I want to personally thank every single one of you for coming this far in the group's history. Even if you haven's posted anything I want to thank you for coming over and publically showing you support this group and for checking the group out in the first place. The main intention of this group when I received it from Khell back in July 2016 was to inform and critique, those were the main priorities. Since then I've broadened out upon the work I do with my writing style and etiquette improving along with my analysis and research capabilities, and as a result, I am proud of how far this group has come and I'm happy of what this group has brought and given to me as a person.


Now, in case you didn't notice, this group is called "Guardians of Greenlight" and also of you didn't know, Steam Greenlight is going away this Tuesday and is being replaced with Steam Direct. If we place those two facts together, unfortunately that means that I can't continue with the usual work that this group is centered upon. Now I've been asked "Just change the group name", but there is one issue with that, I can't. Steam does not allow you to change the name or the abbreviated name of a group after it's been set up, so that means that I can't start the next phase of the work on this group. However, this does not mean it is the end of this group, because I would hate to just have built up this great community over the span of a year with over 800 of you and just let that go to waste, so I'm going to open up a new direction for this group while I additionally work on the other projects that are to come.


After talking with a lot of people and getting requests from some developers, this is what I've decided to do with this group. Now, in case you don't know, Steam Direct's intention is to form a more direct approach of getting a developer's game on Steam, with a fee of $100 per title, it's essentially Greenlight with a tweak to the pricing being per game and not a one time fee and it's also cutting out the community input on the titles, which a lot of developers really liked. Now like I said I've been approached by a few developers and a couple has also commented about this publically and so as a way to address this, here's what I'm going to do.

Since I know that there are a great number of people within this group that are more than happy to give constructive feedback, I have opened a forum called "Call to Arms", which is a place in which developers can post their title/ideas before going through the Steam Direct process to get additional insight into their games and ideas from community members. There are some requirements for posting there though:

1. A trailer (posted on YouTube)
   
2. 4 screenshots minimum (can be posted anywhere such as Imgur)

I would also recommend that if you have or can get a playable demo of your game up, that may assist in the quality of the feedback that you're given from members of the community, and I myself also intend to give feedback to the titles as well. This will also be a good way for you to interact with a community before your game goes live and you can get a good overview of the actual quality of your title and the possible general interest it will bring if it were to be on the Steam store.

There will be no fee for posting your trailer/screenshots/demo in the forums and request feedback, all that I and the moderators request is you follow the guidelines set here and be nice and cooperative with the members interacting with you, and the same goes for the members to be respectful when interacting with developers that come to the forums.


On the note of adapting towards Steam Direct, the overall aim for me is not going to change, I'm going to continue to be as critical, informative and consumer-friendly as I can be, the only things that are going to change are the location.

On the note of those two, I have structured out 2 groups that have been up for some time and that some of you may already be members of and noticed if you took a look in the description of the group, and these two groups are probably now going to be where I centre my work on.

The first group is MellowReviews in which it's a place where I can showcase my own personal recommendations of titles to play based on the quality of the products, and in my eyes this will be important now more than ever with Direct coming in as I am expecting to see a drastic high point for games coming onto Steam. There is currently not much on the group, just some old announcements that now lead to some dead links and no recommendations and the reason for that is that that group is currently going through a reprocessing phase for me to find a good centerpiece to base the group on. There's also the fact that reviewing products does take time as I have to play the game for an allotted time beforehand, and if I can't get round to writing a full review on some titles, I will definitely at least give it a curation-based recommendation.

The second group is Sentinels of the Store which is essentially the same as Guardians of Greenlight but centered on games already on the Steam store. Sentinels of the Store, on top of already having the same base setup as Guardians of Greenlight, Sentinels of the Store also has a curation page which means that if a game has received SOS coverage, the information will be displayed at the top of the Steam store page.


So with that out of the way, I want to thank everyone that has joined this group, the people that have partaken in this group and contributed in any way, and I want to send out additional thanks to my moderators for moderating the discussions well over the group's run and for gaining my trust to make them moderators in the first place.

I thank everyone for their hard work and dedication and hope you can all follow on into the next chapter.

-Mellow

This is just a really quick announcement, as of the 6th June 2017, Greenlight has officially shut down. Valve have stopped accepting new submissions and voting has been disabled.

I am going to be talking with some of my moderators about where to go from here on out and there will be an additional announcement posted soon addressing the future.

Thanks for all your continued work.
-Mellow

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=924440148

http://steamcommunity.com/workshop/filedetails/discussion/924440148/1290691937722853743/

I'm not exactly sure how you could have played that amount of the game for that trailer with the game running at that low of a frame rate. You could probably have the best game in the world, but if you can't even run it, then we won't want to be playing something that's that choppy.

Also, if your main aim is to make players masturbate over your female model, then here's a tip, actually make her attractive. I fail to see how anyone can look at your female model, with no eyelids, low detail to any part of her or anything of the sorts.

But I have to say some parts of your submission are comic, mainly due to your announcement titled "Worth stating about the game -" Where you mention that you can get the girl down to her underwear. So not only do we get to stare at a lifeless 3D female model with clothes on, we can also stare at a lifeless 3D female model with nothing but underwear. Also, can I ask why that was an announcement? Because the way that you've worded the announcement, you make it seem like there's nothing else worthy or outstanding about your own title where you think it's worthy to mention you can get a girl to get down to her underwear.

My recommendation, scrap this and work on something else as personally, I think the concept is doomed from the start with a game that has little going for it, but if you're insisting on sticking with it, freshen up your graphics, add gameplay variety, and additionally can I say that if people that have dedicated their time to finding these types of "cleavage watch" games aren't interested in your game, you have to give it some polish.

This is going to be slightly different to what is posted here regularly as this is not focusing on a single Greenlight submission or Greenlight its self, it's instead centered around Steam Direct, the upcoming replacement for Steam's Greenlight system and is going to be the new way in which independent developers work with Valve to get their game onto the store.

Recently Valve came out with a new blog post titled "Steam Direct Fee & Upcoming Store Updates." Within this post Valve detail and focus on two primary thing, the main one being the fee that developers will have to pay to enter the Steam Direct program and additions to the curator system as a means to broaden the content curators can post and made in an attempt to get them more engaged with what they're creating. I figured that since there were some people messaging me about this, posting this to me and dropping it on my social media pages, I figured I should talk about this and explain my personal thoughts.

I also want to disclose before going further into this that this is simply my personal opinion and should be taken as such, everyone is free to make their own.


Some members that have been around for some time will know I wasn't too particularly fond of Steam Direct when I first heard about it mainly because I didn't see it as a permanent fix for the laundry list of issues that the Steam system had with Greenlight and more of it just as Valve coming in with a different system which barely fixed anything but more as a redemption card to show they were trying.

One thing I will admit though, as time has passed since Direct was announced and more blog posts were made of more changes being implemented in not just Steam Direct, but Steam's market and store as a whole, I was becoming cautiously more optimistic. In Valve's post "The Steam Store: Our Philosophy and Next Steps" they talk about new things being implemented onto the store focusing on the issues that players struggle to find the games they want in what has become an over-saturated market, and also talk more about doing further tweaks to the algorithm in an attempt to develop the way players find the games they would want. Not too much is explained about how this algorithm would work though, however, it can be assumed from a few things named, it takes into account the types of games the player plays, the user tags, user reviews, curation recommendations and a few other factors. This change I was actually in favour of, it did put quite a lot of heavy lifting into how the store is run onto the end user, but in the past this hasn't been proven to be a bad thing, and I tend to take it as a way of saying to the users "this is your store."

Then there was another announcement titled "Changes to Trading Cards" which is probably the move I applaud Valve the most for doing out of all the posts they made. Basically, they stated that to avoid further market manipulation from developers, trading cards will no longer drop when a game first launches on the store, instead the game has to reach a certain point in Steam's algorithm measurements before trading cards start dropping, as it would show people are actually genuinely interested in the game and aren't just buying it for the cards.

But now we're here today with the latest post.


Like I said earlier, this latest post covers 2 main topics, the first being Steam Direct's price, and the second being updates and additions to the once temporarily abandoned curator system.

On the topic of the fee, Valve originally said in their first post that the fee will be anywhere from $100-$5000. Then a couple of weeks later, when they were talking with Totalbiscuit and Jim Sterling, they told them that the fee would not be $5000, but would be aiming for a fee lower than $1000. Then Valve employees interacted with the community for a bit and stated that they were aiming for the $500-$1000. But now, in this new post, the fee is going to be $100 for indie developers per title. The same fee for a greenlight submission, except instead of getting a lifetime pass and posting whatever quantity you want, it'll be per title. I do have a lot of issues in regards to this, but I'll talk about those later on.

Secondly was the changes and addition to the curator system, which aren't too drastic, however, I do admire Valve allowing some further forms of development for curators to further develop how the cover their titles. The first addition is that now YouTube videos can be embedded into the curations you make, and the second one is that curators can now make their own lists of games and categorise them on their page as they wish, which will also supposedly assist the algorithm if a curator makes a list of RPG titles and one of the followers frequently plays RPGs, then those game genres will come up more frequently.

Anyway, now that we have the informative part out of the way and my thoughts on the previous posts, let's talk about the fee.


The community have had a mixed, but seemingly the majority are criticizing the fee, and I'm personally one of those people, and in this, I'll address the complaints that I have about the fee, the good things about the fee and the effects the fee will have on the other factors Valve are introducing.


Valve have stated that the primary reason that they're introducing Steam Direct is directly linked to the shovelware coming up onto Steam:

Originally posted by Valve:

Greenlight also exposed two key problems we still needed to address: improving the entire pipeline for bringing new content to Steam

If this was their primary goal, then I fail to see how having this kind of low fee which probably 80% of developers that publish asset flips (since they clearly have money to spend on $1000 assets) will supposedly improve your pipeline. I get that this is a slightly more extreme fee with this being per-game and not a one time pay, but allow me to put this into some perspective and an analogy, which may be tedious, but it may be the best way to get my point out.

$100 equates to £75 here in the UK. If we take a look at the price of this Xbox One download code for the deluxe edition of Mass Effect: Andromeda,[www.amazon.co.uk] this thing is £70. The Steam Direct fee is just £5 more than than 1 game. Which means, say if a toddler developed his own game, mummy would probably say yes to £75, just £5 more than the game she got him the other day.

However, if we place a different price in there, say the $500 Valve were originally aiming for, which equates to around £385, then mummy won't be as convinced to hand over that amount of money.

Essentially, the point that I'm attempting to make with this analogy, is if Steam Direct launches with this $100 fee, then that means every 4 year old child can get 1 game onto Steam, I wouldn't call this "cleaning the pipeline."


The reason that Valve state for going for a $100 fee instead of something higher, is because some community members disagreed with them, so they dropped it to $100. Personally, I don't exactly see how this is a redeeming factor. And I know I may say it's bad that Valve are listening to their community, but technically they aren't. Because along with the people complaining that the fee was too high, there were people saying the fee should be higher when Valve were semi-settling on $500, and some that were saying it would be the perfect price. So I fail to see what the community members that said the fee should be lower have over the other 2/3s of the community in the division.

I want to say that no matter what Valve settle on as the fee, no one will be pleased, I understand that, but saying that they're going for $100 because "their community said so" I find is a disservice and betrayal to the large amount of communtiy members they didn't listen to.


One of the main things that Valve are pushing as one of the things that will solve the issue of a great many games getting onto the store, is their algorithm which will essentially hide the games from people that aren't interested in seeing them on Steam's front page. However, no matter how good you make an algorithm, it will continually be abused.

What I will say for Steam Direct is that it's a new system, so workarounds will take the time to find. However, with a fee of $100, it's practically an open invitation saying "Hey everyone, come have to go and see how far you can stretch our completely solid algorithm, only $100, which will buy you a deluxe Xbox One code for Mass Effect Andromeda." If they've just set it as that, then a great number of devs that have already profited well off of the markets Valve are attempting to block out with Direct, will have enough money to experiment enough to find workarounds to make their future lives on Steam easier.


Another subset of algorithm workarounds is going to be for the trading cards. Valve have stated that trading card drops will be removed until a game gets a greater ranking within the algorithm, what this greater ranking has not been publically released, with good reasoning as Valve aren't wanting to make it too easy for developers to already try and figure ways out to break the system before it's even begun. But back to the trading cards, all that Valve have done is prevent cards from being dropped upon launch, and to make this thing come full circle, Valve have a heavy emphasis on Steam curators managing the majority of the store. If a steam curation is set up, dedicated to finding games that have intentions of dropping trading cards, then card farmers will more than likely join the curator and mass buy the games and hold onto them in their library until cards begin to drop, and forcibly move it up in the algorithm. That's a scenario I see having a great likelihood of occurring, then before we know it the card issue won't have been resolved for long, all it would require would be for members to be gathered over time, and nowadays that tends to be easy to do through sites like Gleam and Marvelous.


My thoughts on Steam Direct currently stand at this. I still think it's a good system, resolving some primary issues to a degree, but I don't see it as Valve's permanent resolution to what has occurred on the platform. What I'll say is that when Steam Direct launches, Valve employees need to be on their toes and ready to watch over the system in it's first days, their algorithm and Steam curators and the effects on the games on the store and see if the necessary resolutions they wished to have made are going to be met in the future, or if things will just get worse. If they get worse, then they need to be making necessary changes to their system, just like what a lot of people were wanting from Greenlight but never got.

I just want to say, these are just my views, you're welcome to have your own. Hell, if you do, comment them below, I'd be interested to hear them and maybe talk with some about it.

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=930950013

http://steamcommunity.com/workshop/filedetails/discussion/930950013/1290691937714966511/

From my point of view, this game has had no real improvements over the original Freebie to actually call its self a sequel and a different game, you boast about the game having more game modes, but in the description, there are only 3 listed, which isn't exactly too much to boast about as they sound like they don't have too much in regards to variety, I can applaud you for trying, but there just isn't too much here.

I'm also pretty disappointed that you've resorted once again to bribing voters.[imgur.com] I'll say in the past that you've chosen your words carefully when describing why you resort to this kind of practice, but the way you've worded this on SImplo.gg basically showcases (to me at least) your true intent. "Vote and leave feedback if you like the Greenlight above." So if we don't like the Greenlight game, we shouldn't vote or give feedback?

But there's something else that I'm mainly wanting to alert Back to Basics Gaming too, since he has voiced to me he likes to do background checks on the people that he works with and the games posted under his name (which I actually do give him some props for doing as it's more than I can say for other Greenlight publishers.) There is another developer attached to this project called "Taz'Dingo" who seems to not exactly hide away from making public statements on his profile that he's pro-Nazi/Hitler and also being a member of several Steam groups dedicated to people being pro-Nazi/Hitler[imgur.com]. Not exactly the best person to attach your name to in my honest opinion. Even if these aren't the guy's real thoughts, it isn't exactly a good public image that he's giving himself being affiliated with the groups and making comments in relation to it.

#GuardLight