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SteamGreenlight lockdown?!

A topic by Tobop created Feb 13, 2017 Views: 579 Replies: 3
Viewing posts 1 to 5

Sorry if this has been posted before, but is this true? If not, ignore this.
http://www.theverge.com/2017/2/10/14578780/valve-s...

It basically says, there's a bottle-kneck @ steam because of - basically - vote fraud, & I have proof of this.
But it's not worth ranting about the developers. They saw a loophole, and exploited it.

Before I say anything else, I'd like to say that itch.io is better than steam, imo. Crazy hu? Well, no.

So steam is going to apparently change the rules, and just have it so that it will cost money to upload a new game. But that can range from $100 - $5000?! Seems a bit daft. Not every dev team is the same.

(2 edits) (+1)

Steam officially announced it. They will shut Greenlight down in a few weeks and put something new called Steam Direct. From my point of view exploiting the new system will be much easier than Greenlight. I already have a plan. Personally I'm expecting a submission fee around $1000. ithc will be a better platform for the indies but they must develop alternative payment methods also. For example Paypal left Turkey due to local banking law and Turkish devs can't get payment from itch at the moment. I am waiting for Desura's rebirth actually. Perhaps they pay with bank transfer or Bitcoin.

Admin(+2)

It's definitely an interesting change. Charging a high fee is pretty crazy and will likely frustrate many smaller devs enough focus more of their energy on itch.io (maybe they'll see it as a way to raise the first 5k). We've seen a lot of support on Twitter & reddit in favor of itch.io since the announcement. Alternatively, since they're making the only barrier to entry a payment then it makes me wonder if many larger and more financially motivated developers will end up skipping itch.io entirely. But with Steam getting more and more games, we may see more people posting here regardless to get access to more exposure through a different audience. itch.io also provides refinery, which is something Steam isn't doing. At the end of the day I want itch.io to be defined by what is unique about it, and not what functionality it provides that is available elsewhere. So although this update to steam may change the game dev ecosystem, I'm definitely not worried about the future of itch.io

Since there's only speculation about the price though, we'll have to wait and see what happens.

Hi, first time poster here! I read about Steam changing to this model for indie games. I can understand them wanting to get away from the greenlight system, but they seem to be relying soley on the fee per game to discourage time wasters / quickly slapped together asset store games. Unfortunately, it'll also probably put off a lot of the tiny one-person developers who may never sell enough to get that money back.