Pity it doesn't automatically charge the people who made fake things $200. That'd be funny to watch.
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Freeware is nice, but in the end Valve is a business and they can't really make money off freeware, especially considering the low quality of many submissions. Besides, they donate the entire amount to Child's Play so it's not like they're using this as a way to make more money, it's simply a way to raise the barrier of entry and keep out people who aren't serious about their game.
There are other, more suitable distribution channels for free indie games, and I don't blame Valve for putting up such a barrier of entry. All things considered, $100 is a low price for such a thing considering what you get in return. Even if you don't get accepted, it will at least be 'free' adverting by getting your game pitch out to everyone who uses Greenlight.
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Except you don't generate customer loyalty by allowing your service to get flooded with worthless shovelware.
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I'm not sure what you're trying to say here. They do include a fee, and it is exactly to prevent that from occuring. That's the point. If anyone thinks $100 is too much, then there are plenty of alternative ways to distribute your game, but considering that getting your game on Steam means a lot in terms of distribution and publicity it's a small fee to pay.
It's not in Valve's (or anyone else's) interests to allow everyone to throw anything they want on Greenlight. When Greenlight went up and it was free, it was 99% shovelware, joke entries and babby's first Game Maker projects. While the average quality is still pretty low with the entry fee in place, it has made for a significant improvement, so that means it's doing exactly what it is meant to do.
They generate customer loyalty by giving small developers an alternative way to make use of their service and to get the community involved in the process, and they're keeping their service (relatively) free from pollution by demanding a small entrance fee. I honestly don't see how anyone would have a problem with that.
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My point is that Greenlight prevents shovelware from getting on Steam as easily, even without the fee. The fee (which I think is a good idea) is to prevent shovelware even earlier, before it gets to Greenlight.
The only thing I have a problem with is that it is a large fee rather than a small fee (considering that the developers targeted by Greenlight are all indie developers.)
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I don't consider $100 a large fee. First of all, I already mentioned that the service and publicity you get in return by far outweighs the initial price. Secondly if your game is bad enough that you're not willing to wager $100 on it, I doubt it's worth the attention to begin with.
And it's not like Steam has a monopoly on digital distribution, so if you don't want to spend a little cash on Greenlight there are plenty of other venues to turn to. In the end, Greenlight is just another option and every developer will have to decide if it's worth it compared to the many alternatives.
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Doesn't matter. Your argument The Android [...] do just fine without such standards is proven wrong
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You used the plural of "standard" and also the word "such" which indicates that you are not against a specific standard (like the "$100 standard") but rather against a set of standards that use money to maintain a certain quality (Google's "$25 standard" beeing one of them). Nothing to be confused about here
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Free games can still be released on the PC, there is no barrier to entry. But games trying to make a profit, through the normal buy game model or free2play, will incur costs anyways. They can most likely just write off the $100 on their 1040 anyways. If they cant scrape together $100 as a professional developer/team they have bigger problems.
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Because if there's no fee then there will still be lots of assclowns submitting crap. Which means Valve has to waste more resources moderating.
By charging a fee, they ensure that only serious entries are submitted and also support a charity.
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it goes to Child's Play so who cares if there is a fee, they tried to being in a system that everyone well trolled, so why should they pay staff to sit there and go thought thousands on hl3's. so if someone thinks their game is really good enough to be on steam $100 is nothing.
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I think the fee is pretty salty at first glance, sounds more like a method to profit rather than anything else, but also serves as quality control and a better advertisement filter. If you think from a developer's stand point, $100 isn't that much.
Hopefully this will highlight the best works with actual effort by having much less joke/pre-alpha items on the list.
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$100 isn't that much?
http://www.extremetech.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/sad_developer-640x536.jpg
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Taken that they get advertisement for their game and a chance to end up on the Steam Store, it's a pretty cheap investment. That image you posted was probably made with piracy in mind and more correctly shown to people who bought the humble bundle for less than a buck which did cause a lot of issues regarding money; but it really has nothing to do with this, unless you were trying to make a joke of sorts.
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$100 is not a lot of money from a developer's viewpoint. And $100 specially isn't a lot of money when it comes to advertising. Hell, you have people right here giving away more than $400 worth in games, what is $100 for a fee to something big like a chance into getting your game published?
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Since $100 is such a small amount of money from your perspective, try offering $100 to a dev on an indie game development forum, such as this one. Make it a contest or something if you want. You'll either get a very positive response or they'll think you don't really mean it.
Of course, I don't really expect you to believe what you're saying about it being an inconsequential amount of money. (On the other hand, you've given away quite a few non-bundle games, so I certainly can't claim you're not generous!)
Those people didn't pay $400 for the games they gave away, generally speaking. If someone did pay that much to give away games, that's really generous of them, because $400 is a lot of money to most people on this planet, even ones who want to create art/entertainment (videogames) instead of focusing on a "real job."
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I'm not a developer; And I don't think even a developer would throw $100 at people like that just to see if something grows out of it. You're just being inane.
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Being a developer has nothing to do with the value of money. You said $100 has little value, even to someone making minimum wage (implied but not stated - many indie developers make minimum wage, if even that. For evidence, check the forums and read the press on indie devs.) If $100 has little value, you wouldn't mind throwing it at people in order to fund a game.
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No, I wouldn't mind on spending those $100 on something worthwhile. And throwing money at some people on a cloudy-ass forum isn't worthwhile. (and yes, I do think giving away games is more worthwhile to myself than donations to hobbyists)
Also, there's always Kickstarter for that sort of thing.
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Can you please point me where was I disingenuous in the topic?
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100 bucks is a bit much, honestly most of the joke posts would be counted with a suspension, or maybe even a smaller fee like 10 bucks? I think that would even stop most people....
I can see this ending up badly for the free to play titles also, kinda a bummer.
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Wrecking Greenlight? Valve tried having it open to everyone. The ones who wrecked it were the idiotic users submitting fake/crap games. Blame them. Honestly, if you can't scrape together $100 as a developer, you have a lot more problems then just trying to get something on Greenlight.
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No, idiotic users show up everywhere. Valve should have set up a good system to prevent them from submitting fake games. There are many good alternatives that don't require the developer to spend $100. That kind of thinking is why the Xbox 360 is a bad freeware platform.
"Honestly, if you can't scrape together $100 as a developer, you have a lot more problems then just trying to get something on Greenlight."
^
That's my point exactly. Why punish people for not being wealthy? That's pretty stupid.
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Wouldn't making XBLA open to all developers rather than just the serious ones make it more than likely worse? What alternatives do you suggest?
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Now imagine that, but listed out by the dozen for you to buy. That's what it would be like.
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Yeah but point was they let people release crap if you pay them enough...I hope Steam at least doesn't come to that.
I can picture it now: No Gaben No, where you smack Gabe away from a pizza pie.
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Actually, that specific kind of crap is only EVER made by people who are charging for their games. A $100 fee demands that you intend to make a profit. Therefore, the fee only removes two sets of people:
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"a $100 fee demands that you intend to make a profit"
Have you ever handled a business, at all? Maybe a High School students council, even? A fee like that is nothing if you're serious about what you do. You can sell your game for $5 to 20 people and get your money back. I haven't actually seen any freeware titles on Steam, only freemium and MMO titles that usually trick people into paying money later on. If they were all exclusively freeware, Steam would be more than likely wasting bandwidth on nothing.
Besides, free games already advertise themselves pretty much. There's not much point on putting them up on Steam unless you have some sort of OCD and want literally every software you have tied to your Steam account. If you're putting your game on Steam, you're either looking to sell it or advertise it, and both have almost always money involved.
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Your response doesn't make sense because I was talking about free games and you're talking about running a business.
Here's an example of a great free game on Steam that does not have any charges, hidden or otherwise.
Free games do not advertise themselves at all. That's ridiculous. There are so many crappy free games out there that many people simply dismiss anything that says free on it, if they even manage to hear of the free game in the first place.
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Hey, I voted for that game <3 Glad to know it made it!
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Did it? o_O That's odd now... I wonder if I voted on a fake then..
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That's one example out of almost none that got in through Greenlight. I'm pretty sure I played it on some flash game website somewhere. If you imagine each and every crappy free game trying to get a bite out of the Greenlight cake, you'll only end up with oversaturation and a decrease in quality, without mentioning how it would clog up the list and drown all the half-decent titles actually going for the jackpot.
And I'm not sure about your view on advertisement. I'm pretty sure there are people out there who are not looking to spend money on games that love to find out about freeware titles and don't really have a need to adhere to a marketing monster that Steam is.
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So the fact that I may have gotten some crappy indie game's story wrong means that everything that I say doesn't have any credibility? You're adorable.
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What facts do you possibly want to accompany arguments that follow a basic logic on economy and organization? Maybe the fact that Greenlight was an absolute mess before the fee? The fact that games cost money to make, publish, advertise and download? Or the fact that you're inane for thinking that Steam should be an open platform for free games because you seem to think Valve is filled with nice people with tact for other developers and good games, rather than a massive multi-billionaire company with a gigantic distribution service on their hands?
You seem to have the vision of an utopia, that doesn't really add up to anything other than the minority "independent hobbyist developer" crowd who can barely afford lunch. Your credibility is the only one being reduced throughout this discussion because you seem unable to get a grip of reality properly.
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You're making a lot of bizarre assumptions about me again which do not relate to the discussion. (They're also not true. I agree that Valve is self-interested, for example, but that's not something that's even come up in our discussion, which makes it a bit of a ridiculous thing for you to claim I disagree with.)
Further argument seems as if it would be futile, since you're arguing against new points you're making up rather than addressing any of the points I've actually made, so I suspect I'm done.
(On a side note: it's kind of dumb to care about your opinions regarding quality control if you think you can say Super Crate Box is a crappy game without explaining why. I doubt you'll find anyone in the game industry who will agree with you.)
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What other points you've made? Thus far you've only proven to be unable to comprehend the expenses of developing a product (even if said product is "free", it still costs money to maintain and can therefore be considered part of a business), and would rather nit pick on adjectives and intentional hyperbole structures rather than coming face-to-face with what I'm saying and formulating something actually productive regarding the whole discussion.
What I implied is correct to what you've said and made of yourself beforehand, and do have a meaning that relate to this discussion. Maybe if you didn't want assumptions such as those to come up you should have thought up of better and more comprehensive ways to express your thoughts on having freeware titles hopping up on a Distribution Service with no fees to them while maintaining basic and functional quality-control methods.
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The forum won't let me reply to your later comment for some reason.
I don't want to bother with the whole of your comment, but I found it rather hard to skip over you seeming to have no idea what a business is. I suggest you look that up. A business requires intent to profit.
Example: it costs me money to maintain my health well enough to socialize with friends. This is not a business. Just because something requires an expenditure does not make it a business.
Also, you're still not addressing anything I said in the previous comment, but bringing up vague new points without describing them, all the while claiming that I'm avoiding your points. That's nonsensical.
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"A business requires intent to profit."
Stopped reading there. Even charities are a business and they don't aim for profit. Online Services can be also free and can be considered a business maintained solely by donor funding/advertising; because they all do require investments in order to become available, and the fee to greenlight is an investment and for that it turns out to be acceptable method of doing business where you can get your title on a distribution service for everyone to play and the distributor gets more players that can turn out to be good customers. It is a business.
And just so you know, maintaining your health is actually business, even more than anything actually.
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Well, what about Black Mesa? Or No More Room in Hell (another HL2 mod)? Both that MUST use Steam (because Gaben decided HL2 must use steam). I'm pretty sure paying $100 bucks just to be able to be closer to source (heh) and making it easier for players to get patches and everything is something they want to pay for, right?
Now, every Source mod will have to pay $100 to be considered to be put on Steam. And when some of them are being made by one person, just for fun...
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Source Mods have gone a long way where most of them don't even show up on the Steam Store in order to be populated. Downloading entire clients and patches automatically requires bandwidth; so yes, it's something they would probably like to pay for.
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Ah I see, my mistake.
Thought they were the same.
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If you think $100 is a lot of money, then you really dont know the costs involved in creating and publishing a game. $100 is nothing. Most people spend $100 on a night out. Again if a developer of a game doesnt have $100, he doesnt have any funds to get his game out there, and should probably find himself another job. To be listed on the largest online game storefront, or even just on Greenlight would give a huge boost in visibility and traffic to your project. You can look at some of the metrics over at Kickstarter projects that are now on Greenlight, and can see that they have gotten a ton of donations and thus visibility from the page.
Of course idiotic users show up everywhere, I said at the start Valve needs to have some sort of impediment to letting just anyone put their game up on Greenlight. If you think you know of any 'good alternatives' that would actually work and not require a ton of moderation time, feel free to send them into Valve. Its easy to talk though...
Also, like I said way up there ^, the $100 is probably easy to write off on a 1040 as a business tax deduction. So really its not even a cost to someone who does this as a business.
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Summary of the following: you are making bizarre, broad assumptions about people. Your assumptions might fit some of them, but are opposite to the overall trend.
This is the point at which I decided you were either a bit crazy or just somewhere above middle class (which is okay, but try thinking about how other people live.) You said: "$100 is nothing. Most people spend $100 on a night out." I've spent a lot of nights out with a lot of people, including ones who have a lot more money than I do, but I've never seen anyone spend that much money on a single night out except at concerts.
Who told you indie developers are developing games as a business? That's pretty ridiculous. "Indie" and "poor" often go together. The ones who are part of actual game-developing companies are the rare exception, and even those ones have only recently quit what used to be their main jobs. Many of them are developing games as a hobby while working at another job, hoping to eventually make enough money to quit and focus on game development.
You act as if I don't really have ideas for alternatives. Here's one really simple one: charge $10, like Hilary said. That's actually affordable. If a writer wants to submit a story for publication, there is a generally accepted rule that anyone who charges a fee is not a legitimate publication, unless the money is being pooled as payment to the chosen author. Even then, I don't know any writers who would be willing to pay more than about $25 - very few would even pay that.
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Actually my 'bizarre, broad assumptions' can actually be backed up by hard, statistical data, almost all of it falling within about .5σ of a positive correlation and increasing trend, thanks to the exposure of Greenlight. Granted metrics were not obtainable on the entire 700+ sample size, but our analysis grouping is very tight, which indicates a very strong probability of that better exposure and click-through. Analyzing site metrics is a job of mine.
"Somewhere above middle class" Oh that's quite laughable. Believe me there have been many a time where I've had to choose between food for the week or paying rent. As a student paying my own way through college, working 3 jobs, I'm not even close to "middle class". So now who is generalizing? Not sure where you go to spend your nights out, but believe me, $100 is easily spent at a nice restaurant or a bar. If you are going to create and publish a game, $100 is a small price for the exposure it gives your project. And again, if you are actually doing this as a business (read: you plan to get taxable profit in a 1040 field from this) you can write the $100 off as a business expense, so it costs you nothing.
Indie developers are, as the name implies, developing their own game. Meaning they either do it as a side project while holding down a paying job, have accumulated enough to live off for 7 months or whatever it takes to rapidly code the game, or take donations/kickstarters/alphas/betas or whatever to supplement themselves while they code and develop. In any case yes, what they do is a business, even if it is just one person on the team. I do hope you understand the tax standing of a business, and why it is almost required if you are going to develop and sell a game. And yes, if they are going to put their game out on Steam, it should be treated as a business. They are selling a product, even if its a F2P game, and all businesses have costs. If they don't want to treat it like a business, host it themselves, host it on sourceforge or google-code, but it doesn't belong on Steam.
So your 'idea' is to charge at a reduced rate? Brilliant. You still end up with the same problem, that is there will be a distribution of people who will still think that its funny to post their terrible games on Greenlight. People throw away $10 on much less amusement all the time.
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Totally agree with you Unknown.
I don't know why people think Indie Devs = 3rd world poor. Sure they are not rolling in the money but they do have money when it comes to their work (programming). Have you even looked at how much it costs to host a website? No indie gamer should be able to afford that! Its at least $100 a year, a year! and if its a F2P online game, they need servers to host it. Thats even more. Operating costs on things that like get crazy quick. $100 is nothing compared to that. They do what they need to get their game made. Kickstarter, find investors, ask family and friends, work nights and weekends at another job. If they are motivated about making games, they will find the money. Hell, they can even take a loan.
Indie gamers aren't the poor little sods you think they are. They can make money and take care of themselves.
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Obviously, you're the one who hasn't looked into the costs for hosting a website. I hosted one for several years without ever paying more than $15 total in a year, usually less, including registering a domain name. It was fairly well-trafficked, but we saved bandwidth by hosting files on Dropbox. Many indie developers don't even spend that much though, choosing to use a free domain name instead.
Also, some F2P games are hosted by the users. Gotham City Imposters is one such game.
I'm not saying indie gamers can't pinch pennies and get loans. I'm saying they shouldn't have to get loans for things like Greenlight and paying Microsoft huge amounts of money to allow them to update their games on Xbox Live.
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Steam: $100
Microsoft: "Because Microsoft would charge us tens of thousands of dollars to re-certify the game.”
Good example there buddy.
An indie developer who can't afford the $100 is probably trying to put up some Newgrounds quality game on Steam. No thanks.
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Really? I thought the most notable part was "The proceeds will be donated to Child’s Play. We have no interest in making money from this[..]"
Quite cool of Valve.
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Not sure the price needed to be set that high or that there's not a better alternative, but I'm glad they're doing something to cut down on the amount of trolling and otherwise useless submissions. I was excited about Greenlight, but quickly gave up on browsing the submissions when I saw what a mess it was.
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Im ok with this, 100$ isnt that much if youre serious about your work and they make no profit out of it
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You have rated everything in Greenlight! Come back later and we'll have more items for you to rate.
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Wouldn't it be possible to just kickstarter those 100 bucks? Or would the game be too close to publishing to deserve a kickstarter spot?
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Given that proceeds go to charity, I think that's fine. imho, it's not that high. Also, I expect to see a small flood of indie devs on Kickstarter pushing for a $100 fund-raising to get on Greenlight -- doing that just makes sense all the way around (won't come out of the devs pocket if they really can't afford it and they'll get a good idea of whether or not they'd make it through the Greenlight process in the first place).
[edit] Dammit... ninja'd... I shouldn't just open a bunch of browser windows and reply to them as I get to them.... [/edit]
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This is why we can't have nice things. Honestly, I hardly think somebody would spend a single buck for the sake of spamming or making a joke.
Charging 100$ is poorly elaborated and far-fetched. It'll make it a lot harsher for actual game developers to submit their paid/free-to-play titles, and ruins the whole point of making Steam Greenlight available to everyone.
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Nope.
Greenlight is the way for indie-devs into steam store. It's make approval process a little bit easier for devs. It's not the way for school-boy to post their wishlist or any self-made crap games.
$100 - it's not so much money. Real devs could pay it without any problems, imho.
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You could be right, what about free mods? There are few on greenlight (Neotokyo, No More Room in Hell). And some things are being done by one person in his spare time. $100 bucks might be quite much for allowing players easier (then lurking on mod-page waiting for links to megauploadish.pages.com) access to patches...
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If your mod is REALLY god you could ask for donation on your site.
Creating good mods required damned much time. In my opinion - $100 not so much money, may be $50 is better or even $10, but anyway - some people will always hate such borders.
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The update sounds pretty good. Sure, it's a bit of a gamble for a developer, but I don't think it's anything world-destroying for any of them. They can ask their fans to buy like 10 copies of their games so that they can post the game in Greenlight; if fans want it to be there, then they will do that in like an hour.
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There are now people offering loans to pay this $100.
http://www.dejobaan.com/greenlight100/ being one.
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A smaller fee would be just as good, I highly doubt someone would even pay 5 - 10 dollars to post a joke game.
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I think it is an awesome way to solve the pre-pre-pre-alpha games and dumb jokes.
Serious guys are able to afford $100 in publicity like that. Even free to play developers should be able to handle that. After all, if you are making a game with no profit in mind, you should know that you are spending a lot of money using your time on that too.
And if someone is not able to afford that... well, there are other places he can try to publish and get some money to pay for it. Or he could just work on something else for a while and make that money. He can go mow some lawns for all I care.
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I totally agree on that. 100$/90€ aren't that much that one couldn't handle it, if he wants to add his game to greenlight and therefor present the game to thousands of people.
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You are a fucking moron, if you made a game, would you gamble 100 bucks to MAYBE get your game on Steam? Say that is your gas money for a week, would you spend that on an entry? Your attitude is just like that of EA's, if you aren't big enough to think 100 bucks is nothing, then you don't deserve to make a game.
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I see no point in insulting Ekaros for his opinion, regardless of he being right or wrong
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They just changed vote up / vote down buttons to bigger ones with explanations on them on Steam Greenlight.
http://i.imgur.com/jhARM.png
And made a curious announcement:
http://steamcommunity.com/games/765/announcements/detail/1317556891741839763
Most noticeable part being "The first update is a $100 fee for someone to post to Steam Greenlight."
There have been a hundred joke posts and several hundreds of pre-alpha and concept submissions, hopefully this will cut it down to release ready games.
What do you think?
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