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[Bishop]

So Valve hosted a little get-together in London last night. A bunch of indies were invited to chat about games and Greenlight in general. So I had the chance to ask them all of those little mysteries about the system and thought I'd share their response.

Personally the main ambiguity with Greenlight for me was that it appeared to be a straight popularity contest but they assure me it's still a curated system.

They do use Greenlight as a way to short list games but not soley by up votes.

So along with a ton of potential sales;

A game that is quickly rising in popularity is also an attention grabber.

Developer demonstrating that they're listening to their customers and keeping them happy is also considered a plus. Valve say that their ethos has always been about keeping customers happy and trusting that the money will follow, so when they accept a developer onto their platform this is still their main aim.

I asked about whether having my game (Trash TV) available on Mac and Linux as well as Windows would be an added bonus in their eyes and they said only if it was a bonus to my customers.

There was a brief mention that a developer who activity engages with their community, such as posting announcements, etc, would be placed in the queue of items to vote on again. I didn't get a chance to ask about this further. I doubt that if a user says no to a game and the dev updates the info that it'll appear in the users voting queue again. I assume this is for all the users which click on "ask me later". I've only have 8 "ask me later" votes so this seems pretty insignificant.

They talked about the cost of distribution and said that space and bandwidth wasn't really an issue (although they also said they never have enough), that the main thing that pushes up the cost of distribution is if they have to get a designer to work with a developer on their marketing material. They gave the example of developers posting poor quality jpeg screenshots as something that would take time out of a Valve employee to fix.

Overall it seems to generally be common sense, it's difficult to know how much of a weighting up votes gets but it's reassuring to hear that they have a whole host of data that they take into account.

Other tid-bits

They aim to take 10-15 games off the list per month.

I complained abit about how for me success is getting enough money to make the next game, which is pretty low number in scheme of things. He did take note and said that it's a shame Greenlight doesn't currently have any way of knowing when a game has an audience big enough for the developer to be self sustaining off (paraphrased). So there is hope that the system swings a bit more towards making indies' dreams.


So in review I do actually like Greenlight as a system, I'm disappointing I'm struggling but I guess if I can't get enough interest to get okay'd I probably wouldn't have enough interest to survive off the sales.

[Klaim]

Interesting! Thanks!

[Uykered]

I'm more interested in knowing when Greenlight will be removed and their new store system will come (that Gabe recently talked about in his 2 lectures.)

[Klaim]

You mean the store system where anyone can have his "label"? I thought it was going to complement greenlight, not replace it...

[Uykered]

Greenlight is a bad example of the election process, we came to the conclusion pretty quickly that we should do away with greenlight completely because it was a bottleneck rather than a way for people to communicate choice.

[Hipshot]

I'm more interested in knowing when Greenlight will be removed and their new store system will come (that Gabe recently talked about in his 2 lectures.)

Hopefully I will get hammerwatch on steam before that happens...

[Hangedman]

I'm more interested in knowing when Greenlight will be removed and their new store system will come (that Gabe recently talked about in his 2 lectures.)

Months, maybe years. This is Valve we're talking about

[feminazi]

dum they always say it more than da thumbs up but thats still not true

[Bishop]

Greenlight is a bad example of the election process, we came to the conclusion pretty quickly that we should do away with greenlight completely because it was a bottleneck rather than a way for people to communicate choice.

They did mention Gabe had recently said that he wishes all games could be on Steam. However Gabe isn't anyone's boss and the people at Valve who opted to work on Steam and Greenlight are dead against the idea. It'll be forever before Greenlight is replaced.

[Ant]

However Gabe isn't anyone's boss and the people at Valve who opted to work on Steam and Greenlight are dead against the idea. It'll be forever before Greenlight is replaced.

Is this just conjecture or has the Greenlight team said this? Greenlight is clearly hopeless and with the head honcho saying as much I'm hoping it gets axed promptly for a more open store.

[JigxorAndy]

Thanks for sharing!

As for Greenlight being replaced soon... I think that would annoy a lot of people who had to pay the fee, especially since Greenlight hasn't really been up for long. I'm not the biggest fan of Greenlight, but it does drive a lot of traffic to my game's website, so it's useful as a marketing too to get interest in my game (rather than the other way around!).

[Schrompf]

I'm probably the only one who thinks that it's a *good* thing that only a few games get listed in Steam. There's a hell of a lot of rubbish out there, and some cleverly disguised pearls of gaming which only appear to be rubbish at a glance.

Until Greenlight, getting on Steam was a question of hitting the right moderator in the right mood with proper PR material. And to my knowledge they got swamped with cheap games, which made the right spot even harder to hit. Now, with Greenlight, part of that luck has been replaced by a popularity contest. And because of popularity actually translating into sales in some way, this system is actually better for Steam than the previous. From a developer's perspective it's still hard as fuck to get your game listed, but nobody ever said it's easy, and every developer thinks her or his game is worthy.

Maybe there's just too many of us around - too many making games, and too few playing games and paying for games.

[Ant]

It's better than what they had, but not by much. You can still have an open store and make sure trash games sink using ranking methods, the Steam Workshop already does a pretty good job at this. Why shouldn't it be easy to sell your game?

[Mister Dave]

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/186168/Gabe_Newells_vision_for_Steam_More_choice_more_democracy_less_Greenlight.php#.URNiNTXkV68

Tidbits gleaned from Gabe's first talk.

[JigxorAndy]

I'm probably the only one who thinks that it's a *good* thing that only a few games get listed in Steam. There's a hell of a lot of rubbish out there, and some cleverly disguised pearls of gaming which only appear to be rubbish at a glance.

Until Greenlight, getting on Steam was a question of hitting the right moderator in the right mood with proper PR material. And to my knowledge they got swamped with cheap games, which made the right spot even harder to hit. Now, with Greenlight, part of that luck has been replaced by a popularity contest. And because of popularity actually translating into sales in some way, this system is actually better for Steam than the previous. From a developer's perspective it's still hard as fuck to get your game listed, but nobody ever said it's easy, and every developer thinks her or his game is worthy.

Maybe there's just too many of us around - too many making games, and too few playing games and paying for games.

I completely agree with you. I prefer Steam as a curated store which lets high quality games through. That way, they can "tell me" what to buy and what's worth looking at.

Greenlight definitely drives traffic to developers' websites, except now the developers don't have to convince one moderator, they have to convince a large audience through a popularity contest. Already well established games with a large customer base are easily able to leverage existing interest and get Greenlit very quickly - which is great - they should be able to do that. But at the same time, those small quirky interesting indie games, the ones that Greenlight was partly meant to be encouraging, may get moderate attention, but ultimately not enough to get Greenlit without significant marketing effort by the developer. In the old process, they may have been able to get on Steam by convincing that one moderator.

Though Steam still do approach (new) developers and ask if they would like their games on the service, bypassing Greenlight.

[melos]

Any examples of games recently that Valve approahced?

[Uykered]

That's cool that you have traffic coming from your Greenlight page, I thought it'd be the opposite.

I prefer Steam as a curated store which lets high quality games through. That way, they can "tell me" what to buy and what's worth looking at.

I think that's basically the idea of their new store idea (from what I understood): that you can go to the person/company's store whose taste you respect and buy from them. So you could still keep using Valve's curated store or you could use Egoraptor's, indiegames.com, or Derek Yu's curated store etc.

[melos]

Anodyne's traffic from Greenlight is negligible (I think 150 hits). Our fastspring store has 91 hits from greenlight, 20 of which resulted in sales. Not sure on how many of tgreenlight -> homepage -> sales there were, though.

There's definitey a lot more from homepage -> greenlight for us.

[JigxorAndy]

Anodyne's traffic from Greenlight is negligible (I think 150 hits). Our fastspring store has 91 hits from greenlight, 20 of which resulted in sales. Not sure on how many of tgreenlight -> homepage -> sales there were, though.

There's definitey a lot more from homepage -> greenlight for us.

How are you monitoring that hits to your store are coming from Greenlight? Are you going by the idea that people are using the coupon?

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

most site tracking has referrer data; have you ever used google analytics or similar tools?