We've just launched the Stars in Shadow Steam Greenlight submission!

Cool stuff!

How does it work? How many votes do you need? I've posted this on every medium I know of. Hope it helps.

Devildogff wrote:How does it work? How many votes do you need?

As best as I can tell, the process is pretty opaque. Valve lets you know how many votes you've gotten (we've got 772 'yes' and 448 'no' 'votes in the last day or so). Valve also tells you how many people have "followed" the project (73) and it also compares your progress (in terms of total votes as function of time), relative to some of the current highest ranked greenlight projects.

(The current number #20 greenlight project, for example, has 2000+ votes after a bit more than a week of voting, and at the rate we've been going, we're about on pace to catch up with them.)



It's a lot of numbers. The critical thing that all the graphs *don't* tell us is what rank we need to hit to be greenlit. I wouldn't be surprised if there's actually not any hard number here -- someone in Valve's office probably just scans the cumulative data every once in a while, and maybe awards greenlights to anything that's bubbled towards the top recently, provided it looks good to them. (I'd be surprised if Valve really has given up true control of their vetting process in favor of democratic online-voting. And that's not a choice I can fault them for )

Devildogff wrote:I've posted this on every medium I know of. Hope it helps.

Many thanks!

Curious that a significant number of people actually voted "no." That's just weird. Why would anyone want to prevent a title from being on Steam? It may be that only "yes" votes count... which would make sense, but as Sven mentioned, the process is rather opaque.

People choose games based on looks. And if your going through a queue of things with a yes/no option at a sertain point your clicking for clicking a sake.

Maybe people thought it was an rpg or top down shooter at first glance and voted no, others may not like sprites and prefer 3D models, others may of thought the sprites should of been more pixilated to look more 16 or 8 bit.

people are weird.

Arioch wrote:Curious that a significant number of people actually voted "no." That's just weird. Why would anyone want to prevent a title from being on Steam? It may be that only "yes" votes count... which would make sense, but as Sven mentioned, the process is rather opaque.

This. I think it's mostly because people are on Greenlight looking for the next Call of Duty and find this. Dumb teens and twitch gamers who don't want "strategy games" on them thar Steam.

Dumbasses.

Yeesh, take it easy on them. Greenlight asks people if they would buy the game on Steam. If the answer is no, you click no, even if it looks like a good game. It just happens to not be your cup of tea. Same reason stuff gets a thumbs down on youtube. It's not that it sucks, it's just not your cup of tea.

Greenlight puts games in peoples' queues for them. These games may or may not be part of their favourite genres, because the assigning process is pretty much random. I'm pretty sure if there were a super-mega-realistic third person RPG in a fantasy setting in my queue, I'd vote it down because I wouldn't pay money for it myself, no matter how good it looks. I have to be honest in that regard. Those who actually want to buy it will vote yes, and the game will get sold on Steam.

Frankly, I think you guys have got nothing to worry about. Space 4X games sell fairly well on Steam, and the fans will always vote these games up. From the looks of things, and based on your presentation values, you should get an upvote from people who think your game is worth buying and who would consider buying it themselves...and again, that comes down to personal taste, not game quality.

Put the Greenlight link on the usual sites and the fans will get on Steam and vote it up. Then you'll get enough of a head of steam (pun not intended) behind you that you'll have no problem getting greenlit.



And lastly, don't think yourself above the CoD gamers. That kind of arrogance divides the gaming community, and we're already divided on enough issues already. We've got enough real issues to fight for without genre snobbery.

Tssha wrote:Greenlight puts games in peoples' queues for them. These games may or may not be part of their favourite genres, because the assigning process is pretty much random.

This is something I'd been wondering about myself. I'd assumed that greenlight voting queues were targeted towards people's tastes -- kinda like other Steam ads or purchase recommendations. But, a few of the comments we've been getting on the greenlight thread make it clear that the submission is being shown to people who really have no experience with 4X games in particular, or even strategy games in general.

If we really are being shown to an unbiased slice of the steam community, a 50% "yes, i'd buy it" vote is actually very generous. I mean, any 4X game that's honestly appealing to 10% of the PC gaming market is already a pretty massive hit.

Tssha wrote:Yeesh, take it easy on them. Greenlight asks people if they would buy the game on Steam. If the answer is no, you click no, even if it looks like a good game. It just happens to not be your cup of tea. Same reason stuff gets a thumbs down on youtube. It's not that it sucks, it's just not your cup of tea.

I'm not worried about it; I'm assuming that only "likes" have any consequence, as with YouTube and Facebook. But I do think it's a curious quality of human nature that some systems put placebo "dislike" buttons in place, and that some people push them.

Tssha wrote:And lastly, don't think yourself above the CoD gamers. That kind of arrogance divides the gaming community, and we're already divided on enough issues already. We've got enough real issues to fight for without genre snobbery.

No snobbery intended (I like first-person shooters just fine), but I'm not sure that the console shooter players and the PC strategy game players can really be classified as the same community. Gaming is so broad now that referring to "gamers" as a community is kind of like referring to "moviegoers" as a community. Fans of the widely different genres often have very little in common with each other other than that they're sitting in front of a similar-sized screen.

Arioch wrote:

Tssha wrote:Yeesh, take it easy on them. Greenlight asks people if they would buy the game on Steam. If the answer is no, you click no, even if it looks like a good game. It just happens to not be your cup of tea. Same reason stuff gets a thumbs down on youtube. It's not that it sucks, it's just not your cup of tea.

I'm not worried about it; I'm assuming that only "likes" have any consequence, as with YouTube and Facebook. But I do think it's a curious quality of human nature that some systems put placebo "dislike" buttons in place, and that some people push them.

Yeah, that's...odd. I mean, the YouTube system is arguably vestigial, but you'd think if they wanted to change it, they could. I'm pretty sure the google+ +1 icon would work just fine.

Do they have some aim in mind, with the vestigial downvote button? I wonder...and yeah, I hope the downvotes don't count either.

Arioch wrote:

Tssha wrote:And lastly, don't think yourself above the CoD gamers. That kind of arrogance divides the gaming community, and we're already divided on enough issues already. We've got enough real issues to fight for without genre snobbery.

No snobbery intended (I like first-person shooters just fine), but I'm not sure that the console shooter players and the PC strategy game players can really be classified as the same community. Gaming is so broad now that referring to "gamers" as a community is kind of like referring to "moviegoers" as a community. Fans of the widely different genres often have very little in common with each other other than that they're sitting in front of a similar-sized screen.

I will admit, you have a point. Not sure if I agree with it yet...give me a couple days, I'll think it over.

448 'no' 'votes in the last day or so

Jesus, people really are dicks.

All right, we're been greenlit! Many thanks to everyone who voted -- and an extra helping of thanks to those of you who went the extra mile and shared the submission page around!

For people who enjoy staring at detailed numbers (or anyone else who may be thinking of running a greenlight of their own), here's the final "Item Stats" breakdown provided to us by Valve. Looks like in our case, 3,325 'yes' votes for rank 11 ended up being the magic numbers.

Thanks everyone for your support!

Congrats guys!