I think you can make a game with Steamworks and sell it on Steam, and then make another one that you sell everywhere else.
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Steam axes submission process, ALL new pubs/devs must go through Steam Greenlight.
- Thread starter chubigans
- Start date
I think you can make a game with Steamworks and sell it on Steam, and then make another one that you sell everywhere else.
Lock in.
Stallion Free
Cock Encumbered
So clearly the lionshare is coming from the Valve selection method still.
Also, a lot of devs who are greenlit seem to be adding in Steamworks features which takes time. The Afterfall devs are targetting a December release even though their game has been out a year and has had a major 2.0 patch for a couple months.
I would guess that you are US American? Or maybe from the UK?
You too.
I always see this huge cultural disconnect when people are discussing the PC platform. In Europe (especially central and eastern) PC never "died", so it also wasn't "resurrected" by Steam.
I have absolutely no idea what you mean by this statement.
Valve are the most malevolent company: the nice kind. By showering you with gifts and deals and free services and pro-consumer policies you'll be more inclined to spend money on them to reward them for their kindness. Valve you magnificent bastard you.
south america
not saying the PC died, hence why I put saved in quotes, im just saying that it brought a much needed revival when a lot of people were barely paying attention
Steamworks can't even be used until you're accepted into Steam, so this is a moot point in the context of Greenlight. Plus Steamworks titles can and are sold in various other stores, so a title being Steamworks is not a discouragement to sell it on other stores.
Yup. Amazon, Green Man Gaming, and a few others have even started to specialize in selling Steamworks games by undercutting Steam's prices. The countless Indie Bundles also take advantage of this. Steamworks may make it difficult/impossible for something like Origin to take over market leadership in the Digital Distribution space, but I don't think it precludes games from being sold on rival services.
No, the jump from "Greenlight in its current form constrains some developers' ability to sell their games on Steam" to "Valve would rather a game didn't exist on PC if it's not on Steam" is too big as to be disingenuous.
Stumpokapow
listen to the mad man
Erm, this is the case with all retail stores. Wal-Mart needs to see proof that you've sold your product through local vendors and regional vendors before they make a wider order. The digital comparison to scarcity/rotten stock/real-world constraints is discoverability/curation/clutter/information scarcity.
I agree, and thanks!
StarCreator
Member
He means the cost of implementing Steamworks-like functions is significant and if they do it, it's all thrown out the window if they're going to end up on Steam anyway:
Hell, they crowd source their marketing and game development.
Valve hasn't done any actual work since Half Life 2.
SteveWinwood
Member
Why. Every. Thread. Ever. Why.
Stallion Free
Cock Encumbered
Thread was dying. That was the shot of adrenaline right into the heart.
But that's kind of irrelevant. It effectively died in the US and in most of NA. You just saw terrible PC ports or no games at all.
As a Canadian consumer, the fact that the PC market is going great in Germany is of no concern to me. I should have said that the NA PC games market had dried up till digital distribution picked up things again.
im guessing it's sarcasm
SteveWinwood
Member
I need more goddamn sleep.
The "also applies for people with games on Steam" bit isn't new, e.g. Rockin' Android tried to release a game almost immediately after the GL launch and were told to go through Greenlight. They previously released the Gundemonium Trilogy on Steam.
Also if you see anything interesting on Greenlight chances are you can already buy it on Desura.
Also if you see anything interesting on Greenlight chances are you can already buy it on Desura.
I don't get it either. In Poland, I can enter any store that sells videogames and PC games usually have at least twice as much place as games for all consoles put together.
StarCreator
Member
I... guess I'm glad for you guys? The situation in NA is very different though; shelves dedicated to PC gaming vanished from stores here at least a decade ago. The last games I remember getting at retail were Space Quest 6 and the original Half-Life; the 5 or 6 games I got before Steam launched had to be bought online.
faceless007
Member
I'm in America and up until a few months ago, my local Best Buy had a full end-to-end shelf for PC games about the same size as the shelf for each of the individual consoles. Sadly they remodeled (and shrunk) the whole store this year and shrunk the PC shelf to about 6-feet wide in a corner. But that was just this year.
At my Fry's the PC shelf is wider than for any of the consoles.
I don't know if SoCal is some weird anomaly but I've always been able to find stores that stocked plenty of PC games.
At my Fry's the PC shelf is wider than for any of the consoles.
I don't know if SoCal is some weird anomaly but I've always been able to find stores that stocked plenty of PC games.
I don't want to make it too personal or sound stalkerish, but is the Salsa steam account in the Neogaf group yours? If so, you only registered in November 2009? I registered on Steam in 2007 and it already felt like Steam had been around forever and I was extremely late to the party. You being a PC gamer all that time and registering on Steam only in late 2009 looks very suspicious.
Back to addressing your points. PC gaming had some tough times half a decade ago, but a) it was never dead, b)there was a concerted effort to make PC gaming more viable by multiple parties.
In 2006, so before Steam gained significant traction, you had Company of Heroes, HOMM5, Rise of Legends, Dark Messiah of M&M, Titan Quest and many other exclusive games + strong multiplatform support from many publishers. Indie gaming as we know it today wasn't big, but it wasn't big on any platform at the time and the entire indie culture was yet to really flourish, with Steam but also XBLA and iOS.
While (let's call it) guidance by Valve was no doubt helpful in making PC more relevant, there were other companies and factors involved. DD would become big with or without Valve, people across all platforms have no issues purchasing digital content anymore. The market would be more scattered (probably for the better) and maybe not as fast growing (probably for the worse), but it would still grow. The next big issue that Valve had nothing to do with was breaking the cursed cycle of perennial hardware upgrades, the situation where a 12 months old hardware is obsolete is no longer the case. In fact, if you play at low enough resolution (1366x768 or 1600x1050) GeForce 8800GT from 2007 still provides satisfying enough experience in vast majority of games. This removed the stigma that PC gaming requires a significant financial investment. Another thing that improved greatly without is decreased number of hardware, driver and games incompatibilities, which has more to do with nVidia, AMD (and MS to some extent) and game developers finally stepping up.
I'm not sure writing your arguments in capital letters or using the word fucking makes your arguments more convincing... You also had an indie developer telling you that the current PC landscape is very discouraging unless you're guaranteed to release on Steam and you went into full denial mode. Nice. And check your facts before calling people factually wrong.
Haunted
Member
Yup yup. Consoles have been supplemental at best for most people until this generation. PCs are the traditional standard. There's a reason videogames here were called computer games for the longest time (similar to how people said "Nintendo" when they meant all videogames in the 80s in the US).
Can't revive what never died. That said, Steam has successfully brought the biggest platform to the digital age, so it deserves some credit for that evolution.
Germany is one of the most prominent PC-centric countries, though, so I guess I'm speaking from the other extreme here compared to the console-centric US perspective.
Spectacular Dr Dawg
Member
That's ridiculous.
Azure Dream
Member
5,000 "COOL & FUNNY PIX" apps that load every malware known to man (and some known only to dolphin) onto your computer.
Warm Machine
Member
I don't think that is true. They are not actively stopping development of people wanting to make games. However I personally think that Valve only cares about what is on Steam and what they want to put on Steam.
It is in Valves best interests to get developers to put their games on all kinds of stores even if have or do not have Steamworks integration.
They easily dodge the monopoly claims when people do this seeing as though they actively promote the idea of other portals, which is great.
They know that if a game becomes popular on other portals that they will eventually get that same game on Steam and still make a good deal of money off of it due to their community size. They don't need to invest in any heavy lifting themselves to build sales of a game if it is already a known quantity. The only danger is a game becoming a crazy runaway hit that gets exclusivity or independence a la Minecraft but that is so rare it is worth the risk.
Steamworks is set up in such a way (to its benefit, and the devs benefit) that Steam keys are given out on other portals driving customers back to Steam anyway. This gives Valve a good deal of weight and the dev only needs to keep one version of the game updated.
Basically, Valve probably wants devs to make a lot of PC games so that they can sooner or later add them to the store. If the games fail to gain an audience and never hit Steam Valve doesn't care but they certainly are not actively stopping people from trying.
cartman414
Member
Where have you been lately? GOG has been all-inclusive since March. Take a look. They've been carrying La-Mulana, among a few others still not on Steam.
Oh lord. I've been PC gaming along with consoles since the late 90s and only registered a proper Steam account in 2010. Let's not jump to conclusions. I bought Witcher, Risen, the Gothics, Infinity Engine games, Wizardry 8, Titan Quests, Arcanum, Elder Scrolls and countless others retail through all the years. Yes, they still made retail PC games. Still have my big box editions of the Baldur's Gate series and my awesome holographic Daggerfall box even though I've gotten rid of most of my retail games since double/triple dipping with digital sales. Steam join date is by no means a measure of PC gamer-ness or whatever we're doing here.
So, szaromir, you must be new around these parts. Xelios and Salsa PROBABLY aren't the people to be arguing with when it comes to Steam-related stuff...
The only good thing about this I can think of is hopefully this means more developers will integrate Steamworks into their games to get a better chance at release on Steam.
Nothing aggravates me more than seeing a game come to Steam and not include any Steamworks functionality at all.
Also, can we confirm Greenlight is required for everything? The numbers suggest this isn't the case.
Nothing aggravates me more than seeing a game come to Steam and not include any Steamworks functionality at all.
Also, can we confirm Greenlight is required for everything? The numbers suggest this isn't the case.
plagiarize
Banned
Great post. You've convinced me that my proposition was wrong.
That's not how it works. You got accepted by Valve, and only then you can start integrate Steamworks into your game.
Or as the FAQ states:
On the other hand, there are some rumblings that using Source engine for your games will make it more 'acceptable' on Steam (this is pre-Greenlight era).
Or at least, that's the only explanation why a travesty such as Revelations 2012 was accepted on Steam.
You must be equally new, because szaromir has been on his anti-Valve crusade in these threads for a couple years now.
BudokaiMR2
Member
Then please email valve to get La-Mulana greenlit so we can actually start on that work instead of wasting 3-4 months looking at hundreds of comments that basically boil down to "WHY ISN'T IT ON STEAM YET!?"
As someone said already you can't start on that integration until you get an okay from Valve.
Honestly, outside of a decent amount of exposure in the first week Greenlight has done absolutely nothing for us. We are just treading water for reasons which I cannot begin to fathom. I don't even understand why they are greenlighting at such a slow pace if they are doing so for Alpha and Beta versions of games.
My biggest problem is that they have said openly that it is not just a popularity contest and they would be actively talking with people who have gained traction in the community. Our page has had one of the highest Page View/ Favorite ratios on the entire service from the beginning and we have had absolutely no contact from Valve. If it is obvious that we are going to be greenlit at some point(unless we somehow nosedive 72 spots) then why not greenlight us early so that the devs can start work on Steamworks integration, etc.?
What logical reason is there to make dozens of games wait for some arbitrary announcement that is due to come anyway? It is inefficient and just wastes peoples time.
I think Greenlight is a great service for certain in-development games but I don't think it is a good fit for games which are already finished and ready to release. It is just so terribly inefficient it isn't funny.
lol. Paypal and Steam only started supporting and working properly in south america by the time I made that account. I have a previous one for my boxed copy of Half-Life 2 that I dont use anymore.
as for your other points: I never went "full denial" and I responded accordingly. And I did check my facts before saying you are factually wrong and guess what: you are factually wrong. Even though all your other arguments are still completely valid as to how PC games became more important again; Steam is still very much the main reason. Not even hyperboling here, without Steam PC development wouldnt be where it is today. You can shoot down my arguments all you want but this is still simply the truth. Everyone wants to get it on it thus encouraging developers to look at the platform. Games werent selling, Retail was dead. Steam changed this.
could this have turned into a sort of monopoly with its own set of disadvantages to some developers and to how the market works? most definetly. Is this accusation of indie developers moving away from PC because of Steam anywhere near comparable to the amount of developers that Steam brought to the platform? not even close.
I think you may just need to make better use of the non-data Greenlight provides and contract a marketing team in order to earn the right to give Valve a cut. A witch doctor to give you preferential treatment like certain others (like feep) might work too.
Or you could be horrible, siding with the wrong tyrant and put it on the Windows 8 store.
If Walmart orders products they have to pay for those products and take a loss if they don't sell. And those products all represent opportunity cost in terms of shelf space. Ordering products on a national level is a huge cash investment and efficiently running a retail business is largely centered around properly estimating demand, stocking stores properly, etc.
Adding games that don't sell to Steam (but are still quality titles) hits Valve a little in terms of discoverability and UI organization but that's it. That's not at all comparable to a retail business that can make a series of bad bets on bomb products and go out of business.
You have to prove to Walmart that something can sell because there is a lot of risk in stocking a product. With Steam there is almost no risk.
BudokaiMR2
Member
Yeah we have discussed this and we actually have our own marketing team here who are doing what they can.
However, the problem is that there doesn't seem to be a big return on the investment for obvious reasons. One reason is that it is a 100% closed system and there is no guarantee that the people you market to are existing Steam customers who can actually vote. Yes Steam is the biggest PC DD market out there but it is still a drop in the bucket in the overall scheme of things.
An example is that we worked with the NIGORO guys and their WiiWare publisher around the release of the WiiWare version to try and get some of those fans to help out. We ended up just getting a bunch of emails from people complaining that they can't vote unless they buy something on Steam as they were not previously users.
The WiiWare release gave us a small boost but the necessities of the system made it fairly limited.
At this point all we can tell them is that they have to wait their turn patiently and hope they don't decide to run off to a guaranteed publisher.
Edit: I honestly feel like an ass for complaining so much as we are doing much better than 90% of the people out there. However, I don't even think that it is fair.
We have an unfair advantage because we have our own platform to pull users from(no matter how small it is there is still noticeable growth because of PLAYISM)
It is just frustrating that we are stuck in Limbo with not much we can do to affect our situation. We are hoping that we can get a popular streamer to do a LP of the game as that seems to be one of the few ways to get a quick effect.
I am pretty sure that is what helped Octodad climb the ranks if I am remembering their blog post right.
Wiktor
Member
I like achievements, but I prefer MP modes to be handled out outside Steamworks.
alexandros
Banned
It could have easily been a case of the Revelations' devs having friends or family working for Valve or Steam. We do have Feep's example (although Feep's game is actually fun), so it's not really far-fetched to assume that maybe something similar happened with Revelations 2012.
There is quite a bit of truth in this. Although I would stop short of crediting Valve as the 'savior' of PC gaming, they did offer a valuable service and supported PC gaming at a time when most people were shitting on it. They broke the retail stranglehold on PC gaming, provided a solid (after the first couple of years) service, simplified a lot of the stuff that was scaring away PC newbies, kept Steam games open to modding and community content, gave PC gaming a 'face' to rally behind and counter console marketing. Those are not trivial contributions.
They did not do this out of the kindness of their heart, of course. Steam is what it is because PC gamers supported it, making Valve tons of money in the process.
Ventilaator
Banned
Someone please tell me that the line in the OP about Wadjet Eye having to use Greenlight was edited in later, and I didn't just read a couple pages of people who failed to read the first post.
BudokaiMR2
Member
Nope been there the whole time I believe.
Revelations 2012 uses the Source Engine.