Steam wants devs to sell things on their service (and make money in the process) but don't want to have to work for that (greenlight is too much a hassle to be kept as it is, quality control in any capacity takes time , support .... well .... it only make lose money why do anything but the minimum ...)

It's really depressing to see these guys making loads of money, and don't really making anything at all with it.

edit : /rant of the week

Front page is overrated and i hate this frontpage consumer mentality... if you want something then why not look for it?

You look for indie games? New indie games? Then you are 2 clicks away reaching your goal!

It shows under new releases in the appropriate category Games > indie

How hard was that?

All this is just good for GOG, while Steam undoubtedly has more users GOG only releases around 4-6 games a week, and gives every single one of them a write-up and exclusively news page and time to shine for potential customers for DAYS before it's pushed off the front page by new games.

Just look at Steam's front-page now, Dark Souls II arguably the biggest PC release of this month if not the year so far is ALREADY second from the bottom, and it's only been out for ONE DAY, it will probably get knocked off the front-page tomorrow. This is not just an issue for AAA games either, indies already have low exposure, potential buyers might miss games they otherwise might have considered buying or put onto their wishlist for a sale simply because they never even knew it exists, just because they didn't open Steam for ONE DAY.

Greenlight is hilariously crap, and it's doing absurd damage to Steam and it's reputation and undoubtedly also it's revenue and future, if the service gets flooded with low-quality/shovelware indie games eventually customers will lose interest in Steam, or indie games in general, because it's increasingly difficult to tell the quality games from the garbage.

Yes of course most experienced "hardcore" PC gamers will always be able to tell the good from the bad and make decisions accordingly, but the majority might not, they might end up buying too much crap and feel burned/ripped-off, or heck they just might end up buying too many games they aren't playing full stop, and get turned off buying any new games (not give up playing games, but buying games for a long period to finish their backlog) and this would result in a large slump in the market.

It is insane because Valve are willingly doing something that is going to hurt themselves, just to get cred as letting indie games on the service. You just need to check out the Community and forum areas for most Early Access or low-quality indie game on Steam, it's pure rage. Greenlight is creating a loss in consumer confidence in Steam.
It would be great if your average customer was this smart, but they aren't. If customers were all that smart then indie developers wouldn't need to market their games at all and get mass exposure on distribution sites, if their game was good it would become successfully by word-of-mouth alone. Unfortunately not all indie games are Minecraft. Selling products always means reaching outside the niche dedicated audience to those who "might" buy your game if you convince them to, the type of people who don't keep themselves very updated on news for upcoming releases. It's basically business 101.

Tell it to Lazy Average Joe who only checks the front page of the Steam store .

It's not hard, but unless I suspect that there is something new released there that I would be interested in, I won't do that. Much like pretty much everyone else, I won't look for something that I don't know exists.

Steam puts EVERYTHING front and center and they need to sift and figure out what they want to showcase better. Tesla Effect got lots of front page love for days on here, but got dumped in the pile on Steam and had to go looking for it. Also true for some triple A titles which is weird

They could solve some problems by completely overhauling the front page and perhaps transitioning into a system where all games are separated by user-controlled options like by Genre, so you have a Real-time Strategy front page, an RPG front page, and so on. They already kinda have this with the new tags but isn't forced enough to be influential, it needs to be something that's right on the front page. But it still wouldn't solve the underlying problem of market saturation.

I'm hardly a Steam defender, but I highly doubt that devs pay Valve advertising money - although that Skyrim reappearing on top again is suspect. Anyway, let's take Banished for example. A rather small indie game if you will that was featured in the big banner box for something like two months or so, which was way longer than Age of Wonders 3 ever got. Hell, I've seen bigger "AAA" titles get less air time up there.

Couldn't you have picked a worse example? DS2 is a very big and known quantity. It's advertised in the big banner box, and it is the top seller at this very moment. Yeah.

The Steam store page is long over due a redesign. But complaining because too many games are getting released is just a tad bit silly.

Now that I been thinking about it, they should have a indie/greenlight spotlight page or section on the front page. They got SO many games, especially indie ones, coming out they should really show them off better. Also, they reallly need some quality control on there. Shovelware should at the very least deserve to get buried, let the developers pay up the nose for the front then. Only the big companies would bother doing that so its win win

True but with Valve time i don't see that redesign coming anytime soon.

We need to invest a few bucks in this here Steam cell research. That might cure some of it's ailments.

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I think a large part of the problem is laziness - the belief that inclusion on Steam is an all-encompassing panacea and that you don't have to do fuck-all in the way of marketing once your game hits the Steam storefront.

If I'm honest, I was expecting something like this to pop up sooner or later - the pro-Steam bias of a lot of the media (especially Eurogamer, which practically worships Gabe) means that games often don't get coverage when they sell poorly on Steam, just when they sell well. Also, it seems developers are often restricted by their contract with Valve on how they disclose sales figures, which means that they probably have to clear public statements with Valve beforehand.

There are a lot of financial failures on Steam, and with the number of releases growing, that list of failures will continue to grow exponentially. I'd certainly be interested to know if Seaven Studio's fortunes with Ethan Meteor Hunter improved with their Steam release.

I do find it interesting that the complaints on this occasion come from a developer that specifically chose to release his game on Steam only, which was a big fucking mistake from the outset, because it means you don't have any exposure anywhere else.

Also, for all of Broken Rules' bitching about "game dumping", I think they've neglected to realise that it was that very same "dumping" policy that got them onto Steam in the first place.

If developers and publishers were counting on people lazy enough to do not make a little research on something they will bought, if those developers and publishers are screwed because there are too many of them despising their customers, considering them because of their lazyness, and if they are lazy themselves too, well... I'm happy that the honeymoon is over.

The World Wide Web wasn't made to stick people on one store only. A closed WWW should never exist, and if developers are unable to follow this rotten system, they should think of other ways, "classic" ways to make a community, to appeal customers in how the true WWW works.

Lazyness will never be rewarded.
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