SuperMalParit (SMP), the guys behind Towns, gave us some exclusive updates that will be coming shortly to the game – ones that will up the ante and then some!
Well, it finally happened. We weren’t quite sure what game this would happen to, nor when this was going to happen. I think this was something that all of us saw coming but none of us actually wanted to address. Now is the time to talk about it.
Towns is a simulation game developed by Super Mal Parit (SMP), a three-man team that took the game from concept to Greenlight to Steam’s Early Access platform. The game did fairly well, selling over 200,000 copies and grossing over $2 million as of summer 2013. The fan base was fairly supportive of SMP and enjoyed the game, but there was progress that needed to be made. The game wasn’t complete, the dev team acknowledged that, and progress continued on it just like it would with any other Early Access game.
NowGamer: "The issues around Kickstarter, early access and other methods of are crowdfunding are only getting more complex. We argue that we should be more critical of crowdfunding projects."
This week, Steam removed a game from sale from their Greenlight service — a system that enlists the community’s help in picking some of the new games to be released on Steam. Earth: Year 2066 was quoted, by its creator, to be a “first person sci-fi apocalyptic open-world RPG game inspired by such video games as Fallout and Half-Life 2.”.
Steam’s overall quality is only as high as the lowest entry barrier they put up. Greenlight has the potential to allow truly great ideas come to fruition but stories like this, and how easily it occurred, sour what can be a great resource for young aspiring game makers. Instead, atrocities like Earth: Year 2066 can trick their way to receiving funds, and well meaning games like Towns try to run before they can walk.
Even update posts about games that have gone through to possible world wide distribution refer to them as “batches”, seemingly taking away anything special about the fact someones work is now up for sale – almost as if the head Greenlighter is bored of his job. This can only weaken the concentration of great games Steam offers, and weakens Steam itself.
I think they have lost content control a little bit with people being able to have complete control of marketing their products on a worldwide platform.
Steam need to be quicker and more concise on making sure cheap badly made games do not make it through. I think early access it just a bad idea. Buying a game in Alpha or not even that far is just bad practice.
Beta became the new demos, now alphas and early access are the new betas.
The less complete we experience a game the more it has to make up for in the final product. Takes away some of the majesty of a new game too.
Like seeing a sketch of the Mona Lisa before it's painted.
I think Valve needs to do some quality control, cause the greenlight system is obviously not working and turning the steam platform into a mobile market place.
well Valve have always said that Greenlight will only be for a little while.
soon it will all be gone and devs can release games whenever.
only sad thing about this is that Valve really need to start with some real QA before any of that can happen.
QA is already really bad on Steam.
Let regular Joes become Greenlight ambassadors and play the early access games before they go on sale. Not everyone of course, but a select few. They can then turn around and tell Steam if the game's awful and shouldn't be allowed up.
That's actually a great sounding idea. I was also thinking of maybe some kind of development fund pool. Where people on Steam pay into a kitty, which is divvied up and granted to developers.
These ambassadors would be a good idea of deciding who that pot goes to.
