Steam Green Light

shoptroll wrote:

So, how much livestock do we need to sacrifice before March to get Pinball Arcade finally accepted?

I voted. I like pinball, it's a shame it's not around in its natural form as much.

Yes! The gauntlet revival I've been waiting for!

Arcadecraft

You are the owner of a brand new arcade in 1980, and you have 2 years to pay back your business loan and its interest. You choose which machines to buy, where to place them, you go around and empty the coin bins, get to throw out unruly customers, and deal with the regular day-to-day stuff with managing an arcade in the 80s.

Out now on XBLIG, but hoping to get up to PC via Steam, and also working on a touch-based Windows 8 version as well.

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/1...
Hurray! Also, some of the comments are actually brilliant ideas for the future of Steam.
I would love to be a curator. Give me a copy of the game, I'll review it if I have time (on a clean PC based on an image that I use for nothing other than testing-and then I diff the resulting image after I play it so I can tell if any byte whatsoever was actually modified that wasn't supposed to be-it also means I can give store customers a reasonable idea about performance on a given set of hardware). If I like it, you're in!
It would add a whole new meaning to "game reviewer".
Actually this could work for any platform, and any software for that matter.

Reminds me a little of Descent...

Thought this game looked very interesting!

Ether One

We can vote all we want but how often do they actually select new stuff to add to the store? The number of greenlit and released games has been sitting at 42-12 for as long as I can remember now. And yet these new games that I have never heard of continue to waltz onto the front page. It's particularly irritating when fully complete and shipped games like Drox Operative made by developers who already have games listed on steam are stuck in limbo and yet these crappy mobile games seem to get a free pass.

The system sounded great on paper, and seems to work well enough. But week after week I look at the page and nothing is happening. I can't even be bothered to look at the list anymore, let along vote on stuff.

McIrishJihad wrote:

Arcadecraft

You are the owner of a brand new arcade in 1980, and you have 2 years to pay back your business loan and its interest. You choose which machines to buy, where to place them, you go around and empty the coin bins, get to throw out unruly customers, and deal with the regular day-to-day stuff with managing an arcade in the 80s.

Out now on XBLIG, but hoping to get up to PC via Steam, and also working on a touch-based Windows 8 version as well.

But can you play the games?

Recettear is fun running an item shop and all, but wouldn't be as great if you couldn't go out into the dungeons.

Stele wrote:
McIrishJihad wrote:

Arcadecraft

You are the owner of a brand new arcade in 1980, and you have 2 years to pay back your business loan and its interest. You choose which machines to buy, where to place them, you go around and empty the coin bins, get to throw out unruly customers, and deal with the regular day-to-day stuff with managing an arcade in the 80s.

Out now on XBLIG, but hoping to get up to PC via Steam, and also working on a touch-based Windows 8 version as well.

But can you play the games?

Recettear is fun running an item shop and all, but wouldn't be as great if you couldn't go out into the dungeons. ;)

I only put about 45 minutes into it on XBLIG, but don't recall a point where you could play the games. Maybe it could get patched in as part of a PC release?

Well, yet another month goes by with no Pinball Arcade.

But, I see there's a new game posted today that may strike a very nostalgic chord with many of you, as it did for me: Shufflepuck Cantina Deluxe.

MeatMan wrote:

DreadChase

I have no idea what I just watched, but I'm terrified and excited.

TempestBlayze wrote:

Thought this game looked very interesting!

Ether One

Wow, that looks super interesting. A lot of potential in what they show.

Oh, great. Another announcement of an announcement. IMAGE(http://static-cdn.jtvnw.net/jtv_user_pictures/chansub-global-emoticon-c8a77ec0c49976d3-22x30.png)

MeatMan wrote:

Oh, great. Another announcement of an announcement. IMAGE(http://static-cdn.jtvnw.net/jtv_user_pictures/chansub-global-emoticon-c8a77ec0c49976d3-22x30.png)

I always take these as combination of "hey go vote you slackers" and "people still care about this ill-fated project, right?"

I thought Greenlight was working out well. Why is it considered "ill-fated"?

tanstaafl wrote:

I thought Greenlight was working out well. Why is it considered "ill-fated"?

Because making announcements of announcements comes across as kinda desperate for attention? (Even if it isn't, I still don't feel like it does a very good job of helping the cream rise to the top.)

tanstaafl wrote:

I thought Greenlight was working out well. Why is it considered "ill-fated"?

because odds if they dont get upvoted they're probably not going to make it much farther.

psoplayer wrote:

I still don't feel like it does a very good job of helping the cream rise to the top.

This, essentially. There's a lot of stuff that slips through and even Gabe has said they're unhappy with how it currently works.

So... good idea, bad execution/implementation.

ranalin wrote:

because odds if they dont get upvoted they're probably not going to make it much farther.

There's also the issue that it doesn't really solve the issue of getting onto Steam in the first place. Instead of trying to get Valve's attention, you need to appeal to the masses and reach some magical threshold before they even look at your game (I think there's some degree of curation going on at Valve).

Plus there's been some established indie developers/publishers like Wadjet being told to put their games on Greenlight despite already having an established relationship with Valve. At the same time, we're still seeing games hit the store without going through the Greenlight process, so clearly the old "Steam representative" curation system is still in place.

The War Z (which was known pretty much everywhere as a scam) and Revelations 2012 got to skip Greenlight whereas Pinball Arcade (which comes from an established developer and is already out on multiple other platforms) has been stuck in Greenlight Limbo forever. Apparently GDC was full of developers Female Doggoing about Greenlight. The system is easily gamed and Valve lets certain random titles through without explanation. It's a good idea but it's pretty broken in its current implementation.

I am still waiting for The Hunter to get passed Green Light and it's a 3 year old game at this point...

Well, I did raise a question about Greenlight a while back

As set up Greenlight was always going to be a popularity contest but I somehow got the impression that was what it was supposed to be; Valve didn't want to bother with anything that wasn't going to be popular. If they aren't going to let everything onto the platform then they have to have some sort of vetting process, either by someone at Valve themselves or by crowdsourcing it; i.e. Greenlight. As for the fact that the crowd seems to have bad taste... welcome to the Internet.

tanstaafl wrote:

they have to have some sort of vetting process, either by someone at Valve themselves or by crowdsourcing it; i.e. Greenlight.

Or... by individual-sourcing it. As per Gabe's comments over the past few months in regard to individually curated storefronts.

Parallax Abstraction wrote:

The War Z (which was known pretty much everywhere as a scam) and Revelations 2012 got to skip Greenlight whereas Pinball Arcade (which comes from an established developer and is already out on multiple other platforms) has been stuck in Greenlight Limbo forever. Apparently GDC was full of developers Female Doggoing about Greenlight. The system is easily gamed and Valve lets certain random titles through without explanation. It's a good idea but it's pretty broken in its current implementation.

It's also almost its own community at this point, because most people don't check it that much but a small group of people check it all the time. So you don't actually get a good idea of what the average person wants on Steam, instead you just get all these nasty group behaviour where there's groupthink in regards to what games should get on and a sense of ownership over the process.

psoplayer wrote:
tanstaafl wrote:

they have to have some sort of vetting process, either by someone at Valve themselves or by crowdsourcing it; i.e. Greenlight.

Or... by individual-sourcing it. As per Gabe's comments over the past few months in regard to individually curated storefronts.

Yep, this is clearly a better solution. But considering it's on Valve time, who knows when it will actually become a reality.

A small batch of games was just approved:

Edge of Space
Papers, Please
Venetica

What's interesting is that they kinda elaborated more on the selection process and the intent behind the system:

These titles were selected on the same criteria we have been using in the past: Votes in Greenlight give us a hugely valuable point of data in gauging community interest along with external factors such as press reviews, crowd-funding successes, performance on other platforms, and awards and contests to help form a more complete picture of community interest in each title.

So even though people are voting on the games, they are looking at other factors. Plus, it sounds very much like Greenlight is less about letting the community approve games for Valve and more about crowd-sourcing overlooked titles they should be putting in the store (which I feel like they might've suggested was the purpose of Greenlight in past interviews, can't remember). This would explain why all games (especially ones from bigger entities) don't have to go through the Greenlight meat grinder, why IGF titles get a free pass, and why smaller outfits like Wadjet were told to put their games in Greenlight instead of jumping the line.

Searchlight would be a far better name for the service.

MeatMan wrote:
psoplayer wrote:
tanstaafl wrote:

they have to have some sort of vetting process, either by someone at Valve themselves or by crowdsourcing it; i.e. Greenlight.

Or... by individual-sourcing it. As per Gabe's comments over the past few months in regard to individually curated storefronts.

Yep, this is clearly a better solution. But considering it's on Valve time, who knows when it will actually become a reality.

That's definitely the kind of store and small business I'd like to run.

It might be good for all those people wishing to break into vg jurnalizm who are all doing their own sites and just putting their reviews for the world to see. Sort of like how Penny Arcade generally try out the products they advertise.