Evolving Steam

http://steamcommunity.com/games/593110/announcements/detail/558846854614253751

by larsiusprime • 9 years ago

94 52 9 years ago

ihuman• 9 years ago

This sounds like they're re-launching Steam Greenlight, but without the pretense that only quality games will get through. Hopefully the fee will be high enough to stop asset-flips and shovelware, but low enough to allow smaller indie devs in.

gerbal• 9 years ago

The amount of shovelware and asset flips suggest the current fee of $100 is far too low.

I'm dismayed there is scarcely any mention of the quality of works entering Steam. It's patently obvious that quality is the major issue now, not the usability of the platform or developer features.

deelowe• 9 years ago

Valve's corporate philosophy seems to go completely against any sort of regulation. This is reflected in their management/leadership structure (or famous lack there-of).

It seems pretty clear to me that their plans are to rely on the market to moderate this stuff.

lsaferite2• 9 years ago

My understanding is the current fee is per-developer, not per-game. The new plan is to charge per-game, which might help combat the issue to some degree.

coredog64• 9 years ago

This. My kids primarily buy games through Steam. More and more they wind up buying early access games at "finished" prices.

My second concern is that Greenlight and shovelware will turn into a malware channel. Some of the anti-cheat utilities have deep access.

DigitalJack• 9 years ago

Yeah, the early access stuff is more miss than hit. But I've played one game, The Long Dark, that's been "early access" where I've got over 100 hours in it. That's a lot for me. Only the "sandbox" mode is available, but it's enough for me. More than enough. The game is therapeutic for me. It relieves my anxiety.

This is a case where the developers had a vision (and still do), but early access to a mode that was initially just for testing allowed them to discover their test mode (aka "sandbox") was actually a fine game in and of itself.

Early access, I think, allows developers with perfection obsession to go ahead and ship something. Instead of developing it forever, hoping to achieve their goal, and never shipping.

It's true that there is a lot of garbage in early access, but I don't think it's a worse ratio than most indie games.

smacktoward• 9 years ago

I think (assuming I'm reading the announcement correctly) there's an extra wrinkle here, though.

In the old model, the way to get your game onto Steam was to put it through Greenlight, where if it gathered enough support it could get promoted to the main storefront. You had to pay a fee to Valve to submit games to Greenlight, but it was a one-time fee ($100, IIRC), after which you could submit as many games to Greenlight as you wanted.

In the new model, Greenlight goes away; you just submit your game directly, and after you pay a publication fee, the amount of which is still up in the air (anywhere from $100-$5,000), it goes into the storefront. But, and this is the wrinkle, now you pay the publication fee for each game you submit rather than just paying it once. So if you submit ten games for publication, you pay the publication fee ten times.

So why the change? My guess is that Valve has decided that the essential premise of Greenlight -- that community curation would surface the gems within the vast pile of dross that gets submitted -- has been comprehensively broken by tactics like voting rings and giving out free keys in exchange for votes. So this represents them abandoning that idea and replacing it with a more blunt filter: a per-title publication fee. In the old model it cost the same to submit a thousand games as it did to submit one, so developers just threw lots of things against the wall and prayed one would stick. Now there will be a financial incentive for developers to put more wood behind fewer arrows, as the saying goes.

The big question is whether this will improve the overall quality of games on Steam, or reduce it further (if that's even possible). I'm honestly not sure. A lot will depend on where precisely they set that publication fee -- too high will drive off cash-starved indie devs, too low will mean the crap merchants will just swallow it as the cost of doing business.

fnordsensei• 9 years ago

I wonder what they mean by "recoupable" fee, though. Will it count towards per-purchase fees?

lsaferite2• 9 years ago

I think a sliding scale of fee based on sell price would be a good thing as well.

benologist• 9 years ago

If the point is to find the great games Steam should make it free to publish, doesn't matter how many bad games there are except they are a factor in how many great games there are.

Bad games don't make much money before it's discovered and Steam has a 14 day-ish refund policy. It might force them to automate it, like Google Play does for 2 hours after purchases.

leadingthenet3• 9 years ago

This is a bit underwhelming in my opinion. Providing a more streamlined publishing experience is great, but it's not even close to the biggest problem Steam is facing. What about the interface (which is definitely showing its age) being an unresponsive mess, or the fact that support STILL has not improved in any major way? It reminds me of iTunes a bit, especially since this update has the potential to actually make Steam Greenlight even worse.

Valve definitely does not seem to have a clear vision for the future.

zelon882• 9 years ago

Realistically they never had a vision for the future. It seems to be a combination of a bunch of visions. Nonetheless, I can't see much about Steam that took 360+ people 13 years to develop. It seems to me that there is a fear of commitment in an environment that tries to foster comfort for it's workforce. Maybe they need someone to point their finger at a goal and start demanding that progress be made to achieve that goal.

Finish the HL2 story arc for crying-out-loud. Or just cancel it so your fans can move on.

leadingthenet3• 9 years ago

Exactly. They're doing even worse in terms of vision for their game franchises, which is what got them where they are in the first place.

This is a gaming company that hasn't really done anything major for gaming in nearly a decade. How is that even possible?

digikata• 9 years ago

Some of those 360 people were involved in other things, like developing the HTC Vive VR rig, which is nothing to thumb your nose at.

larrik2• 9 years ago

Steam has come a long way in recent years, but it would be nice if some of that fancy store logic they've written could be used on library management. I've collected over 700 steam games, and looking through them became unwieldy after I hit 150 or so.

Careful usage of categories can make up for some of it, but even that is clunky and not something I want to spend time on.

pmoriarty4• 9 years ago

Does the typical Steam user have enough games to make this an issue for them?

wink• 9 years ago

I have 70 and I find the methods to organize them pretty much meh.

I have like 10 categories, but as I'm only actively playing (i.e. have installed) like 5, the rest is still a collapsed bunch of categories...

larrik2• 9 years ago

Buy a few Humble Bundles, where you don't specifically know what some of the games are, and it happens quick.

webwielder2• 9 years ago

Trading cards were added to make people happy?

Zikes• 9 years ago

The gamification of the games platform. People will buy games just for the trading cards. The more trading cards you have, the better your odds of completing a set and turning it in for XP and leveling up your Steam account, unlocking new profile and friends list features.

ansible2• 9 years ago

Yeah, I never got that. For a while I would just sell the trading cards as soon as they were awarded. I think I got some cheap DLC for free from that money... it probably wasn't even worth my time to do that.

jnwatson• 9 years ago

With any pretense of curation gone, I'm afraid Steam will go the way of the Apple App Store. It is a swamp of copycats and low quality half-efforts. Sure, there's quality in there, but it is awfully hard to find.

I hope they make the entrance price high. Steam is already clogged with a lot of subpar stuff. Perhaps if a developer has to put down a chunk of change, he/she will think twice about publishing the 37th zombie-tower-defense erotic (but PG!) visual novel.

MetallicCloud2• 9 years ago

I agree. To make a decent game an enormous mount of effort has to go into it. If you are a solo dev that has spent the last year pouring your heart into a game, I don't think $1000 to release it to a massive audience would stop it being published. If you employ a few people to create a higher quality game, compared to their wages, $1000 is nothing.

If you are a manga artist trying to release the 100th iteration of a 'game' based on suggestive images, it may slow you down.

Not suggesting that $1000 is the perfect price point, just that $100 is far too low.

fatratchet• 9 years ago

They also called it a "recoupable application fee" so it sounds like they might reduce their 30% cut until the fee is earned back.

So as long as a game sells even reasonably well they could get the fee back in full while low quality shovelware gets discouraged.

jlg232• 9 years ago

I hope they make the entrance price high [..] Perhaps if a developer has to put down a chunk of change, he/she will think twice about publishing the 37th zombie-tower-defense erotic (but PG!) visual novel.

Please not, the 37th is the best of all!

Seriously, you are arguing that developers should be hindered from making software so that you don't have to make a selection from so many titles.

Alternative solution for your problem: Replace the generic ratings with ratings calculated only from my friends' and my ratings (or with people matched via ratings of games I played and rated as well).

cosinetau• 9 years ago

I like alternative solutions to this problem, but I don't think yours solves all cases of the problem. What if someone keeps a tightly knit group of friends? Your solution relies on having a substantially sized community of friends that play a wide variety of games, of which, they write reviews for. I feel this is a really tight use case, and one Steam might need to retrain a community for. Do you still think it would work?

There's also the argument that other providers are out there, too itch.io. This compels me to think that the problem isn't really that these software engineers/game developers aren't really hindered in terms of how they're exposed.

Which app store 'gets it right' and how close to do you feel it's use case is to Steam's?

SaltyMaia• 9 years ago

I hope they make the entrance price high

Yeah, that will result in only pre-established games making it onto the store because no one will even risk having to pay that fee for a game there is no market benchmark for.

Have fun seeing only AAA titles and clones thereof in the store. But hey, at least you can be lazy and not have to put a little effort into finding cool new stuff!

Greenlight is a muddy mess of copycats, but imposing a barrier like this to all indie devs universally is a terrible idea. Most likely, it will never even work since indie devs will just move to the next platform where they can actually do their job; Steam will lose all its interest and become a sort of playstation store for PC

Fr0styMatt88• 9 years ago

My thoughts almost exactly!!!!

I used to be a compulsive Steam game buyer, but at some point Steam started showing me tacky anime-dating-visual-novel-high school-crap. I don't get it, what happened? I've bought a few Japanese shmups and a few fighting games, but that's the closest I can get to any possible reason why Steam wants to shove this sh*t down my throat that I'm clearly not interested in.

The store really has become useless for me, unless I know exactly what I want beforehand.

pmoriarty4• 9 years ago

When searching for new games using Steam's "Discovery Queue" feature (under "Explore") you can click on "Customize your queue" and add tags of types of games you don't like. Then, when you browse through your queue, you won't be shown games with those tags.

For example, if you don't like anime games, just add "anime" as a tag in the discovery queue customization dialog.

Unfortunately, they only seem to allow a maximum of 12 such tags. But it's far better than nothing.

pmoriarty4• 9 years ago

I've never found curation useful. As long as Steam continues to have reviews, screenshots, tags, a decent way to search and exclude types of games you don't like, and the ability to get a refund if I don't like a game, it'll be good enough for me. I just wish Steam allowed me to exclude many more types of games in my discovery queue.

socialist_coder• 9 years ago

Wow, this is really exciting. I love the idea for a fairly high recoupable application fee in order to weed out the crap.

steaminghacker2• 9 years ago

i think this is bad news. "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."

It's all about control and stopping real indie development. "low as $100 to as high as $5,000." That's _per title_ ! and it will whatever they can get away with. $5000 to publish a game is not indie anymore.

Latty2• 9 years ago

Valve aren't looking to make money here (well, obviously they are, but not directly from this like you are implying). $5k a game means literally nothing to them - the amount they make from sales makes that a joke.

This is a matter of competing pressures. We want indies to be able to publish as easily as possible, but customers don't want to see lots of bad games.

The easier you make it for indies, the easier you make it for people pushing out crap. This is clearly a response to people's complaints about the lowering quality of the average content in the Steam store, after their attempts at providing better game discovery methods and curation systems haven't solved the issue.

steaminghacker2• 9 years ago

point taken. but it need not be solved by increasing the barrier to entry. instead it's a ranking problem; make the poor titles sink to the bottom.

Evolving Steam

Related Stories