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[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.

[Matthew]

Valve flew a bunch of indies out to Seattle at the start of the year to talk about their ideas for improving the Steam submission process (including myself).  Couple quick comments based on what I know:

- This is augmenting the old process, not replacing it.  Valve still has editorial control.

- The goal here is to filter (yes, there will be MS paint sketches, but they were already getting MS paint ideas emailed to them--this frees up their attention for more important stuff).

- If anyone has specific concerns/feedback/ideas and wants to talk to Valve directly about this, just PM me for contact details.

[bateleur]

A couple of (possible) clarifications based on the London meetup with Valve yesterday (which I attended):

1) There will not be any way to vote games down, only up. (I know there are various things suggesting otherwise, but that's what they said.)

2) Although Valve will retain editorial control, this actually does completely replace the old system in the sense that new developers MUST submit games via Greenlight.

[Klaim]

Very interesting guys thanks!

So they should fix this:



See the thumb down? Certainly a work in progress screenshot that haven't been checked again...

[NemoDev]

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.

It depends on the type of game. There are certainly channels where specific game genres can succeed, but if you are making a classic RPG with retro graphics for PC, I don't think it'll be very succesful on anything outside Steam for example

[TeeGee]

Hi guys, plz upvote my game on steam. thx.

[larsiusprime]

but if you are making a classic RPG with retro graphics for PC, I don't think it'll be very succesful on anything outside Steam for example

Umm.... that's pretty much what Defender's Quest is, and we've done pretty well without Steam so far. Also, Steam is by no means a guarantee of success - there's been plenty of games who have got on there only to have so-so sales.

[Tuba]

If you like my game please give me a thumbs up and don't forget to subscribe thanks!

[moi]

I have a plan for steam, see signature

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

i feel that valve did this because there are now so many indie games being submitted that they don't want to pay people to evaluate them, instead they outsource the evaluation to the community as the first stage of the filter, so that they have a smaller pool of games to evaluate, which saves valve time and money (since they now don't have to pay people to evaluate submitted games as much)

i think the effect of this is that it'd be good for some games and bad for others. it'd be good for popular games/genres, but bad for niche games/genres which are strongly loved by only a few people. in other words, even a mediocre/bad fps or minecraft clone will get hundreds of times more votes than a superb/top-notch visual novel or dungeon crawler

*but* that's basically what any business wants. they want to carry only the games that will sell well (regardless of quality), they don't really care much about catering to a smaller pool of niche enthusiasts, because the latter isn't as profitable. that's why i'd prefer an open-source "windows app store" of the kind that microsoft is setting up. sure, those have tons of bad games (look at iphone games and xblig games for examples), but they also let tons *more* good games on them than steam does. i'd rather have a service have all the good games i could possibly want and also a million bad games, than have it have some of the good games i want and fewer of the bad games

[Zaphos]

i think the effect of this is that it'd be good for some games and bad for others. it'd be good for popular games/genres, but bad for niche games/genres which are strongly loved by only a few people. in other words, even a mediocre/bad fps or minecraft clone will get hundreds of times more votes than a superb/top-notch visual novel or dungeon crawler

*but* that's basically what any business wants. they want to carry only the games that will sell well (regardless of quality), they don't really care much about catering to a smaller pool of niche enthusiasts, because the latter isn't as profitable.

But it's not clear how well the greenlight voting population will represent the steam buying population; a game might be perfectly profitable but not interesting to the greenlight-using demographic, or a game might be unprofitable but very interesting to the greenlight demographic (e.g. if they're willing to upvote it but not willing to buy it).

Fortunately, Valve "retaining editorial control" sounds like they will still be able to pull in good niche/less-broad/not-for-greenlighters titles even if they don't make the 'automatic acceptance' threshold.