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Raptor85
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« on: January 31, 2017, 08:01:16 PM »

It's been bad for a while but man it seems like it's getting worse lately. The amount of lazy asset flips of nothing more than some stock tutorial code and store assets from unity/unreal is incredible...but what's worse is they're ALL getting greenlit!  There's paid greenlight booster services that have been around for a while now that valve seems to be doing absolutely nothing about, causing games that couldn't have taken more than 15 minutes to make to rocket up and get greenlit almost immediately while the honest developers sometimes take weeks.

If that nonsense isn't bad enough, there's games barely in the CONCEPT stage getting greenlit, where there's no actual game yet, it seems all you really have to do to get 90% of the people on steam to vote it up is label it "open world, survival, and early access"

I've always liked digging through new indie releases to try to find the hidden gems but man oh man, it seems like this year that layer of bullshit you have to dig through to find the decent games is just 10x as thick as it was last year...and trying to find a decent vr game is...oh man...99/100 vr games on steam right now are "stand in one spot shooting and endless wave of zombies/aliens/warriors/etc"
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-Fuzzy Spider
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« Reply #1 on: January 31, 2017, 11:07:12 PM »

dont worry, those russian dudes generally dont break 1000 copies and they are doomed to live the life in the country of institutionalized despair.
vr games are the victims of "this is the new iphone, get in the bubble" hype, so ive seen a lot of rando people coming from a woodwork with vr startups so youll also see a lot of cynical trash from them and china. I saw comparable amounts of AR startup when this was a thing.
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« Reply #2 on: February 02, 2017, 07:07:17 AM »

dont worry, those russian dudes generally dont break 1000 copies and they are doomed to live the life in the country of institutionalized despair.
vr games are the victims of "this is the new iphone, get in the bubble" hype, so ive seen a lot of rando people coming from a woodwork with vr startups so youll also see a lot of cynical trash from them and china. I saw comparable amounts of AR startup when this was a thing.
The inevitable crashing and burning isn't quite the point; they're still clogging up the pipeline, making it even harder for the real gems to be noticed in the first place.
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« Reply #3 on: February 02, 2017, 07:13:30 AM »

real gem gonna get noticed
i think bad greenlight products are in minority compared to just mediocre/ok ones
« Last Edit: February 02, 2017, 07:24:37 AM by Bad_Dude 2017 » Logged
taylorgamedev
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« Reply #4 on: February 02, 2017, 02:58:20 PM »

I actually posted a write up last week about how I thought people could improve their Greenlight submissions because I felt the same frustration after participating in it for the last few years. I still love it, but it seems like it's going downhill.

Here's the link to the post if you're interested - https://redd.it/5qd8e1
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Mark Mayers
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« Reply #5 on: February 03, 2017, 10:48:47 AM »

Sturgeon's law
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« Reply #6 on: February 03, 2017, 11:59:03 AM »

Actually, I feel like I've been seeing both worse shit and better stuff on greenlight lately. Mastema Out Of Hell looks interesting, at LEAST average, Immortal Redneck looks like a decent Painkiller/Ziggurat pastiche from a small studio, I like the look of Riptale even if it's humble, I'm just thankful we're out of the Goat Simulator, BMC Studios, Digital Homicide woods.

But those Russian games haven't gone away yet. Anyone remember that meme game that got greenlit?
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quantumpotato
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« Reply #7 on: February 05, 2017, 05:18:05 PM »

I totally agree with you.
It's also frustrating seeing the front store page filled with AAA titles. People who know about Call of Duties Zombies, for example, can search for it IMO, they don't need to be told about it constantly. If that space was available for indie hits.. like, once you've sold 10k copies you stop appearing on the front page after a week and let word of mouth do the rest..
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« Reply #8 on: February 05, 2017, 06:11:16 PM »

steam is rent-seeking bullshit garbage with an extremely problematic monopoly status and has no place in an efficient system of distribution, hope this is helpful
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« Reply #9 on: February 05, 2017, 06:17:38 PM »

steam is rent-seeking bullshit garbage with an extremely problematic monopoly status and has no place in an efficient system of distribution, hope this is helpful

100%. I'm excited to see Itch.io but a lot of stuff on there is very amateur (same with Steam now).

Steam has the promise of curation but how would I even begin? I think a game store could do well like this -- have a few people on staff who play the games. Then they recommend certain games and only publish those through their store. Like Nintendo used to be only publishing quality games. Then you go to that site and say, every 6 months they release a new game, you know it's quality.
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Raptor85
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« Reply #10 on: February 05, 2017, 06:18:31 PM »

the front page is actually mostly generated by your preferences and buying history, with the weekend/weekday deals up top.

But seriously, i think a few of you missed my point. I've travel a LOT for work and often go through greenlight for fun, over the past few months the "crap" entries, which most are just unity,unreal,or cryengine with some stock or tutorial code and some bought assets pawned off as either a "horror" or "survival" game, or RPG maker games with a few stock assets, have gone from about 20% to about 80% of the entries. What's worse, i come back a week later, and 99% of the crap entries i reviewed GET GREENLIT, the only ones that don't are ones with blatantly stolen assets that got reported.  Not only are they getting greenlit most of them get greenlit in a span of only a few days. The greenlight voting groups have basicly rigged the system, if someone is signed up for them their entry, whether it be a functional game or not, is pretty guaranteed to be greenlit very quickly, meanwhile fantastic games that really do deserve greenlight tend to take weeks.

A few of the recent gems i've seem spam voted up to the top are a black and white platformer with no sound and a square as the main character, basicly the stencyl starter game with no art, The Cryengine 5 survival game starter kit with no changes whatsoever, just compiled and given a name and a list of "planned features for the future".  And my personal favorite the gorilla.bas clone with no sound and simpler levels.

Now when they do release they get pretty quickly voted into oblivion but not until after a bunch of people buy it and get stuck with it. (and the steam refund option really isn't obvious to most people, a lot of people don't even know it exists)  The greenlight spam groups even trade free keys for the release so when it comes out they spam positive reviews for the first few days.  Browsing indie games in particular is extremely hard on steam as it's just page after page of overwhelmingly negative reviewed games and you really have to dig to find stuff worth playing. (it doesn't help that steam's filtering and search sucks, so if you sort by reviews you can't sub-sort by anything else)
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« Reply #11 on: February 05, 2017, 06:24:23 PM »

to the two replies that came in while i was typing my last post, there is a better distributer, GOG, and they actually review everything before putting it up.  I always use GOG galaxy when possible but not enough of the more quality indie games submit to them.  It's a two part problem, you can't have customers fully in charge or they'll just rig the system like on steam, but the company reviewing every game makes releases super slow and a lot of smaller but still good games get left out.  Almost need a two part, steam like customer voting with a final company approval
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quantumpotato
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« Reply #12 on: February 05, 2017, 06:33:47 PM »

the front page is actually mostly generated by your preferences and buying history, with the weekend/weekday deals up top.

Ok, what about those damn pop ups?
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quantumpotato
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« Reply #13 on: February 05, 2017, 06:36:43 PM »

to the two replies that came in while i was typing my last post, there is a better distributer, GOG, and they actually review everything before putting it up.  I always use GOG galaxy when possible but not enough of the more quality indie games submit to them.  It's a two part problem, you can't have customers fully in charge or they'll just rig the system like on steam, but the company reviewing every game makes releases super slow and a lot of smaller but still good games get left out.  Almost need a two part, steam like customer voting with a final company approval

Sounds like a better thing, for sure. They don't look "indie" though

Clicking on Games I see The Witcher, SimCity, Freespace, Might & Magic, D&D... where are the quality curated indie games? People like Smestorp & Cactus & Foddy & Increpare churning out fantastic games on their sites.. I want people like that all in one site
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Raptor85
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« Reply #14 on: February 05, 2017, 06:43:51 PM »

click the category "indie" lol

https://www.gog.com/games/indie

they have a whole indie vetting process, i wish they advertised it a bit more
https://www.gog.com/indie
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« Reply #15 on: February 06, 2017, 08:35:05 AM »



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quantumpotato
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« Reply #16 on: February 06, 2017, 03:22:50 PM »

Actual text from the #2 "recent submission" greenlight video:

"After the release of the game you'll see more well designed heroes and monsters!"
... "Possible graphic improvement!"

Now that everybody can make a game.. everybody's making a game Sad
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b∀ kkusa
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« Reply #17 on: February 06, 2017, 03:49:14 PM »

From a game consumer perspective, i never had any trouble finding the little gems hiding in steam because when a game is good, you'd end up hearing about it. I dont consider myself as a heavy player , but i regularely buy indie games from following devlogs here, or looking at activities from friendlist since i befriended people who like to play indie games.
And so far, i can understand the illusion of being overwhelmed by the amount of shitty indie games, but in the end, after checking every steam sales in the past 2 years. I'm more tempted to say that i still crave for quality indie games.
bad Steam greenlighted games don't stand a chance and barely manage to sell +1k copie, and it's easy to be fooled by their performance in steamspy because of giveaways.

From a dev perspective, it's indeed scary because it feels like you have to compete against all that.

But if you're afraid of those games, maybe you should reconsider your product, your skills.

"Now that everybody can make a game.. everybody's making a game"   you are part of that everybody...
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« Reply #18 on: February 06, 2017, 06:03:07 PM »

it can't be mentioned often enough that if steam went back to their pre greenlight curation model, 90+% of the people on this website would never get a game on steam. and because steam has a near-monopoly on pc game sales, it'd make it almost impossible to sell anything at all on pc unless you have *connections* or manage to find a publisher (such as microsoft, lots of the pre-greenlight indie games on steam were xbla ports).

Simply put, Valve being in the market position they are in can't curate too strictly because it'd ruin a ton of people's livelihoods. Their position also requires them to cater to a wide and diverse audience. A lot of the steam games people claim are "low quality", like hidden object games or various other casual games, simply appeal to a different audience than "core" gamers.

That's also why GOG comparisons don't make sense. GOG is tiny compared to Steam and profits using a "boutique" approach, where they cater to a particular demographic (hardcore pc nerds) and stick to that. They can not only afford to curate because of this, they need to curate because it's their whole raison d'etre.
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quantumpotato
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« Reply #19 on: February 06, 2017, 06:19:43 PM »

Great points.
Bakkusa, I welcome the challenge of indie game development. I'd rather be outsold by superior games than (subjectively) inferior eg. unity asset survival sim clones. This is my personal feeling on the matter and I'm sure there is a tangled hierarchy of indie devs who think their games are better than another devs with conflicting views from dev to dev.

My main peeves about Steam, as the "de facto indie game store" as multiple successful developers have pointed out are AAA games (which do enough marketing & have enough word of mouth to, IMO, not need any presence at all just let users search for it or re-direct from call of duty.com to a steam page) and low quality indie games.

I've found games through tigsource, twitter & friends too. There have also been times when I've opened up the Steam search and found nothing interesting, or opened Greenlight and put "not interested" on 10 games in a row because nothing looks fun or innovative. These negative experiences lead me away from browsing Steam (and possibly discovering a gem!).

Silbereisen, good points. Are there other boutique game stores? Eg. a one-stop-shop for quality roguelikes, or SHMUPS or puzzles or what have you? I see this kind of thing on a developer by developer basis but have yet to find an aggregate store.

One of the Greenlight games I saw yesterday had comments about "30 minute game.. but free achievements!" like it was a good thing Sad.
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