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[_glitch]

Then you could "bot" your "enemies" out of the store and create a monopoly for your game idea.

[Schoq]

This sounds a bit ruthless, but there should be some type of purge system from Steam.
If your game gets as certain threshold of negative reviews and/or has low sales, remove it.

thats the worst idea ive ever

[Mark Mayers]

This sounds a bit ruthless, but there should be some type of purge system from Steam.
If your game gets as certain threshold of negative reviews and/or has low sales, remove it.

thats the worst idea ive ever

Then you could "bot" your "enemies" out of the store and create a monopoly for your game idea.

I didn't even think of that. Actually yea, it is a pretty awful idea.

There's no easy solution really.

[s0]

Then you could "bot" your "enemies" out of the store and create a monopoly for your game idea.

metagame

[ｂ∀ ｋｋｕｓａ]

Changes coming to Steam Greenlight
2/10/2017 – Today we shared some information on where we’re headed with the next evolution of Steam Distribution. You can read the full announcement here: http://steamcommunity.com/games/593110/announcements/detail/558846854614253751. There are a couple questions you might have regarding Greenlight that we didn’t get to cover in that blog post, so we’re doing so here:

This new direct path “Steam Direct” described in our post linked above will entirely replace Greenlight. So a couple weeks before we activate this new path, we'll stop accepting new submissions in Greenlight.
In the meantime, if you are considering posting your game to Greenlight, please do so.
We’ve always evaluated and Greenlit titles that we feel we have enough data on, either in terms of customer votes or success on other platforms, awards, kickstarters, or other similar inputs. We plan to continue Greenlighting titles that have sufficient community interest until the release of Steam Direct. At that point, any games that we didn’t have sufficient data to Greenlight will be invited to use the new onboarding path and app fee if they are still interested in bringing their product to Steam.
If you paid the Greenlight Submission Fee and don’t have any Greenlit titles, you can get a refund of your Greenlight Submission Fee.
We have a couple more internal tools we need to complete and we want to allow some time to account for feedback or suggestions from the community. So there isn’t a specific timeline at this point, but we expect to be able to make this transition sometime in the next few months.

Hurry up guys if you have games to submit.

gah, i'm so stressed right now as i'll have to rush making a trailer and some footage.

[Mark Mayers]

Then you could "bot" your "enemies" out of the store and create a monopoly for your game idea.

metagame

Ship malware with your game to create a botnet and take out competitors.

[Bad_Dude 2017]

Then you could "bot" your "enemies" out of the store and create a monopoly for your game idea.

Also every game with day 1 server crash and bugs would get thrown out immediately.

[_glitch]

Then you could "bot" your "enemies" out of the store and create a monopoly for your game idea.

metagame

Ship malware with your game to create a botnet and take out competitors.

This could be a post in the "Pitch your game topic" thread:

Metagame: Ship malware with your game to create a botnet and take out competitors.

[quantumpotato]

Then you could "bot" your "enemies" out of the store and create a monopoly for your game idea.

Or you could make a game that addicts every other game developer to your game.. and then they won't have time to make games! Minecraft 2.0!

Btw that botnet strategy works in real life, the Mirari botnet creator is actively killing other botnets designed to kill their botnet https://krebsonsecurity.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/annasenpaichat.txt . Funnily enough, one of their major clients is a "top 5 Minecraft server", DDoSing the competition

[Alec S.]

So, as someone who has released multiple well-reviewed but poor-selling games on Steam, here's my perspective:

Putting a fee in front of releasing a game onto Steam is going to do a lot more harm than good.  If it's closer to 100 dollars, that's not going to be much of a barrier of entry for spam games, shovelware, ect (in fact, I'd say it would be a lower barrier of entry for that sort of thing than Greenlight)... I'll still be able to release games onto Steam, although the fee will sting a bit, but it will disproportionately effect people from poorer countries.

If the fee is in the thousands, it pretty much kills Steam as a viable platform for small indies.  It makes it a very real possibility to spend a year on a project, have it come out, be well reviewed, and actually lose money on it.  And the problem is, because Steam has such a monopoly on the market, it's a massive uphill battle to get your game in front of an audience if it's not on Steam.  Even a failure on Steam gets more of an audience than releasing most other places.  Sure, it would get rid of a lot of the schlock that you probably ignore anyway, but it would also kill a lot of the vibrancy of indie games that are currently available on the platform.

Now, from a consumer perspective, I've never understood the mentality behind keeping Steam as a walled garden.  Like, what harm does it do me if I can buy a shitty game if I want to. 

I think the big problem is discoverability, and that has very little to do with how many games are available.

So 40% of steam games came out in 2016?  That amounted to a little over 4,000 games.  Amazon sells 480 million products, and somehow does a better job at recommending me things than Steam.

Steam should really clean up their front page and make it more in line with Amazon or Netflix in how it recommends content to users.  It should basically go: "Recommended for you" followed by a horizontal scrollable bar of games, then "Genre you like" followed by horizontal scrollable bar of games then "New Releases" followed by a horizontal scrollable bar of games... and so on.  The front page is so cluttered right now and has such inefficient use of space.

[s0]

Now, from a consumer perspective, I've never understood the mentality behind keeping Steam as a walled garden.  Like, what harm does it do me if I can buy a shitty game if I want to.

I think the big problem is discoverability, and that has very little to do with how many games are available.

yes thank you for expressing my thoughts better than i could.

[Bad_Dude 2017]

I'll still be able to release games onto Steam, although the fee will sting a bit, but it will disproportionately effect people from poorer countries.

I live in a country where monthly salary is $60-$100 if youre lucky and gamedev is like $1000 if youre lucky to be employed fulltime in office, but i would not mind bigger fee. In fact majority of local devs i see on sites are pro $1000 fee. Maybe there is some poorer countries that would not like that, but  <1 kbs internet and computor already required for steam publishing. People dont even buy steam games that much in 2nd world and 3rd world countries, its all f2p, mobile and piracy.
Devs here know thats if $1000 is impossible money for you, get out of the kitchen. And theres entire thing about IT and art-design being more stable and profitable, so high risk and unfair investment is something you should take as granted.
Although anglosphere videogame blogger discourse has already decided that $100 is too much in 2012. Go Itch.io, inclusive space that has no regional pricing and requires like 20 mbs internet and 16 gb ram to be in your browser.

They also told that fee is "recoupable", no one knows what it means yet.

[J-Snake]

A small fee might be enough to keep the submission pipeline not overstressed. Knowing Valve at this point, I think that's really all there is to it. The intention is not to keep "bad games" away from the store (their recent approval history clearly shows they don't want to make a guess what game is good or not), just limit the amount of games that are submitted at once. If I had to make a guess, the fee will be something between 100-500 Dollar.

[Manuel Magalhães]

Go Itch.io, inclusive space that has no regional pricing and requires like 20 mbs internet and 16 gb ram to be in your browser.

Not rejecting your criticism (tho the 16 GB RAM statement is def hyperbolic), but I would recommend reaching out the itch.io team about this (https://itch.io/support or their Twitter). I'm sure they would do something about it.

[Bad_Dude 2017]

Go Itch.io, inclusive space that has no regional pricing and requires like 20 mbs internet and 16 gb ram to be in your browser.

Not rejecting your criticism (tho the 16 GB RAM statement is def hyperbolic), but I would recommend reaching out the itch.io team about this (https://itch.io/support or their Twitter). I'm sure they would do something about it.

Maybe i should try, disabling gif prewievs should be a frontpage button, regional pricing i guess is off-limits because creator sets up the price and i dont think anyone there wants to engage in local taxes and stuff.
Although that seems to be a common problem from Bay area originated sites for me, they work like SHIT.

On a side note Bay area tech mentality should be combatted, those guys think that arduino is some sort of widely available shit for poor people and average gamer can assemble their own Turbografx if they want to play Ankuku Densetsu cart they bought in Akihabara.

[Schoq]

Nuke or otherwise completely annihilate silicon valley imho

[quantumpotato]

Let's stay on topic, tigsourcers.

[Bad_Dude 2017]

no

[PaulWv2.017]

Ugh, too tired to work anymore... Let's read tigs-- :/

After emerging as a de facto monopoly, I think it's incumbent on Steam to open their gates wide. If that's the service they want to be, then they don't have a business turning anyone away - it should be up their customers to decide whether to buy or not. Which is hard for me to say, because I super-liked the walled garden that Steam used to be, but that was in a world where I could still get physical games at a real store.
I'm not even sure about the fee thing. Something I keep being repeated (though not here) is that indies should go through kickstarter in order to raise the money to position their product to sell? Like, wat a hell, really? What about folks who can't or don't want to deal with kickstarter for a number of reasons?

Anyway, I think the problem is, like Silbereisen said, discoverability - and it's not just indies. Since TB semi-retired for health reasons, I don't have a "daily" review show or site I turn to, and I'm largely unaware of recent releases unless they go super super big. I don't even know that discoverability is Steam's problem. Youtube seems like the natural place to advertise, but auto manufacturers and so on seem to have raised the bar on ad costs to something that barely even big companies are willing to pay.

A storefront that's less clunky and more navigable like Netflix's would be a start, I guess. I feel like what I really I want is a tiering system, sort developers by team size and quantity of releases, perfectly quantifiable numbers that are not subject to opinion, but I don't know if that kind of sort method would be useful to anyone who doesn't know a bit about the industry. Maybe just more data about the developers? It would also permit easy cross-sales if a developer catches someone's eye. Anyway. Rambling on, I am.

[Photon]

Let's not make the mistake of thinking "higher fees = quality control." It doesn't.

Hopefully I'm not misrepresenting this, but I read a comment on some article about how essentially its not Steam's job to do quality control; they are a distribution platform. To that, I call total bull. That's like saying the grocery store doesn't have to concern themselves with the quality of their produce and food. They distribute it and that's all that matters, which I'm sure most of us would agree that that's complete bologne. But until something like itch.io really takes off and contests with Steam for a piece of the digital distribution pie, Steam can pretty much be whatever it wants. In fact, one might argue that its high volume of games could be its biggest plus from a business perspective: it has more than enough games in its catalog to push some darlings to the top so that the illusion of "quality control" is still in place, for whatever that's worth.

But for all of this, I think its just becoming more and more clear at this point that there is no magic wand that gets our indie games noticed. The elite status of indie title releases has long since disappeared, and the bare minimum of getting on Steam just isn't going to cut it anymore. In the same vein as what I started with, I'm not sure "quality control = better discoverability" is a particularly strong tactic to bank on either.