Steam Greenlight

[sub]

All they have done with the fee is made it a gamble, regardless as to if your game is good or not, that's $100 with no guaranty that your game will see the light of day. This may work for some people, but not everyone has the $ to throw about.. like I said in my second edit.. $100 is what some people rely on to eat for a few weeks.. you're telling these people that if they have a good product, that they shouldn't eat, and instead gamble on if their game will ever make it out of greenlight. That's an absurd leap of faith for the indy dev who is making a solid product during the weekends on his own while having to eat/pay every other kind of bill.

Your assertion that someone who puts their game on Greenlight is gambling 100 dollars is absolutely, 100% false. The chance of your game getting on Steam is dependent on the quality of your game and the size of your fanbase, it's not random luck.

If someone feels like their game deserves to be on Steam, they will put the 100 dollars up. These people are running a business, and that 100 dollars just became another business expense. If they truly can not manage to come up with 100 dollars, a situation that I find hard to believe, then they can ask their fanbase for donations. If they can't get 100 people to donate 1 dollar, or if they don't want to pay 100 dollars to get their game on Greenlight, it's not a game that had any chance of getting on Steam in the first place.

Also, keep in mind that this is a one time fee. Also keep in mind that Apple charges money every year for you to put games on their store. This isn't some new radical idea.

Greenlight was designed with the idea that people would be able to post proof of concepts and get early backing behind their games as well as a place for finished products, not for people to only put up a finished products alone.

You're also incorrect about this. The goal is for people to be able to post proof of concepts and have some early backing for their games, but that section of Greenlight is not up and running. At the moment, you are only supposed to be submitting games that are well on their way into development.

On the note of "no" votes canceling out "yes" votes, they do. Battleground Europe proved this. I voted for it, it went to 1%.. a friend that I linked it to then trolled, and voted no. It dropped back to 0, it has since gone back up to 1 in the past few hours.

I'm not sure, but I sincerely doubt it. Valve is probably still playing with the algorithms that decide how many votes you need to reach 100%. The change from 1 to 0 could have easily been caused by that.

 

[macdaddymario]

Your assertion that someone who puts their game on Greenlight is gambling 100 dollars is absolutely, 100% false. The chance of your game getting on Steam is dependent on the quality of your game and the size of your fanbase, it's not random luck.

It is a gamble. I could make the next minecraft, fork out the 100 bucks, that I saved and instead didn't eat for 3 weeks (that's not a joke btw, economy is garbage) but instead the market is flooded by groups of indy devs who have a few of their games out already and can now post 4 or 5 or 6 at a time. Now my game, made by one guy, is held up to the standard of a small development team, who now have the money to just put more and more titles online. It's a gamble.

If someone feels like their game deserves to be on Steam, they will put the 100 dollars up. These people are running a business, and that 100 dollars just became another business expense. If they truly can not manage to come up with 100 dollars, a situation that I find hard to believe, then they can ask their fanbase for donations. If they can't get 100 people to donate 1 dollar, or if they don't want to pay 100 dollars to get their game on Greenlight, it's not a game that had any chance of getting on Steam in the first place.

These people, you mean indy dev groups? Yeah, maybe. But what about the small one maners? They get the shaft? Makes sense. Let the people with all the backing they need, have all the chances in the world, and not give the small guy the chance to shine. What fanbase would they ask? The idea of greenlight is to create that fanbase, how can they get the fanbase to donate if they can't get their game up on greenlight to create it first?

Also, keep in mind that this is a one time fee. Also keep in mind that Apple charges money every year for you to put games on their store. This isn't some new radical idea.

This is also the reason many people dislike Apple, the closed source platform makes it way to difficult for the kid in school to show his potential.

You're also incorrect about this. The goal is for people to be able to post proof of concepts and have some early backing for their games, but that section of Greenlight is not up and running. At the moment, you are only supposed to be submitting games that are well on their way into development.

No where on the greenlight page does it say another section is comming soon. It does not say that it is only for submitting games. In fact it clearly says:

"Can I post my game concept or early builds?

Absolutely! We encourage you to post information about your game as early in the development process as you are comfortable with. Greenlight will let you define whether you are posting your game as a concept/early build or as a playable game that is nearing completion.

We ask that you only define your game as 'playable game' if you have a playable build that demonstrates the gameplay mechanics and at least one level of your game. Otherwise, please classify your submission as 'concept' until its far enough along that the community can reasonably evaluate the mechanics, scope, and style of your game. Either way, you will probably get great feedback and a good start in building a community of fans around your game."

No where in there does it say 'Currently, only submit playable games because the concept section isn't ready.'.

I'm not sure, but I sincerely doubt it. Valve is probably still playing with the algorithms that decide how many votes you need to reach 100%. The change from 1 to 0 could have easily been caused by that.

You can doubt it all you want, I listed a game that proved this, and if you read the comment sections of other games they have the same issue. You have a yes and no choice, no's currently cancel out a yes vote. They need to add an option for "I wouldn't buy it, but it looks good" and fix their currently messed up system.

In any event, I'm not going to sit here and argue over a now closed system. Let the 'professional' and 'indy'(I used indy loosely as I don't view people that have had 3 or 4 games released and have made a profit off of them indy) dev studios have it. Eventually another open system will come around and allow people that do deserve recognition to get it after their hard work without forcing them to lose even more before MAYBE seeing the light of day.

EDIT: I would like to add btw.. who the hell does Valve think they are? Let's say their new system goes off without a hitch, that's all well and good, whatever. But FORCING my money to go to a charity that ONLY operates in North America? No, I should have an option of charities to send my money to.

 

[Deverz]

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=94128543

Black mesa on green light

 

[sub]

http://positech.co.uk/cliffsblog/2012/09/05/greenlight-and-the-100-fee/

 

[DaRkOwNs]

I'm not gonna insert myself into a debate on this issue and all brought up, but I currently get paid about 5 dollars an hour. So low, because my business is just starting out, if anyone was about to call bullshit.

an immediate 80% of my monthly check goes to car, rent, insurances, and utilities.

I can still afford a one-time 100 dollar fee.

As for the gambling bit, I don't think you know what that word means. It's not a gamble if your game isn't good enough to get on Greenlight or the Steam Store. That's just fact. They aren't flipping a coin behind closed doors at every submission they get. They WILL look at your game if you submit it, and 100 dollars is the service fee to do so. If it's not good, sorry, but it's just not good.

 

[macdaddymario]

Both of you, as well as the person in that link sub, missed the point of Greenlight, it's now not much different from the capitalists at apple. The only difference being they force your money to a charity that doesn't help a single person outside of the US. Eventually, someone will come around and do things the same way the Android market does, and allow developers of all skill levels and different budgets have a chance to shine. As I said I'm not going to sit here and debate it with you. Dark, if you're not going to insert yourself into a debate, don't post. Not telling you not to add your opinion to a topic, just saying don't say one thing and then do the exact opposite and pretend that you didn't then do it.

 

[sub]

We don't have to debate if you don't want. We can discuss it. I understand why you're against the 100 dollars. I'm not quite sure what's wrong with the charity they chose, but I doubt that they're going to get much money from this regardless.

What do you mean by them being no different than the capitalists at apple. Steam and the App store are very different. You can submit almost any game onto the App store and it'll be accepted, provided you meet some very minimal guidelines.

The line about allowing developers of all skill levels to shine also confuses me. The entire point of greenlight is to get the best (well, the games that would sell the most anyway) games on the store. Valve doesn't want a game that's going to sell 7 copies on their store, and I'm not sure why you'd want that.

 

[DaRkOwNs]

Both of you, as well as the person in that link sub, missed the point of Greenlight, it's now not much different from the capitalists at apple. The only difference being they force your money to a charity that doesn't help a single person outside of the US. Eventually, someone will come around and do things the same way the Android market does, and allow developers of all skill levels and different budgets have a chance to shine. As I said I'm not going to sit here and debate it with you. Dark, if you're not going to insert yourself into a debate, don't post. Not telling you not to add your opinion to a topic, just saying don't say one thing and then do the exact opposite and pretend that you didn't then do it.

I'm not pretending anything, it was an opinion and thus not a debate. I had no references or any real facts so it's just a statement.

I'm sorry to say this, but "all skill levels" just ain't gonna happen in any market. If something sucks, it isn't gonna sell. And of course the charity isn't gonna go to outside the U.S. While Steam operates internationally it's still a States based company and there are plenty of people that need help here, too.

I'm not really sure what you are trying to argue, tbh with you. Greenlight is a way for people to create and advertise and Valve to make money through a commission basis. That's exactly what it does.

 

[macdaddymario]

Sub, to answer your question as to why I may want a game that doesn't look like it was done by a team of developers, is because I feel, and have seen many times over, that more of the unique idea's come from a single person developing his own game. I buy so many apps on my phone that are done by a single person because they tend to be different from the people that work in a team and are ONLY in it for the $ that it can bring them. Let me try to explain it a little better:

You and I work as a team developing a game.. you bring up an idea that is unique, and we talk about it and discuss it, and even after talking to a few people on a forum about the idea, a hand full of them really like it. I'm in it for the money however, and because of that I want to make sure that your unique idea pleases the masses, not just some people who want that one thing and if it doesn't and we can't work out a way to make it fun for everyone it is dropped.

ESF is a prime example of that, we had someone on the forum recently (can't remember who) who was asking about the characters being 'realistic' in regards to the show.. making fighting a SSJ3 Goku with Krillin an impossible battle, (this may NOT have been what he meant, but it is how it sounded to me when I read it) while doing such would make it unique.. because I sure can't think of a DBZ fighting game that has actually made it true to the series in that sense. The idea (while in this case bad) is unique and I would be lying if I said I didn't want to see a game that actually made the transformations do that.

That's what is at the heart of the issue for me, they started out this program with an open sourced mindset, allowing for the niche crowd to show some interesting ideas that other devs simply wont follow through with because it wont interest enough people.

As for the charity thing, I didn't say that the charity they picked was bad, I just disagree with using a charity that only works in one country, when developers from around the world are able to spend their money to put a game on the service. I see no reason they couldn't give people a few picks of a charity they wanted to donate to that worked internationally.

 

[DaRkOwNs]

Sub, to answer your question as to why I may want a game that doesn't look like it was done by a team of developers, is because I feel, and have seen many times over, that more of the unique idea's come from a single person developing his own game. I buy so many apps on my phone that are done by a single person because they tend to be different from the people that work in a team and are ONLY in it for the $ that it can bring them. Let me try to explain it a little better:

You and I work as a team developing a game.. you bring up an idea that is unique, and we talk about it and discuss it, and even after talking to a few people on a forum about the idea, a hand full of them really like it. I'm in it for the money however, and because of that I want to make sure that your unique idea pleases the masses, not just some people who want that one thing and if it doesn't and we can't work out a way to make it fun for everyone it is dropped.

ESF is a prime example of that, we had someone on the forum recently (can't remember who) who was asking about the characters being 'realistic' in regards to the show.. making fighting a SSJ3 Goku with Krillin an impossible battle, (this may NOT have been what he meant, but it is how it sounded to me when I read it) while doing such would make it unique.. because I sure can't think of a DBZ fighting game that has actually made it true to the series in that sense. The idea (while in this case bad) is unique and I would be lying if I said I didn't want to see a game that actually made the transformations do that.

That's what is at the heart of the issue for me, they started out this program with an open sourced mindset, allowing for the niche crowd to show some interesting ideas that other devs simply wont follow through with because it wont interest enough people.

As for the charity thing, I didn't say that the charity they picked was bad, I just disagree with using a charity that only works in one country, when developers from around the world are able to spend their money to put a game on the service. I see no reason they couldn't give people a few picks of a charity they wanted to donate to that worked internationally.

I do understand what you're saying, but greenlight just can't be an open forum. Not won't, can't. If it was just a place where everyone could post their half-assed games, then those few with serious talent and creativity are gonna be buried underneath everything, just as Sub said. At that point, it really -is- a gamble. You'd be totally reliant on the small chance that it gets looked over by one of the developers/producers at steam.

Some people do stake their lives on this stuff. And, just like Black Mesa: Source, if your game is well thought out, crafted, and user backed, it's gonna get on the program. I've read through the guidelines and it's not very strict. Basically just 100 dollars and not being a doom/minecraft/silent hill/street fighter/CoD/BF3 knockoff.

 

[macdaddymario]

I do understand what you're saying, but greenlight just can't be an open forum. Not won't, can't.

Think you're still missing my point. My problem is that it DID start out as an open forum, and was intended to be such when talks of it first came about, right up to launch. It's not that it can't be an open forum, because it was originally
designed to be, it's just they saw the kind of response they got with it, and didn't want to devote the resources needed to maintain it is the sole reason for it changing.

 

[Mkilbride]

Well most developers agree with Valve on the 100$.

Thousands of things flung up on it,

Like Half-Life 3, Episode 3, and a ton of random junk, Halo 7 and the likes...stuff that cluttered the system, made it hard for actual developers, and over-loaded Steams servers.

100$ is pretty fair for a chance at having your project skyrocket into success. If you can't afford 100$, and you're developing a game, something is wrong, that is the mentality right now of most Indie developers posting; they actually like this change.

 

[macdaddymario]

Well most developers agree with Valve on the 100$.

Thousands of things flung up on it,

Like Half-Life 3, Episode 3, and a ton of random junk, Halo 7 and the likes...stuff that cluttered the system, made it hard for actual developers, and over-loaded Steams servers.

100$ is pretty fair for a chance at having your project skyrocket into success. If you can't afford 100$, and you're developing a game, something is wrong, that is the mentality right now of most Indie developers posting; they actually like this change.

You're still missing my initial disagreement with the change. It's the change in business practice, after harping about it being an open forum for so long, simply because they were to lazy and cheap to properly maintain the system they had put in place. If they had initially said when the system was being worked out "This will be a closed forum for serious development teams, not for people to show what they CAN do, and will be charging you per entry", I wouldn't have an issue at all, because they would have been advertizing it exactly as it is now. They didn't do this however because it was designed to be an open forum for the beginner to the much more practiced developer/dev team to show any potential he/she/they had.

Basically it boils down to I can't stand companies that don't stand behind their business model and instead change it once they see how difficult/resource consuming it is. While I understand this is a business, there use to be a time where it was passion that drove people, now it's just the bottom $ figure.

 

[DaRkOwNs]

You're still missing my initial disagreement with the change. It's the change in business practice, after harping about it being an open forum for so long, simply because they were to lazy and cheap to properly maintain the system they had put in place. If they had initially said when the system was being worked out "This will be a closed forum for serious development teams, not for people to show what they CAN do, and will be charging you per entry", I wouldn't have an issue at all, because they would have been advertizing it exactly as it is now. They didn't do this however because it was designed to be an open forum for the beginner to the much more practiced developer/dev team to show any potential he/she/they had.

Basically it boils down to I can't stand companies that don't stand behind their business model and instead change it once they see how difficult/resource consuming it is. While I understand this is a business, there use to be a time where it was passion that drove people, now it's just the bottom $ figure.

They weren't too lazy, they just saw a fundamental flaw in their program and fixed it. Pretty effectively, at that. If you disagree with it, that's fine. But it's not because Valve failed at anything that they had promise. I'm actually quite impressed with how it's working so far.

And no, it's not -won't-. It's can't. They simply don't have the manpower to process thousands upon thousands of requests for bullshit games. You need to stop blaming them for this. You're forgetting there are thousands of people who consider themselves "Developers" and only hundreds of people working on this. They did exactly what they should have and fixed the problem.

I really don't mind that you have a problem with it, but you just don't seem to be getting the important facts in this argument. It's not simply that it's a business, you're again forgetting that they have to PAY people to go through all this. If they have to hire more just to process *******s with a minecraft clone 40 times over, then they're gonna be losing more money than they could ever possibly make with it. And like I said, the acceptance process is pretty damn leniant.

 

[dbzrogue]

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=93100527
DO
*******
WANT

 

[macdaddymario]

They weren't too lazy, they just saw a fundamental flaw in their program and fixed it. Pretty effectively, at that. If you disagree with it, that's fine. But it's not because Valve failed at anything that they had promise. I'm actually quite impressed with how it's working so far.

And no, it's not -won't-. It's can't. They simply don't have the manpower to process thousands upon thousands of requests for bullshit games. You need to stop blaming them for this. You're forgetting there are thousands of people who consider themselves "Developers" and only hundreds of people working on this. They did exactly what they should have and fixed the problem.

I really don't mind that you have a problem with it, but you just don't seem to be getting the important facts in this argument. It's not simply that it's a business, you're again forgetting that they have to PAY people to go through all this. If they have to hire more just to process *******s with a minecraft clone 40 times over, then they're gonna be losing more money than they could ever possibly make with it. And like I said, the acceptance process is pretty damn leniant.

You didn't address anything in the quoted post. Nothing about them changing the business practice after going on about it being open for all devs and so on. You just quoted a post to continue to try and tell me that I'm wrong. If you want to continue this debate that's all well and good. But I'll wait for you to properly address what you quote first.