Hey all, not sure how many of you got notice of a Steam Greenlight Dev Meeting today, but yea there was one scheduled for today by Valve that stated it was for Steam Greenlight Developers to help address concerns, questions ect. to improve Steam Greenlight.
Only problem is… if Valve care so much why not have a real meeting using something like Go To Meeting where Valve can properly manage the Q&A, by allowing all participates a chance to ask a question with a virtual hand raise, you go down the list and allow each person to ask, be heard, and receive an answer…
Instead, they invited everyone into a Steam Group Chat where 100’s of people are blasting off Questions all at once, and you can’t even read anything because the chat is flashing like 5-10 messages a seconds! !@#%# :-x
Lol so I see you really made this thread uh.
Well I will agree, It does seem like it was a bit pathetic with people screaming to get their opinions in.
And by the end of the chat… nothing, no annoucements, no conclusions. Nothing.
Greenlight is useless! It’s not even discoverable nor are they leveraging their user base effectively to provide more views and votes.
Our game gets 20-30 views a day now… With a total of 18000 since Greenlight started. Out of 40 million+ users it’s clear Valve is doing it wrong.
I’d suggest they rotate 2-3 Greenlight games in the Steam News Update popup on the client daily.
Greenlight as an experiment is a complete failure and I’m surprised it’s even kept going this long. I actually have a chart from a while ago that tracked indie game releases over time and even after the introduction of Greenlight, the release pace hasn’t changed at all and games still get released without any previous publishing deals. All Greenlight has succeeded in doing is showing just how many indies were submitting to Steam before Greenlight was introduced.
They should just make it so that Steam is an open system and anyone can submit, but maintain curation on the front page.
Sounds like you are suggestion they should have opened an ‘indie store’, then let market forces do the work of pushing the best content to the top, of course along with some special features, editor choices, new releases etc. They could even make it so that the most successful (by critical review/sales) would transfer to the main steam store for even greater visibility. Which is what I feel they should have done as what they have now doesn’t seem to be doing anything at all. At least it would justify the fee they charge, are they still charging that?
I’m actually really surprised they didn’t go this route in the first place.
The fee is still there. But yeah, an “indie store” which you could link to people so they could buy things through the Steam client with periodic “indie gems” being featured on the front page would be ideal. At least, ideal compared to the current mess.
Gabe said (in some video I was watching where he says the same thing he says in every video for an hour) that as soon as it launched they realized it was something they don’t intend to keep and basically was a wash.
Nope still don’t want to see it happen. I’d rather Steam remain a purely curated platform.
Thats not going to solve anything either. It’ll have the same problems as greenlight has right now and how users discover your game. You won’t see much in the way of sales either. Users will still want that only on Steam(except now it’ll just be the main store) and there’s a huge difference between clicking a yes button and dropping down cash.
I agree, the current system appears to have 1 objective: That steam no longer has to waste so much time reviewing games, they can simply tell you to dump it on greenlight and forget about you. Also you have to pay for that.
I think it would be much better to let people vote with their money. It is so easy to just say yes/no by clicking a button, but it is a completely different story to click buy. An indie section or something were indies can sell their game and then promote the successful ones would be a win for everyone, steam, gamers and developers.
You do get some decent exposure for 1 week, so you still get something out of that fee.
But as it is a more suitable name for the service would be “redlight”, “strainer” or “flypaper”
You want greenlight to work? make it a preorder system. If enough preorders are met, the game goes into the catalog.
Still will suck but would be better than the current popularity contest where people don’t have to cater to the pirate community to get free votes. Right now, some one promises a group of people a free “pirated copy” of the game and they get to vote. That’s the way McPixel became the first Greenlight approved game. The guy himself posted his game in piratebay and then made a redit catering to the piracy community. Instant #1.
So, make “votes” actually come from your credit card. Lets see how many voters actually want to put money in the table for the title they are backing up.
Great idea Starsman. This way they can keep their precious curated store, and steam gets to see votes that actually matter.
And you actually gave me another idea: I can put a link in my game in google play asking people to vote for it in greenlight :), until they fix greenlight, at least I can ask our fans to help us.
There’s just too many indie games at the moment. During the early 2000 there were many para-legal hobbyist websites dedicated to cataloging and preserving games out of stock, some of which were poorly recieved. I can’t see that kind of thing happening these days with all the junk in the market. And not all of it is actually junk, but there’s just too much! If things keep progressing like they do, soon there’ll be billions of games.
For the record, I know I sound like an elitist jerk but:
I hope that greenlight dies. I hope that it remains difficult for people to get their games onto protected platforms. This is because every indie noob slenderman title added directly harms visibility for legitimate games. And who decides what is legit is down to the store curator. This quality bar is essential in my view if these markets will continue to thrive.
We saw it all unfold on iOS and that is a pretty decent indicator of what is to come.
I am saying that blasting open consoles for all is the road to ruin. It undermines public trust and spending, it creates a force where every customer prefers to just play freemium games and drives it all down to the lowest common denominator. I mean no disrespect to anyone reading this thread who has high hopes themselves, it’s just business.
I worked very hard to get Simian Squared into a position where Sony, Steam etc actually knows about us and has heard of us before - partly due to the hard work with clients, and having two strong visual titles out. We aren’t a giant company, just a couple of guys working around the clock. I don’t want to see that future ruined by gibbering talentless masses destroying visibility of quality titles.
Curated, please. One man can do top quality stuff that meets that bar, so don’t be afraid of it, embrace it.
I agree 100%. This greenlight crap depresses me. Even if I write an amazing game, now I have to go through some bs process of winning votes to make it onto steam… fantastic… If I know anything, its that im shite at promoting my stuff.
