Interfectum
Member
Really? Your solution is an iOS ghetto?
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Steam axes submission process, ALL new pubs/devs must go through Steam Greenlight.
- Thread starter chubigans
- Start date
Really? Your solution is an iOS ghetto?
jim-jam bongs
Member
they chill with 4chan all day, smoking blunts and making hats
They count the money.
opticalmace
Member
Fine with me.
Greenlight is a great idea as a safety net for gems that fall through the cracks as well as a chance for the little guy to get noticed, but it's just not a system that's up to the task for replacing internal curation on a grand scale. If Valve feels like they can skimp on that department by making the approval process a popularity contest for even established devs, then Steam will be a lesser storefront for it.
faceless007
Member
Wasn't the previous Steam submission process manned entirely by one guy? Did they just automate him out of a job or something?
Oh god stop this right now. The days of Valve being silent for years at a time are long past. You can easily compare their recent output with similarly sized studios.
no its not.
TouchMyBox
Member
Greenlight hasn't really failed yet. It has problems and concerns, but it's all awkward speculation at this point rather than something you can really point to and properly criticize.
I, however, anticipate some growing pains.
plagiarize
Banned
there are finished PC games that have been released on PSN, Xbox 360, iOS and Android that are not on Steam because they haven't cleared greenlight. How is that good for anyone? Now imagine adding a crap load more games into the popularity contest.
crimsonheadGCN
Banned
Valve stated this was the plan from the beginning:
http://www.pcgamer.com/2012/07/12/how-steam-is-about-to-change-its-role/?ref=rss
http://www.pcgamer.com/2012/07/12/how-steam-is-about-to-change-its-role/?ref=rss
Co-signed.
For me, the shine wore off Greenlight when La-Mulana wasn't in the first wave of approvals. Or the second. To be frank, I haven't voted on a thing since. When high quality, finished games are being overlooked in favor of betas and unplayable pre-alphas, I can't help but feel like Greenlight is basically worthless to me.
26 games have been greenlit and only 5 have actually been released.
I didn't know that was happening. That definitely sounds like a major issue.
SteveWinwood
Member
If more things got through greenlight faster, I wouldn't mind this change. But ten every month or two is waaaaay too slow.
But honestly if this doesn't work out, valve will be the first to change it. I'd rather a company be flexible and take some risks, and make some mistakes, than COD every year.
But honestly if this doesn't work out, valve will be the first to change it. I'd rather a company be flexible and take some risks, and make some mistakes, than COD every year.
I strongly dislike this. It slows down games coming to Steam, and Greenlight is already something most consumers will not find themselves actively engaged in when it comes to wading through titles to vote on stuff. There are already titles caught/lost in the process that I want to see on Steam.
plagiarize
Banned
exactly.
Yep, that's the big issue now. Valve just takes the top 10 and approves, without really looking at it.
When in fact they should sherry pick themselves, by actually looking at the stuff, and not only the top votes.
Most people are incapable of evaluating games without playing it. This will result in a lot of bad pandering games getting picked up and a lot of actually good ones to never get released.
They should be wise enough to recognize that the people actively voting on greenlight don't actually represent most of the people buying steam games.
A-fucking-greed. La-Mulana probably won't even make the Holiday sale season. ;_;
Man I can't believe they passed up COD:BLOPS 2 for an indie game. That is so stupid. I'm gonna make Valve pay by only spending $275 on their Christmas sale as opposed to $300.
Who the heck is concerned with Call of Duty being affected by this?
Aquamarine
Member
For a company with only 300 people (a lot of those working on Steam), Valve does a pretty good job of having at least one major release every year.
In comparison, Ubisoft has nearly 7,000 people working at it.
List of Valve releases for the 7th Gen (supposing it began September 30th, 2005 with release of the 360)
- Half-Life 2: Lost Coast 2005 First-person shooter Windows
- Half-Life 2: Episode One 2006 First-person shooter Windows, Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, Mac
- Half-Life 2: Episode Two 2007 First-person shooter Windows, Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, Mac
- Portal 2007 Puzzle video game Windows, Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, Mac
- Team Fortress 2 2007 First-person shooter Windows, Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, Mac
- Left 4 Dead 2008 First-person shooter Windows, Xbox 360, Mac
- Left 4 Dead 2 2009 First-person shooter Windows, Xbox 360, Mac, Linux
- Alien Swarm 2010 Top-down shooter Windows
- Portal 2 2011 Puzzle video game Windows, Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, Mac
- Counter-Strike: Global Offensive 2012 First-person shooter Windows, Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, Mac
- Dota 2 2012 Multiplayer online battle arena Windows, Mac
Yogventures! isn't even scheduled to have a beta until 2013. No reason why some of this stuff should be taking up slots over real products.
Setting aside for a moment how good Greenlight is currently working, I strongly support Valve's direction towards taking themselves off approval process and letting consumers be major stakeholders in that decision process. I find it surprising that some people would rather have Valve do this stuff, and in fact see this move as closing of an avenue when Valve themselves shouldn't be an avenue in the first place.
I was being facetious. Or am I caught in a counter-facetiousness trap?
SteveWinwood
Member
I agree on a certain level... but on another, consumers are really dumb.
Zoramon089
Banned
The vast majority of that list is what I said. Tools to let other people do the work. I'm not trivializing the time and effort spent on making those tools but...content creation tools =/= content
It would be prudent to step back and think about who "consumers" are in this case. The people going through all of the games at Greenlight don't represent a very wide audience, and frankly, you won't get an audience representative of the purchasing consumers on Greenlight no matter what you do, unless you start paying people for votes.
This makes no sense to me.
I can't expound unless you elaborate about what doesn't make sense to you.
This is truly terrible news. Greenlight should be a last resort not the only option of getting your game on Steam. I don't understand Valve's thought behind this. I would think they would have enough money to hire a small staff with diverse gaming tastes to sort through most of the games that would be worthy of being on steam. If something falls through the cracks, the developer or publisher could put it up on Greenlight.
I hate to think that in the future, really cool indie games could be completely overlooked. I thought Greenlight sounded cool when I first heard about it but not if it's the only option.
I hate to think that in the future, really cool indie games could be completely overlooked. I thought Greenlight sounded cool when I first heard about it but not if it's the only option.
Glass Rebel
Member
Valve makes an effort to lessen their influence on the PC market and this is how gamers react.
In all seriousness, Greenlight isn't fleshed enough to replace their previous model IMO. Not enough slots, not enough transparency. But at least the idea, or rather the motivation, is good.
In all seriousness, Greenlight isn't fleshed enough to replace their previous model IMO. Not enough slots, not enough transparency. But at least the idea, or rather the motivation, is good.
I recommend anyone interested in this topic, especially if you can't see a downside, listens to a little twenty minute conversation about Greenlight on this recent episode of Idle Thumbs:
http://www.idlethumbs.net/idlethumbs/episodes/that-meat-boy-sat-me-down
Starts at 26:30.
Touches on -
-the potential dilution of 'the first time' experience which this system brings
-the notion that indie game developers increasingly need to also be indie game marketers
-the benefits of a crowd-source initiative versus one of curation through a small, static team
-Valve tending towards hands-off automation of their produce & infrastructure
-how distribution affects the medium
http://www.idlethumbs.net/idlethumbs/episodes/that-meat-boy-sat-me-down
Starts at 26:30.
Touches on -
-the potential dilution of 'the first time' experience which this system brings
-the notion that indie game developers increasingly need to also be indie game marketers
-the benefits of a crowd-source initiative versus one of curation through a small, static team
-Valve tending towards hands-off automation of their produce & infrastructure
-how distribution affects the medium
BomberMouse
Member
Why? it levels the play field. The only reasonable outcome of this is that more games will come out of SG instead of only 20 a month.
This is like stating we don't have room or time for gamea that might not sell much, what has the most potential to sell the best gets in. Obviously quality doesn't have much to do with how a game sells, if you can't hype your game and many unknown indies can't then you can't get into Steam? This isn't any better than console certification, at least there you know after a set period of time if your game passes the clearly detailed conditions it will pass, now here it depends on random people based on what they feel like it.
Greenlight was a great feature as an aditional service to get games on Steam.
As the sole way for indie developers to get on Steam it's an extremely lacking service, and this is a very short sighted move. No longer is getting into Steam a matter of quality (some would argue it never was, with some truth), but a matter of popularity and promotion ability, which skews things to games with higher budget. It essencially blocks the smaller good/great titles from getting into Steam, which was the entire point of the service in the first place.
This wouldn't be bad as long as the people responsible for selecting games to be sold on Steam (before Greenlight existed) still manually pick titles off the service, effectively replacing contacts made by emails for the greenlight pages. Unfortunately so far it seems that all they are doing is allowing the most popular games into the service, which is a really bad policy, especially when you have cases of publishers with enough pull doing sketchy moves such as "We'll give a free game to everyone that votes for us" such as Postal 2.
As the sole way for indie developers to get on Steam it's an extremely lacking service, and this is a very short sighted move. No longer is getting into Steam a matter of quality (some would argue it never was, with some truth), but a matter of popularity and promotion ability, which skews things to games with higher budget. It essencially blocks the smaller good/great titles from getting into Steam, which was the entire point of the service in the first place.
This wouldn't be bad as long as the people responsible for selecting games to be sold on Steam (before Greenlight existed) still manually pick titles off the service, effectively replacing contacts made by emails for the greenlight pages. Unfortunately so far it seems that all they are doing is allowing the most popular games into the service, which is a really bad policy, especially when you have cases of publishers with enough pull doing sketchy moves such as "We'll give a free game to everyone that votes for us" such as Postal 2.
graywolf323
Member
because Steam can't afford to pay people to screen submissions? Valve is just being lazy
Turning Steam approval into a popularity contest does not level the playing field.
I feel there just needs to be an actual incentive for voting. None of my friends is voting on Greenlight because they just don't care.
Giving people something, like a TF2 item, a Dota 2 item, 5/10 cent steam credit per 20 voted games. (Only 1 item per day / 3 days /??)
I share your sentiment about not really caring to check Greenlight for interesting games, but I don't think I understand how one could be unhappy about missing out on title they might enjoy because the people who do obsessively check Greenlight didin't vote for it.
The way I'm reading what you're saying is like this (as an example): "I don't like the last game that got greenlight, but I didin't care enough to go and vote for anything I would've wanted to see greenlit instead either."
This seems like a bad idea. According to posts in this thread even devs with games on steam are asked to use greenlight instead?
I rarely visits the Greenlight community. I think I went twice, the first time being the day it launched and the second time was when a game posted here seemed interesting and i went to vote for it.
Interesting projects are probably going to get lost in a sea of shovelwares and cheap copies and get rejected just like they were before.
I rarely visits the Greenlight community. I think I went twice, the first time being the day it launched and the second time was when a game posted here seemed interesting and i went to vote for it.
Interesting projects are probably going to get lost in a sea of shovelwares and cheap copies and get rejected just like they were before.