Steam Green Light

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http://steamcommunity.com/greenlight

http://www.pcgamer.com/2012/07/09/st...

Valve have just announced Steam Greenlight. The new service will work like the Steam Workshop, but for indie games. Creators can submit their work for rating by gamers, and the best rated games will then enter Valve’s approval process for inclusion in the Steam store.

The new service was revealed at a private event in London for British indie designers. Apparently the official website will launch soon, and we’ll have more information as soon as more anonymous text messages come through to my phone.

So what's to stop people voting for everything?

I think there's potential here, if they make it so developers have to 'sell' their game well with a good demo/video to let voters make an informed decision, which hopefully would stop anyone trying to put a 5 minute "it compiles!" job onto steam.

Scratched wrote:

So what's to stop people voting for everything?

You'll still have clear winners, right?

SixteenBlue wrote:
Scratched wrote:

So what's to stop people voting for everything?

You'll still have clear winners, right?

I guess the devil's in the details. Are there 'winners' and 'losers'? Is it a case of passing a threshold? How often will voting happen?

Good now I can get a handful of my favorite games onto Steam.

I imagine there is still going to be a team of people looking at things, so even if "pet project x" gets voted in (say, by your college punking Steam) the committee will still look at it and communicate with the devs.

This might kill off XBLA Indie Games at the rate that Microsoft treats their Indie Games section. I can't even find that XBLA Indie Games under the horrible dashboard.

Nice. This was hinted at a few months ago in a couple interviews and glad to see it being something the public has access to (unlike XBLA Indie Games). Hopefully this will solve some gaps in their service which people like Vic Davis (Solium Infernium and Six Gun Saga) infamously fell into.

EDIT: This would probably solve the issue of finding Linux games to put on the service when the Linux version launches.

Can I post my game concept or early builds?

Absolutely! We encourage you to post information about your game as early in the development process as you are comfortable with. Greenlight will let you define whether you are posting your game as a concept/early build or as a playable game that is nearing completion.

We ask that you only define your game as 'playable game' if you have a playable build that demonstrates the gameplay mechanics and at least one level of your game. Otherwise, please classify your submission as 'concept' until its far enough along that the community can reasonably evaluate the mechanics, scope, and style of your game. Either way, you will probably get great feedback and a good start in building a community of fans around your game.

Sounds rather Kickstarter-esque, but without pledges.

MeatMan wrote:
Can I post my game concept or early builds?

Absolutely! We encourage you to post information about your game as early in the development process as you are comfortable with. Greenlight will let you define whether you are posting your game as a concept/early build or as a playable game that is nearing completion.

We ask that you only define your game as 'playable game' if you have a playable build that demonstrates the gameplay mechanics and at least one level of your game. Otherwise, please classify your submission as 'concept' until its far enough along that the community can reasonably evaluate the mechanics, scope, and style of your game. Either way, you will probably get great feedback and a good start in building a community of fans around your game.

Sounds rather Kickstarter-esque, but without pledges.

Sounds like the title is pretty accurate. Work out a prototype and test the waters, if it gets a good reaction then green light it for production. I like that idea although I don't have much desire being someone's free focus group.

Scratched wrote:

So what's to stop people voting for everything?

from: http://steamcommunity.com/greenlight

...the specific number of votes doesn't matter as much as relative interest in a game compared with other games in Steam Greenlight.

so if you vote for everything, you (partly, anyways) render your vote meaningless.

This is fantastic, and a winning proposition for everyone. GOG has a similar feature that allows them to see what users want, therefore what can make them the most money. It's a simple cream-rising-to-the-top setup and the Steam community can vote with their feet (and eventually their wallets). I've seen great games languish (Hegemony Gold) and awful games for sale (Bad Rats? seriously?), so this should hopefully correct/address that.

There's hope for Din's Curse yet! Exciting stuff.

I wonder what games that don't get many votes will do, because to me that would signify either no one is interested in the concept (do a rethink and avoid wasting time implementing something few want) or that it needs more quality/better marketing to attract people. It'll be interesting if some developers move their complaints from "Valve didn't pay any attention to me or dismissed me with no reason" to "gamers blocked me from steam by not voting for me", in which case my gut reaction is that they're deflecting blame from themselves.

Biggest story since steam points cards at gamestop.

Scratched wrote:

It'll be interesting if some developers move their complaints from "Valve didn't pay any attention to me or dismissed me with no reason" to "gamers blocked me from steam by not voting for me", in which case my gut reaction is that they're deflecting blame from themselves.

I really doubt that people are going to gloss over something that's actually good for no reason at all. If that was the case, Kickstarter wouldn't exist. That goes double for the Steam Workshop and previous "wisdom of the crowd" gaming projects like the exchanges Maxis did for their games.

Really interested to see how this actually works out. The community doing the voting is going to make or break it. In a sense it's just marketing kicking in earlier than it otherwise necessarily would, but I'm a little wary of the tastes of the crowd - people don't often know what they want before they actually have it. If it goes well, it could be awesome in helping direct the game to be more commercially viable and appealing on launch.

What's currently a bit baffling to me is you can't get access to stuff you need to develop the game (SDK, docs, app id) before the greenlight is granted. I guess that could change if it's a problem to enough people, but certainly it feels weird to have released games on Steam recently and now you can't continue to develop before greenlighting the new title (which is in early stages). It would make more sense to me to just use Greenlight for deciding what to release on the marketplace. I would guess cost of support being the reason to do it this way, still inconvenient to me as a developer.

jlaakso wrote:

Really interested to see how this actually works out. The community doing the voting is going to make or break it. In a sense it's just marketing kicking in earlier than it otherwise necessarily would, but I'm a little wary of the tastes of the crowd - people don't often know what they want before they actually have it. If it goes well, it could be awesome in helping direct the game to be more commercially viable and appealing on launch.

What's currently a bit baffling to me is you can't get access to stuff you need to develop the game (SDK, docs, app id) before the greenlight is granted. I guess that could change if it's a problem to enough people, but certainly it feels weird to have released games on Steam recently and now you can't continue to develop before greenlighting the new title (which is in early stages). It would make more sense to me to just use Greenlight for deciding what to release on the marketplace. I would guess cost of support being the reason to do it this way, still inconvenient to me as a developer.

Hopefully I'm interpreting your post correctly, but I think greenlight is more about getting games into the store than having access to steamworks features.

Scratched wrote:

Hopefully I'm interpreting your post correctly, but I think greenlight is more about getting games into the store than having access to steamworks features.

That's how I would like it, yes, but that's not the case currently - you only get all that stuff once greenlit. But hey, early days and all, let's see how it works out next month.

Hmmm, it would seem to me that if your Plan A is making your game with steamworks before you've got the prerequisites from valve, that's putting the cart before the horse, it would seem wise to me to have a Plan B too, to implement those features without Valve's say-so, whether it's for proof of concept placeholder for steamworks or another network, or for your own system.

I guess this ties in with the Valve/Steam monopoly problem that could happen, if companies tie themselves to what is admittedly the largest platform on PC by their own choice, then they have to deal with the consequences of that choice going against them and impeding their own development.

I wonder if they're already releasing a few long-wished-for games during some sort of Green Light Beta. I have no inside information, but the recent release of fan-favorites Din's Curse and KOTOR 2 (now that the Sith Lords Restored Content mod is done) in rapid succession might mean that someone is really paying attention.

Yay: "Steam Greenlight is slated to launch at the end of August"

Oh hey, looks like this is now active!

51 items (at least) left to rate....this could take some time.

It's alive!! Sweet.

stevenmack wrote:

Oh hey, looks like this is now active!

51 items (at least) left to rate....this could take some time.

That number keeps going up. 91 now.

I know...rating everything might have been a bit optimistic

There's some interesting stuff on there though.

some pretty TERRIBLE stuff as well. Like, Xbox Indie terrible.

stevenmack wrote:

There's some interesting stuff on there though.

some pretty TERRIBLE stuff as well. Like, Xbox Indie terrible.

I think there's a golden halo effect around indie games at the moment (and for the last few years) off the back of a few titles. I think this will highlight the other side of the coin, the general "the majority of everything is crap" side. Not to say that there aren't good things in there, I've voted for something I found interesting (signal ops), but that putting on the 'indie' hat doesn't automatically make something good, and also highlights what valve have had to filter out the past few years.

If you need a good laugh, some guy started up a tumblr featuring the worst submissions so far.

On a more positive light, apparently this space simulator has already been through a kickstarter but I never heard of it before. Looks intriguing.

kuddles wrote:

If you need a good laugh, some guy started up a tumblr featuring the worst submissions so far.

I think some people are just trying to use it as publicity for their mod, or the hope that they'll get their mod 'legitimised' by having it hosted on steam rather than on any other mod site like any other mod. I think there may be a way for steam workshop to do something with mods, but this isn't that.

Seduce Me is an erotic game with light strategy gameplay, pre-rendered backgrounds, and hand painted images of glamourous women.

edit: I just looked at the tumblr that kuddles posted after I posted this and it was the first entry.

kuddles wrote:

On a more positive light, apparently this space simulator has already been through a kickstarter but I never heard of it before. Looks intriguing.

Terraria in space. I backed it. I up voted it too.

garion333 wrote:
kuddles wrote:

On a more positive light, apparently this space simulator has already been through a kickstarter but I never heard of it before. Looks intriguing.

Terraria in space. I backed it. I up voted it too.

Ah, that looks great! Voted up.

I know I shouldn't be surprised but I'm going to enjoy reporting a number of these tonight.

shoptroll wrote:

I know I shouldn't be surprised but I'm going to enjoy reporting a number of these tonight.

Me too. Now it's a question of whether we can report crap entries faster than they can submit them.

I actually just received a nice thank-you email from Steam Support for reporting several of them. I'm optimistic about this.

I notice some of the Brownlight entries have already disappeared from Greenlight. That gives me hope that it's not going to be quite so Sturgeon-licious as, say, the Android appstore.

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