Steam Greenlight
To those trying to get Greenlit, some advice.
I've noticed a small trend of games coming on Greenlight listing every genre known to man.

You may think you're being clever, and gaming the queue system to get your game to show up on more peoples greenlight pages, but you are really just hurting your chances. Here is why:

Yes, you are going to considerably increase the number of views. When somebody customizes their queue by genre, it is only a positive check on genres, without any filtering capabilities. That means if I, as a voter, set my queue to just racing games, it will show the most recent games with racing as one of their genres, even if it is a action, adventure, horror, rpg, mmo, free to play, racing, that only has a 30 second racing level that isn't even in the trailer.

So, yes, if you do include 15 genres on your games page, you will get more page views, but more and more of those page views are going to be people less and less interested in your game. Your page view count will mostly only contribute to your down votes.

For instance, if your next racing game has a level up mechanic, that doesn't make it an rpg. If the person looking for the next indie Dragon Quest gets your racing game in their queue, they're going to vote against it. If your adventure game has a vehicle segment, that does not make it a racing game, and the Gran Turismo enthusiasts are going to vote it down.

Please, do yourselves a favor, and look more closely at your game and try and select just one or two genres that you think most accurately encapsulate what your game is about, or where you think your target audience with this game lies.
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Actually there is literally no downside to this for developers.
No votes don't count for anything, it is yes votes that matter. As a result, if even one person out of 100 pushes YES when this non racing game showed up in their racing queue, you now have one vote you wouldn't have had otherwise.
Actually there is literally a downside to this for developers. When people like me get annoyed and downvote a project simply for over-using the genre selections, when otherwise we might have voted for it. The downvotes may not "hurt" the project, but the lack of "upvotes" certainly does.
Being able to only view certain genres just incentivises developers to tick as many genres as they feel they can get away with, if you don't like developers doing that then stop filtering by genre. An alternative way to do things is to instead of filtering be able to automatically vote no to all games in a genre which is more in keeping with the purpose of greenlight anyway, and such a feature would certainly ensure most developers only use one or two genres at most, but that obviously has it's own problems too.
Okay, so just to clarify, this isn't me complaining about my queue. I don't filter anyway. As anyone who looks at the games I own would see, I'm not really particularly genre loyal. I've just noticed a rather large number of games in my queue list 8 or more genres (out of 16 available), many of which are obviously not particularly applicable.

I feel that it is obvious that the developers are trying to game the queue system, and started to look at how effective it was. Answer: it appears not to be. Although statistics were only available to the general public for games on the first few days of Greenlight's existence, the developers, themselves still get these statistics en masse (even to the extent that some developers have complained of the statistics being overwhelming). Because these statistics also have no confidentiality clause, many developers, such as Farm for Your Life's Hammer Labs, have shared these statistics widely on their sites and blogs.

A quick perusal for curiosity's sake reveals a few things. It seems a vast majority of the green lit games (including those awaiting release), only list three or fewer genres. Also, the specific number of up votes isn't the only determining factor on whether you are in the top 100 or get greenlit. some games have had almost three times(!) as many votes and only been 50% of the way into the 100 versus another game that only had a third of the number of up votes but was 81% at the same time. A couple of things that are shown in the statistics, and seem to have a very relevent part of the algorythm is the "yes" vote to "ask me later" to "no" vote ratio, the percentage of unique page views that result in your game being favorited, and the number of collections your game is added to per unique page view. It appears you need at least a 60% yes vote ratio to crack the top hundred regardless of your actual number of upvotes.

Granted, Valve isn't being particularly forthcoming on the exact way in which green lit games are decided, and probably rightfully so, in order to prevent their system from being gamed/rigged in such a way as the queue system is being attempted right now. It does appear, however, that these attempts at gaming the queue system are actually being much more harmful to the developer than helpful.

Besides, I figure, I'm also probably not the only one that takes into account the honesty of the developer in cases such as the genre into account before I vote. So if nothing else, fixing the genre to be more accurate might actually get more upvotes from people such as myself.
Ultima modifica da fireboytroy; 25 gen 2014, ore 22:34
Correlation/Causality check needed.
Are the ones which list over half the available genre also pretty crap? If so, you can't really blame the genrespamming as a cause of their failure. In many cases I vote no befeore I even see the genre listings (or I get as far as free-to-play mmo, and downthumb it then).
Have to admit, I never filter and I don't tend to pay much attention to the genre as it's generally hard to get two people to admit what each genre should/shouldn't contain.
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Data di pubblicazione: 25 gen 2014, ore 18:04
Messaggi: 6