#steam direct

[leninthelion]

Do you know what this means? That's right: Lenin - The Lion Steam store page is on the way to being published! The game won't be released now - probably on December - but you guys will be able to access the store page, see some information about the game, give your feedback about it, and of course, get ready to access the complete game when it's released! Soon I'll post Lenin - The Lion Steam store page here, on Tumblr, and on other social media. Stay tuned!

[creationvibes]

I know this seems out of nowhere but I decided to take a break from Yolhammer and work on something smaller and simpler. I haven't really been able to work on Yolhammer much since my computer is so weak and lags too bad. I haven't even been able to build the project in about 3 weeks. But I would like to try to get this game done and maybe put out on Steam or somewhere for Halloween. If I don’t meet the deadline oh well no big deal. This project is called “Umbral” and it’s just a game about a little bat that had his father killed and mother kidnaped by an evil winged snake and it’s your job to find and rescue her. Short and simple is the goal here. I LOVE 2D art way more than 3D so this is a nice break from 3D. What do you think of these screenshots I took of the two levels I have been working on so far?

[osaywat]

The Steam Dichotomy

The dysfunctional thinking between what developers have and what they think they want

Valve announced that Steam Greenlight was no more, and then Steam Direct became news everywhere. Not much has been said yet, other than Steam Direct will be about as much as Steam Greenlight was – and this has sparked debate among indie developers. Some show support with the initiative, whereas others are disappointed in the low fee and the consequences they assume from it.

Thinking less competition will provide for better opportunities for sales is absurd. You can try standing on a street downtown selling candy by yourself, but the fact that you would be the only kid diung anything doesn’t mean that anyone would buy from you. Ideally, having a market involves the concept of multiple variables efficiently coexisting, without it the concept of a market doesn’t exist. Without company diversity operating in the same supply and demand, indie developers would be nothing but quirky kids doing creative things that belong nowhere in the economic spectrum. Having a healthy market indicates more to work with, there are more games but also gamers too; having more people to perceive as potential users is a positive thing.

Without the data a market provides, companies like Steam would not exist. There would not be enough of a user base to build up a distribution platform that would operate as an important hub in the industry – you would be stuck working on your own Wordpress website, with your GoDaddy / Shopify store.  I sure remember those days, way before even social media existed. To assume a company should do less to serve third-party expectations is flawed, a company works for itself, even if it is a hub that provides a service to many other smaller companies and indie studios.

 The thing indie developers understand as a problem is the denial to accept the bar gets raised every single time there is a surplus of content. More games dictate gamers will have choices, providing new bars for what is value and price, including options for costs and quality. When more is asked of you, you shouldn’t complain about giving less – learn more instead; there is so much to work with, having fewer people playing games won’t dictate your success, but having more venues to reach out to more.

There is not much to discuss on Steam Direct so far, we need information on how content will be curated now, and what this new platform will offer for indie development. For now, all we can do is revise the concepts of cost and price, and quality and value – all sound similar, yet they are not. Not long ago, I wrote about the difference of cost and price, this time I want to introduce quality and contrast it with the concept of value, all relevant to the future of your games.

Value is something that becomes defined by the user, if it is something that serves a purpose for any specific use, or that it becomes something that resonates in sentiment. Quality relies entirely on the company, and sometimes it might even set the bar for cost and performance. Also, while important, users might buy not because it has quality but they will not buy it in the absence of quality, reason why quality and value need of each other.

Maybe your game presents the most refreshing imaginative creation yet on its genre, but if the game crashes on start, it matters very little how meaningful it is if it’s unplayable. Maybe your game runs perfect, but it is yet again another pointless shooter clone without even a story to it – development should not impair marketing, just as marketing can’t exist without development. Yet, it is often known that developers can market a game for five years and more, or simply just launch without marketing at all – neither scenario is healthy without understanding how variables like quality and value will set the bar for cost and ultimately, price.

Steam is one of many distribution options for digital content, and it is one of the fundamental ones. It widens your options as a publishing platform, but it doesn’t provide success by default. Everything you combine with the concept of cost, quality, value and price will.

Game development production is fundamental: the time you take working on something, the time it takes to promote said something, the money you inject into it. There are so many variables that need time and money, and if you do not have the money then it should take ten times the work and attention. But thinking because you can’t afford it, that it might not be needed, is what makes indie developers fight to be in a new releases listing rather than organize a genuine marketing plan instead. Invest your efforts wisely, don’t be afraid of competition – grow with it.

“Loads of moneeyyyy! Money, money, money ♪ ♫ ♪ ”

[saku-baka]

Our thoughts on Steam Direct

Last Friday Valve announced their plans regarding the future of Steam. They decided to get rid of Steam Greenlight and replace it with a direct sign-up system called Steam Direct. A decision that could potentially harm a lot of developers around the whole world. Including us.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with their submission system;

Steam Greenlight is a crowdsourced game submission program where developers had to pay a small fee of $100 to submit their game to Greenlight. Then it was up to the community to vote on some of the new games they’d like to see released on Steam. It was a great way for indie developers to get feedback from potential customers during their development process and eventually publish their finished product on Steam. But this system had some flaws. Developers could easily offer rewards in exchange for votes. And since its launch plenty of games including copycats of existing titles, fake projects, and unfinished demo’s flooded Greenlight. It became a tough process to get noticed among these games. It doesn’t come as a surprise that Valve wants to make some changes to improve the quality of their platform. But we would’ve never thought that their solution could be of such a great influence on our future as an indie studio.

Starting from next month Valve will launch Steam Direct. They mentioned the following plans for their new submission pipeline:

You’ll have to complete a set of digital paperwork, personal or company verification, and tax documents

Valve will check each submission to ensure the quality and make sure they are actually games

You’ll have to pay an application fee for EACH game you’d like to publish ranging from $100 - $5,000 (Valve is still gathering feedback before they set on an actual price)

Paperwork

We don’t know how tedious this process will be for developers outside the US. But other than that we don’t see a problem with filling out some paperwork.  

Valve checking submissions

Here’s where the problems could kick in. There’s not a lot of information about how Valve will determine the quality of each submission. There are speculations that Valve employees will have a say in this. Others talk about an algorithm that filters out the good from the bad. Either way, we are aware that visual novels and dating sims are frowned upon by a lot of people. Many developers in this genre use free tools as Ren’py, RPG maker, and visual novel studio. We fear that these types of games just won’t tick the boxes that Valve or a potential algorithm have in mind.

The application fee

And here’s where it get’s ugly. If Valve decides to settle with a rather high application fee, they will ruin the chances of many indie developers to get their game out there. We are running Sakubaka with just the two of us. We simply don’t have the money to pay for a large fee. And judging from all the sad and angry comments about Steam Direct we’re not the only ones. Not to mention that they rob indies of the chance to make mistakes during their development process. Because they won’t be able to afford it. It will be a privilege only granted to those with a big bank account. Imagine if great indie titles as The Binding of Isaac or Undertale had to be published under these circumstances. They wouldn’t have seen the light of day.

Community

Steam Greenlight was all about giving the community a voice. With Steam Direct Valve denies their community the right to decide for themselves which games they’d like to support and eventually buy. People who only play triple A games probably won’t be bothered by this change. But not everyone is interested in those big titles. If a high fee will become the new reality, the amount of indie games will decrease. It could force audiences who’d love to play these kind of games to look for them elsewhere.

There are still many questions unanswered about Steam Direct. We will probably get these answers at its launch in march and some terms may change in the process. But until then it’s going to be a nerve–wracking month for us since our whole business plan revolved around Steam Greenlight. It felt only natural to pick Steam as a potential publisher because it’s convenient to use and could distribute our game to a large audience from over the whole world. We put a lot of effort in our game just like many other developers out there. We really hope Steam will think twice before settling with a fee that could damage the future of many developers. If they really intend to “decrease the noise in the submission pipeline.” there are other ways to achieve this. Someone made a great suggestion in the comment section of the announcement that Valve could make it mandatory to release a demo of your game.

Whatever happens, we will keep you updated on the matter! Thank you all for reading this post.

[blazehedgehog]

What do you think about Steam Direct and/or it's admission fee?

I’m glad Steam is trying to stop the torrent of raw sewage spilling out on to Steam. Jim Sterling’s discovery that 40% of Steam’s entire catalog of games were released in 2016 is mind-boggling.

Valve seemingly took “work smarter, not work harder” to heart, but in reality it just makes them look lazy. Instead of solving the problem first and then building tools to help accomplish that task more quickly, they did it the other way around: they built a bunch of tools that they hoped would make the problem solve itself. Instead of knowing how to fix it, they theorized how to fix it, and used everyone as beta testers. That’s bad, and has had bad consequences.

Steam Greenlight was a mess. Speaking as somebody who made it through Greenlight, I can say with certainty that I don’t think my game deserved to make it through Greenlight. When you register, they talk about the tens of thousands of votes you need, you’re shown a percentage to the top 100 most popular games on Greenlight, all of this information to suggest where the line is drawn for games approved for sale or not.

None of it matters.

I think OverBite peaked at 71% of the way to the top 100 games. By the time it was “greenlit,” it had slipped back down to like, 43%. Less than 2000 people actually viewed my submission page. Only half of them actually voted on the game. Of the people that did vote on OverBite, nearly half THEM said “No.”

But it was still good enough to be greenlit. No surprise, then, that a lot of total garbage managed to get through Greenlight and approved for sale. Greenlight was a sloppy solution because the other option involved Valve doing more work for themselves.

Steam Direct sounds like Valve will be a little more hands on with what gets approved or disapproved, which is great. But I also think that it probably won’t stem the tide as much as I (and others) are hoping – we’re moving towards an era where everybody can do everything and Valve specifically wants to encourage that. One person’s trash is another person’s treasure, so the idea is to let all the trash in and even if it only sells one copy, that’s still money for Valve. In Valve’s eyes, the solution is to then build a curation pipeline so the trash can get to a person that might appreciate it.

We might see a slight reduction on the amount of crap going up on Steam, but really I think Valve’s involvement in this is going to be checking for Digital-Homicide-style shenanigans (where they were submitting six variants of the same template game with different graphics packs overlaid).

Then again, Valve tossed out that submission price – the “it will cost between $100 and $5000 to submit to Steam Direct.” Higher prices obviously mean a more exclusive service, because tiny no-name developers throwing crap at the walls won’t be able to afford it. There is an opportunity here to, again, clean up Steam. But how clean should it be? What’s worth cleaning up? Some have mentioned we wouldn’t have gotten games like Undertale or Stardew Valley if the Greenlight submission fee was too high.

It’s a tough decision to make, because you have to be deliberately exclusionary and that rightfully starts to spook a lot of people.

If it was me, I’d do one of two things.

Make it so that every submission to Steam Direct costs $100. With Greenlight, you paid $100 one time and could submit an unlimited amount of games after that. Instead, I’d make it so that every single game submission cost $100 by itself. Increasing the financial investment deters people from flooding the system with garbage, but $100 still keeps the same doors open for the games I just mentioned (Stardew Valley and Undertale).

If Steam Direct is going to function like Greenlight where it’s a one time fee to submit unlimited games, raise that to $250 or maybe even $300. Basically, you don’t want this to be something somebody can do as an impulse, but still not so expensive that you shut out smaller developers. Having the submission fee be the same as buying a game console makes sense to me.

I know for some developers out there, the idea of being suddenly shut out from Steam for the first time in two years is scary to them, but I feel like this is something that needs to start happening. User curation isn’t working and as a society we’re reaching total media overload because it’s so easy to access literally millions of hours of entertainment each and every day. There needs to be a better way to cull everything below a certain point, as sad as that sounds. It’s too overwhelming not to.

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