Personally I don't like the sound of it. Yes it may well weed out the rubbish games released, but I'm guessing it will stop a lot of us even trying to put a game up. The new submission fee could be anything from 100 to 5000. Bit of a jump that, especially as it is a per title fee. If the fee were 5000, there is no way at all I would put a game up, it's just too much of a risk (not too mention more money than I have anyway). In honesty it wouldn't need to be anywhere near the 5000 mentioned to put me off. Even good games sometimes fail, there's no guarantee it will take off. I've seen plenty commercial games that are really good, that fail to sell in quantities they should have. At least with the current system you can afford to lose the fee and even if your game doesn't sell that well, you will probably not lose money after all is said and done (apart from all the hours you spent making the game). Unless of course it isn't given the green light.
All Steam need to do is vet the games better. This is just a way of trying to avoid negative press without spending any money themselves. In fact just the opposite, trying to force the process of quality control on to the developer by charging a higher fee. Now yes, I agree the dev should have some quality control, that's obvious - but by the same standards Steam should also have the same. Do you see the film industry saying "We don't actually watch and check the films, we just rely on the film makers to do a good job and rate it accordingly." No, Steam could do a lot better job with this, they are just greedy, greedy, greedy. This is just a knee jerk reaction to the barrage of bad Steam games highlighted on Youtube, and a broken voting system that allows bad games to be released. I mean come on - some of these games - you can tell they are terrible at a glance. 30 seconds play testing would tell you that the game is utter rubbish with no redeeming features. Not hard to check before releasing on your store. I mean perhaps try reading the comments people make on a game, before deciding that just because x amount of people have voted for a title it is good to go. It may well be the same bunch of people who voted for 8 other awful games. Perhaps that in itself could be taken into consideration? This wouldn't be hard to police better.
No Valve are just scared people will move to another game provider, pushing up the fee so only people who already have money can apply. This is just a good way of preventing indies from starting up and a cheap option for Valve. For me it's a cop out. All they need to do is pay a few people to vet the games better, it will hardly cost them a fortune in comparison to what the games will make them in the long run. They are a huge company that acts like they are an indie in this regard.
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