'We knew that we wanted it to be as small as possible to ensure it wasn't a barrier to beginning game developers, while also not being so small as to invite easy abuse by people looking to exploit our systems'
Couldn't you have the price vary depending on the size of the company so that big companies pay more and small indie developers pay less?
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The publication fee isn't even steam's main source of income. So, why care at all? You know that "big companies" won't even blink an eye when paying those $100-$5000, while indie developers may suffer from it. I, for one, think that a low fee is a good idea.
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Yup, seems fair. Also glad to learn it's actually refunded after X sales, it makes sense.
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The fee is no form of quality control whatsoever, so it doesn't matter as long as they carefully look over what games get approved and put on the store.
It's a good decision that they made it per game, though, so no one will try to flood the market and slow down the reviewing system with cheap and undeveloped games.
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If they can and will filter out the card-misuse though bot systems... it could work. Same as previous GL fee, but instead of lifelong, it's / game, I think that's not a bad decision, as it doesn't hinder quality.
I personally expected something in the 200-500$ range
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yeah russian will keep spaming useless games with cards.
per game with 15 cards --> 8 drops
each key will bring them 8 cent. so basically they just need to giveaway 1250 keys and hope that people sell the cards on the market and they have the money back.
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Do they really?
I recall TotalBiscuit saying the opposite repeatedly, that games even without executables have made it onto the service.
As does the mass of "not working" launch-day reviews we usually see (clearly, they can just be missing some issues).
Edit for clarity
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the mass of "not working" launch-day reviews
Some games work perfectly fine on 90% of configurations and have problems or refuse to work on a number of specific machines for reasons that are hard to know upfront. Sometimes number of computers with problems can be higher, that doesn't mean game was not tested and working before release.
TotalBiscuit saying the opposite repeatedly
While I have great appreciation for his work, he doesn't know everything, and if you read Valve's "discovery 2.0, steam direct and curators 2.0" blog posts, you'll see they clearly said they test every game before release to make sure it's working, virus free, have the features that are advertised by the devs (like controller support) and so on.
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Some games work perfectly fine on 90% of configurations.
I don't disagree; that's the caveat I stated exactly. Granted, it's anecdotic, and people with issues are more likely to be vocal, but it could be a symptom of a lack of curation, that's why I mentioned it.
On the TB front. That's obvious as well, but I'd have expected that his research on what he called "the minimum curation Steam should be doing" to be on point. Add to that that Steam has a history of looking to work/intercede less and automate more, so I wouldn't be surprised if there wasn't someone validating that games can run. I may be remembering old videos, so you can be right on that.
If we had heard of a game that had been blocked due to it being unplayable then I would have no doubts on the matter (I concede that it seems unlikely due to corporate privacy policies).
I'm just skeptical on how exhaustive the checks are; but, point taken.
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If we had heard of a game that had been blocked due to it being unplayable
But, if they would block a game (and let's say, give developer a chance to fix the issue before it's allowed to release), how could you (or me, or TB by that matter) hear about it? No one would know.
As you said yourself, you only hear from more vocal members of community - those that have problems with otherwise working and released games.
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On that topic:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8QU16Ty0QJQ
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Honestly, he sounds like jackass. He's attacking Valve for Direct, and Direct starts on June 13th. This game has nothing with Direct and whatever he's implying. I'm not going to go into it any further into the topic, but this looks like a case of wrong configuration. But if you're a famous "journalist" you should at least check your facts before you go into rage mode.
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What you said also has nothing to do with Direct:
They already check if the game is working and so on
Regarding the video, you misunderstood what he was saying. You clearly missed the point he was making on their competence not on what Direct is doing as if it was already running.
On the example:
A missing executable and/or other files is not a configuration issue.
From the reviews:
Destruction 48 launched with missing gamefiles resulting in an unplayable product. At the time of writing this review, this game could NOT be launched at all.
Jim is a bit of dick, but this and other broken games wouldn't have made it onto the service if Steam was really doing the QA you said they were doing.
Nevermind if you don't care, I just thought you might want more information, but if you are believing that because you have some inside information I'm lacking I'd love to have that.
Have a nice day.
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I didn't care until that Badm "struggling dev" asshole showed up after scamming $500 from few thousand people.
Or other key revokers and shit. I'm terminally fed up with idiots posing as "devs" only to annoy & scam the indie supporting userbase.
Some thinning out is direly needed.
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I don't agree with this because it is an investment to publish your game. If developers from a country with a weaker economy has to pay less, then it wouldn't be fair to ask more money for the same game in a country with a stronger economy.
Personally I think the whole regional pricing is stupid. Let's say you have 1 indie developer from western Europe and 1 from Russia. They both make a game with the exact same quality.
The person from Europe sells his game cheaper in Russia which effectively decreases his income per game even though he lives in Europe and everything is more expensive.
The person from Russia sells his game more expensive in Europe which effectively increases his income per game while he needs less money to live.
Sure, I get why developers do it. Otherwise they will sell less games in poorer regions, so they get less money. But that doesn't make it fair.
So basically, with the same quality game. Both developers pay and earn the same amount of money on paper. But because of the economy differences (you can do a lot more with 100 euros in Russia than in western Europe). The Russian can rent a house, the European can rent a garage.
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It's not a matter of increasing a price, it's a matter of lowering a region's price so that it stops being prohibitively expensive when accounting for the converted value of that region's median salary.
It's an attempt to solve access issues and break into markets where taking no economic considerations has forced people to piracy.
You shouldn't make less money by having more people become able to purchase your product (ceteris paribus), you should make more.
The same is true for the devs, if one has to (for the sake of argument) skip a meal while another has to sell a car to pay for the fee, guess which developer wouldn't be able to list their game.
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It's just a matter of from what perspective you view it. Personally I believe a developer should be compensated fairly to their regions standards.
It's the same as someone in western Europe would work for Russian minimum wadge. He wouldn't even be able to rent a room, let alone eat... Basically he would be dead within a few weeks lol.
I get where you are coming from. But a developer from a "rich" country makes less money from selling games cheaper in a "poor" country. And a developer from a "poor" country benefits greatly from selling games in a "rich" country.
But shit happens. It has happened long before steam too There is a reason many big companies have big factories in third world countries. The people who actually do the labor earn 1 euro a day or whatever. While they sell the shoes (for example) for 100 euros a pair in a first world country. The big companies are just accounting for the converted value of that region's median salary.
It's the way the world works. But that doesn't mean I have to be okay with it :)
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It's the same as someone (...)
That's exactly the point. Where you live and hence your salary dictates what you can afford to do, i.e. what your purchasing power is.
But a developer from a "rich" country (...)
That's irrelevant. The issue is the barrier to entry not the difference in purchasing power resulting from where that person decides to take his money. By that logic people who move somewhere should have their assets liquidated and only get a fraction back whenever they move somewhere new.
By what you are suggesting, who should keep the profits you are taking away from developers because, you believe that they should be paid a lesser cut since they live in a "cheap" country? That money doesn't vanish on its own.
big companies have big factories in third world countries. (...)
That's completely unrelated to what this is, the only way you'd link it would be by noting that the poor salaries those people earn require lower prices otherwise nothing could be sold there.
Your need to go on tangents makes me think you don't understand what is being discussed.
Yes, there isn't a universal salary across the world, so we should ignore that and act like it doesn't happen, instead of accounting for it, resulting in more people having access to, in this casem Steam games and their development?
Regional pricing allows for more people to access a good or service, hence getting the company more profit, they would otherwise miss out on, and resolves the access issue that pushes those people to seeking replacements or abstaining, depending on the type of good.
I believe that the only counter point that can be argued, though wrongly in my opinion, is that being someone who can afford the higher price you are essentially subsidizing the cheaper regions, due to the greater portion of profits coming from the more wealthy regions. But that ends up in a question of how the business strategy/profit margins of the company were designed, so that if by selling, in a particular region, at close to cost the margins in a different region had to be increased to make up for it.
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I would be here for this. I'd been thinking about developing some games, you know, learning and stuff. But the fee discouraged me. That's quite a huge amount and I literally cannot afford it at the moment. And with my games possibly/most likely flopping, it's basically just one big, bad investment.
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Guess I need to start building that Steam game I always wanted to develop...
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In the Steam announcement of this, Valve said that they were thinking more like in the 500$ range.
So the easiest way for Valve is bending like long grass in the wind while they did have the opportunity to ask for a decent amount and start fresh.
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I really miss that feature because I and a lot of others used this a lot. ;_;
Valve: "negligible collateral damage in the combat against the grey markets"
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Valve was created so we could play games in first place, not a place where all of sunden everyone is a game trader/seller.
if you're into trading as a hobby, my dear steam is made for gaming ;)
you can still trade as well, but now you're going to deal with 3rd party websites
you can argue that you cant gift a certain game to your friend that it is on sale, well my dear you can
all you gotta do is buy a steam gift card and give him the pin so he can grab that amazing deal
and Im pretty sure you can do it online.
And yes I do trade from time to time, I rarely do games, but ingame items my dear, I usually trade them for steam gifts cards
or sell them into steam market and I made few transactions with real money envolved as well and so far so good.
I still dont get why everyone is so blind when it comes to that, first of all steam just opened the doors to everyone
now every 3rd party website can grab some $$$.
But maybe I get it because Im not that "kind" of person that has 8k games into my account
Maybe for you guys theres a convenience factor but still > not the end of the "steam world experience"
all you guys need is to adapt to those changes :P
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I'm for more than a year completely retired from trading but I bought and stored steam gifts directly in my inventory so I could make giveaways here (3.5K+ to date and many were Steam gifts) on SG whenever I wanted as I had a lot of gifts in my Steam inventory.
And having 5 games or 7K+ games in ones inventory is a non issue because in both cases you can't buy and store to the inventory anymore.
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Maybe too low, and it should be a variable fee as niceguyjon said.
For example, an Apple developer have to pay 99 USD yearly only to be able to publish a simple Safari extension in their platform.
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What about card drops? They still drop? How do we know if a game drops or not? Will this only be aplicable to newly released games? Wheeeen?
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I know that, but valve said that games won't be droping trading cards anymore until they meet a certain threshold of something metrics
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They already fucked over the card drops. From http://steamcommunity.com/games/593110/announcements/detail/1954971077935370845 :
"Instead of starting to drop Trading Cards the moment they arrive on Steam, we're going to move to a system where games don't start to drop cards until the game has reached a confidence metric that makes it clear it's actually being bought and played by genuine users. "
Where it's unclear how the new system works. I mean, I don't know how we can end p with a situation where cards aren't dropping for Vanquish, where Steamspy shows pretty decent stats (for a HD remaster of an old game): https://steamspy.com/app/460810 , there's a large nuber of reviews already etc.
Where this: http://store.steampowered.com/app/614950/Shootout_on_Cash_Island/ typical $1 game already has card drops enabled 1 day after release. (Steamspy doens't have stats on this one yet.)
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Do you know if they implemented the trading cards for Vanquish already? Maybe that's the issue. It's mentioned on the store but not implemented yet. I think that is the real issue, not Steam change to card drops.
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Well if they're not implemented yet, that'd explain it. But then why allow advertising with them on the store front ?
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Not the first time something like this has happened. Shadowrun Hong Kong advertised itself as having trading cards at release... and they never added trading cards (but they've removed the thing that says that the game has it). It seems like its up to the devs/publishers to set these things, and there's nothing on the side of Steam that actually checks to make sure that its true.
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That's 10$ more than the greenlight fee, so nothing will change and we can't even vote on games anymore. Great change!
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no one buys? as soon as you see a game....costs 10-50cent
open your friend activity page .... and start counting let's roughly say 400 people just have to buy it
and you have your $ 100 back as a trash developer and that without the whole cardsales
And as we have learned ....add stupid super easy and many many achievements ..and you get positive feedback = carddrops
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Unfortunately there's a demographic for shit games on Steam, especially considering there are a lot of those that buy new games when they come out, so making those 100$ back isn't that hard.
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hopefully lack of cards changes that even a bit.
Unless they move to achievements and steam items like this or this
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I knew about the achievements, but items are new to me! At least you gotta give those devs some credit that they're always finding new ways to cheat the system.
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What if a developer giveaway 10.000 keys. Will many of those people give a Good review, So that they can activate their card drops.
Edit: only direct buyers from steam reviews count.
What if a developer add many easy achievements for a bad/fake game. HOW many people will get those achievement to activate their card drops.
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I was gonna add what you EDIT : the review made bu purchasers and not key activations.
Even if there are easy achiev, at least the dev will have to produce something. Too many games for cards are just idled without being launched, why bother making something running correctly ?
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What if I buy the game from another site like humble bundle because it's cheaper and player the game for 20 hours?
My review just randomly doesn't count?
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That's going to be a lot of reviews for a lot of games that aren't counted towards the score then.
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It is and it isn't. If you buy on the store, your voice matters to other customers of that store. If you buy a key on GMG, leave a review there and it will matter to buyers there. If you buy on gamersgate, leave a review there... I can understand their logic even if it makes my own game have less reviews.
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They have done it because if a developer giveaway free keys, many people could give good reviews even if the game is terrible.
On the other hand even direct steambuyers can only give good reviews to activate their card drops. Their new system isnt perfect
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Valve has stated that they'll look at a number of different metrics to determine if a game is going to be allowed to have cards or not, and they've been careful with not revealing what those metrics are (which is the right thing to do, the less we know about the metrics, the harder the system will be to game).
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The discover queue does not seem to care what you've marked as not interested, other than it won't show that particular game again. They really should improve that. What they could simply do is give you two different choices, "not interest in this game" (works like the button does now) and "not interested in games like this" (which will change what other games it will recommend).
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Not quite. The $100 is more of a deposit that you'll get back with sales. Valve will basically not get a cut of any sales up until the first $100 that they would have got, which instead goes to pay back your deposit fee. Or that was at least how Valve said that it would work when they first explained the new steam direct system.
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Steam Direct fee is...
The most acurate statement i found for myself: is not bothering me at all
https://media.giphy.com/media/l3vRi0EtWE9RrFpDy/giphy.gif
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gabe: "we can make an extra $100 per title if we do away with the greenlight system. but we gotta make them think they came up with the idea, or else it won't work."
scott: "how do we go about doing that?"
gabe: "we pitch this awesome idea about steam direct and how it will get rid of all the trash by making developers pay larger fees"
scott: "isn't that the opposite of what we want done?"
gabe: "sure is, that's why it's brilliant. all we gotta do is say it was their idea to make it cheaper!"
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I expected it to be a bit higher. But luckily Valve is also making another change, where cards won't drop until they're sure that what they have is a game, and not just a card farming tool.So that should discourage some of the worst offenders at least.
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I was just thinking about that. If cards won't drop unless they can make enough people to actually play the game, then it should be a lot more difficult to game the system as recruiting farmers is a lot easier than asking people to spend 1-3 hours actually sitting in fornt of the game and playing it.
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Some dev mentioned it in some conversation. I have no idea what thread it was, if it was even here and not on Steam itself.
As I said, if the engine lets. Some do not, even today.
You can unlock achievements using SAM, yes. But it is not that difficult to check if achievements are unlocked in a randomised way for people or at really similar intervals. The system can be cheated, true, but that would need writing a dedicated script for every single game individually, and convincing people to run some unknown file on their PCs. (Granted, there are enough dumb and/or naive people on Steam to do that, considering the vast amounts of gullable idiots who lost their account on clicking random links posted by total strangers.) Or organising masses to unlock achievements at certain intervals manually, because let's face it, if people would unlock all achievements in the same second, Steam could easily detect it. Assuming they did not fire that one intern who knows how to code.
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it is not that difficult to check if achievements are unlocked in a randomised way for people or at really similar intervals
That would need writing a dedicated script for every single game individually.
Also if you play offline achievements are unlocked at the same time next time you open the game in online mode.
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Or they don't unlock at all Glares at Guacamelee Gold But yeah, if they do unlock, its a wave unlock
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This price is not the issue. I think a 100 bucks for indie devs is more than enough. Triple A companies should be paying more, if anyone has to. But Steam needs a proper quality control. An agent perhaps for each game released that checks whether the game can be allowed in the store or not.
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So you just need to bribe a few curators rather than a couple thousand users?
(Mind you, the whole damn curator system is a joke and about as useful as the worst troll-reviews. Actually, troll-reviews are generally better. I rather would have curators be removed ENTIRELY than giving them more power for whatever god-awful reason anyone thinks that's a good idea)
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I think $100 will prove to be too low to keep the asset flipping, card farming achievement sellers out.
But it's less risky to start low and then bump up the price until you get deisred result, than to start high and scare off too many legit devs I guess.
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And to the surprise of no one, Valve changes absolutely nothing!
How is $100 per game but direct access to the store better than $100 for account for a chance of getting to the store? We already get peeps burning $100 to upload jokes/copyright shit on greenlight, so I doubt this will change anything -.-. At least Greenlight offer a modicum (even if possibly imagined) of curation, but now with direct we are hoping that it is no longer financially feasible to sell shit games on Steam when the initial cost is $100 US? Are they not aware that games are literally being sold for pennies within the first month of launch already?
$100 may inhibit those that start from nothing, but this will not stop the ball from rolling at the current state. A $100 is nothing and once peeps figure out how to game Steam's new card system, it will get even worse. If they truly wanted to fix the system, they should at least know how it works.
W/e, at least I get pointless +1s.
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The main difference is that it's going to be $100 per game, not per account.
And the curation of Greenlight is purely imaginary, simply because Valve did exactly jack shit to stop vote boosting groups.
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Some people already found out how to game the new card system... The new system actually made it easier to game it because it removed a part of the manual approval process for the cards which got placed by an algorithm that can be fooled in a rather simple manner and Steam Direct would make it even easier to release games for that purpose... I've reported it to Steam, but I doubt it's getting fixed any time soon, cuz the Valve time clock says it's coffee break time for the next year or two now that they "fixed" so much. :P
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$100 per game
Is it too low in your opinion?
https://steamcommunity.com/games/593110/announcements/detail/1265921510652460726
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