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[inkBot]

People on the Greenlight discussion boards are talking about having a fee for listing your game. Not sure what i think about that idea. It could help to weed out the fake and terrible games, but it's not a guarantee. The price would also have to be reasonable. The general consesus currently seem to lie around $10-15, though one guy wanted it to be $100.

[Christian Knudsen]

Paying for the privilege of showing Steam that they can make money off your game? Eh, no thanks.

I think they just shouldn't have a browsable front page for Greenlight at all. You submit your game, get a page for your game, then place the link on your own website so that fans can visit it and vote for it. That's it.

[bolosaur]

I definitely wouldn't mind paying $15. It's essentially free (or in this case, cheap) advertising, and you don't really need to utilize Steam's sales channel if you don't want to.

[inkBot]

You submit your game, get a page for your game, then place the link on your own website so that fans can visit it and vote for it. That's it.

Nothing is stopping you from doing exactly that anyway.

[Christian Knudsen]

Of course not. But you were talking about Greenlight being spammed with "fake and terrible games". If there's no browsable frontpage for these games to show up on, there's no incentive for people to submit them. Remove the incentive for people submitting "fake and terrible games" instead of punishing those submitting actual good games.

[Bambino2012]

We shall see if this will be good or not, I have a feeling it won't.
Before greenlight you could have a good game without a fan base behind it, you just submit it to Steam, and they would check if it had quality or not, and if it did, it would be approved.
Now, you need get a fan base before submitting it, or you won't have a chance, and those downgrades we still don't know how they work, but I can imagine all the fps kids downgrading games like Binding of Isaac and similar titles.
I just hope this type of smaller games won't simply vanish.

[TheGrandHero]

People on the Greenlight discussion boards are talking about having a fee for listing your game.

Technically there already is a fee: your account has to have at least one purchased game.

Before greenlight you could have a good game without a fan base behind it, you just submit it to Steam, and they would check if it had quality or not, and if it did, it would be approved.

Except that's not really how it worked. Before Greenlight, you submitted your game to Steam, and they *might* check if it had quality or not, and then regardless of whether it did or not you would be approved. Or you might not be but they'd never bother giving you a reason why or what you could do to improve it. There were a lot of good games getting turned down, something even Valve has admitted.

[Klaim]

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/176887/Discoverability_on_Steam_Greenlight_Its_nonexistent.php

Interesting article.

Anyway they still need to fix the sorting. It's buggy. I found games that don't appear in a category even if they are marked as in this category.

Also, random main page.

Please. ;__;

[Ouren]

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=92983309&tscn=1346402410

miniFlake, my game from the most recent IndieRoyale is trying to get on!
Help us out! :D

[bateleur]

Also, random main page.

Yes, this is the number one feature I'd like to see. I don't know if it will ever be possible for underpublicised games to make the grade, but if it is they'll need to be seen sometimes.

[DJ_Link]

Hey everyone. In case you are interested here's my game in Steam Greenlight
It's called Dary's Legend and it's a roguelike:

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=92920748

Thanks

[inkBot]

Of course not. But you were talking about Greenlight being spammed with "fake and terrible games". If there's no browsable frontpage for these games to show up on, there's no incentive for people to submit them. Remove the incentive for people submitting "fake and terrible games" instead of punishing those submitting actual good games.

The browsing list actually does serve a purpose (even if its current implementation leaves much to be desired) and that is the ability to browse through the list and maybe stumble upon something you might not have noticed otherwise.

If all you want is a page on Greenlight you can link to, why do you need it? If you can raise enough interest for it on your own, why not just set up your own site and sell it through there?

For Greenlight to be successful it needs exposure (M$ didn't understand this, I hope Valve does, which they seemingly do) and taking away the Greenlight homepage/browsing list would be completely counter productive to that end.

[Christian Knudsen]

Greenlight isn't a marketplace for Steam to sell games or create awareness of games. It's a filter. It's a way for Steam to get a feel for what's currently hot out there. This isn't at all comparable to XBLIG nor XBLA, so I'm not sure what you mean with Microsoft?

[Oskuro]

but this will create a problem that games that can be a jewel that don't have a fan base, will never get their feet in there

Create? That problem already exists pretty much everywhere, from store shelves to online retailers, or Kickstarter. Having an audience is not about quality, but about popularity, that's why big publishers dump so much money into marketing. Unfair, but that's how it works.


Regarding Greenlight, I'm cautiously optimistic. Seems interesting, but let's just see how it evolves before getting too excited

[Hangedman]

If they remove the downvotes and the community forum it might work.

The former (downvotes) should equate to 'i don't want to play this game' but are currently 'no one should get to play this game'.

The latter (forum) is just a ton of people saying 'why are there so many simple games where are the aaa games i hate flash games'

So at this point it's a trainwreck as predicted.
What will really be the decider is how much the Steam staff rely on it. Which we may never know.

[Christian Knudsen]

We don't really know what algorithms Steam is using or what numbers they're looking at, so for all we know, downvotes might just remove a game from your list of games to rate.

[inkBot]

Greenlight isn't a marketplace for Steam to sell games or create awareness of games. It's a filter. It's a way for Steam to get a feel for what's currently hot out there. This isn't at all comparable to XBLIG nor XBLA, so I'm not sure what you mean with Microsoft?

Actually, it is. The process of getting a game onto XBLIG is very similar to Greenlight. You put up the game for rating by the community and if it gets rated enough, it's then put onto XBLIG. Thing is, Microsoft has kind of pushed XBLIG aside and it doesn't really do all that well afaik.

And yes, it's true, Greenlights primary function is to act as a filter Valve can use to gauge interest in a game. But it also functions as a way, as I've already stated, to showcase games with the possibility of people finding games they might not have otherwise. That's the entire reason the list is randomized (though I'd rethink that design choice if I were them).

[Chris Pavia]

Hopefully they purposefully launched with a bare-bones but stable system, and will iterate depending on the loudest (or most valid) complaints.

Hopefully.

[Christian Knudsen]

Greenlight isn't a marketplace for Steam to sell games or create awareness of games. It's a filter. It's a way for Steam to get a feel for what's currently hot out there. This isn't at all comparable to XBLIG nor XBLA, so I'm not sure what you mean with Microsoft?

Actually, it is. The process of getting a game onto XBLIG is very similar to Greenlight. You put up the game for rating by the community and if it gets rated enough, it's then put onto XBLIG. Thing is, Microsoft has kind of pushed XBLIG aside and it doesn't really do all that well afaik.

And yes, it's true, Greenlights primary function is to act as a filter Valve can use to gauge interest in a game. But it also functions as a way, as I've already stated, to showcase games with the possibility of people finding games they might not have otherwise. That's the entire reason the list is randomized (though I'd rethink that design choice if I were them).

The peer review process on XBLIG is for QA. It's not for determining whether or not a game has a large fanbase or if it's actually a good game. It's not really the same at all.

And I don't really disagree all that much with your last paragraph, so let's leave it at that.

[Cobralad]

Just browsed forums...
Instead of publishers Steam indies got young faggots. It appears that most people thought that it going to be "My fav gaem on Stem" instead of indie games. Most of topics are "Why there are only flash games?". Also, some random guy created Half Life 3 project without much problems.
Several fags suggest fucking World of Warcraft, Guild Wars 2 and Battlefield 3 for Greenlinght, so you should know what people are deciding your project destiny now.
I think this in fact may get indies devoid of Steam, since Greenlight is already got reputation of garbage pile. I think they should remove thumbdowns and get better moderation for projects.