Steam Greenlight is going away

I like the idea of Steam Direct but it all depends on the fee. The fee have to be big enough to discourage people to post small cash grabs, asset flips, tutorial games and flappy bird clones etc and not too high to make it impossible for small serious indies to enter.

But if they fee is below $500 we're all doomed and Steam will become worse than google play in a week Just imagine that everything that has been posted on Greenlight suddenly gets on the store if they only pay a small fee. OMG what a nightmare. In this case keeping Greenlight is a much better solution.

So for example, If the fee is $1000+ it would make developers think twice before they publish a game on Steam as there is now actually a risk involved. But the fee is recoupable which means that if the game sells you'll get the fee back and in the end it wasn't a cost just a deposition. So the only ones who will actually pay the fee as a cost are those who post a game that doesn't sell. And that is a risk that comes with all businesses so nothing new about that.

However there's still a problem and that is that most games on Steam sells for a lot more than $1000 so many developers will keep publish trash as they know that it will generate revenue. So I hope there will also be some kind of quality control from valves side to stop these developers as well.

So this is far from a perfect solution but if the fee is high enough then it will be a good start and will drastically decrease the flood of games that comes through greenlight. So I'm glad to finally see Valve doing something about it and I hope they will add to it and improve it even more.

This is why I always liked the idea of publishing to the web: it costs nothing, you get all the revenue, and there is no gatekeeper who can deny you access if they don't like what you're doing for some reason.

Of course the downside is less visibility (Steam provides lots of gamer eyeballs) and payments are more difficult (they handle transactions for you). I often think about what could be done to try and make the web a better publishing platform for Steam-like games. I think there's a few companies out there thinking about it too, like Mozilla who are doing a lot to promote 3D WebAssembly/WebGL games.

Almost sounds like opportunity for Construct made games...

Steam has gotten too big for their britches and is taking advantage of game designers.

Time for a new instant game portal with a small monthly fee for any game designer to post their games which allow 3rd party advertising. You host the games on your own page and can update them and maintain a blog to attract your viewers.

Sort of like Ichio but with an instant gaming system. Looks like GameJolt is also going that direction.

I foresee Steam becoming irrelevant in the next few years and I wouldn't tie myself to them now with their fake system of green lighting that is just a way to clip new designers that submit games.

I saw this I think about a week or so back, and it really made me much more hopeful. http://www.xbox.com/en-US/developers/id It's pretty cool that others are stepping up and offering alternatives.