NAVIGATOR - Fast-Paced Puzzle Action [OUT NOW!]

[Alpha Six]

Gamers are spoiled. they don't give a shit about you or what you do unless it immediately appeals to them, and now that their tastes are heavily separated between genres, we have entire generations of gamers that only play certain genres, and vehemently tear apart anything that doesn't fit into their genre. obviously there's always going to be groups of people who just play what they enjoy and don't go out of their way to slander other games, but that is such a minority when it comes to Gamer Groups that it won't even register as a blip on the radar to most developers unless you've already established a fanbase of new users. becoming a new developer is incredibly difficult for this reason alone.

Those people have been given an uncensored, unfiltered, unmoderated "voice" in the indie games industry, via Greenlight. Greenlight is a very alpha product and it shows a lot in the overall execution, and the huge community of Gamers, that have now been given a voice, are using it to express their flawed point of views on video games (or; their extra flawed views on independent games).


watch this. right here. im about to blow your fraeken mind

the biggest mistake they made was allowing a "negative" feature; this isn't the same as a reputation system, or the ratings system from YouTube.

these "thumbs down" (which are now, thankfully, gone) affect the "community" rating of the game, and if the "community" seems to be saying "no", well guess what-- your hard work and time spent doesn't pay off, unless Steam themselves decided to take a look at your game... which would severely weaken the impact of "community approval," which is what the system was made for in the first place, right? because of this, Valve would probably have to take down the service for a little bit to do some major re-imagining, then bring it back up with what they've learned from this kitchen fire. (which is moderation, hopefully) the basic idea for Greenlight was to give power to the community and make adding new games easier, but i think Valve may have misfired and accidentally made it more difficult for them to do so (with this initial release of Greenlight, at least).

another flaw with the thumbs-up/thumbs-down system is that you don't have to give a comment about your rating. at all.
you didn't have to give a reason to downvote a game. it was as simple as going into a game, finding something you don't like about it, and pressing a button.
congratulations, you just negated a positive vote. and it took you maybe 10 seconds at the most to read the first sentence (or even just the genre of the game) in the synopsis, look at 2 screenshots, and decide "this is shit."
and guess what? people are bored enough to do this to your game. trust me. they are. it only takes seconds for them to tell you that they think your game isn't worth a dime, then go on and do it to the other 200+ games on Greenlight. it doesn't matter how good/bad your game is, because 70% of the market already thinks it's bad. and by looking through Greenlight's support forums, you can see the obvious bias against indie games that a lot of Steam users have.


there are little to no stats for the owner of Greenlight to look through, except comments, page views, approval rating (which is offensively high-- there isn't a single game on Greenlight that has over 20% approval so far, including the "big ones" who already have established fanbases like Project Zomboid, which has been on Desura for ages) and how many people have "favorited" your game-- all details which people can see anyway.

when thumbs-down was a thing, there was a bar in your stats that recorded how many thumbs-up and thumbs-down you have... which they also screwed up. thumbs-up/thumbs-down were measured on the same bar (like the YouTube ratings bar), but rather than see the precise number of upvotes to downvotes that you have, Greenlight decided to show it to you in the form of a percentage. this leaves the developer wondering who/how many people care(s) about their game, and a lot of developers were recording an offensive amount of 30/70 +- ratings. which, again, happened because thumbs-down was a concept in the first place.







so, Greenlight is a bad service?

no.

It's a great way to get publicity for your game and start building a fanbase through the people who aren't needlessly hating your game for dumb reasons. Steam pretty much dominates the PC market and has a lot of users that are almost exclusively Steam. by putting your game on Greenlight, you're letting these people know your game exists. (but remember that the publicity comes at a price; dealing with a bunch of shitty Gamers bashing you)

if you want to consider getting your game on Greenlight now, I would say do it-- but take the service with a grain of salt, because it's still a baby right now, and only has an idea of what it's doing.