less games of a higher quality available. Same for mobile. I am sure if game devs had to spend $500 to $1,000 per published game the markets would not be flooded with so many games that are just clones, crap, half finished and so forth.
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His career builds up on reviewing games. It’s what he was doing for roughly 10 years. He has seen good games, he has seen crappy games.
But he is clearly aware of stock Unity assets as he actively comments on it in this video.
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There is no need to take down bad games or poor sellers. Steam is a perfect example of a “Long Tail” style company, and there is nothing wrong with that. The important part is the rating and search systems. Those are the real keys for making a good “Long Tail” style business, where everything is welcome in the store and end users make sure products get reliable ratings so other users can make good choices about purchases. Ratings and search already exist in Steam, but could likely use some improvement.
Walling off the market with pay barriers won’t fix the mess. Before Steam, there were plenty of well funded but sometimes very bad games available at physical stores (which operated on very limited shelf space). All that pay barriers would do is force larger, more well funded projects to be the only option. Since there is no physical shelf space limitation in an online store like Steam, there is no point into reverting to the previous model that blocked small projects from the market place.
Everybody that is advocating returning to the previous market model needs to immediately read “The Long Tail” by Chris Anderson. It is available through Amazon
BTW, Amazon is a perfect example of a company that really mastered the concept of a Long Tail business.
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Jim’s not a developer, he’s a critic. Critics are very rarely also producers of the content they critique. I can’t throw a football to save my life, but if an NFL quarterback had my lack of skills I’d certainly be justified in saying that he shouldn’t be charging money for his services. But he has answered this particular criticism by saying essentially that he doesn’t know how to make games so he doesn’t. If you don’t know how to do a thing, then you shouldn’t do that thing. Or at the very least, you shouldn’t charge money for that thing.
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I think it is OK they way it is. If you can’t be bothered to search through the content then find a reviewer/curator you like/trust.
I’m not saying there isn’t anything they couldn’t do to improve it (enhanced filtering would go a long way in this regard), but I’m not a fan of barriers to entry, especially monetary ones.
Sterling also built his following largely on ripping into bad games. In which, let’s be honest - if you’re familiar with Greenlight titles - you will see a lot of stock unity assets used.
Admittedly, I have a dog in this race, as I’m planning to release my game on early access in a few months. I’m hoping to clear a thousand units in Early Access sales and I’m definitely worried that the flood of very questionable titles has made organic traffic very slim and hard to come by. On the other hand, if the barrier to entry was much higher - would I even have the opportunity?
Edit 1: Plugged my Game.
Edit 2: Removed the plug and removed negative commentary on someone elses project.
I don’t think that every outlet should have a barrier to entry, but I do think that some should. The only reason to worry about a barrier to entry is if you can’t pass it. And if you can’t pass it, both you and the outlet’s customers alike are better off if you spend more time improving and less time throwing game after game against the wall and hoping something sticks. The stores with no barrier can serve as the pee-wee leagues for game developers to develop the skills they need for the bigger leagues.
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You hit the nail on the head. It’d be cool if there was some kind of path for people to follow. Like say Steam and other mainstream markets required the game dev to have 2 to 3 games released on free markets such as Kongregate before they could get on Steam. Kind of proving themselves. Actually any smart game dev would do that anyway. Make a free game publish to Kongregate and other web portals. Do a few of those and then in your Kickstarter or Steam campaigns you can use those other games as proof that you can take a game to completion.
But that’s not meaningful or realistic. What constitutes a “game” varies tremendously (as stuff like Greenlight/Early Access has demonstrated).
You will always have people gaming a system unless it’s just a clear line like:
- You need to pay $1,000 dollars for your game to be listed.
In which case you’re means testing admittance. Which, well, is what it is.
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