I have no direct experience with Steam Greenlight but, in principle, I like its democratic approach to filtering out the dredge.
"Steam Greenlight is a system that enlists the community's help in picking some of the new games to be released on Steam. Developers post information, screenshots, and video for their game and seek a critical mass of community support in order to get selected for distribution. Steam Greenlight also helps developers get feedback from potential customers and start creating an active community around their game during the development process."
It does essentially turn it into a popularity contest though. And one unforuntate side effect is, if I'm a budding game designer and I want to get my (albeit not so great) games out there and in front of as many people as possible I so I can make a little money and get lots of feedback through reviews, I now have a huge barrier to break through to do so. The alternative is to post your game in a site like IndieDB and hope that a couple dozen people check it out and take the time to give you some feedback.
I agree, it's a trade-off. It gives you a chance to prove yourself to your customers rather than a gatekeeper but it's not particularly well suited for games that don't seem very interesting until you play them.
A question I like to ask myself is whether or not MineCraft could have survived Steam's greenlight process if it were released today without its bizarre sort of grassroots audience development and word of mouth marketing. I'm not so sure it would have.
The industry is still largely figuring this shit out and I'm optimistic about Steam because Newell has mentioned that he thinks Greenlight is a bad example of an electoral process so I'm hoping they can improve on it.
I think Google was hoping that third party app marketplaces would take off and they'd be able to do content selection on their own but that hasn't really panned out anywhere but in China.
Also I'd love to get his source for the claim that Tomb Raider "lost hundreds of millions of dollars" because unless he has information that isn't available to the general public, he's pulling that straight out of his ass. The only thing anyone knows about Tomb Raider is that it missed its sales projections which does not necessarily mean that the game didn't recoup its investment. It just means it didn't perform as well as anticipated which says more about SquareEnix's ability to forecast sales than it does about the games success.
Page 5, Operating Income total is negative 16.8bn yen, which is $167m USD. But that's spread across ALL of their titles, and they were wildly optimistic sales projections to begin with. The US sales team was summarily laid off for that. This guy's ability to understand and interpret data is laughably horrible.
I think the guy is right in a way we are paying too much attention to him we are giving him too much air time..Had the brunt of the community just ignored him this article would have faded away with barely anyone noticing it.
It's the same with how we treat internet trolls just ignore them....This guy is no exception he's had his fun and we've given him exactly what he wants our undivided attention. He now has a name and people will take notice when he posts again at least for a little while.
Your time is precious spend it doing more interesting things most humans are intelligent enough to do their own fact finding now and anyone who really want's to know what's going on in the creative business or even the games business will do their own fact finding and realize their own truth of sorts.
I think it was right to give this article attention initially. It's that kind of dribble that will carry, and build, to the point that it gets repeated by those who don't know the truth. It's best to stop this misinformation at the start.
That being said, the article has been crushed to dust, and I agree, there is no reason to keep feeding the attention whore, who apparently still does not understand why his article wasn't worth the space it occupies in data.
I'm absolutely flabbergasted reading the guy's comments on his latest article. The arrogance is pretty astounding. The funny thing is, if you talk to developers, especially those in the trenches, they're usually pretty happy to talk about the issues that are affecting their industry and their work, often in a fair bit of detail - but rather than attempt any form of discourse, we get remarks like:
The fact there is such anger over this article alone proves I’m a real journalist. As HipHopGamer said, if it wasn’t at least a little bit true, people would have just brushed this off. The problem is what I’ve written is true, and people know it.
The scenario is this: people like Cliffy B realize the industry will soon no longer be able to support their buying of luxury sports cars in its current state. Therefore, they want to hurt gamers by taking away used games, charging for online passes, raising prices, etc. so that they can continue to afford the Lamborghini’s that he has. This is when what he is making becomes a problem.
Hah, don't get me started on Square Enix... what about being more organized, putting better people in command to not take 5-8 years in production of a game to launch it?
Or even better... What about not doing as large games as that and not calculating the wrong numbers on future planning?
Replies
A question I like to ask myself is whether or not MineCraft could have survived Steam's greenlight process if it were released today without its bizarre sort of grassroots audience development and word of mouth marketing. I'm not so sure it would have.
The industry is still largely figuring this shit out and I'm optimistic about Steam because Newell has mentioned that he thinks Greenlight is a bad example of an electoral process so I'm hoping they can improve on it.
I think Google was hoping that third party app marketplaces would take off and they'd be able to do content selection on their own but that hasn't really panned out anywhere but in China.
From Square Enix's investor relations website:
http://www.hd.square-enix.com/eng/news/pdf/13q4slides.pdf
Page 5, Operating Income total is negative 16.8bn yen, which is $167m USD. But that's spread across ALL of their titles, and they were wildly optimistic sales projections to begin with. The US sales team was summarily laid off for that. This guy's ability to understand and interpret data is laughably horrible.
It's the same with how we treat internet trolls just ignore them....This guy is no exception he's had his fun and we've given him exactly what he wants our undivided attention. He now has a name and people will take notice when he posts again at least for a little while.
Your time is precious spend it doing more interesting things most humans are intelligent enough to do their own fact finding now and anyone who really want's to know what's going on in the creative business or even the games business will do their own fact finding and realize their own truth of sorts.
Stop feeding him....please
That being said, the article has been crushed to dust, and I agree, there is no reason to keep feeding the attention whore, who apparently still does not understand why his article wasn't worth the space it occupies in data.
Or even better... What about not doing as large games as that and not calculating the wrong numbers on future planning?