Valve to crowdsource distribution choices with Steam Greenlight | Hacker News Reader

Valve to crowdsource distribution choices with Steam Greenlight

arstechnica.com

40 pointsiProject15 comments

I'm kind of surprised they haven't tried a sort of kickstarter model.

E.g. People commit to buying your title, and when you hit the threshold they get billed (and get the game), and the game instantly gets approved to into main Steam. The required minimum could be based on revenue rather than sales , so that a $1 game requires a lot more potential buyers than a $40 game.

Steam would need to ensure each game is completed. It would tarnish the brand if some games were not finished. Kickstarter does not suffer from this problem because everyone goes into it expecting that the game may not get off the ground.

It would not be for pre-funding. A completed game (or at least nearly finished beta) would need to be submitted through some sort of basic approval process - scan the installer for viruse, make sure it actually loads, etc.

This is great! hopefully it can deliver on the promise that XBox Live Indie Games never quite delivered on ... which is to say giving indies a channel to the same marketplace, on the same terms, as everyone else. The problem with XBLIG was always that the indie games were always in a different menu and never quite given the same opportunities as other titles (ie. XBLA had achievements, etc.).

It also acts as Steam's XBLIG equivalent for games that haven't (yet) been approved for Steam proper, which I don't think is a bad thing.

As long as they allow developers to link to their own downloads and homepages, this is going to be a huge opportunity for smaller indies to market themselves, with a Steam brand name and a simple voting mechanism. As a developer of niche games, I'm pretty excited about it.

To be fair I've played a lot of indie games on xbox live and a lot of them feel like their based off of a bad programming tutorial. It's fun to play them and go WTF why, definitely not something they should promote to a larger audience. It looks like Valve is solving the problem by having their customers go through the indie game bin and pull out the ones that are actually good.

You make is sound like all Xbox Live Indie Games are bad. The problem with that service is that which is mentioned above, not enough recognition as "official" apps for the Xbox 360. I'm convinced that if developers where given more responsibility then they would act upon that higher responsibility accordingly. As it is now developers really don't have much of an incentive to make decent games for the platform. But Valve's way of doing this seems to be a good one, let the customer's decide what gets on Steam, you really can't go wrong with that strategy.

Well said. Also, the very fact that the service allowed lower quality games is actually a good thing ... many game developers made well received titles on XNA and have moved on to bigger and better things (see Ska Studios, and Zeboyd Games for two examples).

Very true, in a way Xbox Live Indie Games is a lot like the Android Market Place. You have a wide variety of apps that are really very good but you also have a lot of complete crap. If Microsoft would ever actually follow through with it's experiments then it could really become a true power house again, it seems that Microsoft tends to innovate but then burn out on their innovations (keep in mind that Indie Games launched in 2008, right around the same time that the Android Market Place was really blowing up). I just wish Microsoft would give Indie Games the attention it desperately needs.

And then some of them at that "bad programming tutorial" level somehow end up really entertaining :D

e.g.: I made a game with zombies in it (yes, this is a shameless plug, nope I didn't write it, nope I don't know who did; but... for a dollar, it's some of the most fun I've had on xbox and it is a VERY rudamentary concept)

Nice. This is a great way to deal with Sturgeon's Law.

Link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeons_Law

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Valve doesn't have the sales data of games that are not on the service though.

I just fail to see the big deal behind this. Really, isn't the games market enough to crowdsource distribution choices? This is only needed because Steam is a closed platform, which people seem to forget.

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