While it obviously tears down a barrier for game developers and sellers, it also tears down barriers for buyers, which seems a lot more important to me. Steam Direct moves the goalposts so getting to the market is painless. So even if Steam’s new curation efforts suck, I believe it will be so much easier to drive your own traffic to your page. People want to feel like they’ve accomplished something with their time, and they don’t feel like a Greenlight vote gives them anything. (That’s right, I saw my analytics, ya jerks.) But if that same link I’ve been showing them gave the option of just buying the game, they probably would. I’m positive I have close friends and family who didn’t vote for my Greenlight. Instead of receiving not-even-a-promise that they may be able to buy something they want down the road, the visitor can just buy the damn game. I think it’s much easier to drive traffic to a page when there is a potential immediate value to the visitor. Why is Steam Direct better?Īll of that crap I just talked about? You have to deal with that just to make your game available! I’d rather be adrift in a sea of terrible games than struggling to even get to the market. You may be able to get people to create an account to buy something, but not to cast a vote they feel is ultimately meaningless.įrom what we can tell, these six hundred-ish views on our IndieDB Greenlight announcement got us about four Greenlight votes. Is that enough motivation to go to a page, potentially create an account, log in, and click a button? I don’t think so. The only thing someone receives for clicking that “Yes” button is a possibility that in the future they may be able to buy a game. You may be thinking, “people without Steam wouldn’t buy the game anyway.” That brings me to my next point. Also, a lot of players who like and support your game may not have a Steam account. Even worse, think of the last time a website asked you to login to an account you didn’t have. You probably just closed the tab and moved on with your day. Think about the last time a website asked you to log into an account you weren’t already logged into. First of all, if a person following a web link was running the Steam client, they probably had to log in via their browser to get to the Greenlight page. There were a lot of barriers people don’t consider that make the conversion rate terrible. It was that driving your own traffic to your Greenlight page could be seemingly impossible for a little guy. My main gripe wasn’t with the Greenlight concept. Driving traffic to your Greenlight sucked We can form a solid plan around that instead of working toward an ambiguous release date. With Direct, my company will be able to release Intrusion Protocol in August. I’ve talked to a developer that saw the community successfully Greenlight three of their projects, and they still had no idea how. The idea of letting the community pick the worthy games to make it to Steam had good intent, but not being clear about the rules was frustrating to developers. Hence the reason it was so bizarre that I’ve seen people with less than 300 Yes votes talk about getting Greenlit.) Valve was anything but transparent about the Greenlight selection process. (As of the end of Greenlight, you needed over 4,000 votes for the top 100. Some got through with less than 300 votes. Three top investment pros open up about what it takes to get your video game funded.Īsk a few people about their Greenlight experiences, and you’ll likely get vastly different stories.
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