Didnt Steam Direct come into affect this year? And new games shouldnt give trading cards so these fake games should be decreased by next year when they realize they dont make any money of cards?
And I guess many of these games were wating to be greenlit?
Comment has been collapsed.
u don't need cards to make profitz, u can use unlimit key generation system and sell keys to sites like steamground.
After selling 10000-30000 keys, u can make next "game"
$100 its too small fee, should be $500 or even $1000
Comment has been collapsed.
They said that they'll limit the key generation. :P
Comment has been collapsed.
You sure that's the limit? Still, steam did that in order to limit the sales outside steam, not in order to fight crappy games. They just want the maximum profit, not the happiness of their customers. :P
Comment has been collapsed.
my bad, not 300k 😱
500k 😎
from this thread
Comment has been collapsed.
This was an example, not an actual limit. The limit varies depending on how much games you sell on Steam.
Comment has been collapsed.
Can you show me link with this info?
Devs released trash games on steam and sell 20-30k keys to different stores without any sales on steam. So we will see more trash soon, 20000 games in steam store in the end of 2017, and probably 30-40k in 2018.
Comment has been collapsed.
Selling 20-30k is not nearly as much as 300-500k. Valve probably still tolerates such "small" amounts of keys, but in my opinion it is only a matter of time before they start lowering that number, too.
About the source of my info, it's actually the very picture you linked. As Sean J says: "So at some point we start deciding that the value you're bringing to Steam isn't worth the cost to us." That means that if you sell more games on Steam, they will allow you to generate more keys since you're actually still bringing them money. If you sell almost nothing on Steam, they're not gonna grant you, as mentioned in the example, 500k keys. The 500k figure is, as Sean wrote, an example, meaning that they probably check all requests for unusually large batches of keys and decide manually if they're gonna approve the request or not. If I had to guess (and this is really just my guess), the limit is probably closer to 100k than to 500k. But again, that depends on how well the game is selling.
I hope I explained my thoughts well :)
Comment has been collapsed.
I see your point. But I think the main income was from card profits. They gave away thousands of copies in massgiveaways.
Even if they sell it on sites like steamground. I still think their profit will decrease because who buys a fake shitty game that doesnt have cards. :)
Im not saying fake games will disappear completely, but I think its to early to call steam direct a failure until we see if there is any difference by next year.
Comment has been collapsed.
who buys a fake shitty game that doesnt have cards
Lets check one game in one store
http://lastkey.ru/goods/info/50544-achievement-hunter-begins
Was 10 000 keys, now - 1700 left. So 8300 sold only in this store 😱
Lets check this developer
http://store.steampowered.com/search/?publisher=putilin_industries
16 (!) same games without cards released in two months
Comment has been collapsed.
They get the $ from sales and more from card fees, the $100 are easily recouped, and they are bound to get to the card threshold eventually since people keep buying this stuff.
*BTW: Affect = (verb), Effect (the result)
Comment has been collapsed.
I thought games only got cards on steam if they get sold x times on steam? Not if they are sold on 3d party sites.
Comment has been collapsed.
I don't think the exact mechanism is clear, but that's our understanding of it.
Yet, even restricted to steam purchases it's just a matter of time. They've moved to selling 1000+ achievements and achievement profile flair among other things.
At $1 a piece, getting to the threshold isn't too difficult.
Comment has been collapsed.
Nothing, if we talk about quality, for now steam is beetween itch.io and deadzura. I think in 2018 steam will be like android playmarket 😁
Comment has been collapsed.
Steam Direct is supposed to make it easier, not harder, to get on Steam. According to that graph it's working as expected.
What's supposed to help combat the flood of shovelware are the changes to card drops and the recently rumored key generation limits; I think it's too early to see the effect of those changes.
Comment has been collapsed.
+1
Also they approved tons of stuff that was submitted when greenlight was a thing.
If it does work, we'll see some result next year
Comment has been collapsed.
steam direct, all money directly to gabe's wallet. 👌
Comment has been collapsed.
so you are advocating for higher price on all games on steam?
Comment has been collapsed.
You cant have cheap games with that fee to publish... I bet you know that too
Not all good games have good sales!!
Comment has been collapsed.
As far as I know (might be wrong) you get the money back once you sell 1000 dollars worth of copies, so you wouldn't actually lose money.
Comment has been collapsed.
so steam gets profit no matter what?
If they dont show your game anywhere(profit)
If you sell 1k (profit)
remember that kind of scheme will only compound the publishing problems for non-companies
And yes i think nobodies can still make great games
Comment has been collapsed.
How do you measure if it was a failure or not?
We don't know the real goal behind it.
As far as we know it's giving Steam an excuse to tighten restrictions on key generation while still getting to collect a 50% cut from trading card sales rather than just the 20-30% they get when those funds are spent on games.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Comment has been collapsed.
It's September already, so it's not like the YTD has been a super-short period. It will probably end up about where it would have if Greenlight were still the current method to get on Steam.
We'll likely start seeing a decrease in added games pretty soon as Steam starts choking out card sales and third-party keys. This won't stop people who are overconfident in their work's value (like me!), but it should cut out a bunch of bad actors.
Comment has been collapsed.
Valve never said they were going to step in and stop the asset-flipped shovelware. They said they were going to make it less profitable and hope it dies off by itself. So, higher and more barriers before you can make profitz from cardz.
Where if the game fails as intended: Valve makes more money out of it at the expense of the developer. If that scares the Dev away, they can write it off as a PR investment and claim their hands-off approach of shit sorting itself out works. If the dev stays anyway, well, a fool and his money are soon parted.
And if the game succeeds unintentionally, Valve doesn't lose as they still get their 30% cut of everything.
Because that's the end goal, Valve making as much cash as possible with the least amount of effort. You know, like the average business.
They also said they were doing away with Greenlight in large part because of how easy it was to rig votes, and how people were making a business out of that. Well, no more voting mechanism means it can't be rigged, so mission accomplished there I guess.
They also said they would fix the discovery queues etc. so the main store page wouldn't show the drek if you flag enough of it as "not interested". Personal experience shows me that seems to be working now, a few months after I gave up on flagging stuff, so that's something. (Not enough to actively start using Steam's storefront again though).
Comment has been collapsed.
Steamgifts is actually one of the places contributing to the problem.
There's a culture here of "+1" for the games library, getting crap games just to have them, and of course to idle for cards. This is the kind of mindset that makes shovelware profitable - you might be getting the game for free by winning it but somewhere down the line money gets to the developer because a member here chose to enter a giveaway for a game they really really didn't want to play. Lots of keys here are bought through bundle sites that include games in their bundles that probably shouldn't have been exposed to the public, or even from grey market resellers, and lots of members here contribute any way they can to the making of more of these games so they can watch their steam library grow, or farm cards on multiple accounts.
If you really truly are against this kind of games then you need to consider what changes could be made to this site to discourage such users, and next time you consider entering a giveaway consider whether it's a game you actually want to play.
Comment has been collapsed.
Speaking of failure of Direct, here is a game that was NOT greenlit originally, but now Direct gladly let it in:
http://store.steampowered.com/app/726760/Pie_Door_Run/
Comment has been collapsed.
https://twitter.com/ZhugeEX/status/906229491453874179
So Valve... What's next?
Comment has been collapsed.