Steam

[Hollow]

It's looking likely that this game is going to be rejected, isn't it? Like numerous other indie developers I've heard of in the past few years.

[henryv]

Why did binding of isaac was released on stream then?

I think it's arbitrary.

[Marak]

Binding of Isaac was released on Steam based on how well Super Meat Boy did, and (to a lesser extent) the fact that Edmund McMillen had been making games - obviously, some more successful than others - for years. So he was (is?) a "proven commodity", and not much of a risk to toss on Steam.

At least, that's how I see it. Comparing Isaac to Defender's Quest doesn't work so well because it's really not Apples to Apples.

[henryv]

Thanks for the input. I'm not a fan of flash games until recently. I've never even heard the author for binding of isaac until you said it.

[Marak]

It gets a bit complicated, but "Team Meat", the guys behind Super Meat Boy, are Edmund McMillen (designer) and Tommy Refenes (programmer).

After the stress of Super Meat Boy, Ed decided to make a game that was unhindered by the restraints that SMB had to be under to be acceptable to Microsoft and the Xbox, and thus, while Tommy was on a well-deserved vacation, Ed teamed up with a different programmer (Florian Himsl), and the result was The Binding of Isaac.

[Anthony]

Actually, we've yet to be rejected - we haven't even gotten that much of a reply from Valve / Steam. :/ I've been submitting the game monthly since December, and tried a few other contacts at Valve, and simply haven't received one single response, even a rejection. It's quite disheartening, but our goal is to keep doing well and succeeding until Valve finally takes notice. They may want to be indie friendly, but they're not there yet. Fortunately, Desura, Gamer's Gate, and Impulse / GameStop PC Downloads are all much more responsive and have already accepted us (in fact, Desura contacted us first!), so we'll at least be on those before long.

[On that note, if any of you have a contact at Valve, or work for Valve, please give us a ring at leveluplabs@gmail.com - we would *love* any way to get a foot in the door! I'll send you cookies too!]

[Hollow]

Actually, we've yet to be rejected - we haven't even gotten that much of a reply from Valve / Steam. :/ I've been submitting the game monthly since December

You've been emailing them for six months straight with a polished indie game and for some reason they haven't even given you a single word in response?

Color me completely unsurprised. Steam really are the worst when it comes to looking at games not made by multi-million dollar corporations or with massive pre-established fanbases. I think the only exception I've seen is Terraria, which they allowed to be sold through their client while it was still in a buggy alpha state, due to them thinking it was going to be the next Minecraft and they didn't want to pass up an opportunity.

http://www.formspring.me/edmundm You could probably try and get into contact with this guy, one of the makers of Super Meat Boy / Binding of Isaac. I bet he could get you in touch with them good enough to get a proper rejection.

[Hollow]

Here's some helpful responses for you. Also, first off, I hope you aren't emailing them from Leveluplabs@gmail.com but rather some email @DefendersQuest.com

Read Parts 4-6 of this for a better understanding of what to do, too. http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/s ... ?t=2411076 I suggest sending Defender's Quest: Gold Edition when finished to Total Biscuit on youtube to see if he would do a WTF? of it.

I

From personally talking with Valve employees?

They get around 150-300 applications a day for games. Over half of them are first time projects that should be on something like Newgrounds rather then on Steam. Another large bunch is just reskinned versions of current games, stuff like Call of Duty 4, except the intro screen/menu/loading screens call it BIG JOES HOUSE OF PAIN.

They have nowhere near the manpower to check even half of these, so for many games, it gets a quick look, and if it looks like something from RPGMaker/other places, it'll just get put aside for later under the assumption it's another Newgrounds quality product, which many of these actually good indie games look like on the surface.

If they aren't swamped that day, they'll try to do a few internet searches for more information on it, but chances are they'll be swamped, and the first few seconds of the game will be all the information they'll get, and let's be honest, even stuff like To The Moon! feel somewhat low quality off first impression, it's only after you've played it do you realize it's a full quality game.

They are putting work into fixing this issue though, they've been hiring more and more devs to cover more ground, and have just started a huge hiring phase looking for people to "integrate with the indie community " that are supposed to find all these indie games that they don't have yet. So we'll see how that goes. Best advice though for indie devs is to put links to threads talking about their game in the menu or something for the Valve build, so they can check what the internet says about it easily.

e: This is also why stuff like Revelations 2012 are on Steam, and why it's easier to get games on Steam when you already have something. If you've purchased a Source license, you've already been working with Valve, so they generally don't bother to check it since they don't have time. And once you have a game up, all you have to do is call them up and say you've made something else, and they'll usually dredge it up from the rest of the games and streamline it in, since they trust you. It's also why I wish SOLDAK WOULD RESEND DIN'S CURSE, since he'd likely get it in now that he has Depths of Peril on Steam. I've emailed him about it several times, and he's just outright refused since he doesn't want to bother them or someshit.

I dunno, personally I'm not a fan of that Flash-made Newgrounds look either. To me, that says, "I learned how to use Flash when I was fifteen and I've neither changed nor improved my game design practices since."

That said I do like the after screenshot and it's much improved from the original. Really Penny Arcadey though and I don't much care for the PA art school, but whatev', I mean you can't demand the world from folks. The gameplay screens though I dunno it looks really "I got these sprites off a free-resources RPGMaker site."

Getting on Steam can be tough for an indie game; pretty much either you need a large fanbase, or to catch Valve's eye due to quality. This is how it should be; they have a vested interest in giving customers the expectation of quality. And, well, that game looks pretty easy to dismiss.

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_...e_crash_of_1983

May I suggest Desura as an alternative? I understand they're very open to indie games.

I'm not a developer, but yeah, I understand that's pretty standard. [Not getting a response for months on end]

It's not necessarily a rejection, either (they do send actual rejection letters, or so I've heard). I couldn't guess at how many games get submitted to Steam, but I imagine it's a mind boggling number; whoever's in charge of evaluating games probably took one look at the screenshots and put it at the back of the line for evaluating. I was following the development for Recettear (which looks kind of "generic anime game-y" at first glance) and I seem to recall they submitted to Steam and got no response, but eventually did get accepted.

I can only speak from our experience, of course, but we weren't able to make contact with steam for about four months. After that, we were told there were too many titles similar to ours on steam (A Space 4X/RTS which was launching in 2010 for reference). We tried to appeal that, or at least find out what they meant because the only other truly similar game available on steam at the time was Light of Altair, but no response came.

The only reason we got on steam is because of people mass-emailing steam about our product. Humorously, even though we were contacted by the same guy we were in "contact" with for over a year, he e-mailed us as if we'd never spoken before.

So I imagine that they speedrun through testing of potential titles. Or, at least, they did back then. No idea what's going on now but there's definitely been a few new hires. This is purely conjecture, but we were pretty sure back in 2010 that they only had one or two points of contact for indie games and I can imagine trying to sift through all that and be fair to everyone and failing miserably so we don't take it personally.

To this day, it's acknowledged by many developers that Valve's approval process is still almost completely random. I'd like to remind people that it took Aquaria - which was already an IGF grand prize winner, well reviewed and commercially successful - several flat rejections before someone at Valve googled 'Independent Games Festival' and realized that this was kind of a big thing.

You can have a multi-award-winning hit and Valve will tell you to go away. And sometimes, you can have just a single early gameplay trailer on Youtube and Valve will contact the developer, asking if they've got a distribution deal yet.

[Anthony]

Thanks Hollow. I've met Edmund, I might be able to get in touch with him. Good idea. Though with his role in the recent Indie Game movie and success on XBLA I imagine he's probably pretty tough to get back in contact with these days. Nice thread on the forums, good find there. I suppose it's comforting to know that everyone else is just as frustrated by this, though I have serious doubts about their claim of hiring more people to handle this. People were having trouble in 2010, and now in 2012 it's the same deal.

I have indeed heard that it's tough to get them to even look at the game, which is why I'm trying to emphasize reviews (we got an 8.5 from Destructoid and a glowing review on Rock, Paper, Shotgun) and sales so far. Seems I can't get them to even scroll down the page that far to read it though. Oh well. We'll keep on pressing - thanks for the support!

[Hollow]

You could probably just punch into Edmund's formspring "Hi, it's (name he knows you by), can you shoot me an email at (your email)? I need your consultation about getting my game on Steam." or somehing along those lines. I've sent two questions to Edmund's formspring and he answered them both the very next day, so he checks it often and answers pretty much everything.

[Hollow]

And one more

A lot of the bigger/more well known indie games get on Steam because the devs meet with Valve at a conference/show and go "hey, we have this awesome game coming out, here's a 3 second clip" or what have you, and then they get business cards exchanged and it goes from there.

Blindly submitting in to a queue of 700 games is not a good way to do it.

edit: "going from there" might mean giving Valve an alpha/beta build of the game for them to play internally for a bit and see if it's good. This only sort of works for the bigger AAA games, if you're making the 50,000th bejeweled clone with anime art, they probably won't help you out.

[Hollow]

Another tip: When you send out your game, you probably want to include a savefile with the game that contains every level beaten and every character unlocked. Most people who do a first look at the game are only going to see the tutorial, and tutorials aren't very interesting.

[quig]

Seems like valve is implementing a new feature that should make it easier for games like Defenders Quest to get the attention of valve.
http://www.pcgamer.com/2012/07/09/steam ... -to-steam/

[Hollow]

Did you guys get a response from Edmund? Just curious to see if things are going okay, or if you're waiting for Greenlight to come out.

[quig]

It looks like it is coming to Steam in the future.
http://marlamin.com/cdr/view.php?type=sub&id=16114 An entry in the registry for Levelup Labs.

[Hollow]

Haha! That's awesome. I hope the advice I gathered in this topic helped in some small way. I'm genuinely curious to know the process they went through to go from being ignored for months to getting on Steam. What did you have to do?

[larsiusprime]

In totally unrelated news I have an announcement to post later today
Stay tuned!

[Shinigami]

Lars, you MUST have been a stripper in a previous life cause dude, you really like to tease

[larsiusprime]

This might be relevant to your interests:
http://www.fortressofdoors.com/2012/08/ ... steam.html

[Hollow]

You may want to only offer Steam keys to those who personally mail you asking for one with their receipt, or maybe just the first 100 to do so, since sending out 16,000 Steam codes to people who already own your game would probably get quite a few just given away at random to people across the internet or sold at a discount. Or maybe that would work in your benefit since it would get the word out, I'm not sure. It would probably be a good idea to wait a week or two before mailing them out either way if you decide to do so, so people aren't trying to buy a key for $2.50 from someone instead of full price for the game on launch.

Also, I'm incredibly excited for you guys. You're one of my favorite indie developers, along with FigHunter games. I hope this opens up plenty of doors for you guys and helps you get all the funding you need to make more awesome games!