shawnblais lähetti viestin:

I really wish they would've implemented a serious fee of $1000 or something to allow professional indie teams to have some visibility.

i much disagree. you wont get more visibility with higher fees. you get more visability with a higher sale rate. the visibility is controlled by some alghorithm. The main goal of the alghorithm is to increase sales and profit. Your game sells. you get more visibillity. Nobody buys your game then the alghorithm doesnt want loose impressions for your **** game and you loose visibility. Paying 1000$ will not change anything for you. If you are willing to spend 1000$ for your game start then better just spend the 900$ on advertising.

You have a good niche game which mainstream people not buy then hope steam improves the alghorithm to identifiy your target group better. That would bring you more sales and more visibility.
Trying to reduce competitors with higher fees is simple minded and wont work.

NEMESIS lähetti viestin:

shawnblais lähetti viestin:

I really wish they would've implemented a serious fee of $1000 or something to allow professional indie teams to have some visibility.

i much disagree. you wont get more visibility with higher fees. you get more visability with a higher sale rate. the visibility is controlled by some alghorithm. The main goal of the alghorithm is to increase sales and profit. Your game sells. you get more visibillity. Nobody buys your game then the alghorithm doesnt want loose impressions for your **** game and you loose visibility. Paying 1000$ will not change anything for you. If you are willing to spend 1000$ for your game start then better just spend the 900$ on advertising.

You have a good niche game which mainstream people not buy then hope steam improves the alghorithm to identifiy your target group better. That would bring you more sales and more visibility.
Trying to reduce competitors with higher fees is simple minded and wont work.

The economics of paid advertising usually don't stack up for games priced below $10. Managing direct marketing requires time and skill that many Indie devs don't have. Additionally, Steam does not support tracking services like Facebook Pixel.

A $1000 submission fee would be presumably recoupable, at $5000 or $10,000 of gross revenue, whereas advertising is entirely unrecoupable.

The reality is that in this new era of zero-minimum-quality, customers are being more cautious and only purchasing games with some existing buzz and an established playerbase. This puts many Indie devs in a catch-22 situation, where they cannot get any sales or customer interest because they have no playerbase.

A $1000 fee as Nemesis suggests (particularly if paired with a requirement to have a registered company -- plus an increase of minimum price from $0.99 to $2.99 or $4.99 for the base game) would shortcut this, by indirectly establishing a greater minimum average quality of release. Customers would become more interested in browsing, Valve would become more interested in selling, and efforts would shift away from low-quality hobby projects towards meatier, high-quality, bigger-budgets efforts from small teams.

Look at what has happened since Steam Direct has released: much lower average quality, increased reliance on Algorithm, new releases hidden, removal of features like Trading Cards, lower median revenue. It stands to reason that if Steam Direct is adjusted to target bigger, higher quality projects, many of these outcomes would be reversed and the entire storefront would be improved for everybody.

Richard East lähetti viestin:

A $1000 submission fee would be presumably recoupable, at $5000 or $10,000 of gross revenue.

A large fee does not guarantee a high revenue.
And Steam cannot guarantee traffic for a poorly selling game.
You have already been advised to buy ads for $900 if you feel a great need for it.

Any half-decent game shall make more than $10'000.

$900 will get you nowhere, especially with low priced games (eg: $25 or less), and even more without the possibility to track down ads.

In short, Richard East is right from A to Z... :-)

ManuTOO lähetti viestin:

Any half-decent game shall make more than $10'000.

Do you want to say that the game cannot earn $10K due to the fact that the fee is less $1000?
P.S. Maybe Steam Direct affects the speed of making money but not the quantity.

The only reason for an increased fee is to gate small games out of Steam and avoid "competition". As there will be less games, then the sales of what remains will increase. This a morally questionable way to do things, isn't it?

Kezarus lähetti viestin:

The only reason for an increased fee is to gate small games out of Steam and avoid "competition". As there will be less games, then the sales of what remains will increase. This a morally questionable way to do things, isn't it?

It would be true if traffic was evenly distributed between all games.
All traffic is taken away by AAA games now.
Therefore, he will compete for traffic with AAA games.

The problem is that more & more games means less & less visibility for everybody : the incoming game list is now almost wasted ; organic search is more & more a chore for the average user ; the lowering average quality means some gamers will avoid everything except the most popular titles or the ones recommended by friends.

All in all, the trash games are buried away, which is fine, but with current Valve's decisions, they bring with them the small games that can't afford impactful marketing.

Right now, the future of Steam seems to be the mobile app stores : hundred of thousands of apps seen by no one, because people just check the top-selling, featured or advertised apps.

This will prevent some small talented Indies to get enough success to go on in their career, and thus in the long term, it'll even lower more the quality of games. And so on.

We'll be left with the Free-to-play games designed for retention instead of fun (eg: daily quests aren't fun, at least not for me :-) )

Valve can make the choice to take action to paint a brighter future for the Indie market on PC, or just flush down everything except the AAA & III stuff.

ManuTOO lähetti viestin:

Valve can make the choice to take action to paint a brighter future for the Indie market on PC, or just flush down everything except the AAA & III stuff.

I am curious, how would they do that?

I don't see how a higher entry fee for developers would help. Right now my front page have AAA, Mobile ports and Free To Play games. Steam search engine is garbage and I rely on SteamDB to look for anything good to play.

I receive external traffic 80%, from Steam - 20% (search, community, curators)
This traffic cannot be transferred to someone, even if someone pays $1000.
$100 fee - gives some traffic from DQ one month.
MLT - traffic died;
----------------------------
What you can expect from the $1000 fee?

P.S. It is already impossible to take away anything from indie games. Steam can only forbid to publish indie games by raising the price fee. But no one will get anything from this.

@GraphXGames,
most Indies solo devs could pay the $1000 fee. Hobbyists and spammers couldn't, though.
And for an Indie team, $1000 is really very low.

If it's too high, set up an itch.io page (or a website, or whatever) and start to sell with it with a bit of marketing. If your game is good, you'll get to $1000 quickly (that's only 50-100 copies sold).

@Kezarus,
without knowing how everything sells on Steam exactly, I can't be sure of my plan, and even less of the limits, but let's try :

1) Create the "Steam Cocooning (™)" tag (SCc for short) for hobbyist games (and spammers ).

a) you get it for a $50 fee (the fee is to cover Valve's work to check you created correctly your Steam page and your build)

b) SCc games have _zero_ visibility on the normal Steam ; your game isn't listed anywhere on it, except if a user opted in to see SCc games, through a parameter (ie: see only normal games, see only SCc games, see both)
There's SCc link on top (or bottom) of the Steam pages, so the tag gets a bit of promotion and some explanation.

c) SCc Games that sell well are automatically moved to normal Steam (ie: once they grossed ~$10'000)

2) Move to SCc all games that are already released and didn't gross for $10'000 since their release (once they are released since at least 1 year)

3) New normal games require a $1000 fee, recoupable at $10'000 grossing

4) Now, you get more visibility for all decent games, including small Indies game ; Valve can promote again the "Incoming soon" section in all its glory and put most if not all games within the "New & Popular" section, so now it's only "New" (or at least, low selling new games can stay there for a more long time)

5) Browsing "New" section or tag section becomes possible again. Steam can redirect a bit of the visibility of the Discovery algorithm from AAA to most games

6) Normal games that grossed for less than ~$50 in the past year are moved to SCc (this limit cannot be public, else it'll be abused)

7) And while I'm at it, rehaul completely the discovery algorithm, remove the global score (or hide it a bit), and rehaul the review systems :-)


EDIT:
NB for 1.b) When a user decides to see only SCc games, he would see only SCcs games in the "more like this section" ; when he wants to see both, I guess some SCcs games could be in there too (if the algorithm is smart enough) ; so a SCc game would get visibility, from only from the SCc tagged views.

ManuTOO lähetti viestin:

@GraphXGames,
most Indies solo devs could pay the $1000 fee. Hobbyists and spammers couldn't, though.
And for an Indie team, $1000 is really very low.

Steam will not promote games whose conversion is worse than AAA games even if you pay $10K fee.
You can’t buy all the Steam traffic for $1K to earn $10K - it's very low conversion to sales.

@GraphXGames,
my last game, which is very far from being an AAA, ended in the "News & Popular" (likely for France only though) for a while and its effects has been really nice for my sales (plus the more it sold the more it stayed there, as usually).

So I can only wish that more Indie games get the same treatment (including my future games ).

And to achieve that, having less released games will mean less new games pushing out the previously released ones out the news list.

And the "Coming Soon" screen lists everything, both AAA & trash games (last time I checked, which was more than 1 year ago), so removing the hobbyist & trash games from it would greatly benefit small indie games.

ManuTOO lähetti viestin:

@GraphXGames,
my last game,

What the game?

=> https://store.steampowered.com/app/760630