!! Breaking !! Steam Replacing Steam Greenlight?! (Steam Greenlight Is No More?!)

[thebluesky]

!!! NEW FROM STEAM !!!

Guys, Steam has announced they are now going away with Steam Greenlight.

The New System Is Called "Steam Direct", Steam Greenlight Was Merely A Stepping Stone.

OFFICAL FROM STEAM

"This new path, which we’re calling 'Steam Direct,' is targeted for spring 2017 and will replace Steam Greenlight," Valve explains. "We will ask new developers to complete a set of digital paperwork, personal or company verification, and tax documents similar to the process of applying for a bank account. Once set up, developers will pay a recoupable application fee for each new title they wish to distribute, intended to decrease the noise in the submission pipeline." Part of the goal is to discourage the submission of Greenlight projects that are submitted in bad faith, such as joke-projects or projects comprised of stolen assets.


But The Fee could possibly be higher. Anywhere from $100 to $5,000 per game.

Crazy Right?

"We want to make sure Steam is a welcoming environment for all developers who are serious about treating customers fairly and making quality gaming experiences," Valve wrote. "The updates we’ve made over the past few years have been paving the way for improvements to how new titles get on to Steam, and Steam Direct represents just one more step in our ongoing process of making Steam better."


Thanks For Reading,
Phoenix Gaming

[warpzone32]

Steam Direct will make the problem of crap games WORSE, not better!

Look, this isn't rocket science. With the move from Greenlight to Direct, Valve is planning to remove all semblance of Curation and just replace it with a bigger paywall. Since legitimate indie games cost MORE to produce than lazy games that don't even try and Asset Flips, all this move will do is push legitimate indie devs OFF of Steam for good, while increasing the proliferation of bad games, asset flips, and shovelware.

Meanwhile, prices will go up across the board for us end-users, and Valve gets an extra ten million dollars a year for doing literally nothing other than saying "give me more money." By definition, it can ONLY make the problem worse. To make it better you'd have to penalize crap games while giving legitimate indie developers a free pass. And you literally can't do that without curation!

So what's the solution? It would have to be an automated solution, I guess, because Valve has proven time and time again over the years, it doesn't like paying people to actually do any sort of quality assurance no matter how many LITERAL BILLIONS OF DOLLARS ACCORDING TO FORBES it rakes in.

How about keeping Greenlight as it is, except instead of just requiring a certain number of likes, you look at the RATIO of likes to dislikes? How about only allowing one game every 6 months per developer, so these so-called cottage industry players can't get a foot in the door and then use it to charge a fee for pushing crap onto Steam?

How about WEIGHTING everyone's votes according to how much shilling they've done in the past? You can DETECT abuses of the system automatically, you know. Shills vote differently than regular people. Shovelware developers publish more frequently than legitimate developers. You can use algos to do ALL this crap. All it takes is for someone at Valve to step up and say "I'll do it."

Or, hell, crowdsource it. Users can look at each other and click "person" or "bot" on each others' profiles. Get a Web of Trust model set up for the community to literally police itself.

Add an Asset Flip tag and allow users to exclude tags from the front page.

Literally anything (or no action at all!) would be a better solution than adding a paywall. Shady businesses with terrible business practices will always, always, ALWAYS be more ready, willing, and able to front the money to pass a paywall than actual starving artists and indie devs. Always.

Steam Direct will make the problem worse! Everyone knows this! It's obvious! Why is Valve pretending it doesn't know this?

Steam Direct will make the problem worse.

[warpzone32]

Oh, nice! Now they're shovelling all our complaints into one big thread so nobody sees it! I can see now why Valve is pandering to the Asset Flippers. Valve, too, it seems, likes to suppress speech and sweep complaints under the rug.

[profile name]

Well, asset flippers and shovelware bring in money to valve to spend on their vr games.

[Pheace]

Asset flippers are exactly the kind of games that would get hit by this change... why do you think they are changing the system at all otherwise?

[warpzone32]

Actually, Valve's doing the exact opposite. By removing greenlight's (admittedly broken, exploitable) curation and replacing it with a paywall, Valve is ensuring that the quality of games on Steam will go down. Good indie games cost more time and money to make than an asset flip, which you can knock out in an afterrnoon with a copy of Unity Free and $40. Therefore, Asset Flippers are more able to afford the increased fee than legitimate indies. Therefore you will see more Asset Flips, and fewer legit games, as a result of the move from Greenlight to Direct.

[Pheace]

warpzone32 eredeti hozzászólása:

Actually, Valve's doing the exact opposite. By removing greenlight's (admittedly broken, exploitable) curation and replacing it with a paywall, Valve is ensuring that the quality of games on Steam will go down. Good indie games cost more time and money to make than an asset flip, which you can knock out in an afterrnoon with a copy of Unity Free and $40. Therefore, Asset Flippers are more able to afford the increased fee than legitimate indies. Therefore you will see more Asset Flips, and fewer legit games, as a result of the move from Greenlight to Direct.

Asset flippers are the least likely to get sales when they put a game on Steam, they tend to shotgun a ton of different ones on the store either hoping to get hit by lightning or make enough money off Steam cards.

It's exactly these countless failed attempts that are going to be hit by this change. Not the indie games that actually spent time and money into their game.

Of course, I do hope whatever monetary limit they put on games going on the store will also be used as a paywall before the game is allowed Steam trading cards.(or perhaps even a higher limit)

[warpzone32]

Pheace eredeti hozzászólása:

Asset flippers are the least likely to get sales when they put a game on Steam, they tend to shotgun a ton of different ones on the store either hoping to get hit by lightning or make enough money off Steam cards.

It's exactly these countless failed attempts that are going to be hit by this change. Not the indie games that actually spent time and money into their game.

Of course, I do hope whatever monetary limit they put on games going on the store will also be used as a paywall before the game is allowed Steam trading cards.(or perhaps even a higher limit)

The problem with Steam Trading Cards is that people want them and are willing to spend money just to get them.

The problem isn't that the game sucks, the problem is that your peers don't care that the game sucks. If it costs them $10,000 to add trading cards into a game, games with Steam Trading cards will have to charge a lot more. That means the addicted trading card collectors will pay that price. (Remember, these people DO NOT CARE that the game they just paid good money for SUCKS. They're in it for the cards, and only the cards.)

Therefore adding a fee to Steam Trading Cards will only make games with them, especially bad games that only EXIST as a vector for rare ones, much more expensive. Now instead of worthless card games in the $1.99 bargian bin, you'll be seeing worthless card games priced at $60 alongside Doom and Half-Life 3.

I know how unintuitive this is, but adding a paywall doesn't solve the problem. The cost will get passed on to the consumer, and legitimate developers are the people least able to afford to front that cost on-spec.

[profile name]

Pheace eredeti hozzászólása:

Asset flippers are exactly the kind of games that would get hit by this change... why do you think they are changing the system at all otherwise?

Asset flippers have money to get thru the paywall.

[Saviliana]

People don't realise that asset flippers have already gain enough money form multiple app shop to pass the paywall, no matter how much steam build up a paywall like trump says he would build up a wall, it just won't stop asset flippers flooding the market.

It was not covering the problem, like cut blood flow form a whole arm for a wound at the outback and hoping for it would recover itself overtime, it won't and it never ends well.

[warpzone32]

Saviliana eredeti hozzászólása:

People don't realise that asset flippers have already gain enough money form multiple app shop to pass the paywall, no matter how much steam build up a paywall like trump says he would build up a wall, it just won't stop asset flippers flooding the market.

It was not covering the problem, like cut blood flow form a whole arm for a wound at the outback and hoping for it would recover itself overtime, it won't and it never ends well.

This guy gets it. Steam Direct will increase the number of asset flips on Steam, while serving as a deterrant to honest indie developers. You can't argue with the math. An asset flip costs way less time and money to make than a legitimate indie game, and Valve is charging them both the same entry fee. Guess which one will make it in.

[Pheace]

warpzone32 eredeti hozzászólása:

This guy gets it. Steam Direct will increase the number of asset flips on Steam, while serving as a deterrant to honest indie developers. You can't argue with the math. An asset flip costs way less time and money to make than a legitimate indie game, and Valve is charging them both the same entry fee. Guess which one will make it in.

It's not going to stop *every* asset flip out there (if a game is at least halfdecent), but the point is to make it at least unprofitable to just dump games on Steam.

Sure, they can *pay* past the paywall on a crappy asset flip. For what? To never sell more than a couple of games and never see their money returned? That means the purpose is lost.

These trade card tactics for instance as far as I read relied on them being incredibly liberal handing out 'free' keys or being incredible cheap in bundles and then counting on trade card income. Hence why a min requirement on sales would work towards curbing that, since the only way to get past that is to either get sales on Steam or buy their own game till they past that mark, and the latter could seriously hamper the potential profitability of the whole thing.

[Saviliana]

Pheace eredeti hozzászólása:

Sure, they can *pay* past the paywall on a crappy asset flip. For what? To never sell more than a couple of games and never see their money returned? That means the purpose is lost.

You don't know anything about marketing do you? Getting a product on steam is already a goal to them, as like some average joe gets their ♥♥♥♥♥♥ work on a national TV news live to become something able to be talk in the bar with. There are alot people like to spent their money in this kind of way, and guess how they have get their money to gets on steam? Moar(*typo for silliness) stupid people who buy their products in the first place. And those stupid people would like to see if the game get up on steam and thought it is better then they were thinking, and pay more to get more form those "developers". The paywall method would just never works on stopping those asset flippers, and it would make the system more attractive to those kinds of business that doing the flooding.

[Jillas]

Pheace eredeti hozzászólása:

Sure, they can *pay* past the paywall on a crappy asset flip. For what? To never sell more than a couple of games and never see their money returned? That means the purpose is lost.

I'm not sure if all Digital Homicide games were asset flips or not, but we all can say that their games were bad, so let's use them for our example:
DH released 21 games total on Steam (full list with names is here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Homicide_Studios )

Imagine if they were required to pay $5k fee for each game they released on Steam (21x5000=105000), we shouldn't forget that Valve said that the fee is recoupable, so it means that they somehow will be able to return that money, but even if the fee wasn't recoupable, they still be profitable! Here listen what this guy says:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mX6Ge-KaoZg
He made some good calculations based on open data, and it looks like DH has made at the very least $200k just by selling trading cards and a $3 bundle. So, 200k-105k=95k even with the new Steam Direct fee they would earn $95000 minimum!

Looks like even a $5000 fee won't be able to stop asset flippers from what they're doing if Valve allows them to have trading cards. And we all know that Valve will never remove trading cards, 'cause they make huge money with that system...

[Pheace]

Jillas eredeti hozzászólása:

He made some good calculations based on open data, and it looks like DH has made at the very least $200k just by selling trading cards and a $3 bundle. So, 200k-105k=95k even with the new Steam Direct fee they would earn $95000 minimum!

Looks like even a $5000 fee won't be able to stop asset flippers from what they're doing if Valve allows them to have trading cards. And we all know that Valve will never remove trading cards, 'cause they make huge money with that system...

200k over 21 games though? (if I'm not mistaken). How many sales (through Steam) did those games have?

I'm definitely not saying to remove Steam trading cards, *at all* but say you need a minimum of 5 or 10k (income made through *Steam sales* for a game) before you unlock trading cards would many of those even get to the unlock point? From that number they only make around 10k per title (if that) so *paying* your way through it (by faking xxx accounts to buy your game?) to unlock Steam trading cards almost loses it's purpose at that point.

Again, most games would still unlock Trading cards just fine so it's not like Valve's losing that market. It would just cut out the games that don't sell much, anything at all on Steam itself. (numbers would need adjusting for effectiveness of course but no doubt Steam knows exactly at what point it would be best).

[warpzone32]

Pheace eredeti hozzászólása:

Jillas eredeti hozzászólása:

Looks like even a $5000 fee won't be able to stop asset flippers from what they're doing if Valve allows them to have trading cards. And we all know that Valve will never remove trading cards, 'cause they make huge money with that system...

I'm definitely not saying to remove Steam trading cards, *at all* but say you need a minimum of 5 or 10k (income made through *Steam sales* for a game) before you unlock trading cards would many of those even get to the unlock point?

You're missing the point, Pheace. Everything Digital Homicide did was profitable for them and profitable for Valve. When Direct goes live, it will still be profitable for developers like them and become even MORE profitable for Valve. Therefore Valve has every incentive to keep asset flippers like Digital Homicide on Steam, as long as they don't do something bone-shatteringly stupid like try and sue half the userbase.

Valve will not change the trading card system, because it's working just fine the way it is to make Valve money. Valve will not drive bad games away from Steam, because bad games are selling just fine as long as they have trading cards.

Valve does not care about good games or bad games. Valve does not care about legitimate indie developers. Valve does not care about art. Valve only cares about money. Steam Direct, in the form Valve proposed it, is proof of that.

Steam Direct will increase the number of asset flips on Steam, while driving legitimate indie developers out of business. You've already seen the math on that two different ways from two different sources. Why are you still in denial?