If you’re way too f****ng bored now or just drunk or retarded, read on to see the story of my game:
An year ago I put my game on Greenlight steam. It was total shit at the time and asset flip. You probably think the game did poorly and never got approved? Wrong! It was approved via greenlight and actually reached top 5th place in greenlight out of 1400+ games.
Now the fun part…I was happy with the success and went through finishing the game. I started the game literally from scratch because i didn’t want people to accuse me of “asset flipping”. 2 out of the 3 levels were re-build from scratch.
^ Those are far from the most telling screenshots of what the game has to offer. Here is a trailer which has a low fps rate because my screencapture software ucks - but the game runs smoothly on decent machines - even steam approved the exe already…
I have no problems releasing at as early access and the price is currently low…well compared to doom and gta -:)… 8$ and not 60$.
However Steam are already finding reasons not to approve the Store page which aside from any possible paranoia seem to tell me they simply don’t want the game but can’t just say “no”. I’m sure when I’ve signed up I’ve agreed to accept the fact that they can reject with no explanation given, but so far this hasn’t been the case, they seem to give reasons not to accept the store page which postpones the release.
My current strategy is:
Put it on sourceforge as demo with one of the levels + source code (unity project for it…) and then lower the price to 5$ via paypal for full release.
WIll this ever work? I’ve also already contacted Gog and 2 publishers who wanted to play a demo months ago.
I just want to get rid off this sh**y game, don’t want to turn this into a never ending slavery to a project I don’t even enjoy working on. I want it to end.
Maybe instead of assuming you’re the pawn of a larger conspiracy to keep your game off of steam you should tell us what Valve said their reasoning was for not letting you upload it yet.
The reason for my suspicion is the whole approval process that far:
I uploaded for approval roughly a week ago…the exe was approved in no time, just one day. I thought thats the hard part and that the description is the easiest.
Then the description “hanged there” for several days…no approval, no rejection…I then start thread in a forum - no answer. Then finally maybe after someone seeing the thread in their forum replied to my email that they can’t release because I have added an “EULA” in the legal lines of the description. Fine…i removed the eula and resubmitted.
Then…they wrote that that the game should consider early access. Fine…but that gave me big red flag: Basically, why are they reporting about the exe once the game is already approved but the description not? Are they hinting they can determine if a game should be early access based on screenshots and video alone 0_0? I don’t get it…
Fine, I put early access as an option and re-submitted for review. Again started a thread in their forum asking politely to send me single email with all issues possible instead of spreading it out in several. Then…no reply, even some guy replied but not valve."
With that being said, I’ve read “horror stories” about people unable to upload their builds or the testers unable to play their game. Now this was my fear and not the f****ing EULA which I fixed but they came up with something out of the blue.
Obviously you’d feel slightly paranoid in a situation like that, there’s no logical explanation that it’s all fine if you analyze the whole process of approval that far.
Just cut your losses and drop it. You’ve clearly made up your mind already. Likely you just feel you need to still monetise it somehow because of sunk cost fallacy. Am I right? I’d say put it on https://flippa.com/ if you want, but I wouldn’t expect to get much for it. Also note that you probably aren’t allowed to resell any assets that you used.
I’ve been considering flippa for totally different things - such as: if I need money fast for a mobile app. Any experience with that? I mean I’ve made some money with google play over the years but now considering a whole different approach which as anyone can guess will mean less money via flippa but I wouldn’t mind just testing it.
I mean, sorry if this sounds too vague and all over the place - what I’m trying to say is: sell an app for FAR less than the projected money I’d be taking from google play on 15th-20th the next month, just curious if flippa works at all or is it just brokerage where “investors” are looking for other investors…
Sorry, no idea. I never used flippa nor did I release anything on steam. If you have a mobile game that gives you income I’d keep it unless it also has ongoing cost of some sort attached to it and you want to cut your losses on maintaining it or something like that.
If you are going to release the source, or try to sell the game source, bear in mind that you cannot resell or redistribute anything that is not yours. And scripts, models or content that is from the asset store or (or elsewhere that doesn’t specifically allow you to redistribute), will have to be removed first. Just something to bear in mind.
The approval of the exe sounds like it was just an automated check for malware.
Then they look into it some more.
Might be that they look at your game more closely than others since after reading a few Greenlight comments, the Greenlight project was likely reported for use of CoD and CS:GO assets.
Yeah you could be right…the cs thing MIGHT have been an issue but again and again - it was resolved an year ago. Someone actually reported it one Saturday evening last year (guess it was a serious lawyer who reported it - and then steam removed the report - no questions asked.
I won’t be surprised if people now report it for the fact that 2010 I’ve been using php scripts bought from hotscripts.com and not making my own…
- and then steam removed the report - no questions asked.