next »

[Klaim]

I think we should wait to see what it means in practice before thinking that it forces you to be a popularity seeker.

I mean, you still need a pool of people to be your audience to make a project viable. The problem is about the size of this audience. If they choose only big audiences then yes, it's a popularity thing. If there is a minimum size that is not that much, then maybe it's good.

Anyway, that's a step in the good direction: if Valve does something like that, that will force console makers to consider providing a similar feature.

I'm wondering what about the big publisher's games? I guess they will pay to be on steam anyway...

[larsiusprime]

Leveraging public user-reviews are actually a GREAT way to open up the floodgates to everybody, but still separate the gems from the crap.

Kongregate is a great example of this - it's incredibly rare for a game that the kong audience would love to get overlooked. You have all kinds of rough, weird gems that any sane panel of reviewers would pass over that instead get a fair shake because the audience can discover it.

With most stores, you have a zero-sum kind of situation. The more exclusive the store, the better it is to be on there, but of course YOU don't actually have a shot (pre-greenlight steam). The other extreme is the "everybody is welcome" stores like the Apple app store - almost no barrier to entry, but just being on there isn't worth much.

A well designed user-review system (and yes, there's many poorly designed ones) can break this zero-sum symmetry, so you can have a largely open system that isn't clogged to the gills with crap, and lets the system approach meritocracy.

I detailed this in a gamasutra article about a month ago. Really cool to see it come to life!

[ANtY]

anyway its a good initiative except a voting system is a terrible idea where all the minecrafts will get on top.

and

This is actually bad news for indie devs.

Now you're going to have to win a popularity contest if you want to get your game on Steam, instead of a professional evaluation process.

[Klaim]

Ah yes I've read your article, greenlights made ma think about it actually, and I was wondering if they consulted Kongregate or took some example from it.

For example, one thing if I remember correctly in Kongregate is that some users earns more credibility and it shows on their profile or something like that.
It don't look like they are doing this in GreenLight, and I find it curious because I think it's part of the success of Kongregate (or maybe I'm mixing with something else?)

Anyway I read http://steamcommunity.com/greenlight/ and now I have these questions for them:

 1. Why is there a negative vote?? I mean, on the screenshots on this page you can see the thumb down. I think this is dangerous. If they manage to weight the system like the stackexchange.com websites, it would work nicely, but it don't look like they will do it that way...

 2. They accept concepts? Wow that's quite surprising... I wonder why?

So it looks like it's both a way to make your game visible AND a way for them to setup a priority list of release or something like that.

I hope they learn fast. I guess they do.

[larsiusprime]

Yeah, the devil's in the details.

As for Kongregate, I'm not 100% sure how they weight the votes, though I do believe that there's some magic sauce in the background that takes your reputation in the community into account (ie, amplifying the voice of good, useful, feedback, and silencing the voice of trolls).

Newgrounds has been doing that for a long time, too, and Kong built on that model. Stack exchange applied it to answering questions. All great examples to learn from.

The down vote button does seem a little weird to me - I can't really think of what it would be useful for. On Kong/NG, you need to say how much you like a game, so a low star rating option makes sense there. On stackexchange you need to vote on how good an answer is, and so up/down votes make sense. But saying, "Hey! Make sure this DOESN'T get on steam!" ...?

Although my gut tells me there's no great non-malicious reason to vote something down... (the downvote could easily lead to reddit-style "bury brigades") maybe I'm underestimating the glut of "made it in an hour" cheapo things that will be uploaded. The Kong/NG model is  veeeeery good at making sure those kind of entries get filtered out, and that does depend on downvoting.

[Klaim]

Newgrounds has been doing that for a long time, too, and Kong built on that model. Stack exchange applied it to answering questions. All great examples to learn from.

Oh ok I was thinking about Newgrounds in fact.

The down vote button does seem a little weird to me - I can't really think of what it would be useful for. On Kong/NG, you need to say how much you like a game, so a low star rating option makes sense there. On stackexchange you need to vote on how good an answer is, and so up/down votes make sense. But saying, "Hey! Make sure this DOESN'T get on steam!" ...?

In StackExchange, you don't downvote if you don't agree, you downvote if you think the answer or the question are either not suited at all, provide false informations or something nefast for the future readers. Also you loose your own points when  you downvote so you don't do it lightly.

Although my gut tells me there's no great non-malicious reason to vote something down... (the downvote could easily lead to reddit-style "bury brigades") maybe I'm underestimating the glut of "made it in an hour" cheapo things that will be uploaded. The Kong/NG model is  veeeeery good at making sure those kind of entries get filtered out, and that does depend on downvoting.

I hope so too.

As no system is perfect, I guess we'll see some problems anyway.

[moi]

Ther is always vote rigging. There is on NG and kong, even on XBLA, you have people mass voting down XBLIG games

[ANtY]

It basically means that it'll be even easier for already popular games and even harder for the non-popular ones to achieve anything 

[Klaim]

I don't know, I always assumed that Steam and other portals, even console publishers, are only ice on the cake and you should never count on them to make your business, only make it better.

That being said I never sold a game I made myself, so I'll see in a few months what is reality.

[falsion]

I almost didn't realize there was a thumbs down button. That confirms my suspicions (or maybe paranoia) about this. I've never sold a game before, but if I did, I would be very worried about that thumbs down button.

All it takes is a strawman argument and a single troll to stir up an entire forum of fellow trolls to thumbs down a project to oblivion.

I'll probably remain skeptical on this until I actually see it in action and how exactly they are implementing it all. Is this replacing the usual way they deal with indie games? Is there still a process to get in the old fashioned way?

[Tuba]

This should help games acclaimed by the community but rejected by Steam for some reason like Gemini Rue and Noitu Love 2 (I know, they were accepted the second time).

From what I understand, even if the game has a high rating, it's still up to Valve to decide if it's worthy or not to be on Steam. So, if a crappy game gets there by some rigged poll, Valve should reject it. With time I think Valve will figure a way to filter those earlier in the process.

Anyway, You'll probably need a Steam account to vote, which means having at least one game bought in your account, I don't think many people will buy a game just so they can vote more than once.

[VDZ]

From Steam's perspective, this is pure brilliance - it's a filter for games which will sell (popular in community) and games which won't sell (unpopular in community); games that don't survive the voting process likely wouldn't sell well on Steam in the first place. And the community will be doing it for free for them, so they even save costs with it.

As for the optimistic Kongregate comparisons: how good is Kongregate for indie devs, actually? From what I heard it has overcrowding problems and it's unlikely your game becomes popular enough to provide any serious sort of income - did I hear wrong?

[Klaim]

I almost didn't realize there was a thumbs down button. That confirms my suspicions (or maybe paranoia) about this. I've never sold a game before, but if I did, I would be very worried about that thumbs down button.

Actually, that might also be a mistake from them. The texts don't say anything about voting down, there is only one screenshot where you can see a thumb down button. So, we don't know anything about that.

If they have vote down, they have to have a credibility system too, otherwise it's flawed from the beginning.

From what I understand, even if the game has a high rating, it's still up to Valve to decide if it's worthy or not to be on Steam. So, if a crappy game gets there by some rigged poll, Valve should reject it. With time I think Valve will figure a way to filter those earlier in the process.

From what I read there, there is no rejection, only absence of acceptance. A game can be submitted but never accepted. That let an opportunity for the developer to make it better if he can I guess...

[Klaim]

From Steam's perspective, this is pure brilliance - it's a filter for games which will sell (popular in community) and games which won't sell (unpopular in community); games that don't survive the voting process likely wouldn't sell well on Steam in the first place. And the community will be doing it for free for them, so they even save costs with it.

As for the optimistic Kongregate comparisons: how good is Kongregate for indie devs, actually? From what I heard it has overcrowding problems and it's unlikely your game becomes popular enough to provide any serious sort of income - did I hear wrong?

I agree on the Steam point of view. For Kongregate, I think any community of consumers can be described like that anyway...

[larsiusprime]

Kongregate is responsible for about 90% of my game Defender's Quest's revenues so far. We got an extremely favorable review on Rock Paper Shotgun and a great 8.5/10 review on Destructoid, and Kongregate traffic alone brought in more sales than all of this good press by an enormous margin. This also *DESPITE* us being the target of a concentrated down-vote brigade of haters.

It's been very helpful. It's got a lot of stuff on there, sure, but it was where I initially got discovered long before I started working on commercial projects and it's where I met my current working partners.

No Indie should make Steam (or Kongregate, or any one site) the be-all-end-all. Even without being on Steam, we've been making enough so far to make our company viable. We'll be launching on Desura/Impulse/GamersGate soon and even if Steam doesn't ultimately accept us, we'll be making a modest living, which is fine by me.

So, speaking as someone who's self-published and worked with some of these sites before, I feel it's a step int he right direction, but no you do not *need* Steam to be successful.