8 ms·

Evolving Steam

94 points by larsiusprime 10y ago

ihuman 10y ago
This sounds like they're re-launching Steam Greenlight, but without the pretense that only quality games will get through. Hopefully the fee will be high enough to stop asset-flips and shovelware, but low enough to allow smaller indie devs in.
- gerbal 10y ago
  The amount of shovelware and asset flips suggest the current fee of $100 is far too low. I'm dismayed there is scarcely any mention of the quality of works entering Steam. It's patently obvious that quality is the major issue now, not the usability of the platform or developer features.
  - deelowe 10y ago
    Valve's corporate philosophy seems to go completely against any sort of regulation. This is reflected in their management/leadership structure (or famous lack there-of). It seems pretty clear to me that their plans are to rely on the market to moderate this stuff.
  - lsaferite 10y ago
    My understanding is the current fee is per-developer, not per-game. The new plan is to charge per-game, which might help combat the issue to some degree.
- coredog64 10y ago
  This. My kids primarily buy games through Steam. More and more they wind up buying early access games at "finished" prices. My second concern is that Greenlight and shovelware will turn into a malware channel. Some of the anti-cheat utilities have deep access.
  - DigitalJack 10y ago
    Yeah, the early access stuff is more miss than hit. But I've played one game, The Long Dark, that's been "early access" where I've got over 100 hours in it. That's a lot for me. Only the "sandbox" mode is available, but it's enough for me. More than enough. The game is therapeutic for me. It relieves my anxiety. This is a case where the developers had a vision (and still do), but early access to a mode that was initially just for testing allowed them to discover their test mode (aka "sandbox") was actually a fine game in and of itself. Early access, I think, allows developers with perfection obsession to go ahead and ship something. Instead of developing it forever, hoping to achieve their goal, and never shipping. It's true that there is a lot of garbage in early access, but I don't think it's a worse ratio than most indie games.
- smacktoward 10y ago
  I think (assuming I'm reading the announcement correctly) there's an extra wrinkle here, though. In the old model, the way to get your game onto Steam was to put it through Greenlight, where if it gathered enough support it could get promoted to the main storefront. You had to pay a fee to Valve to submit games to Greenlight, but it was a one-time fee ($100, IIRC), after which you could submit as many games to Greenlight as you wanted. In the new model, Greenlight goes away; you just submit your game directly, and after you pay a publication fee, the amount of which is still up in the air (anywhere from $100-$5,000), it goes into the storefront. But, and this is the wrinkle, now you pay the publication fee for each game you submit rather than just paying it once. So if you submit ten games for publication, you pay the publication fee ten times. So why the change? My guess is that Valve has decided that the essential premise of Greenlight -- that community curation would surface the gems within the vast pile of dross that gets submitted -- has been comprehensively broken by tactics like voting rings and giving out free keys in exchange for votes. So this represents them abandoning that idea and replacing it with a more blunt filter: a per-title publication fee. In the old model it cost the same to submit a thousand games as it did to submit one, so developers just threw lots of things against the wall and prayed one would stick. Now there will be a financial incentive for developers to put more wood behind fewer arrows, as the saying goes. The big question is whether this will improve the overall quality of games on Steam, or reduce it further (if that's even possible). I'm honestly not sure. A lot will depend on where precisely they set that publication fee -- too high will drive off cash-starved indie devs, too low will mean the crap merchants will just swallow it as the cost of doing business.
  - fnordsensei 10y ago
    I wonder what they mean by "recoupable" fee, though. Will it count towards per-purchase fees?
    - WillPostForFood 10y ago
      I would assume recoupable will mean that you get 100% of sales revenue up until the point you've earned the publication fee back. Then Valve will start taking their % cut on sales thereafter.
- benologist 10y ago
  If the point is to find the great games Steam should make it free to publish, doesn't matter how many bad games there are except they are a factor in how many great games there are. Bad games don't make much money before it's discovered and Steam has a 14 day-ish refund policy. It might force them to automate it, like Google Play does for 2 hours after purchases.
leadingthenet 10y ago
This is a bit underwhelming in my opinion. Providing a more streamlined publishing experience is great, but it's not even close to the biggest problem Steam is facing. What about the interface (which is definitely showing its age) being an unresponsive mess, or the fact that support STILL has not improved in any major way? It reminds me of iTunes a bit, especially since this update has the potential to actually make Steam Greenlight even worse. Valve definitely does not seem to have a clear vision for the future.
- zelon88 10y ago
  Realistically they never had a vision for the future. It seems to be a combination of a bunch of visions. Nonetheless, I can't see much about Steam that took 360+ people 13 years to develop. It seems to me that there is a fear of commitment in an environment that tries to foster comfort for it's workforce. Maybe they need someone to point their finger at a goal and start demanding that progress be made to achieve that goal. Finish the HL2 story arc for crying-out-loud. Or just cancel it so your fans can move on.
  - leadingthenet 10y ago
    Exactly. They're doing even worse in terms of vision for their game franchises, which is what got them where they are in the first place. This is a gaming company that hasn't really done anything major for gaming in nearly a decade. How is that even possible?
    - vernorvinge88 10y ago
      Oh please. Steam on Linux hasn't ushered in "Linux on every desktop" but it's done quite a bit for Linux gaming. Dota 2 came out 4 years ago and is huge. Greenlight was launched 5 years ago. That achieved nothing for indie game devs I guess. Anyone of those was a pretty major event in "gaming".
      - zelon88 10y ago
        I never claimed that Valve wasn't productive. I meant to highlight the seeming lack of discipline they sometimes display. They are a "Jack of all trades" but the master of none. They'll work on hardware or features for Steam that nobody asked for while (sometimes arrogantly) letting other projects (with actual demand) linger.
larrik 10y ago
Steam has come a long way in recent years, but it would be nice if some of that fancy store logic they've written could be used on library management. I've collected over 700 steam games, and looking through them became unwieldy after I hit 150 or so. Careful usage of categories can make up for some of it, but even that is clunky and not something I want to spend time on.
- pmoriarty 10y ago
  Does the typical Steam user have enough games to make this an issue for them?
  - wink 10y ago
    I have 70 and I find the methods to organize them pretty much meh. I have like 10 categories, but as I'm only actively playing (i.e. have installed) like 5, the rest is still a collapsed bunch of categories...
  - larrik 10y ago
    Buy a few Humble Bundles, where you don't specifically know what some of the games are, and it happens quick.
webwielder2 10y ago
Trading cards were added to make people happy?
- vernorvinge88 10y ago
  Gamers love schwag
- Zikes 10y ago
  The gamification of the games platform. People will buy games just for the trading cards. The more trading cards you have, the better your odds of completing a set and turning it in for XP and leveling up your Steam account, unlocking new profile and friends list features.
  - ansible 10y ago
    Yeah, I never got that. For a while I would just sell the trading cards as soon as they were awarded. I think I got some cheap DLC for free from that money... it probably wasn't even worth my time to do that.
    - elcapitan 10y ago
      Same here. The notifications are the most annoying part to me. I really don't care about that stuff, and I don't need a message in my inbox about some new thingy.
    - pmoriarty 10y ago
      There's probably an age demographic involved here. It's probably not worth your time because you're an adult and earn a good income. But most kids under a certain age don't have a job, don't think of their time in monetary terms, and might find collecting and trading cards to be fun. Steam probably has a ton of such demographic information that would make for some really interesting articles and research.
jnwatson 10y ago
With any pretense of curation gone, I'm afraid Steam will go the way of the Apple App Store. It is a swamp of copycats and low quality half-efforts. Sure, there's quality in there, but it is awfully hard to find. I hope they make the entrance price high. Steam is already clogged with a lot of subpar stuff. Perhaps if a developer has to put down a chunk of change, he/she will think twice about publishing the 37th zombie-tower-defense erotic (but PG!) visual novel.
- MetallicCloud 10y ago
  I agree. To make a decent game an enormous mount of effort has to go into it. If you are a solo dev that has spent the last year pouring your heart into a game, I don't think $1000 to release it to a massive audience would stop it being published. If you employ a few people to create a higher quality game, compared to their wages, $1000 is nothing. If you are a manga artist trying to release the 100th iteration of a 'game' based on suggestive images, it may slow you down. Not suggesting that $1000 is the perfect price point, just that $100 is far too low.
  - fatratchet 10y ago
    They also called it a "recoupable application fee" so it sounds like they might reduce their 30% cut until the fee is earned back. So as long as a game sells even reasonably well they could get the fee back in full while low quality shovelware gets discouraged.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- jlg23 10y ago
  > I hope they make the entrance price high [..] Perhaps if a developer has to put down a chunk of change, he/she will think twice about publishing the 37th zombie-tower-defense erotic (but PG!) visual novel. Please not, the 37th is the best of all! Seriously, you are arguing that developers should be hindered from making software so that you don't have to make a selection from so many titles. Alternative solution for your problem: Replace the generic ratings with ratings calculated only from my friends' and my ratings (or with people matched via ratings of games I played and rated as well).
socialist_coder 10y ago
Wow, this is really exciting. I love the idea for a fairly high recoupable application fee in order to weed out the crap.
steaminghacker 10y ago
i think this is bad news. "We will ask new developers to complete a set of digital paperwork, personal or company verification, and tax documents similar to the process of applying for a bank account." It's all about control and stopping real indie development. "low as $100 to as high as $5,000." That's _per title_ ! and it will whatever they can get away with. $5000 to publish a game is not indie anymore.
- Latty 10y ago
  Valve aren't looking to make money here (well, obviously they are, but not directly from this like you are implying). $5k a game means literally nothing to them - the amount they make from sales makes that a joke. This is a matter of competing pressures. We want indies to be able to publish as easily as possible, but customers don't want to see lots of bad games. The easier you make it for indies, the easier you make it for people pushing out crap. This is clearly a response to people's complaints about the lowering quality of the average content in the Steam store, after their attempts at providing better game discovery methods and curation systems haven't solved the issue.
  - steaminghacker 10y ago
    point taken. but it need not be solved by increasing the barrier to entry. instead it's a ranking problem; make the poor titles sink to the bottom.

94 points by larsiusprime 10y ago

This sounds like they're re-launching Steam Greenlight, but without the pretense that only quality games will get through. Hopefully the fee will be high enough to stop asset-flips and shovelware, but low enough to allow smaller indie devs in.

gerbal 10y ago
The amount of shovelware and asset flips suggest the current fee of $100 is far too low. I'm dismayed there is scarcely any mention of the quality of works entering Steam. It's patently obvious that quality is the major issue now, not the usability of the platform or developer features.
- deelowe 10y ago
  Valve's corporate philosophy seems to go completely against any sort of regulation. This is reflected in their management/leadership structure (or famous lack there-of). It seems pretty clear to me that their plans are to rely on the market to moderate this stuff.
- lsaferite 10y ago
  My understanding is the current fee is per-developer, not per-game. The new plan is to charge per-game, which might help combat the issue to some degree.
coredog64 10y ago
This. My kids primarily buy games through Steam. More and more they wind up buying early access games at "finished" prices. My second concern is that Greenlight and shovelware will turn into a malware channel. Some of the anti-cheat utilities have deep access.
- DigitalJack 10y ago
  Yeah, the early access stuff is more miss than hit. But I've played one game, The Long Dark, that's been "early access" where I've got over 100 hours in it. That's a lot for me. Only the "sandbox" mode is available, but it's enough for me. More than enough. The game is therapeutic for me. It relieves my anxiety. This is a case where the developers had a vision (and still do), but early access to a mode that was initially just for testing allowed them to discover their test mode (aka "sandbox") was actually a fine game in and of itself. Early access, I think, allows developers with perfection obsession to go ahead and ship something. Instead of developing it forever, hoping to achieve their goal, and never shipping. It's true that there is a lot of garbage in early access, but I don't think it's a worse ratio than most indie games.
smacktoward 10y ago
I think (assuming I'm reading the announcement correctly) there's an extra wrinkle here, though. In the old model, the way to get your game onto Steam was to put it through Greenlight, where if it gathered enough support it could get promoted to the main storefront. You had to pay a fee to Valve to submit games to Greenlight, but it was a one-time fee ($100, IIRC), after which you could submit as many games to Greenlight as you wanted. In the new model, Greenlight goes away; you just submit your game directly, and after you pay a publication fee, the amount of which is still up in the air (anywhere from $100-$5,000), it goes into the storefront. But, and this is the wrinkle, now you pay the publication fee for each game you submit rather than just paying it once. So if you submit ten games for publication, you pay the publication fee ten times. So why the change? My guess is that Valve has decided that the essential premise of Greenlight -- that community curation would surface the gems within the vast pile of dross that gets submitted -- has been comprehensively broken by tactics like voting rings and giving out free keys in exchange for votes. So this represents them abandoning that idea and replacing it with a more blunt filter: a per-title publication fee. In the old model it cost the same to submit a thousand games as it did to submit one, so developers just threw lots of things against the wall and prayed one would stick. Now there will be a financial incentive for developers to put more wood behind fewer arrows, as the saying goes. The big question is whether this will improve the overall quality of games on Steam, or reduce it further (if that's even possible). I'm honestly not sure. A lot will depend on where precisely they set that publication fee -- too high will drive off cash-starved indie devs, too low will mean the crap merchants will just swallow it as the cost of doing business.
- fnordsensei 10y ago
  I wonder what they mean by "recoupable" fee, though. Will it count towards per-purchase fees?
  - WillPostForFood 10y ago
    I would assume recoupable will mean that you get 100% of sales revenue up until the point you've earned the publication fee back. Then Valve will start taking their % cut on sales thereafter.
benologist 10y ago
If the point is to find the great games Steam should make it free to publish, doesn't matter how many bad games there are except they are a factor in how many great games there are. Bad games don't make much money before it's discovered and Steam has a 14 day-ish refund policy. It might force them to automate it, like Google Play does for 2 hours after purchases.

leadingthenet 10y ago

This is a bit underwhelming in my opinion. Providing a more streamlined publishing experience is great, but it's not even close to the biggest problem Steam is facing. What about the interface (which is definitely showing its age) being an unresponsive mess, or the fact that support STILL has not improved in any major way? It reminds me of iTunes a bit, especially since this update has the potential to actually make Steam Greenlight even worse. Valve definitely does not seem to have a clear vision for the future.

zelon88 10y ago
Realistically they never had a vision for the future. It seems to be a combination of a bunch of visions. Nonetheless, I can't see much about Steam that took 360+ people 13 years to develop. It seems to me that there is a fear of commitment in an environment that tries to foster comfort for it's workforce. Maybe they need someone to point their finger at a goal and start demanding that progress be made to achieve that goal. Finish the HL2 story arc for crying-out-loud. Or just cancel it so your fans can move on.
- leadingthenet 10y ago
  Exactly. They're doing even worse in terms of vision for their game franchises, which is what got them where they are in the first place. This is a gaming company that hasn't really done anything major for gaming in nearly a decade. How is that even possible?
  - vernorvinge88 10y ago
    Oh please. Steam on Linux hasn't ushered in "Linux on every desktop" but it's done quite a bit for Linux gaming. Dota 2 came out 4 years ago and is huge. Greenlight was launched 5 years ago. That achieved nothing for indie game devs I guess. Anyone of those was a pretty major event in "gaming".
    - zelon88 10y ago
      I never claimed that Valve wasn't productive. I meant to highlight the seeming lack of discipline they sometimes display. They are a "Jack of all trades" but the master of none. They'll work on hardware or features for Steam that nobody asked for while (sometimes arrogantly) letting other projects (with actual demand) linger.

larrik 10y ago

Steam has come a long way in recent years, but it would be nice if some of that fancy store logic they've written could be used on library management. I've collected over 700 steam games, and looking through them became unwieldy after I hit 150 or so. Careful usage of categories can make up for some of it, but even that is clunky and not something I want to spend time on.

pmoriarty 10y ago
Does the typical Steam user have enough games to make this an issue for them?
- wink 10y ago
  I have 70 and I find the methods to organize them pretty much meh. I have like 10 categories, but as I'm only actively playing (i.e. have installed) like 5, the rest is still a collapsed bunch of categories...
- larrik 10y ago
  Buy a few Humble Bundles, where you don't specifically know what some of the games are, and it happens quick.

webwielder2 10y ago

Trading cards were added to make people happy?

vernorvinge88 10y ago
Gamers love schwag
Zikes 10y ago
The gamification of the games platform. People will buy games just for the trading cards. The more trading cards you have, the better your odds of completing a set and turning it in for XP and leveling up your Steam account, unlocking new profile and friends list features.
- ansible 10y ago
  Yeah, I never got that. For a while I would just sell the trading cards as soon as they were awarded. I think I got some cheap DLC for free from that money... it probably wasn't even worth my time to do that.
  - elcapitan 10y ago
    Same here. The notifications are the most annoying part to me. I really don't care about that stuff, and I don't need a message in my inbox about some new thingy.
  - pmoriarty 10y ago
    There's probably an age demographic involved here. It's probably not worth your time because you're an adult and earn a good income. But most kids under a certain age don't have a job, don't think of their time in monetary terms, and might find collecting and trading cards to be fun. Steam probably has a ton of such demographic information that would make for some really interesting articles and research.

jnwatson 10y ago

With any pretense of curation gone, I'm afraid Steam will go the way of the Apple App Store. It is a swamp of copycats and low quality half-efforts. Sure, there's quality in there, but it is awfully hard to find. I hope they make the entrance price high. Steam is already clogged with a lot of subpar stuff. Perhaps if a developer has to put down a chunk of change, he/she will think twice about publishing the 37th zombie-tower-defense erotic (but PG!) visual novel.

MetallicCloud 10y ago
I agree. To make a decent game an enormous mount of effort has to go into it. If you are a solo dev that has spent the last year pouring your heart into a game, I don't think $1000 to release it to a massive audience would stop it being published. If you employ a few people to create a higher quality game, compared to their wages, $1000 is nothing. If you are a manga artist trying to release the 100th iteration of a 'game' based on suggestive images, it may slow you down. Not suggesting that $1000 is the perfect price point, just that $100 is far too low.
- fatratchet 10y ago
  They also called it a "recoupable application fee" so it sounds like they might reduce their 30% cut until the fee is earned back. So as long as a game sells even reasonably well they could get the fee back in full while low quality shovelware gets discouraged.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
jlg23 10y ago
> I hope they make the entrance price high [..] Perhaps if a developer has to put down a chunk of change, he/she will think twice about publishing the 37th zombie-tower-defense erotic (but PG!) visual novel. Please not, the 37th is the best of all! Seriously, you are arguing that developers should be hindered from making software so that you don't have to make a selection from so many titles. Alternative solution for your problem: Replace the generic ratings with ratings calculated only from my friends' and my ratings (or with people matched via ratings of games I played and rated as well).

socialist_coder 10y ago

Wow, this is really exciting. I love the idea for a fairly high recoupable application fee in order to weed out the crap.

steaminghacker 10y ago

i think this is bad news. "We will ask new developers to complete a set of digital paperwork, personal or company verification, and tax documents similar to the process of applying for a bank account." It's all about control and stopping real indie development. "low as $100 to as high as $5,000." That's _per title_ ! and it will whatever they can get away with. $5000 to publish a game is not indie anymore.

Latty 10y ago
Valve aren't looking to make money here (well, obviously they are, but not directly from this like you are implying). $5k a game means literally nothing to them - the amount they make from sales makes that a joke. This is a matter of competing pressures. We want indies to be able to publish as easily as possible, but customers don't want to see lots of bad games. The easier you make it for indies, the easier you make it for people pushing out crap. This is clearly a response to people's complaints about the lowering quality of the average content in the Steam store, after their attempts at providing better game discovery methods and curation systems haven't solved the issue.
- steaminghacker 10y ago
  point taken. but it need not be solved by increasing the barrier to entry. instead it's a ranking problem; make the poor titles sink to the bottom.