Is there a way to reach the Greenlight community?

[matt]

I'm not sure if anyone here knows about this, but I'm just wondering if there is some value to the Greenlight community and a way to continue to reach them. We have 2,277 favorites and 2,079 followers. While there might be some overlap between that and our kickstarter backers, judging from the comments, the Greenlight community is mainly interested in the game AFTER it launches on Steam, and I suspect we didn't convert too many.

If I continue to post announcements, will those reach people who are interested in the game? Do they get notified in some way that isn't easy to miss? I'm on some steam discussion groups, but I never check them because as near as I can figure, there is no way to get email notifications from them and they just show up in a weird area of the Steam client. Maybe I'm just not a hardcore enough steam user...

Thanks!

[RightClickSaveAs]

I still get pretty confused about the interface on Steam in general, and Greenlight seems to be buried in it's own corner of Steam under yet another layer of confusing design, but one thing I do know is that if you post an Announcement it will show up in the users' Activity tab if they're following the project. The activity tab is likely to get eyes on it, I'm pretty bad at using Steam for social stuff and I still end up checking it at least every week.

I'm following several things on Greenlight including NN, and I have noticed that developers don't seem to use the announcements a lot, but I'd imagine it couldn't hurt and would reach at least a handful of people, if it's not too much trouble.

[matt]

Okay, I'll post announcements every once in a while - perhaps release notes about updates to the alpha build or something. Maybe I can get some of those people to pony up the cash for the alpha slacker backer package.

Thanks for the advice!

[RightClickSaveAs]

Just saw your Greenlight announcement, and it looks like it's getting a few comments already so there are people seeing it. One thing I've noticed on Greenlight and the Steam community in general, it seems to reach a lot of people internationally, you see a lot of Russian and Brazilian posts active in the comments and discussions.

How's the Greenlight experience been for you so far, do you think it's had much of an impact on exposure? They've started to regularly greenlight big batches of games now, which seems great but I think the process is getting diluted a little and there are some really odd things getting Greenlit now. Valve has also said they're moving away from it, so that probably has something to do with it?

[matt]

I think Greenlight helped us. I don't think we got a huge amount of backers from it, but every little bit helped. Fortunately, we had a strong trailer, which attracted interest on that platform. I think we were in the top 15 or 10 after being on for 45 days or something. They are definitely trying to get tons of content on Steam.

At Steam Dev Days, Gabe Newell went into a bit more detail about what they are going to do to get rid of greenlight. Basically, the idea is that anyone can sell anything on Steam - maybe like iOS. There will be Valve's Steam store, but also anyone can have a Steam store. I suspect getting on Valve's steam store will be the challenge. If you don't, I suspect your sales will be negligible.

Hopefully they continue to curate their store, so it doesn't turn into an iOS like market where games with the most marketing spend rise to the top, and it's impossible to find any thing good. I think that is why they are toying with greenlight and accepting a lot of new games to see how it affects their storefront.

[ranger_lennier]

Being more like the app store makes sense to me, because as it is now, Greenlight isn't that good at selecting the best games. And that's completely unsurprising, because in most cases the games aren't finished and people have to vote on them based upon a brief description and trailer. It's a lot easier to present an awesome idea for a game than to actually make an awesome game. Jim Sterling had a video on Steam quality control recently.

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/ ... ty-Control

One game he mentions is Guise Of The Wolf, which apparently sounded cool on the Greenlight page, but was completely broken when it actually came out. TotalBiscuit did a couple of Youtube videos on it, which for the moment are down after copyright claims by the developer (something we've heard too often lately).

I hope there is a way for games to get promoted to the main Steam store, however. Maybe a game could earn a promotion by getting enough positive reviews from people who purchased it.

[matt]

Yeah, I suspect if a game sells well enough on the other stores, Valve will probably add it to their store, but I'm not sure how it'll work. I'm not sure Valve is either.

I suspect developers with relationships with Valve will still be able to get on the main Steam store. We didn't HAVE to do Greenlight, but I figured it was probably another way to build a community, so I went ahead and did it. I don't think Greenlight is really working for anyone. I think it's really more of a way for Valve to test the scale of getting a lot of developers on Steam.