

Valve's solution for Steam Greenlight's noise: A $100 donation to Child's Play - CrazedGeek
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/177123/Valves_solution_for_Steam_Greenlights_noise_A_100_fee.php#.UEavrLWe52B

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forrestthewoods
This is a great fix. Greenlight was immediately filled with fake entries full
of porn, copyrighted material, and games that simply don't exist. The $100
price point is high enough to turn away most fakes but low enough that it's
not a barrier for real products.

Greenlight itself still has problems but Valve has already shown they are
quick to respond to issues so I expect it to continue to improve.

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demallien
Yup, it's a good solution. Funnily enough, it's very similar in nature to
Apple requiring you to pay $100 to get a developer certificate for iOS (which
allows you to run software that can break just about any limit that Apple
imposes on AppStore apps). Maybe Apple PR will notice that this was positively
received, and start donating the $100 developer fee - it sends a loud signal
that the fee is all about filtering, and not about raking in $$$

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chrisballinger
Those fees also pay the salaries for a large number of full-time app
reviewers.

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dalke
Huh. Really? So the overhead fees that Apple charges for placing something in
the app store doesn't including paying app reviewer salaries? How strange.
Given that there's probably over 100x as many IOS users as developers, and
that the users are supposed to be the ones who benefit most from review, it
seems a rather strange bias.

Where do you get your information about the internal income source for the
reviewer salaries?

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prunebeads
It's an interesting approach to the problem, which doesn't hurt the customer.
After all, the burden of marketing has always been on the seller's side.
Indeed, $100 may seem too high a fee, but the mechanism isn't set in stone
either. If Valve realise that it's too difficult for indies to get in, maybe
they'll reduce the entry fee, or create a secondary market with a lower one.
Anyway, the customer is the winner here, and that's good.

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mdonahoe
Reminds me of the $99 yearly fee to submit apps to the App Store. Except Apple
isn't one for charity.

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kartoffelmos
But then again, after the $99 is paid to Apple, you can publish what you make
to the App Store (yeah yeah, we are all aware that restrictions apply here).
From what I gather, after paying $100 to Steam/Child's Play, you have a
_chance_ of having your game/app have a speedier approval process.

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kevingadd
The choice to use charity is a nice move here, but I still think it's kind of
a poor choice.

The indie games community in particular is an example where lots of
'outsiders' with very limited access to resources are able to build
interesting games that speak loudly and provide experiences people have never
seen before. Many of those people cannot afford even an extra $100 to submit a
game to a service like Greenlight just for a _chance_ to share it with people
(the same complaint has often been lodged against competitions like the IGF),
and end up having to beg fans to help them handle it.

For someone earning minimum wage, a $100 donation - which seems tiny to me,
used to Silicon Valley salaries - is over a day's worth of take-home pay.

A fee this large skews the effort involved in a Greenlight submission such
that it is dramatically in favor of people for whom money does not mean much,
and has the unfortunate effect of excluding developers who are _perfectly
willing_ to invest _TIME_ into their games but do not have extra money to give
away just to get into a public voting competition. The games are not worse
just because the authors are poor.

Note that services like Apple and Microsoft's marketplaces at least provide
some value for your $99: They host your game, they perform basic quality
certification, etc. In this case you aren't getting as much for the expense.

EDIT: Some additional thoughts:

Offloading the fees directly onto charity means that the impact of a potential
chargeback (most likely to come from a jerk who is looking to put fake entries
up for laughs) is more dramatic than it would be otherwise. Now the bill for a
chargeback is potentially being sent to the charity (though I'm sure in this
case Valve would choose to eat the fees.)

If the goal is merely to filter out joke submissions, the fee does not need to
be remotely as high as $100. SomethingAwful uses a much lower cost for forum
registrations which does help to filter out noise.

On the other hand, SomethingAwful is proof that a fee is not sufficient to
keep trolls, unkind individuals, stupid people and all-around jerks away from
your community. Valve can set the fee as high as they want and bad things will
still happen.

The problems that currently afflict Greenlight require a serious approach to
moderation and a serious approach to content discovery. Right now their
approach to both is lackluster at best: The only way to discourage poor
behavior on the part of a game creator is the Report button, while poor
behavior on the part of commenters generates zero retribution (the most a
creator can do is ban them from their game page). Game discovery is
nonexistent as there is a single randomly-sorted list of games that reshuffles
itself as you page through, making it impossible to simply browse. Even
something as simple as 'people who upvoted this game also liked' is not
present here.

At present Greenlight is basically a popularity contest, with a group of
around ~15 games currently boasting visitor counts in the hundreds of
thousands with the rest of the games on the service sitting around 5 to 10
thousand. If Valve's goal was a popularity contest, it makes the idea of
paying money to participate all the more ridiculous.

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InclinedPlane
(Apologies in advance if this is a grumpy post, I don't have the energy right
now for it not to be.)

Anyone who is working a minimum wage job and has the ability to develop a game
has very much more serious problems than the Greenlight barrier to entry.
That's a bullshit scenario. And if you lower the barrier significantly down to
$20 or less then you erode the protections because then it becomes just low
enough so that wasting that amount of money for a prank is not a big deal. It
needs to be a non-trivial amount of money (to encourage seriousness) without
being a significant amount of money, and I think $100 is in that range. Look,
if you can't afford even $100 how the fuck are you going to manage to acquire
the tools such as a computer or an internet connection to be able to support
game dev?

Ultimately, this is not a perfect solution, it's just a noise filter. And the
trick is making it light enough so that it doesn't squelch legitimate signal
but heavy enough so that the remaining noise is easy to handle using other
tools, and I think the $100 fee fits that pretty dang well.

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wccrawford
Sorry, but that's not a bullshit scenario. There are reasons someone might
take a low-level job while they're working on other things.

For one thing, a physically taxing job that's not mentally taxing gives you
exercise but doesn't rob you of your will to think. When I come home from my
programming job, I often want to do just about anything else. When I used to
come home from stocking shelves, programming was something I did avidly.

I'm sure that's not even the only reason, either.

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Joeboy
> Sorry, but that's not a bullshit scenario

It's also not the only relevant scenario. I reckon there are plenty of people
who are capable of developing games and are unemployed, at school or living
somewhere $100 is a significant amount of money.

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cube13
But those people aren't the target of Greenlight. This is a marketing tool,
not a funding source. It's not Kickstarter.

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activepeanut
I think this should be implemented by Apple and Google with a curated list of
charities you can select your donation to go to.

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apike
Apple charges $99 per developer per year, but Valve seems to be charging $99
per title. This approach might cut down on "spray and pray" noise in the App
Store, and the extra cost wouldn't materially affect most legitimate
developers.

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wccrawford
$100 per title that you need greenlight without the normal channels.

I think if you already have a good-selling game on Steam, the second game
would be a lot easier to get through normal channels.

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kevinconroy
+100 for charity, -100 for open marketplaces.

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darkestkhan
It is still open marketplace.

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newobj
You mean "It was never an open marketplace", right?

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darkestkhan
In many marketplaces you have to pay for place in order to open stand yet we
still call them open marketplaces (as long as price is affordable, but I would
consider 100$ to be such) so why when you apply the same mechanisms for
"virtual stand" it suddenly ceases to be open?

