dstarr3 :
That's not the problem at all. The problem is you can pay people to upvote your game on Greenlight and get your garbage asset flip on Steam with almost no delay.
The problem isn't that it's hard to find a diamond in the rough. The problem is that they let their "rough" get completely out of control. You want to fix the real problem, Valve, close the floodgates and do some moderation and curation for a change. There's already a $100 barrier to entry on Greenlight and that's not stopping anyone.
I agree. And Valve only exacerbated the problem with their trading card system, which made it easier than ever for shady "developers" to in effect pay people to greenlight their shovelware. They just need to offer free Steam keys to those who vote for their game, or who get the game as part of a cheap Greenlight bundle, and promise trading cards, so the voters will in turn be able to idle the game for a couple hours, then trade or sell away the cards in the Steam market. Once the game is on Steam, the "developer" can keep putting it into third-rate bundles where they might only make a few hundred dollars or so, but enough to more than pay for the minimal costs involved with repackaging some asset pack or unfinished student project and getting it on Steam. This junk software, in turn, floods the Steam store, making it harder to sift through and find actual decent games. There are plenty of really good games on Steam that just don't get the exposure they should, because they get lost in a sea of barely-playable cash-grabs.
dstarr3 :
What I'm HOPING is that the pay to entry is based on how legitimate their project looks. If it looks like you're actually hand-crafting a decent attempt at a game, awesome, $100 and you're in just like today. But if you're working on a zero-effort asset flip, that'll be $5,000, please.
That could potentially work, but it would require Valve to hire people to play each game, and to do a bit of research to make sure it's not just an asset flip, and that the developer actually has the capability of turning it into a finished product if it isn't one already. They would need multiple people to play it too, to avoid bias from a single tester. Is that something they could even do for $100? The original idea behind Greenlight was that that Valve would look over the top-rated submissions to determine which to let on Steam, but that apparently got out of hand and soon gave way to them allowing almost anything through with minimal interference.
I suspect they'll probably decide on some fixed price, and that it will be considerably more than the existing Greenlight submission fee. And while that could help cull a lot of the asset flips and other bottom-tier shovelware, it could easily deter many legitimate new "indie" developers as well. As I mentioned above, it's easy for good games from small developers that lack advertising budgets to get overlooked on Steam. If a small developer isn't sure that their game won't get overlooked, and is already weary of potentially losing money on it, then putting themselves thousands of dollars more in the hole isn't going to help. A lot of those games might simply never get made. If Steam had done this a few years ago, before Greenlight got out of hand, when getting a game on Steam actually meant something, it could have been okay. At this point though, just getting a game on Steam does not necessarily mean it will be profitable, and the existing mountain of shovelware that's built up over the last few years isn't going anywhere. Also, there's the question of what "verification of the developer or studio and tax documents" involves. It makes it sound like a small developer without existing games on Steam might have a harder time getting their foot in the door.
Facebook
Twitter
Instagram