Valve plans new system along with fee increase
So since we were planning a steam greenlight campaign in a few weeks I want to talk about this. How will this affect Pumpkin Online? We don’t know, since this has just been announced and we have already paid the greenlight fee and are planning to go ahead and do it sometime this month. We don’t know when they are officially dropping it. So we’re caught in a bit of a limbo. I just want to talk about this as a developer. If steam decides to increase their submission fee anywhere from $500-$5000 ( on top of 30% royalty per sale) as they are considering, we may have to distribute other places, increase the price of the game, or have to fund raise again just to cover the submission cost. Now I’m not saying the Steam Greenlight process is perfect. There are a lot of trash games that got steam greenlit, and bad early access games (Some of which I have bought myself) and I’ve been seeing a lot of people championing this hike in price to get rid of shovelware, ‘bad’ games. However, please consider a price hike for us smaller developers like us means 1. Games will get more expensive on Steam to cover initial costs 2. Consider what will happen to games you can buy for under $10 or free 2. Less games on steam as we are forced to go someplace else 3. We’re no longer going to see the possibility of smash hit games like Undertale or Stardew Valley on Steam and it’s going to mostly AAA games who can afford the exorbitant fees. 4. Future indie game Kickstarter goals are going to go up to cover this cost. 5. End of smaller or niche games like Visual Novels, and short games on Steam made on a smaller budget by a small team that don’t intend to sell many copies. The fee they already have I think takes care of a good amount of the shovelware, and we’re willing to pay a submission fee, but we’re just hoping it’s something reasonable not $1000-$5000, because we would love to have our game on Steam and sell Pumpkin Online at a low cost. So we’re going to go ahead with greenlight this month and we’ll see what happens. I hope you guys will continue to support us because we are working really hard to make sure when we release the game it is fun, playable, and as bug-free as we can. On that note our monthly demo video will be released in a few days, Jayden is working on a few more things and we’ve moved on to private playtesting with close friends and have started the process of getting feedback and debugging. ~ Pumpkin Online is a multiplayer, farming dating sim, currently being developed by a small indie company, Pumpkin Interactive. Feel free to check out our website for more information about our game.