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Author Topic: Steam just became much more hostile as a game release platform  (Read 17170 times)

zaimoni

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Sunk cost of U.S.$100 merely to exist.

The traffic Greenlight is off.  Whether the current color is yellow, red, or black (to facilitate mushroom management) is debatable ;) 
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Dark.Revenant

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Re: Steam just became much more hostile as a game release platform
« Reply #1 on: June 06, 2017, 05:44:25 PM »

$100 is a hilariously small fee compared to the costs of developing even the smallest of games.  That's like saying this week's groceries are a sunk cost.
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zaimoni

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Re: Steam just became much more hostile as a game release platform
« Reply #2 on: June 06, 2017, 06:07:56 PM »

Depends on what kind of games you're doing, and the local time cost per hour ($1/hour is feasible if you know where to shop).  Clearly volume isn't deemed to be working for Steam now, thus the paywall cash grab.

I can understand wanting to prevent the turnkey U.S. election-themed games that aren't indexed worth anything now (the "bodyguard Ronald Rump" puzzler probably would had have a large enough player base even with this paywall, but I'd guess most of the others didn't clear $1,000 in retail sales).

This is a complete showstopper for new rogue-likes (no more games like HyperRogue, Caves of Qud, or CogMind), and most definitely has ruled out my interest in the Steam marketing platform for the next few years.
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Linnis

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Re: Steam just became much more hostile as a game release platform
« Reply #3 on: June 06, 2017, 06:33:22 PM »

If a dev can't shell out 100$ for their baby, wonder what machine did they even make their game on.

Also, once you sell 1000$ of profit the 100$ is returned. That is very reasonable.
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MesoTroniK

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Re: Steam just became much more hostile as a game release platform
« Reply #4 on: June 06, 2017, 07:02:04 PM »

Jeez, you are killing me zaimoni.

I have spent quite a bit more than $100 bucks on my mods... And that is not counting time = money equivalence, but straight up money out of my own pockets. I find it laughable that anyone that is serious about making a game to put on Steam would ever be even slightly inconvenienced by this "cash grab". If they are, then they are not serious about what they are doing.

Dark.Revenant

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Re: Steam just became much more hostile as a game release platform
« Reply #5 on: June 06, 2017, 07:19:52 PM »

Depends on what kind of games you're doing, and the local time cost per hour ($1/hour is feasible if you know where to shop).  Clearly volume isn't deemed to be working for Steam now, thus the paywall cash grab.

I can understand wanting to prevent the turnkey U.S. election-themed games that aren't indexed worth anything now (the "bodyguard Ronald Rump" puzzler probably would had have a large enough player base even with this paywall, but I'd guess most of the others didn't clear $1,000 in retail sales).

This is a complete showstopper for new rogue-likes (no more games like HyperRogue, Caves of Qud, or CogMind), and most definitely has ruled out my interest in the Steam marketing platform for the next few years.

At $100 per fee, Valve is literally losing money on the deal.  Paying some employee to validate the game, handle the paperwork, etc costs them more than that.  It categorically cannot be a cash grab; the fee is intended to weed out total non-games.

Also, unless you're hiring Russians at the minimum wage, how the hell are you getting developers at $1/hour?
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zaimoni

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Re: Steam just became much more hostile as a game release platform
« Reply #6 on: June 06, 2017, 07:36:00 PM »

Also, unless you're hiring Russians at the minimum wage, how the hell are you getting developers at $1/hour?
Pretty much.  Back when I was last on eLance (2011) that was a common hourly quote rate from Czechoslovakia.
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BillyRueben

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Re: Steam just became much more hostile as a game release platform
« Reply #7 on: June 06, 2017, 07:41:58 PM »

I honestly wish it were more. The amount of garbage on Steam now is astounding.
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Alex

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Re: Steam just became much more hostile as a game release platform
« Reply #8 on: June 06, 2017, 07:45:51 PM »

I think it's pretty much just supposed to weed out some of the outright "scam" type stuff, i.e. not-really-games made to take advantage of the Steam trading card system or whatever. Don't know if $100 will be effective here, since apparently they were thinking of $500 internally and changed it to $100 based on feedback.
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zaimoni

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Re: Steam just became much more hostile as a game release platform
« Reply #9 on: June 06, 2017, 07:52:37 PM »

If a dev can't shell out 100$ for their baby, wonder what machine did they even make their game on.
Utterly normal for rogue-likes.  I specifically named that genre because they're normally bootstrapped to a playable state on pure time cost.

CogMind is the exception here, as its alpha has been commercial (in the StarSector sense) for two or so years before committing to Greenlight very recently.
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zaimoni

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Re: Steam just became much more hostile as a game release platform
« Reply #10 on: June 06, 2017, 08:03:43 PM »

I think it's pretty much just supposed to weed out some of the outright "scam" type stuff, i.e. not-really-games made to take advantage of the Steam trading card system or whatever.
Agreed; Valve needed at least to kill Early Access, to stop competing with Kickstarter/IndieGoGo/....

This looks like a more fundamental problem; the "scam-like" entries don't make money for Valve either, and were heading towards a critical PR issue (judging from Bay12 forums).  So yes pay-walling makes sense as a dual-purpose move, it just utterly kills a method for taking rogue-likes commercial dead.  (Yes, $0 entry cost for a PR lottery for a proven-playable game, was a key part of making this viable.).
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Dark.Revenant

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Re: Steam just became much more hostile as a game release platform
« Reply #11 on: June 06, 2017, 09:02:35 PM »

Again, it is unthinkable that someone who spends a thousand hours or more on a game and then goes through the effort of winning enough support to win GreenLight can't come up with a paltry hundred bucks.  Even just one donor from the EU or US or Australia or Malaysia or whatever would cover that.
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Anysy

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Re: Steam just became much more hostile as a game release platform
« Reply #12 on: June 06, 2017, 09:07:57 PM »

I dont really follow - how is this any different from the old steam greenlight fee? (which iirc was also 100 dollars for the dev studio). This seems to be the same thing, just a marginally better way to avoid game spam that we were seeing.
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Nick XR

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Re: Steam just became much more hostile as a game release platform
« Reply #13 on: June 06, 2017, 09:59:46 PM »

IMO should be $1k, refundable when you reach 3k in sales.  If you don't think your game will make 3k, you probably shouldn't be putting it on steam.  I'm sick of drinking from the steam trash-firehose of *** indie games.

Tartiflette

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Re: Steam just became much more hostile as a game release platform
« Reply #14 on: June 06, 2017, 11:33:50 PM »

If you can't afford $100 to put your game on Steam, put it elsewhere until you get that money. You might even be able to patch it for the most common bugs before being on Steam. And if you can't get enough sales, maybe you shouldn't put your game on Steam then.

Also, wasn't the fee higher than that before Greenlight became a thing?
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