Indie Devs Aren't Happy With Steam Greenlight

[Zombie_Moogle]

Nobody is interested in my game? Clearly this is Steam's fault for not running prime-time TV ads for it using the $100 I gave them to display my work that no one has heard of

Seriously, what does he want? Users that give a crap vote on what they'd wanna see published there. Sounds to me like he's just butt-hurt no one voted for his game.

 

[latiasracer]

Unfinished games, korean grinders, high brow "artsy" games... games that have a whacky cartoonish style that cant be taken serious.

This is my biggest problem with it, what's the point of voting for something that isn't going to be released on steam for atleast another year?



Towns is the only green lit game I've actually bought and whilst it amused me for a fair while, it was not fantastic.

 

[New Troll]

Or maybe if you really want your indie game to get that front page notice we could have a separate vote to see which Greenlight game deserves to have the front page view for an entire day or week...sort of a Greenlight Games Pre-Vote Vote. Vote to have your game on the front page so that it can get enough attention for voters to vote for your game to be accepted on Greenlight so that it can be put back on the front page for voters to finally buy.

Or the games that's been Favorited the most. Maybe just cycle through the top 7 Favorited.

 

[Colt47]

I tried green light and felt like I was going to lose my mind after looking through just the first three pages of submissions. Some of the game ideas are really good, others seem like they'd be better on a different piece of hardware such as Fractured Soul (would love it if it were on the vita, but not so much on the PC).

It's basically like a game version of those research survey's that give you some kind of website specific currency for completing them, toting that if you fill out enough of them you'll get a shot at some scholarship, food coupon, random-freebie-item-of-GLORY!

The only people who get any benefit out of the system are the researchers. Everyone who fills out the sheets for a chance to win something are foolishly wasting their time.

 

[EvolutionKills]

I really don't care all that much. How many of the millions of people on Steam do anything more than boot it up or have it idle in the background? How many only installed it because it's integrated into a game they purchased a hard copy of? How many of those users use the forums to do anything more than complain when something doesn't work? How many use the community features at all? How many care enough to set up their freakin' profile?

To complain that only 15K users out of millions check out Greenlight on a regular basis (even assuming this is correct), seems like it's a logically invalid inference. There's no guarantee that you'll get X amount of users or X percentage of users. If only 15K visit, then only 15K of all of the people that use Steam for any number of other reason care enough to also spend time browsing through the mess of unproven and unknown indie titles.

So most people don't care, big whoop. Steam is a game distribution service first, DRM second, community third, and Greenlight falls somewhere further down that list. I look at it when it first came out, and just shrugged and moved on. If an indie game is good enough to break out of Greenlight to more widespread notoriety (such as F.T.L.), then I'll give it a glance. I'm by no means an indie connoisseur, nor do I go out of my way to play indie games for any particular reason. And judging from the numbers, that seems to put me in the overwhelming majority.

Sorry indie developers, but you have to give me a reason to care.

 

[DTWolfwood]

Reach out to the popular youtube gamers to get you votes on greenlight. Greenlight isn't a billboard. As an indie dev. you still have to "advertise like shameless whores" to get you the votes you want. I've only ever used Greenlight when i've seen the game in action. So there you go. my 2 cents.

 

[itsthesheppy]

I looked at Greenlight once. It was so poorly designed that I couldn't make heads or tails on how to navigate it. I think I've voted on two games, tops.

 

[Alexander Dergay]

Ok, here is some information from our campaign on Greenlight. We are making a game called Legends of Eisenwald. We put it on Greenlight on Dec 13, and as of today we got almost 115k visitors and almost 47k yes votes and currently hold #9 position. Now, everyone seemed to have forgotten that before Greenlight the process was much worse - as a dev you had to go to Valve's website, fill out a form and then wait for a response indefinite time. And if response was no, you could resubmit again but without high chances of anyone to look at your game ever again! Well, Greenlight has its issues and could be improved but we have to acknowledge the good it has done and then think about ways to improve it. I spoke about it more in this article here: http://tinyurl.com/ch32to8, lately I feel sort of on a quest to defend Greenlight.

And as many of commenters here pointed, it's necessary for devs themselves to do some promotion! You can't expect Steam or anyone else do all the work for you. In a way, Greenlight is a training camp to promote your game in the same way you would need to promote it when the game is out. And I am very grateful that I got to realize that we pretty much suck in promotion. At least now I can think of some measures what to do instead of just focusing on the production of our game.

 

[Albino Boo]

That's a very weird complain for developers to have. Do they expect Steam to actively promote greenlight more than what they already do? I don't think Steam users would like a more aggressive attempt to draw attention to it. Greenlight costs just 100$ to get in, do they really want more free publicity out of it? Also, game that get media attention are always going to have more votes than anonymous games, because that's just the way it is. I don't live to promote games, and I assume nobody does, so expecting millions of people to just fire greenlight on a regular basis is probably asking too much, at least for what greenlight is right now.

Honestly, I forget it exists too until I go over a games kickstarter page and they go "Vote for us on steam greenlight!"

They could make it more visible without pushing it on people, for example if they remove it from the Community sub menu and stick it next to the store button along the top bar.

They did the same thing for Big Picture mode, wouldn't be too intrusive to put an icon on the main bar for it.

Look for $100 they are getting 15k people a week looking at their product, thats a damn good deal. Big picture is product developed by valve, so guess what, they give their own things prominence that they don't do for others. Valve isn't a charity and greenlight is a massive hand up from valve to indie gamers that they don't have to do. Complaining that your unfinished game hasn't been given a lot space in the biggest pc game shop in world shows a certain lack of realism. Valve is going to give prominence to things that will bring them the most money and that isn't greenlight.

 

[CardinalPiggles]

Maybe people don't frequent Greenlight because a large percentage of indie games are gimmicky forgettable experiences?

I've got nothing against Indie games at all but there are few that hold my attention for more than 10 minutes.

 

[Alexander Dergay]

Look for $100 they are getting 15k people a week looking at their product, thats a damn good deal. Big picture is product developed by valve, so guess what, they give their own things prominence that they don't do for others. Valve isn't a charity and greenlight is a massive hand up from valve to indie gamers that they don't have to do. Complaining that your unfinished game hasn't been given a lot space in the biggest pc game shop in world shows a certain lack of realism. Valve is going to give prominence to things that will bring them the most money and that isn't greenlight.

And if your game is any good or you have some community or do some promotion, then the results could be much better! But yes, right now it's easy to get lost in over 1000 games there, and because of that it's not enought just to hang in there and hope that your game will do well.

 

[Albino Boo]

Valve is going to give prominence to things that will bring them the most money and that isn't greenlight.

I know this might come as a surprise...

...But when people see games they would like to spend money on, and support those games getting released...

Steam would make more money!

Then again you also thought that Bohimia interactive was spying for Turkey, so I am not sure how much traction I am going to get here.

Dear god man, they have a finite amount of space on the front page and they two choice use that for the game with worldwide multi million dollar advertising campaign that sells millions of units a month or take that space for an unfinished indie game that will lucky to sell 10000 copies a month.

Valve will gross about $6 per AAA game so they sell 400000 a month, giving them a gross profit of $2.4 million. From an indie game they gross about $2 per game because of the lower price point and sale rate of 10000 per month so thats a gross profit of $20000 or 120 times less money.

 

[RatherDashing89]

And how much exposure would these indie games get without Greenlight? Talk about biting the hand that feeds you.

 

[Albino Boo]

Apparently you didn't even read what I said. I said an Icon along the top bar next to the community, name, store, library ect buttons. (protip in case you are too lazy to look: THAT BAR IS MOSTLY EMPTY) they could easily put the little greenlight symbol up there to draw more attention to it.

Only an Idiot would think that putting a symbol there would lose them sales from AAA games advertised below that arent even released yet.

They would still make more money by putting an icon for call duty there instead, because they make more money per item and it sells more. Apparently you can not work out that indie games sell less than AAA games .

 

[Albino Boo]

Look for $100 they are getting 15k people a week looking at their product, thats a damn good deal. Big picture is product developed by valve, so guess what, they give their own things prominence that they don't do for others. Valve isn't a charity and greenlight is a massive hand up from valve to indie gamers that they don't have to do. Complaining that your unfinished game hasn't been given a lot space in the biggest pc game shop in world shows a certain lack of realism. Valve is going to give prominence to things that will bring them the most money and that isn't greenlight.

And if your game is any good or you have some community or do some promotion, then the results could be much better! But yes, right now it's easy to get lost in over 1000 games there, and because of that it's not enough just to hang in there and hope that your game will do well.

Go into any shop and you find the best selling items are more prominently displayed than the not so good sellers. Valve is business and they will make more money per sale and sell more AAA games than indie games, so greenlight gets pushed to the back of the store. It would help your business to be more prominent but it would not help Valves. The only real way its going to change if cost more than $100 to get on greenlight and Valve examines all applications and accepts only those its thinks are good.

 

[rasputin0009]

"Look at these pictures I drew! No, I don't have anything else to show... Please, like my game!"

Wading through that shit isn't fun. I don't care if there's a gem or two hidden in that shit-hole, I'm not swallowing crap to find them.

 

[Dr.Awkward]

Like I said in this [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/7.407828-Swindle-Dev-How-Can-Consoles-Improve-Ties-With-Indies] article, I think the biggest thing indies want right now is an exposure of their games that is equal to that AAA games are given. They're getting really tired of the same-old genres getting the spotlight again and again while their new takes on genres that have been forgotten and deemed "outdated" are thrown by the wayside, being only discovered by the few people who are curious enough to go beyond Steam's store front page.

 

[hutchy27]

I know it's there but everytime I look, they look terrible and the only ones I like the look of are greenlit already.

 

[FreakofNatur]

The fact is, without some form of advertising, Papers, please wouldn't get as easily greenlit. Indie devs can't throw games at green light and expect audience. They still have to poach their votes, as it were.

It's an accurate metaphor. It might be a greenlight, but you still have to walk your game through it. Don't expect views to drop from the sky, go refer people to the enabling platform.

That said, there's too much junk on greenlight. Like a previous poster did say, It's like looking for gold in a landfill.



Except everything is gold in color.

 

[Reyold]

I think the biggest issue with Greenlight were all the complete garbage submissions piled into the service before Valve started limiting applications. A lot of original visitors got tired of wading through the mess and gave up on the service, only visiting games promoted elsewhere (Kickstarter, Official sites, friends, etc.)

That's definitely one of Greenlight's issues. I check it on a semi-regular basis, and while I do occasionally find good games, there also a loads of games that are obviously crap. Some people don't have the patience to wade through it all, and I don't really fault them for it.