Steam.... love them or not, they are the 800 lb gorilla us indie developers need to impress to ensure wide distribution of our games. We are planning a Greenlight, hopefully in the near future, once we are far enough along to create a compelling promo video. We did put up a Steam Green Concept page a while back and would like to share the stats of that with other developers. Overall, we found it useful for:
1. Validation that what we are making is of interest to our target audience. 97% yes/no on the concept. Note: this is a largely different stat than the full greenlight yes/no as users are FAR more kind to concepts. Also the wording of yes/no is different "do you like this concept" is very different than "would you buy this game".
2. A few kudos (all indie devs loves a pat on the back now and then)
3. More insight into comparing what we are working on to other indie projects.
What we did not get from it:
1. Much exposure. There is not all that much traffic going to the greenlight concept area. (see stats below)
2. As much conversation as I would have liked. We did get comments mostly "looks good" or "keep going", but I had hoped to create more conversation and maybe even use it to get some feedback as we continue dev.
3. Traffic falls off very quickly. The vast majority of traffic you will get is in the first week. Steam's system for concepts seems to have a negative bias of placement w/ age of the concept. We peaked at #2 "Most Popular this week" but the project had little traffic after about 2 weeks.
Stats:
