Valve fields indie Greenlight complaints
Valve hosted an online get-together to talk with indie developers about Steam Greenlight, and was met with some outspoken critics who claim it's not visible enough and has been bleeding users.
Steam's Greenlight program is meant to raise indie awareness by putting aspiring games up to a popular vote, but some developers feel it isn't doing enough to put the games in front of potential audiences. Valve hosted an online get-together to hear the thoughts of indie developers, some of whom were outspoken about improvements to the service.
A transcript on Crunching Koalas (via Develop) shows the conversation. Valve's Tom Bui said that Greenlight has attracted approximately two million voters. A representative of Intravenous Software said they don't see anywhere near that kind of traffic, and asked if the Greenlight page can be given a more prominent position.
"I'm not talking about votes, I'm talking about visitors," the developer said. "I know a number of Devs, and each get about 15k visitors in the first week. Then it falls off a cliff. That tells me you have 15k people who come look at Greenlight on a weekly basis, and about 5k who check it once a month. Considering you have millions of members, don't you think those numbers are very low. Only games that get media attention get any more visitors than that." Intravenous claimed that millions of members and only 15,000 regular Greenlight viewers means "something is wrong."
Developer Space Bullet also said that since the launch, the traffic has seen sharp declines.
For its part, Valve countered that it gives front page placement to Greenlight and all Steam users get a message when a new round of Greenlight games is ready for voting. It also claimed that contrary to Space Bullet's claims, traffic has been "pretty steady since after the big spike at launch." The company has also promised further revisions to the Greenlight program, and says it is "actively looking into" making more tools available for developers before their projects get approval.
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replySteve Watts posted a new article, Valve fields indie Greenlight complaints.
Valve hosted an online get-together to talk with indie developers about Steam Greenlight, and was met with some outspoken critics who claim it's not visible enough and has been bleeding users.-
It really could be more visible.
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If they're going through the trouble to have the program to begin with then they should support it. If not there isn't much point in having it.
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Don't get me wrong I love steam. But Valve does annoy me sometimes. Especially the fact the offline mode more or less always broken in some way.
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er is more or less
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I've accepted that Steam is an F2P MMO now that is best enjoyed by buying DLC.
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I've grown to accept that Steam is a F2P MMO now that is best enjoyed by buying DLC.
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I'm curious why you think it is not supported.
It is just as visible as any other section of the Steam website (link in the menu + large block feature on the front page), they send out those news announcements when a batch is greenlit, and they even make it clear on the store page itself when a game shows up that it arrived due to the Greenlight process.
So far, 31 greenlit games have been released to the store, each of which we may not have ever seen on there otherwise. And each of which is given the same opportunities as any game that made it to Steam in the normal manner.
What more are people expecting here?
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I don't understand the point of Greenlight. Why don't they just have an indie store and if sales seem to blow up for a particular title, just move it over to the front page for an added boost?
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To be fair though, part of the failure of XBLIG is Microsofts inability to market it properly or even intentionally NOT marketing so they won't piss off people selling discs or on XBLA. I'm sure the concept would work somewhat better on Steam where the indie games wouldn't be hidden, just separate.
Separate but equal... how could that ever fail??
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XBLIG has proven that idea is a failure. If you segregate the games in to different store fronts it basically kills the discoverability of the games. Indie developers have been fighting stuff like this for years on the consoles I really doubt they would want to see that on PC.
There are plenty of indie focused digital distribution services but they don't get nearly the same attention as Steam. Greenlight is trying to find a happy medium between curation and what the consumer wants.-
That all makes sense.
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I like this idea only cause I can see a "I am rich" app being created and someone making money off it
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Kind of a silly complaint... it is plenty visible, and the fact that it even exists in the first place should be huge enough of a deal for most.
My question is, if you can't be bothered to publicize your game enough to get it some views on Greenlight, how were you planning to be successful with the game in the first place?
Granted, I'm not an indie dev, so maybe I ain't seeing things in the right perspective. :P-
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Maybe not comparable to the Greenlight situation, but it's not always easy to get media coverage. Even with the entire Divinity series under their belts, the guys at Larian found it very hard to get gaming news sites like IGN, GameSpot, etc. to cover Divinity: Original Sin during their Kickstarter campaign. They said that the thing that really seemed to reinvigorate their campaign was their frequent video updates and posts on YouTube. Well, that and word of mouth.
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Ya, I get what the dev's are saying. I went there a few times at first and now only go when a title or a dev makes some noise in the media/Shack. And, yup, there's too much crap up there too - or at least stuff that looks like crap without a better ability to market itself.
Marketing is kind of the double sword of the indie world. You don't want a publisher who'll gobble up the profits, but marketing a game, especially if it's your first few, can be seriously challenging. -
Valve says there are 2,000,000 users. Devs are saying that there are about 20,000 active users.
Given the usual tiering structure in UGC communities, you'd expect the devs to be around 1% of the participants, the "power user commenting crowd" to be around 5%, and the "vote only" crowd to be around another 10%.
Yeah, the 1% active count seems low.-
What about the OGC communities?
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They have a point about bleeding users. During the first maybe two weeks after it was launched I checked it out. But since then I haven't been back. Sort of had forgotten all about that feature until this article even.
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I think for me, its all of the crap titles and "wish lists" that people post that turned me off. Some are extremely subpar...I mean, developing is nice, and Im glad people are taking an interest, but maybe your first effort at programming at all shouldnt be your greenlight entry.
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There is a problem with Greenlight: quality. All I see are half-assed minute-long bugged-out silent films of alpha "gameplay" that reveal very little about what the final concept is supposed to look like, cover art produced in MSPaint, and previews like, "For a free game demo follow this link: Official game page | Compatible with Windows XP/Vista/7/8, Mac OS 10.6+ and Linux 32/64-bit."
Maybe if you want your game to get attention, you should try a little bit. Make your shit presentable. Stop trying to sell pre-alpha garbage. Authors don't submit first drafts to publishers and you shouldn't, either.
Most of the games I check out on Greenlight, I do so in good faith rather than actual interest. In another couple months I'll only go there to look up one specific game I found linked to elsewhere. That's not Steam's fault, it's because of crummy games and tripe developers that don't deserve to be on there.
Suggestions:
- Add a "Recently Updated" tab in addition to "Recent submissions." If a game gets a big update (patch, media, content, etc.) and the developer updates their front page accordingly, it'd be a way to bring attention to a title that has been hanging out for a while.
- Bring attention to titles that are close to actually being Greenlit.
- Take out the trash. Give me an incentive to vote "No." This would help clear space for more worthy titles, and reduce the resemblance to the cesspit that is Xbox Indie Games. -
The guy at IV's response doesn't make sense. He doesn't see nearly 2 million votes in total and across all games, translated into traffic on his game's site, and per month?
"I know a number of Devs, and each get about 15k visitors in the first week. Then it falls off a cliff. That tells me you have 15k people who come look at Greenlight on a weekly basis, and about 5k who check it once a month."
Why does he think that who visits Greenlight visits his game's page?
Also, when is WRC 3 going to finally be Greenlit? -
I think the problem is it's *really* boring to use. I'm basing this on my own experience of course, but I just don't think enough people give a shit to navigate through that upvoting indie games. 15k users sounds about right, somehow.
Also I didn't feel like the options "I would buy this / I wouldn't buy this" reflect whether or not I think it should be made available to others. They may have changed that though, I dunno-- I haven't checked out greenlight since launch (because boring.)
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I've had a game greenlighted and this is my take on it. Valve didn't create greenlight to give indie developers a chance they created it feed a select few games to their extremely understaffed internal screening process. Which before greenlight come out ignored everyone who wasn't coming from a publisher or developer with existing clout. My game actually got turned down even with a publisher initially because they were just too small to garner any attention at valve.
But now the crowd sourcing is breaking down because the novelty of searching through all these games is gone for most people. On top of that there is much more crap games in the system now making it even harder for decent ones to get noticed. So its back to where its started, valve has all these submissions but won't devote the man power to review them.-
Also I should have said that there is no amount of votes that you need to graduate from greenlight. You just need to have enough votes to distinguish your self from the masses. Which means being in the top 10 to get screened by valve employees.
tldr; Greenlight is a pit they throw indie devs to fight each other for their lives. -
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