Steam Greenlight is Going Away

By the same token, they're probably not as insane and ridiculous as Steam's community. The forums for Vampyr (newest game from the devs behind Life is Strange and Remember Me) have been abhorrent since the game popped up (though they seem to be about normal now).

 

The various pre-existing communities aren't necessarily relevant. What is relevant is your ability to push your target audience towards your work. And if your target audience is "People on Steam/itch/whatever" then you need to work on that, because it's not particularly useful.

If you're just pushing your game up onto a service and hoping that sheer numbers get you some views then that tells me that you don't know specifically who you're selling to, which is a problem.

 

I think that "vocality" of community does not translate into revenue in any way.

I think the best idea is to see steam as distribution platform and ignore all the insanity going on in their discussions.

 

marketing marketing. The community is good for input, not for direct sale.. my opinion.

 

Im mixed. Im happy price is cheaper but I currently dont have a official company to put my game on there in the future

 

Why do you need a company? Individuals are legal entities that can sign contracts. There is frequently no need to form a company unless you need the liability protection. Which is pretty unlikely in games.

 

You still need to match your forum to your target audience. How much interest and feedback and what kind of feedback do you think these two games would get here (if the devs had made them in Unity and posted here for feedback)?

Bit Blaster XL

Environmental Station Alpha

I expect if these were posted in the WIP forum or Feedback Friday thread both would have received little attention and the little feedback received I almost guarantee would be primarily focused on how the devs should increase the resolutions, add more juice, post them on free game portals, etc.

Yet that would completely miss the point. Both are well rated solo Indie games. It is very important that you get feedback from your target audience not a random user (dev or otherwise) who is bored and decides to comment.

GameJolt, Itch and others using the appropriate game classification categories and tags are better choices for games like these. If you make a 3D shmup try to find places where a lot of people hang out that love playing 3D shmups, etc.

 

I think dev's are probably some of the worst to get feedback from, you become excessively analytical so you can effectively troubleshoot issues and also suffer an ailment I call "wallface".. Had another stint at W3 the other day after dev'ing, couldn't stop noticing issues and I said to myself (honestly this graphically doesn't look very good).. Which is somewhat insane.

I don't have fun playing games after I've been dev'ing for too long, I had to remind myself that I had wallface and should probably have a couple of days break.

 

I'm registered as a sole proprietorship with a special business address because it makes my taxes a little more manageable to fill out quarterly...ly and because it keeps me from getting buttloads of junk mail. That might just be a regional factor though.

 

Well yeah that's the problem, posting in dev forum, you'll get feedbacks from dev perspective, mostly.

Well I do think the otherwise, they will be my future buyers, I think their opinion does matter.

I don't get it, if I want to sell games on particular service, wouldn't it be good if I know first if the people there are going to be interested in my game even before I complete it?

 

I think what we're trying to say is that your target audience shouldn't be users of store xyz

 

I think that vocal people are not your future buyers. I also highly doubt that they're your friends. In my opinion, overly vocal and overly active people are interested in community participation, and not in your product. Meaning, their priority will be raking up any sort of points that can serve as "reputation" (steam level, post count, etc), arguing to people, trolling people, picking fights on forum and asserting themsleves... while buying your game will be very low on their priority list.

I think this kind of public pretty much can only be exploited for profit via abusing trading cards, emoticons, etc and that's it. Basically, their reason for participation is interacting with community (and feeling good about themselves), defending honor of their "tribe"and not buying and playing your product. I'm not sure if catering to this kind of audience is even good idea in the first place. Another possibility is making joke games that are so bad on purpose that they'll want to buy 50 copies if of them and gift them to their everyone they know in order to annoy/pull prank on them. This kind of thing is not the kind of gamedev I'd want.

Personally, I'd prefer just store with no community.

Also this.

 

Id rather make the games I want to make then make a game that I thought would sell well.

 

Who is "they"? Who are "the people there"? You're moving in the right direction, and starting to ask questions that many never think of, so props for that. You need to keep going, though, and "drill down" with those questions until they're getting you practically useful information.

You're treating distribution services and audiences as if they're the same thing, which they're not. How many different types of people do you think use Steam? Do you think that some of those people also use other services? Depending on your audience they might even primarily use other services.

"Are Steam users interested in my game?" is a good question to ask at first, but it's just hinting at what you should really be asking. You want to ask "who are the people interested in my game?" and then "how many of those people are there?" and then "how do I best get my product to them?"

What you're doing at the moment, though, is presupposing the answer to the last question and then only sort of kind of addressing one of the other two questions filtered through that. With that method, even if you found out that a significant fraction of "Steam users" like your game, who are they and why do they like it? Without knowing those things you can't effectively design and market to the right audience except by chance.

*Edited because I didn't like the way it sounded. The thinking there was definitely headed in the right direction and I wanted to acknowledge that.

 

That's a common argument I hear against doing market research and testing. The thing is, there are so many games I want to make that I can't possibly make them all. I'll get to make maybe a few dozen significant games in my life out of many hundreds of things I'd genuinely like to make. With that in mind, when I pick which one to make next it may as well be one that I think people want to play as well as being one I want to make.

 

My game has been on the Windows Store for a few months now and while its given me a chance to run some basic analytics to improve certain aspects of my game, lets just say the sample size has been very small...

Sufficient, no.