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Steam is not special, its just another website


firecat

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I never saw the grand appeal of steam before. I think the reasons are just because of valve. 

 

A lot of triple A games are making it to steam. Valve has also equal opportunity to invest.

 

Yes, it is correct that steam is just another game host site. I think they push it to a different extent. But I do see devs thinking it's more than what it is.

 

Steam is the most popular place to go and it's difficult to really pinpoint the amazing ones. Especially when everyone wants be an Indie dev.

 

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8 hours ago, Lumaria said:

Steam is the most popular place to go and it's difficult to really pinpoint the amazing ones. Especially when everyone wants be an Indie dev.

its never proven, people keep saying that to make it "sound" like its the only place indie developers visit but thats not true. this is coming from people who also say that there are more users in xbox/psp than psp/xbox, its all just lies that people want to fill to make it true.

24 minutes ago, B0X0R said:

Let us dive deeper into the core of the conflict. @firecat, what did Steam do to you?

steam ruins lives, the ultimate truth, 10 developers who got nothing from steam:

http://www.puppygames.net/blog/?p=1574

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It was another cataclysmically disruptive event, so soon on the heels of the last. Suddenly you’ve got a massive problem on your hands. You’ve sold 40,000 games! But you’ve only made enough money to survive full-time for two weeks because you’re selling them for 10 cents each. And several hundred new customers suddenly want their computers fixing for free. And when the dust from all the bundles has settled you’re left with a market expectation of games now that means you can only sell them for a dollar. That’s how much we sell our games for. One dollar. They’re meant to be $10, but nobody buys them at $10. They buy them when a 90% discount coupon lands in their Steam inventory. We survive only by the grace of 90% coupon drops, which are of course entirely under Valve’s control. It doesn’t matter how much marketing we do now, because Valve control our drip feed.

http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/StevenHonders/20151228/262752/The_consequences_of_failure

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Doomsday, the first sale reports from our publisher came in. I was brave enough to ask them to share early numbers. We had sold...almost nothing. Approximatly ~250 people had bought our game and sales numbers were dropping fast. We did not hit the Steam front page, we did not do as well as our numbers showed. Harsh reality check, 90+% of our players had pirated the game. They played and enjoyed our hard work for two years and payed nothing for it. This wasn't the biggest problem, because at least they enjoyed it (I hope at least). But the impact of piracy was way bigger then we anticipated and the response from people pirating the game, was what hit me personally the most.

http://venturebeat.com/2015/07/29/five-nights-at-freddys-developer-on-hate-and-working-at-dollar-general/

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“It’s difficult when people seem to dislike you only because you’ve found success with something,” wrote Cawthon. “I think some people have this idea that I spend my days swimming in gold coins like Scrooge McDuck and cranking out games with no effort — then laughing all the way to the bank. The reality is quite different, and I think that people who hate on me for being successful are misguided.”

~ Five Nights at Freddy’s developer Scott Cawthon

http://www.gameranx.com/updates/id/19356/article/female-developer-verbally-abused-after-submitting-game-to-steam-greenlight/

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This is the second time Quinn has attempted to get the game through Greenlight, and the second time a series of abuse has followed her.

http://siliconangle.com/blog/2015/06/22/indie-dev-on-why-he-doesnt-believe-in-steam-sales/

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“It’s now a standard gamer behavior to wait 3 or 4 months before buying any game because you know for sure there’s a major discount coming. It’s so systematic that it’s nearly stupid not to do so!”

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2013-10-30-indies-market-early-and-often-or-sink-into-obscurity

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"When you look at things like Steam Greenlight and people complaining about needing 80,000 votes to even get onto Steam, it's like, getting 80,000 people to click a button that says yes first of all means you need to have an exponentially larger number of people get to your page in the first place"

https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/37f2r2/unsuccessful_steam_games/

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I have quite a few steam friends that have developed games on Steam. Several of them have lost money with development vs sales. Usually the games that don't do well aren't willing to publicly share their failures and chances are they want to move on with life.

http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/DanielWest/20150908/253040/Good_isnt_good_enough__releasing_an_indie_game_in_2015.php

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I see it as a risk that's simply not worth taking. I can’t help but make games, so I’ll keep working on them in my spare time, but without any real hope for commercial success.

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/7.847349-Steam-Greenlight-Failure-Leads-Indie-Dev-To-Torrent-His-Own-Game

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"My game UFHO2 has been on Greenlight for 2+ years now, and with no luck. Is it so bad?" he wrote in a Reddit post. "I released it days ago on Desura/Humble Store, but the trend is clear: nobody is going to buy it unless it's on Steam. Thus, I've put it on torrent so everyone can enjoy it."

this is why vale VR is a failure:

Valve blames developers

http://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/is-vr-making-you-sick-its-probably-the-developers-fault-valve-claims/

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7 minutes ago, firecat said:

“It’s difficult when people seem to dislike you only because you’ve found success with something,” wrote Cawthon. “I think some people have this idea that I spend my days swimming in gold coins like Scrooge McDuck and cranking out games with no effort — then laughing all the way to the bank. The reality is quite different, and I think that people who hate on me for being successful are misguided.”

Funny enough, this describes exactly you and your hate toward Steam. 

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21 minutes ago, firecat said:

I don't give a flying fuck about what other developers have to say. I want to know how you, Angel Moreno, feel that Valve has wronged you.

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1 hour ago, B0X0R said:

I don't give a flying fuck about what other developers have to say. I want to know how you, Angel Moreno, feel that Valve has wronged you.

i already told my answer, steam cheats developers and ruins lives. you can read the 20+ developers who went through the process of what many consider "best platform for pc software".

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Yeah, the problem isn't with Steam, more that there's too much supply and not enough demand. Jeff Vogel spoke about this 5 years ago (the following is an abridged version):

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The easy money is off the street. If you want to make it in this business now, you have to earn it. It's a total bummer. Blaming Steam won't help.

The Big, Big Problem. The Only Problem.

The problem is too many games.

How bad has the problem gotten? How towering, bleak, and painfully unavoidable? It's gotten so bad that even the gaming press has noticed it.

Steam released more games in the first 20 weeks of 2014 than in all of 2013.  I don't know why anyone acts surprised. How many times last year did we see the article, "Another 100 Greenlight games OK'ed for publishing!"?

This wouldn't be a problem if there were a demand, but there's not. After all, almost 40% of games bought on Steam don't get tried. As in, never even launched once! At least the people who download free-to-play games try them.

(To be clear, this isn't a problem because these games will keep people from buying new ones, though there will be some of this. People mostly don't play these excess games because they didn't want them. The problem is that a business based on selling things people don't want is not a stable one.)

Because this flood of games is so unmanageable, Steam has been doing everything it can to throw open the gates and get out of the messy, stressful business of curation.  This is absolutely inevitable. It's also going to winnow out a lot of small developers, who don't have the PR juice to get noticed in the crowd. (Think iTunes app store.)

With so much product, supply and demand kicks in. Indies now do a huge chunk (if not most) of their business through sales and bundles, elbowing each other out of the way for the chance to sell their game for a dollar or less. Making quick money by strip-mining their products, glutting game collections and making it more difficult for the developers who come after to make a sale. (I am NOT making a moral judgment here. It is the simple consequence of a long series of calm, rational business decisions.)

Indie gaming started out as games written with passion for people who embraced and loved them. Now too much of it is about churning out giant mounds of decent but undifferentiated product to be bought for pennies by people who don't give a crap either way.

It's not sustainable.

It Really Is the Only Problem.

It's simple math.

All gamers together have a huge pool of X dollars a year to spend on their hobby. It gets distributed among Y developers. X stays roughly constant (up a little, down a little), but Y is shooting up. A fixed pool of money, distributed among more and more hungry mouths.

Those mouths are your competitors. All your heroes? Notch, The Behemoth, J. Blow, etc? They’re your foes now. Are you ready to fight them?

You can talk all you want about how mean Steam was to you, or how much "discoverability" is a problem, or about how important it is for developers to go to GDC or the PAX Indie Warren or to cool game jams or whatever. It's all a distraction.

X dollars, Y developers. That's all that matters.

And if X stays constant, the only way to solve the problem is for Y to go down. I'll give you a second to work out the consequences of that for yourself.

Stop Blaming Steam!

I am somewhat irked by developers blaming Steam for their problems. "Why don't they publish me? Why don't they feature me? Why won't Steam make me rich!?" All of it said in exactly the tone of voice my 8 year old uses when she's angry her older sister got a bigger piece of cake.

If there has been one true hero in this story, it has been Steam. If, in 2008, I'd written my dream list of what a publisher could provide to help the little developer, Steam would have done it all, and then some.

I have a private theory, that's really only in my own brain. It's this. Valve is full of really cool people, who truly love games. But, at some point, with Steam, these basically nice people suddenly found themselves in the position of deciding who lives and who dies. It's a stressful, miserable place, and they didn't like it. It just made it harder to get out of bed in the morning.

In the last few years, Steam workers were the ones who handed out the golden tickets. They gave one to me. (Everyone on Steam made a lot of money. Even niche-developer dingleberries like me. You could put Pong on the front page at $20 a copy and still make a fortune.) The guy next to me who didn't get the ticket? He was angry. At Steam, at me, at the world. But mostly Steam.

Steam found themselves in a position of being hated for something it could do nothing about. Not to mention the fact that the sort of curation they were doing was impossible in the long term. You shouldn't want the games you can buy to be controlled by some guy at a stand-up desk in Bellevue, WA. They aren't wizards. They can't tell what's going to be a hit any more than anyone else. The free market has to do that job.

So they stood aside and opened the floodgates. Supply shot up and demand stayed even, which means, by a certain law of economics (thefirst one, in fact), prices have to drop. Which brings us to the bundles.

The Bundles. Oh, So Many Bundles.

I've long been a vocal fan of Humble Bundle. They're good people who want to make the game industry cooler. Their sales widgets are an amazing tool. We use them ourselves. Their bundles started out as a fantastic way to showcase what our slice of the industry has to offer and help charity to boot.

Now, however, there are a lot of bundles. Many of them. Their main purpose: help established developers squeeze a few more dimes out of fading (or faded products). They are a product of the glut.

As I write this, Humble Bundle is running two weeks of DAILY bundles. That's, like, 3-10 full-length games a DAY. Spend a hundred bucks or so, and you'll get enough solid titles to keep you occupied for years. You should do it. It's a bargain. Then you'll only need to pay full price for the one game a year you really care about, and you won't need to worry about risking cash experimenting with new developers.

Then, give it 2-3 years, and you won't have to worry about new developers, because there won't be any.

Again, there is NO moral judgment here. We're all making calm, rational business decisions. I'm just saying where it's going. Where it has to go.

It just can't last. Bundles used to earn a ton, but they don't anymore. If making pennies a copy selling your games in 12 packs is the main source of a developer's income, that developer is going to disappear. Also, all of the bundles and sales encourage users to expect to pay a price too low to keep us in business. It’s just the same race to the bottom as in the iTunes store, except this time we were warned, and we did it anyway.

And hey, I’m not blameless in this. My games have been in a million sales and bundles. It’s what you have to do now, and I’m just as fault as everyone else.

If someone tells you this is the slightest bit sustainable, they are misleading you. There are lots of different reasons to do this. Maybe they need to fool you. Maybe they need to fool themselves. Just don't believe them. X dollars, Y developers. That's all that matters.

I Shouldn't Have Written This.

Because it's redundant. I mean, we knew all of this, right? Gamers certainly know. It's been a few years since looking at the new indie games went from, "Ooh! Let's see what treats await me today!" to "Aaaahhh! So much stuff! I am stressed out now!"

Also, it bums me out. I feel like some jerk who sees a guy's pants fall down and points and laughs and shouts, "HA HA! Your pants just fell down!" The pants-down guy has my sympathy. My sales are way down too, so if you hate me, I hope that fact gives you a little smile.

But all this stuff seems pretty obvious. Someday, as things shake out more, I want to try to get into a much more interesting, chewy topic: What happens next? And, if you still want to write indie games, perhaps a grizzled old survivor of multiple booms and busts can provide some helpful ideas.

http://jeff-vogel.blogspot.ca/2014/05/the-indie-bubble-is-popping.html

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You seem to ignore a few certain things.

Steam is a brand name, by using its platform, you give yourself a recognizable outlet for people to potentially find your game easily and download it. That doesn't guarantee success. You can't upload a game to Steam and think it will magically take off just because of it. You still need to market the game and give the fact that it's easily accessible through Steam as a selling point. Even then, there's no guarantee of success. It's called capitalism - sometimes you're a winner, many times you're not.

If a developer is approaching the idea of having their game on Steam as some sort of magic gateway to millions of downloads and money out the butt, they're living in a fantasy land.

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10 hours ago, firecat said:

i already told my answer, steam cheats developers and ruins lives. you can read the 20+ developers who went through the process of what many consider "best platform for pc software".

You are a broken man. Unable to form his own opinions from his personal experiences. You are living your life behind the walls of other people's lives. I suggest that you step away from your home which you call the internet, and start living. Learn how to build your own wall and stand on it. Until then, you are simply just a useless child running in circles.

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7 hours ago, Valmore said:

You seem to ignore a few certain things.

Steam is a brand name, by using its platform, you give yourself a recognizable outlet for people to potentially find your game easily and download it. That doesn't guarantee success. You can't upload a game to Steam and think it will magically take off just because of it. You still need to market the game and give the fact that it's easily accessible through Steam as a selling point. Even then, there's no guarantee of success. It's called capitalism - sometimes you're a winner, many times you're not.

If a developer is approaching the idea of having their game on Steam as some sort of magic gateway to millions of downloads and money out the butt, they're living in a fantasy land.

let you said this: "I don't think Steam can really fall under the title of "Just Another Website" until you can name 9 more similar websites that deliver the same impact as Steam does."

now you saying it can't do that: "You still need to market the game and give the fact that it's easily accessible through Steam as a selling point. Even then, there's no guarantee of success."

oh and just so you wont play word games, keywords are "impact" for the first sentence and for your current post the keyword is "success".

3 minutes ago, B0X0R said:

You are a broken man. Unable to form his own opinions from his personal experiences. You are living your life behind the walls of other people's lives. I suggest that you step away from your home which you call the internet, and start living. Learn how to build your own wall and stand on it. Until then, you are simply just a useless child running in circles.

animal-lion-cute-hide-face-colour-14415-

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9 hours ago, Decay said:

There is no such thing as a platform that can guarantee sales. Steam doesn't guarantee anything, success or failure. But it gives them a chance bigger than any other platform can give. It's as simple as that.

This. This this THIS.

Why hasn't this point been counter-debated yet

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4 hours ago, Sakamoto said:

This. This this THIS.

Why hasn't this point been counter-debated yet

its already been point out that people use that sentence has propaganda. if 20+ developers cant find success in steam (including fnaf creator) then there is no way that sentence is true.

also just so people won't counter, fnaf creator only wanted to create games (sure i dont like the game). but he is receiving death threats, this has nothing to do with being popular or else there would have been laws about this kind of stuff (this is not a law debate). the fans are the ones to blame for making a game into something people dont like, where do these fans come from? steam because every fnaf game (not mobile) has been only in steam. you know what steam will do? nothing because its just a website.

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15 minutes ago, firecat said:

its already been point out that people use that sentence has propaganda. if 20+ developers cant find success in steam (including fnaf creator) then there is no way that sentence is true.

also just so people won't counter, fnaf creator only wanted to create games (sure i dont like the game). but he is receiving death threats, this has nothing to do with being popular or else there would have been laws about this kind of stuff (this is not a law debate). the fans are the ones to blame for making a game into something people dont like, where do these fans come from? steam because every fnaf game (not mobile) has been only in steam. you know what steam will do? nothing because its just a website.

Steam is surely at fault for people being assholes.

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Let me see if I can help you here:

1. Steam, regardless of your pounding away at the keyboard, is the best-known online outlet for downloading video games along with extras specific to the site. Meaning online play with others, the weird rewards system, etc. It has the potential to deliver a bigger impact or chance of success than a typical indie developer can get on their own. Comparing Amazon to Steam is silly - you're comparing a convertible to an oak tree. Your list of other websites is nice, and there's nothing wrong with putting your game on them, either. Just don't expect to hear most people to know or care about that site as compared to knowing Steam. Know why there are people with the annoying habit of calling all mp3 players iPod or all soft drinks Coke? Brand name recognition. Heck, ever say "I need a Band-Aid" at all? Band-Aid is a brand name for what's really an adhesive medical strip. Power of brand name. Steam has the potential for your game to get out there better because it has that sort of brand power.

2. Steam is part of a capitalistic society at large. Meaning being on Steam is no guarantee for success for anyone. It's a potential tool or resource, but nothing in capitalism is guaranteed. Will developers fail even using Steam? Of course. They can also fail having it listed on Amazon or their own home page. But it does have potential for greater success than just hosting it on a makeshift website.

3. What you're basically trying to say is, because some developers did not do well on Steam, it must suck and everyone who likes Steam must be a brainwashed zombie. Problem is that there are so many other factors as to why a game fails anywhere - economics 101, really. Supply and demand, product quality, marketing, etc. Blaming Steam for a developers game not taking off is like blaming the President for high gas prices.

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12 hours ago, firecat said:

let you said this: "I don't think Steam can really fall under the title of "Just Another Website" until you can name 9 more similar websites that deliver the same impact as Steam does."

now you saying it can't do that: "You still need to market the game and give the fact that it's easily accessible through Steam as a selling point. Even then, there's no guarantee of success."

oh and just so you wont play word games, keywords are "impact" for the first sentence and for your current post the keyword is "success".

You already identify where you went wrong, so there's not much else for anyone to add. 'Largest impact' in no way means 'guaranteed success'. To say these two sentences are conflicting in nature is very, very wrong.

7 hours ago, firecat said:

its already been point out that people use that sentence has propaganda.

It has been suggested, without much in the way of reasoning or evidence.

7 hours ago, firecat said:

if 20+ developers cant find success in steam (including fnaf creator) then there is no way that sentence is true.

20 developers not being able to find success on Steam in no way counters Decay

7 hours ago, firecat said:

also just so people won't counter, fnaf creator only wanted to create games (sure i dont like the game). but he is receiving death threats, this has nothing to do with being popular or else there would have been laws about this kind of stuff (this is not a law debate). the fans are the ones to blame for making a game into something people dont like, where do these fans come from? steam because every fnaf game (not mobile) has been only in steam. you know what steam will do? nothing because its just a website.

That's nice. Also completely irrelevant. Serving no purpose. Useless in nature. Unconnected to the points being discussed. Tangential. Inapposite. Inappropriate. And unimportant. 

The idea that people visiting Steam behave badly doesn't show what you want it to show. It's very sad.

 

3 hours ago, Valmore said:

Let me see if I can help you here:

1. Steam, regardless of your pounding away at the keyboard, is the best-known online outlet for downloading video games along with extras specific to the site. Meaning online play with others, the weird rewards system, etc. It has the potential to deliver a bigger impact or chance of success than a typical indie developer can get on their own. Comparing Amazon to Steam is silly - you're comparing a convertible to an oak tree. Your list of other websites is nice, and there's nothing wrong with putting your game on them, either. Just don't expect to hear most people to know or care about that site as compared to knowing Steam. Know why there are people with the annoying habit of calling all mp3 players iPod or all soft drinks Coke? Brand name recognition. Heck, ever say "I need a Band-Aid" at all? Band-Aid is a brand name for what's really an adhesive medical strip. Power of brand name. Steam has the potential for your game to get out there better because it has that sort of brand power.

2. Steam is part of a capitalistic society at large. Meaning being on Steam is no guarantee for success for anyone. It's a potential tool or resource, but nothing in capitalism is guaranteed. Will developers fail even using Steam? Of course. They can also fail having it listed on Amazon or their own home page. But it does have potential for greater success than just hosting it on a makeshift website.

3. What you're basically trying to say is, because some developers did not do well on Steam, it must suck and everyone who likes Steam must be a brainwashed zombie. Problem is that there are so many other factors as to why a game fails anywhere - economics 101, really. Supply and demand, product quality, marketing, etc. Blaming Steam for a developers game not taking off is like blaming the President for high gas prices.

The next stage of Indie development on Steam will be interesting. Far too many Indies making titles looking for quick money, and Steam's letting them all on. With Indies suddenly not being as financially rewarding, and some making comprehensive losses, that suggests an Indie crash coming soon, but we've been expecting it for a few years now and it hasn't come ...

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1 hour ago, Rooke said:

The next stage of Indie development on Steam will be interesting. Far too many Indies making titles looking for quick money, and Steam's letting them all on. With Indies suddenly not being as financially rewarding, and some making comprehensive losses, that suggests an Indie crash coming soon, but we've been expecting it for a few years now and it hasn't come ...

its official you are a fanboy, i wouldn't say it if you didn't try to think about the developers it hurt but now i definitely know that you are completely and unreasonably hopeless. how could you so selfish, how could you not feel any pain for the developers, why do you think you are a dictator. this is what i'm talking about the steam community being a bad community, just because a community is saying something doesn't mean that community is considered a good community.

in other words, jumping into the bandwagon is bad for small business, youtubers did the same thing and look what happen... random videos left to right, play the lottery at 1 Billion but small chance at winning , surveys will pay the bills, payed for playing games, twitter/facebook is better (killed myspace rip), iphone is better (its basicly the same as android), make vn for your first game, and the internet will pay for itself (it never did).

its real you cant say no to it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bandwagon_effect

moreover, the indie crash is a lie, we dont know who started it but anyone with a brain will understand that every indie developer has different budgets (spending) and in no way shape or form will developers stop building games.

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The idea that people visiting Steam behave badly doesn't show what you want it to show. It's very sad.

@Valmore this involves you too.

look what you are doing, you are trying to pressure me into doing something i hate. you are no better than ISIS who do the same things you are doing right now. shame on you, shame on you.

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