I agree with this. I think that putting your game on Greenlight before you even know if you have the funding to develop it is jumping the gun. And, based on Valve's reasoning for some of the games they've Greenlit, you'd be better off running your full Kickstarter, building a good voting base, then launching your game on Greenlight and getting a big pile of votes all at once.

Aren't most using their greenlight page to direct traffic to their kickstarter page?

I don't think we will see any less of these projects. Greenlight is probably not their highest priority of the two.

Good points all round, guys. Good to see some sensible discussion going on. :)

Mindwedge a écrit :

And thusly we see the real purpose of Greenlight submissions for the vast majority: as another marketing tool and just that.

Indeed, your philosophy seems to have become the norm. I still like to think that Greenlight was created so that Gabe could lure all the indie teams to his platform, but it seems that there is a whole meta-game emerging. People use GL to drive Kickstart, and kickstart to create "Surging".

I must agree for us, Greenlight for the most part was a marketing tool. We did our Greenlight submission just before our IndieGoGo campaign. But our campaign was to raise marketing funds, and not to finish the game, as the game had enough money to get completed.

Many of the Kickstarter and Indiegogo campaigns are games that are already far into development, but the developers are asking for additional funds to improve the production values. Even if the campaign fails they still intend to make the game. These I have nothing against being submitted to Greenlight.

But then there are the games that are still in the concept stage, and the developer is asking for funding to create them. Those games in my opinion should not be submitted to Greenlight in such an early stage (that's what the concept section is for).

Actually Kickstarter or not, I'm against submitting any game that is very early in development to Greenlight. Just look at some of the games that already got Greenlit, some of them are not even close to being finished and ready for release, some of them are even looking like they might get dropped.

Yeah, unfortunately concept came a bit late for some of them. I remember Interstellar Marines had a failed kickstarter campaign. So who knows how that will go.

Eh, a kickstarter will help at least some games even if they don't make it on greenlight. The exposure itself is what counts.