Today was talking with some other developer friends about a “hot topic”. Steam, and the difficulty to get in it.
If you’re an indie developer, at least once in your life you got a forum/post comment saying “you should get your game on Steam!”. It sounded almost as an insult, like saying “you fool, why don’t you just use that?”. Yeah, like if Steam was an OPEN platform.
Getting on Steam is really HARD, and for most indies they represent the main source of income, a bit like casual portals are for casual game developers.
There’s really no rule (for Indies) to get on Steam. Many games look very similar, yet “some” are accepted, and others not. Their selection criteria aren’t really clear to be honest.
Now, I came with a solution that I hope the Steam people will at least consider: why Steam doesn’t allow any indie to sell their games through them, as a sort of shareware vendor? We could add “Buy on Steam” button beside our usual vendors like BMT Micro, Plimus, Regnow, and so on.
And those games wouldn’t appear on Steam. They would need absolutely to do NOTHING, except create an interface for developer so they can setup their products. They could even get away with a submission fee or a yearly subscription like Appstore does.
Advantages would be for both sides: indie devs would finally be able to tell to the users who ask if they can buy from Steam “Yes, here is the link.”
Steam could get “free money”, and honestly they would get the most advantages from this idea. They could also be surprised by how some apparently unknown games sells, and maybe “promote” the best selling “underdogs” on their main games catalogue.
I see really no downside to this idea. Now I hope someone at Steam looks at this post, and at least takes in consideration this suggestion 😉
Hmm, I heard a lot about Steam but I honestly never use it. I usually download/purchase either from Big Fish Games or the official (company) site myself (with paypal or my debit). That is a very lucrative idea you have there but then again not all people may see it that way.
Oh well I buy either with steam but also directly. If is an indie game I definitely buy directly to support the author. It was just a suggestion for all those users that tell me “you need to get your game on Steam!” like if was my choice 😀
There have been talks about setting up some Steam-like service for the lesser-knowns, but the costs, maintenance, and risks for that are estimated to be through the roof. It also wouldn’t help to be known as “The ‘Steam’-like service for the Steam rejects”.
It doesn’t make sense to make a Steam competitor for hardcore and indie hardcore games when there’s already Impulse, Direct2Drive, Gamers Gate, etc. But a dedicated portal for Sim, Visual Novels and classical RPGs seems more reasonable, since not only will it gather traffic for all the unknown small-timers, but it can provide a rudimentary form of copy protection and achievements for member games. Naturally there have recently sprung up several VN portals — they have the online part down but they lack the integrated wrapper system (what makes Steam, Steam).
Nowadays it’s not enough to call oneself “indie” since you see increasingly many ex-EA, ex-Activision, ex-AAA devs going at it alone after being laid off. And naturally, they tend to bring more experience and budget to a project compared to others. It is but natural that those capable of more expensive projects would want to screen out the cheaper projects since they are like “fart apps” in their eyes and clutter the market that they sell to. So what we have are tiers in terms of polish/budget: $1 million (AAA and the big casuals); $100,000 (big true indies such as those in Indie Fund… these are the types of indie games you often find on Steam. Of course, the disclaimer being that you can have a very low budget game that can get on Steam because it’s extremely popular.); and then finally the $10,000 and less, where it’s hard to believe there are people who actually make a living selling downloadables from their own websites.
That sub-10K tier is the one that needs the Steam-like service the most, since the indies in that tier cannot fund the costs of everyone re-downloading the game every time they want to play (the online model). This is the tier that is also affected the most by piracy, since 10,000 pirated copies is devastating when the expected number of copies sold is only 2,000.
Of course we want to be on Steam! Just like we want to be featured on the front page of the New York Times! But is it really necessary? There are a lot of eyeballs, and majority of those eyeballs turn into wallets when a sale occurs… but perhaps they’re not really the target audience for your game? (That they’re only buying because they cannot pass up a sale). The suggestion of Steam just linking to the sites sounds like we want Steam only because it’s popular. But I would argue that it’s the Steam system that’s more valuable — the not-so-intrusive DRM and achievement wrapper, auto-updating system that is the most important because it’s a system that can make even pirates want to pay to play. We have other avenues to obtain popularity and hit counts, but getting people to not mind not pirating is the real feat.
Honestly, what I find more weird about Steam is that they DON’T have any submission guideline. I know and talk with SO MANY indie (more or less successful) and getting on Steam for each of them was a different experience. And there have been cases in which of two very similar games (both ISO RPGs) one was accepted and the other not. For NO REASON GIVEN. I suppose that’s what makes most devs angry. Personally I’ve almost never been on a portal so I’ve learned how to survive without them 😉