Steam Greenlight is Going Away

well that game is already available on other storefronts, and their site .. they just want to reach more people so they put it on steam aswell ... lol look at the bottom it says steam coming soon


ooooh wait a sec.... its $2 ??? ... oooohh... i thought it was free.. i thought on their site the "desktop" was a button to download it ><

oh wow... thats lame .... nevermind....

 

Regardless of the changes, Steam is still going to block games for religious and political reasons. Just ask @Ony. There is no specific reason that the existing age rating system couldn't keep her games with appropriate audiences. And yet Steam will block it just to avoid backlash with their core audience.

 

You have to read the comments and then read between the lines. The game has apparently sold over 100k units elsewhere and people say it is well executed. Yet there are a couple comments about it making money from human suffering or promoting violence. And just have to know how people are. It seems like so many people these days are offended by something and with this kind of system and anonymity of Internet they can try to "fight back".

 

Of course and I get that. It is Steam's business if they want to block things so be it. Not saying I agree or not just saying that is their choice. Makes sense. Doesn't make sense to me for myself to try to block @Ony's game. I am a Christian and some would feel the need to block it. I simply look at it like each of us always has a choice.

If I wasn't interested in a sex game then why am I at her game's page to begin with? Do I need to vote No to try to block the game? No. My choice would be to simply not vote or not even be on the game's page in the first place. I don't need to go on a crusade to try to force it so other people no longer even have the choice.

That is the part I am talking about. The gamers don't need to be and shouldn't be deciding which games other gamers can and cannot buy. If I / they don't want to play a certain game then don't buy it and don't vote at all. It is that simple.

 

Well there are just as many comments that are positive for political reasons, which isn't exactly what greenlight is necessarily supposed to be for. And the negative comments are very very few anyway. Most of the downvoters probably didn't feel strongly enough either way about the political message to comment.

I don't know about how well it has sold anywhere else, and probably a lot of people voting don't either. If you replaced the theme with a some generic gaming theme like 'Knights and Elves' I doubt it would have gotten through based on what you can see of the gameplay on the steam page.

Maybe it's a good game, I don't know. But I think they could have done a much better job of highlighting what was good about the gaming experience, and if it was good maybe people would have voted it in straightaway. The video shows mainly interviews with the developers which kind of looks like the main point of the game is not really the gameplay itself.

All I'm trying to say is that if you want to make a game and succeed with it, you have to make something fun and make it very clear in your marketing why it's a great gaming experience. Otherwise, you'll either simply get downvoted, or be at the mercy of people's opinions on stuff other than the gameplay.

 

I would say it is a fairly profound idea/good observation and was probably worth 6 pages of discussion.

 

Hmmm...was this game actually on Greenlight? Steam removed it pretty quickly.

Personally, I don't think that a private channel removing content that violates the rules of the site is censorship. I have also said this before....Free Speech does not mean that you can say whatever you want wherever you want. It is entirely within the law to take games like that off Steam. It is discrimination and hate. Too many of my country men and women confuse what free speech actually means.

And..it has nothing to do with the discussion at hand. A game like that never even made it to be considered for Greenlight and the changes in steam are not going to change that. No never applied to it as Steam realized it didn't belong on their site.

 

I agree with the premise, but maybe downvoting is necessary to offset rigging of the votes? Overall there's no way to avoid greenlight being a controversial and calamitous system but I'm not sure removing the ability to downvote would have helped keep bad games off there.

 

But the downloading is somewhat rigged as well according to Jim's video above the fold. So really, the entire voting process is corrupt and needs to go. I see why Steam is doing this.

 

Votes can be rigged both ways, though... and I think that rigged downvoting is more likely to happen.

It reminds me of the time when metacritic stopped being useful. Basically, every time there was a dislike towards certain game, the game in question were zerg-downvoted into oblivion.

----

Basically the problem with voting system in general (regarding games, anyway) is that it assumes that people who vote have good intentions (which isn't true).

 

I agree!
Although I must say, if ever there was to be a reality TV show on game development maybe greenlight could be a source of inspiration?

@neginfinity yeah I can see why the voting system is problematic, just that if you're going to have upvotes you should probably have downvotes too, imo.

 

So it seems there's STILL a pretty common misconception on here about greenlight, so I guess I should clear it up? "No votes" don't do anything. You can't orchestrate mass downvoting with any real effect because all voting no does is remove the game from your queue. The only votes that count towards your place in the top 100 or any other listing are yes votes.

 

Didn't know that. Maybe then that's what's missing?

Only half kidding.

 

uuuh yes thats what free speech means, that you can say anything...
who is to say what is correct to say??

i would elaborate on the concept, but i fear id be discriminated against and hated for what i have to say, so nevermind... ill just stfu

 

Bucky, go check the laws. That is not what it says. You can't walk into a restaurant with political signs and be protected by free speech laws. An example, there is a protest gathering in my small town this weekend. The discussion is about how the participants must stay on the sidewalk. If they walk into the building, which is a private club, then they can be arrested. Free speech is protected in public spaces, not in private buildings, websites, or anything else that is owned by a person, a company or a corporation.

This is why there are public spaces, like the Mall in Washington D.C. where you can protest and say whatever you want.

It is the ignorance that people believe you can say whatever you want, wherever you are, in private places, that makes me wonder what the schools are teaching these days. Even my teens know what free speech actually means.

My son just reminded me that the government cannot stop you from speaking and you are protected by laws to that effect. Private companies, such as Steam's terms (read them) have the absolute right to "censor" what others put on their site.

 

oh yeah of course, I know that
but it doesnt stop people... its reliant on how much respect a person has for the private place in question lol .. i mean laws dont stop people either, its all about personal perspective... but whatever

>< ugh iam the king of thread derailment .... ill really stfu now LOL

 

It's okay. I tend to be easily led astray. lol

 

Just to be clear, remember that No votes are not factored into the decision to Greenlight a game. According to Valve, only Yes votes matter for Greenlight. A No vote in Greenlight does not mean the end user dislikes the game. It just means the user does not think they would buy the game if it was available on Steam. Voting No on a game is not a negative or harmful thing.

The majority of No votes a game receives will occur in the first couple days a game is on Greenlight, because everybody sees the latest submissions regardless of their personal interests in specific types of games. Users who find a game by searching using manual voting queues are vastly more likely to vote Yes, because they are already filtering their personal queue based on their own interests. Unfortunately, very few users generate their own voting queue. Nearly everybody just looks at the latest submissions.

 

There was a post on Gamasutra today about a publisher setting up a fund to help devs pay for Steam Direct if the fee ends up being high:
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/...und_that_helps_devs_pay_Steam_Direct_fees.php

 

That is nice, however they get to decide who they will help, and that really makes sense. But again, it could cause some games not to be chosen for subjective reasons.

Hopefully Steam will not put the amount so high that it leaves out too many people. I think we could come up with $1k but anything over that probably wouldn't be worth it.

 

There's a point to be made for yes/no ratio being the only kind of system that has a chance to actually do some kind of "quality filtering". If it just counted yes-votes it would either have a threshold so low that almost everthing gets through, or so high that it's a popularity contest again and niche games stand no chance, even if they would have had 90% yes ratio within their niche audience. Also pure yes-vote number counting would lead to results heavily skewed by visibility factors like "how long is the game visible on the greenlight frontpage before it's pushed out of sight by new releases". I understand where you're coming from, but a pure yes-vote based system would either be pointless or also unfair. I think the new upfront fee is a better alternative and all around more "professional" in my opinion.

 

If you read above, the No votes don't count toward the Greenlight total.

 

I'm pretty sure that yes/no ratio had a lot to do with greenlight timing. Maybe not if the game would make the cut or not but how fast it cleared, certainly.

Valve had a lot of discretion, I don't think there were clear rules.

I think having something playable was a huge boost, and releasing on another storefront was another big factor.

I am 100% certain that number of yes votes was not the only factor or even the main factor.

 

Did they kill it already? I just popped over there and it said my queue was empty even though I didn't rate anything. So clicked on All Games and it said there was nothing. Then I clicked on Generate New Queue and it said I had rated everything on Greenlight. Which is nothing. Maybe it's just an error, right as I was about to submit my game. Because of course that would happen to me after Kickstarter hanging Firefox after trying to upload my video, then refusing to encode it when I switched to Edge, and SendOwl claiming they can't process my Paypal payment and scaring the crap out of me even though there is money in that and my bank account. I wanna go back to the stress of actually making the game, that is so much easier to deal with.

 

Seems so.
It does not show any new submissions for me.

RIP Greenlight

 

Oddly, if I click on the "Submit your game" button, it still takes me to the submission page. Yeah, right. I'm not falling for that. I submit my game and they don't give me the refund to people they promised refunds to if no game had been submitted. Is dealing with Valve always this vague and uncertain?

 

Still active for me.

Speaking of going to steam, there are a few posts there from steam with more information.

http://steamcommunity.com/greenlight/discussions/18446744073709551615/133256758580075301/
http://steamcommunity.com/games/593110/announcements/detail/558846854614253751

The first link in particular has some details on timing (a couple of weeks). On what happens to unreleased games that have been greenlit (they won't need to pay a fee). And on what happens to games already on greenlight (Steam will approve the good ones, and the rest have to go through the new process).

 

Did you mean to say months, or did I miss something? Yeah, it's back for me too. I guess it was just life trying to freak me out again. Hopefully I can get everything setup tonight get back to coding tomorrow.

 

Just reread the post. It indicates a couple of weeks before Steam Direct opens. Not a couple of weeks from now. My bad.

 

I did not know that because I was going by the comments of people saying they voted NO! and then going on like lunatics ripping the game for whatever reason.

Well that and all of the developers I have seen talking about their Yes/No vote ratio and many have at least alluded to a belief they needed to have at least a 51% yes vote ratio.

Maybe it is all in people's heads. It could also be as @frosted mentioned above that possibly the No votes may help to delay the success.

At any rate on the one hand I like the idea of people being able to rate & review games IF people could be trusted. Because then we can actually go by it helping to make a decision. But people just do such stupid things. They do vote No or rate a game low for reasons that at least IMO they shouldn't be. Like the people on mobile low rating games and demanding devs do this or that (even purchase their marketing services). It is that mindset that is also on Steam and I think it would be great for it not to be. Of course, when you have people involved unfortunately that just comes with it.

You know I've read several times now... and I am not sure if it was on Steam comments or in forums around the web (maybe both)... people saying they always rate such and such games as low as possible whenever they can simply because they don't like that kind of game and wish the genre would just die. Other times it is because they personally dislike the developer for whatever reason "they are an ***** and I will rate every one of their games as garbage"

Whether they actually do it or not or are just making noise who knows. But it is this kind of insanity that was behind my original post. If the NO votes really had absolutely no impact at all on the game being listed or the time-frame for the game being listed then it was much better than I realized. Because I figured these a-hole kind of people really were just making it harder than it should be.

 

According to Valve, the only thing that matters for Greenlight is the number of Yes votes. No votes and the Yes-No Ratio do not matter. There are plenty of titles that made it through Greenlight without 51% Yes votes, so that is not a cutoff. It is possible that Valve employees are looking at all of the data (including No votes and ratios) when making manual curation decisions about specific games, but Valve has said Yes votes were the only consideration. As for how many Yes votes lead to a Greenlight, it seems to vary a lot.

 

Yeah, they'll hopefully base this on data. If they don't, it doesn't matter and the system won't work. I am assuming they are doing this with basis in what they know about the games on the store.

Greenlight is a fickle thing, but there is a number of factors attributing to shovelware coming through. Massive campaigning, giveaways, votes bought or exchanged, etc. A poop joke or some nudity can be very vote enticing, but it's not exactly raising the bar on the storefront. This hurts the actual quality content out there. I'm not saying it doesn't have it's place somewhere in the ecosystem, but stuff like that is plentyful and will drown out the good games out there.

Well, new releases is one thing, but I will essentially also drown out searches or other places where algorithms will do the sorting. It's a broad issue.

 

I disagree. It's all about fostering a good ecosystem, longevity and relations. If Valve wanted to open the flood gates, then there would be no need to implement Direct at all.

The developers are also their customers, and they have to nurture that relationship and in the long run, that does mean having Steam being an acceptable option with good discoverability. With 40% of all the games on Steam coming out in 2016, there's clearly some issues there.

There'll always be low quality games on Steam, no matter what. The point is to weed out the worst part of them, and that is part of what Direct will do. It's not going to be perfect and we'll still see shovelware, but hopefully to a much lesser extent.

What they really should be doing is hiring a team to curate it. It would be a ginormous amount of work, and probably also wouldn't be the optimal solution. Maybe it's not possible to do it right?

 

Is it?

I mean we don't have a lot of information and reading way too much in what valve has posted is an easy mistake to make.

But I have some free time and I like posting on forums, so here we go. Here are some quotes from what Valve has said about direct:

Greenlight stepping stone to something more "direct". Completely curated -> Curated by the community (early Greenlight) -> Almost no curation (current Greenlight)... So what's the next step here?

So, Greenlight almost completely opened the floodgates and they are now taking the next step.

It seems to me they realised almost everyone could get through Greenlight now, so there's no point to it, so... why is it there? Enter Steam Direct, now everyone can release their game at any time with no barriers all for the low fee of xxx$ per game!

I expect a whole lot more "noise" and much less signal as we move forward.

 

So this thread had a lot more replies than I thought, but I've skimmed through most of it now.

What I don't get is how so many of you and so many Steam customers talk about Steam as if there are millions of games on there. There are basically no products on Steam if you compare it to any other online marketplace, there's like 10-15 000 games on there now? That's so few you can basically browse through them by hand. In what other marketplace do you have the slightest chance of doing that?

How many products are sold by Amazon? 100 million? A billion? Do you have problems finding what you want there? I certainly don't.

This is and has always been a problem with Steam's interface for finding games. And the same is certainly true for Apple's App Store where they have done nothing to improve it since it was launched. I've never used the Google Play store so I can't give my opinion on that.

Just give us the tools for letting us find the games we want and there would be no need to limit the amount of games on Steam.

And then you talk about the need for human moderation. I don't get that at all. All these things are only issues if we ignore the actual issue - Steam's interface for finding games is still laughably bad. Just compare the old Unity Asset Store to the current one and imagine what such a change would mean for your ability to find the games you want on Steam. There are 2-3 times as many assets on our Asset Store as there are games on Steam, but I find it much easer to find the asset I want than it is to find the game I want on Steam.

With both Steam and Apple's App Store, which are the only 2 places I buy games from currently, I have to find the game using external services and then go directly to it on the marketplace. That's the entire problem right there. I work with log systems containing tens of billions of log messages and yet I have no problem at all finding the exact log message I'm looking for. It's all about making usable tools.

I could write a 10-page article detailing everything wrong with Steam's current interface, but the biggest issues for me is that it currently doesn't allow me to set any filters, save any searches, filter any searches or anything like that. There are a dozen game genres I never want to see, let me filter them out. I never want to see a game with a rating less than 5, let me filter them out. I never want to see a survival game ever, let me filter them out. Etc. etc. etc. I'm sure that if I had the tools I could limit the games that was visible to me on Steam to only those in my games library and a few other games that were of actual interest to me.

I still agree that a symbolic minimum fee should be in place to keep out those who are obviously not serious about this, but I feel $100-300 is enough for that. Floating Point (http://store.steampowered.com/app/302380/) is an example of a completely free game that I think is cool that is on Steam. I would like to make free games like that myself and put them on Steam. I think I would be fine with paying $100-300 to have my free game on Steam for the exposure and not have to put it somewhere else. I personally thought $100-300 was a suitable entry free for using Unity as well to keep out those who are obviously not serious about this, but Unity disagreed with me there so we'll see what Steam does.

Edit: I just wanted to add that there's ~30 million songs on Spotify and I almost exclusively listen to my Discover Weekly playlist which is automatically generated by Spotify for me every week and yet I feel like I don't listen to any music I don't like or what would be considered objectively bad music. On the other hand when I try browsing the Discover queues on Steam everything I get is games I don't want or objectively bad games.

 

I think that a $500 fee per game would definitely deter a lot of people. Those who peddle junk on greenlight do it because they have nothing to lose - having probably paid the fee before they realized how bad their stuff was. There is absolutely no reason why they should not continue when every cent they make is profit. But when you have to part with hundreds of dollars each time and run the risk anew, I think it changes things.

It's like Google play, with the free section, even horrible games have many thousands of downloads, because the user has nothing to lose. But as soon as they have to part with even $1, the game only gets a small fraction of the downloads. People just don't like opening their wallets for anything risky (unless it's a slot machine I guess, but I think it's safe to say that developing and selling games doesn't quite have the same feedback loop).

 

I don't know what sort of comparison is that. It's apples to oranges. But I'll bite. Here's another comparison.

How many terrible home movies can you find in any major online movie store? What is the ratio compared to normal movies?

How does that ratio compare to steam's terrible to normal games?

 

Next step is scary, is what it is. I see what you are getting at, but I refuse to believe they are just opening up for everything to come in. It will hurt them. Sure, they will get a ton of games with the gates open, but I doubt that will increase the revenue. Consumers, like us, will have a hard time finding games we want. It will practically render the store front useless in the long run, unless they curate that (which I believe they already do to some extent).

It's hard to know what exactly will happen, but I do hope they are basing this on useful data. They have a bunch of the best and brightest minds available to them, the money are flowing in, and they are privately owned. They are not doing this to turn pennies, especially not since they should be able to make more by catering to the developer community and nurturing that.

I think it's comparable to menus in a restaurant. It's better to have a short menu with a few, delicious courses, than having a large selection. Steam is throwing around bigger numbers, but overall, they should be interested in having quality games on their store front, compared to a large quantity of cheap knock offs.

I honestly believe that Steam Direct will make it less attractive for a lot of the shovelware, but I guess we won't know that until we see numbers from 2017.

 

I'm not really sure what you're saying. My point was that it doesn't matter if there's 1 million terrible games on Steam and 10 good ones, or if there's 1000 terrible ones and 1000 good ones. If the interface for finding the games you want is bad then you'd have a hard time finding the game you want in either example, but if it was good then it wouldn't matter to you that you were browsing through 1 million and ten games or 2000 games because you'd only be looking at the games you were interested in anyway.

And there's also the point to be made that what you and I consider terrible may be worth playing for someone else.

My point is that even if Steam stopped accepting new games right this second we'd still have a hard time browsing through the games already on the marketplace so we already have a problem and what they choose to do about future submissions doesn't affect the existing problem one bit. And from personal experience in dealing with web stores and systems up to 100 000 bigger than Steam in regards to the number of entities they handle the amount of games on Steam is currently not and probably never will be the root of the problem, at least in my opinion.

 

Some good points I haven't thought about.

True, with steam greenlight having players give new games a yay or nay, and just a tiny subset of Steam population still caring about voting, a small amount of haters might bring down a good niche game for no good reasons (while obvious crap gets waved through in the name of sarcasm).

Which is a common problem with "crowd sourcing", something we see on a daily basis in democratic system where a small minority waves a stupid decision through *cough*TrumpAsPresident*cough* just because a) the bigger majority cannot be bothered to go voting, or b) because the system is crap, allowing a minority to win against a majority.

Both of which is evident in Greenlight, with all the crap games that get waved through, paid voting and whatnot. Clearly the majority has lost interest, and the system is no really working.


If Steam is really that important to niche games -> IDK... but what I get from your post is that you like the newer system more because you are no longer at the mercy of the vocal minority, you are just required to make "a leap of faith" with your own money first.


Another good point as to why the newer system might end up being a good thing no matter how rough around the edges it currently is.

 

Steam just gives exposure. I don't think it is the best way to market a niche game though but if the game is on Steam it become accessible to people who want to buy it and play most of their games on Steam. A niche game would easily be hidden on Steam but linking to the game on Steam from multiple sources..social media, websites, banners, whatever, could help.

 

Out of curiosity and because the discussion about alternative storefronts that might become the Indie goto places was going on earlier in this thread...

Do you reckon that IF there was a storefront that catered more towards players and developers of your niche, and gained fame for that among players interested in that niche (so in the end, there might be Steam for big AAA games, itch.io for low cost Indie games, and maybe a dozen specialised stores for more niche games like Roleplaying RPGs, Simulators (no, not goat simulators), Strategy games, and so on), would that be a better or worse situation in your opinion compared to the current "you need to be on Steam even though you have low sales there" situation?

Given all the guys that will end up buying your game will be on said alternative store anyway because there are almost no impulse buys for a hardcore niche game (or so I would think), and anyone interested in said niche would soon find the storefront in question (which implies the storefronts do need to market themselves a little bit so the average Steam user DOES know where to find his hardcore simulator content that is no longer on Steam)...


Maybe something for Valve itself to think about? Have multiple Storefronts for different niches, instead of one big fat community that should encompass clearly incompatible genres and playerbases (as we can see from your example)?

That might actually help a lot with the discovery problem. Less potential eyes that COULD look at your product, but a higher percentage of sales among the ones that do look at your product.
Much better chance of getting meaningful moderation and curation going without breaking the bank.

Maybe a community that is not only interested in voting for new releases, but *gasp* does so without "sarcasm" and "haters" getting in the way?
Maybe way more relevant customer reviews?

 

I think a popular niche gaming store would be better than Steam for us. We are making a roleplaying game and if we had a place where roleplayers would go to look for games, it would obviously be the best place to put our game. Steam doesn't even have a roleplaying tag in it's search so it sort of leaves us out. Plus, role players are hard to find.

 

I don't think Valve's goal with Direct is about reducing the flood of crap games. I think Valve's goal is to make it easier and faster to get a lot more games onto Steam. Valve will probably set the price to $100 per game, just to weed out some of the least serious stuff. But I highly doubt Valve will try for $500 or $5000 per game, because that would deter a lot of developers from using Steam.

Have you read the book "The Long Tail" by Chris Anderson? I suspect that Valve execs have read it and follow many of the ideas. In a digital storefront, the rules of a long tail dominate. With a long tail style storefront, you never try to reduce the amount of products. You allow nearly everything onto the store, and then let reviews, refunds, automated recommendations, and excellent search options help pair up customers with products.

Manual curation is usually the wrong solution, since it does not scale well. I get that manual curation can be useful at solving the quality issue, but the quality issue does not need to be solved from Valve's point of view. As long as Valve can offer reviews, refunds, automated recommendations, and excellent search options, then they can succeed as a long tail style business. Valve is trying to be more like Amazon and less like Best Buy.

 

At that price point you're not weeding anything out (just look at the current state). You may as well remove it.

 

I agree that $100 per game will probably weed nearly nothing out, and will probably lead to even more low quality games on the store than the existing Greenlight process. But that is what I am guessing Valve is going to do. I would be surprised if Valve chose $500 or $5000 per game.

 

That $100 was the lowest value suggested by the devs in their queries which sounds something it wont most likely be. It would make no sense to make things worse than they already are. On top of that they mentioned the recoupable fee which would hint that they are considering a higher cost. $100 would make it a zero risk thing even if you did not get it back.

Also even if most of their systems are automated the flood of low quality stuff will also generate extra load in form of a support tickets or other issues, at minimum hinder product discovery even more for the users. My suggestion queue has been mostly terrible for long time even if I have said hundreds of times I do not care about x, y and z games. It's still suggesting (thinks I might like them) me these low budget games with neutral ratings. Can't get any better if there will be even more game in the pool to suggest from with similar tags that the high end games have.

 

In my local game group the news was shared as 'Steam realizes that people don't deserve to vote'.

 

Well, if many of the votes are paid for then I don't think those people do deserve to vote. Had it stayed honest, it might not be going away. Sadly, it seems this was a problem created by the developers who paid people to vote yes on their game.

Is it possible that it might reduce the number of games a developer puts up? If they pay $100 and sell very few games so their money is not totally recouped, and then pay another $100, and another, eventually they will be out a large amount of money. I agree higher would be better, but maybe it will help a little with some developers who paid $100 for dozens of bad games.

 

So basically, Steam was never mad at people paying to get votes to get greenlit to get game on store.

They were just mad that it's too many steps! ... So they made it: pay -> store. 1 step. They're efficiency freaks!!